Gold Standard Page 3

  Though he had waited and waved goodbye to the bus. He didn’t have to do that.

  Kory sighed and grabbed his math homework. He’d ask Sal about it in the morning.

  Like Kory, Sal was smaller than the otters on the high school swim team. They’d been friends since Kory could remember, going to church together, movies together, even playing Ultima Online together a few years back. Then Sal had discovered girls.

  Kory had been mostly blind to the changes going on around him, but Sal began to act like a tourist in a strange new land. “I got a date with Jessica,” he’d hiss. “Check her out. No, don’t turn and stare!” Her primary claim to beauty appeared to Kory to be the now-prominent breasts straining against her sweater, because otherwise her features hadn’t changed. He didn’t think that was such a big deal, but the next week Sal had gleefully reported to Kory how they felt, the first in a long string of kiss-and-tell incidents.

  Kory listened with polite interest, but it wasn’t until the summer that he finally realized that this wasn’t just a new game Sal was interested in, but a change that was happening to all his peers, one he was expected to share in. It was even harder for him to keep up, since he was seeing less of Sal than he had in the years when they’d spent the whole day together.

  Sophomore year had been the first year Sal and his friends on the vocational track left the school every afternoon to get training for real world jobs. Sal was going to be a computer technician. “I’m gonna be the guy the big guys have to call to get their machines fixed,” he was fond of boasting. “For you, Spike, I’ll do it free.” Sal still called him `Spike’ after his Ultima Online character, but he didn’t want Kory to call him `Ike’ any more.

  This morning, he was in a particularly good mood, so Debbie, a pretty sophomore skunk who was his current girlfriend, must have spent at least one of the nights of the weekend. Sal refrained from telling him about it, though. “Hey, Spike,” he said. “I heard about Jenny. You okay?”

  Kory shrugged. “I’m fine. How did you hear?” It must be all over school by now, he thought.

  “Debbie’s older brother’s dating Jenny’s older sister’s best friend,” Sal said, stretching his lanky form and curling his tail up behind him. “So what did she say?”

  Kory dropped into his seat. “She said she didn’t understand why I didn’t write poems like that to her.”

  “That’s all? That’s weak.”

  “That and Chris Stafford asked her to the prom and she said yes.”

  “Stafford?!”

  “Yeah.”

  Sal shook his head, unable to muster any more words. “Freakin’ Stafford,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Kory saw one of his Warcraft buddies come in and waved to him across the room. Jason waved back and went to sit with Dev. The two of them were hardcore gamers, and though he enjoyed playing with them, they didn’t consider him dedicated. He sometimes hung out with them; they were nice enough in small doses.

  “Hey, Sal,” he said into the silence. “Say I bumped into a girl at the pool, and she...slipped and banged her knee. If I bought her coffee after, and then asked for her phone number, you think she’d think I was hitting on her?”

  His friend turned to him with a grin. “Did you get the phone number?”

  “Uh...yeah.”

  Sal punched him on the shoulder. “Back on the horse already!”

  “Ow.” Kory grinned. “C’mon, would she think I was hitting on her?”

  “Heck, yeah,” Sal said. “But if she gave you her number, she didn’t mind. You didn’t call her yet, did you?”

  “No. But what if she thought I was just being friendly, like I said she should give me her number so I could check up on her knee?” Sal laughed. “She wasn’t, like, thirteen, was she?”

  “No!”

  “Then she knew and she didn’t mind. So here’s what you do. Call her tomorrow night. Not tonight, that’s still too soon. See if she’s free Friday night. Me and Debbie will go to the park with you. What species is she? Otter?”

  “Uh, fox.” Too slow to think of another lie.

  Sal cocked his head. “Fox? At the pool? It’s not Sharisse, is it? Please tell me it’s not Sharisse.”

  “It’s not Sharisse.”

  “Good. So who is it? Gina’s dating that tod from Westgate, Ellen’s seeing Jim Brush, and Tanya Torick is dating that foreign exchange student, the fennec. Not one of them, right?”

  “No, she, uh, goes to Hilltown P.S.”

  Sal raised his eyebrows. “She was at Caspian?”

  “No. I went to the municipal pool. Just to get away.”

  Geoff Hill, a large raccoon, stepped into the room and ambled back to them. “Oh, great,” Sal muttered. “Just ignore him.”

  “I know,” Kory muttered back.

  “Hey, Rainbow,” Geoff said in a falsetto, and the class tittered. “I got a pome for ya. `Roses are red, violets are blue, who’s the biggest wuss in school? it’s you!’ Har har!” He dropped into his seat behind the two of them, still laughing at himself.

  The sad part, Kory thought, was that several of the rest of the class were chuckling along with him. He sank down in his seat.

  “Asshole,” Sal muttered. Kory shrugged. “Don’t worry. They’ll forget it pretty soon.”

  “Not while Deffenbauer has it posted in the hallway cabinet.”

  “We could bust it...” Sal shut his mouth as their teacher walked in, and opened his math textbook. “So...did you do the homework?”

  They talked about school while Kory thought about what Sal had said. So Samaki had been hitting on him-and by giving him his phone number, Kory had effectively said, “Sure, stud, let’s get it on.” Well, it was nothing a phone call wouldn’t clear up, he was sure. The fox was friendly enough, and once he heard it was all a misunderstanding, he’d happily go on his way. Maybe they could even stay friends. Samaki didn’t seem as obnoxious or predatory as most of the gay people he’d heard about.

  That night, though, when he called up the fox’s entry on his cell phone, he was unaccountably nervous. What was he going to say? “Sorry, I’m not gay?” What if Samaki wasn’t gay? He paced back and forth in his room, and just as he’d decided to close the phone, that Samaki wasn’t going to call him back anyway, it rang.

  Looking down, he saw Samaki’s name flashing, and automatically picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Samaki.”

  “Hey there.” The fox’s voice was cheerful and light. “Good, I was worried for a minute you might’ve given me a bogus number. How’s the head?”

  “Oh, fine, as long as I don’t think about it.” The “bogus number” comment sounded like something someone who’d been hitting on him would say.

  Samaki laughed. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean...” He laughed too, worry receding. “It’s okay.”

  “No blackouts or dizzy spells?”

  “No, I’m fine, really.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  There was a pause. Kory tried to decide what to say next, but the fox beat him to it. “Hey, I was going to try to hit that new movie on Friday, Planet Death.” For a moment, Kory thought, oh, no, and then Samaki said, “It’s supposed to be terrible. Want to come along and make fun of it?”

  “Sounds like fun,” Kory heard himself say.

  “Great!” The fox sounded almost relieved. “You know where the Landmark 8 is?”

  “I can find it online,” Kory said.

  “Cool. I’ll call you later in the week when they have the show times up. It’ll be the sevenish one.”

  “Okay. Or you could just e-mail.”

  Samaki hesitated. “Sure. What’s your e-mail?”

  They traded addresses. Kory entered Samaki’s in his online address book. It looked like a generic cable address. “Do you do any stuff online at all?”

  “Not much,” Samaki said. “Some homework. We only have one computer in the house for all of us.”

  Kory looked at his computer a
nd felt a little ashamed of having it. His family didn’t have much, but they had DSL and they each had a computer. “You have a lot of brothers and sisters?”

  “One older sister. She’s away at college. Two younger brothers and one younger sister.”

  “Wow.”

  “You?”

  “One younger brother, that’s it.”

  “Nice not to have to wear hand-me-downs, huh?”

  Kory grinned. “I thought you said you didn’t have an older brother?”

  “My sister wore jeans. And t-shirts with flowers. I shouldn’t be telling you this, I just met you.”

  Kory laughed. “It’s okay. My brother hates wearing hand-me-downs too.”

  “Why, do you wear t-shirts with flowers on them?”

  “Worse,” Kory said. “Dragons. Oh, I don’t think I should be telling you this.”

  “You went through a dragon phase too?”

  “Uh...”

  He heard the fox’s soft chuckle. “Still kind of in it?”

  “Kind of.” He looked at the dragon poster on one wall. “Do you ever play online games?”

  “Not really. It’s hard with not having much computer time.”

  “Oh yeah.” Great, Kory. Nice guy you are. Why not tell him how great the rich kids’ pool is while you’re at it?

  “I play some games. The guys on the team play poker once in a while. My brothers and I play card games too. I used to read to `em, but since they got older they don’t like that so much. I still read to my sister, though. She’s four. How old is your brother?”

  “Thirteen,” Kory said.

  “Cool,” Samaki said. “You got any homework tonight?”

  “Yeah. Working on a paper for English.”

  “Hey, me too. Want to hear what mine’s about?”

  “Sure.” He sat at his desk and listened to the black fox talk about his English paper, and then he told Samaki what his was about, and they talked about homework for forty-five minutes.

  The next night, Samaki sent him an e-mail with directions to the theater and a note: “Math homework tonight. Quadratic formulas. You any good at that?” And they spent another hour talking on the phone, letting math lead them into science and science fiction and other favorite books they shared.

  On Wednesday, Sal asked him if he’d called his girl, and it took him a moment to remember what his friend was talking about. “Oh, uh, yeah, she’s busy Friday night. Sorry.”

  “You going to see her Saturday? We could go out to Kern’s maybe.”

  “No, she kind of, uh, blew me off. I don’t think it’s worth calling again.”

  “You give up too easy. I bet if you call again, she’d go out with you.”

  “Just leave it, okay?” Kory slouched in his seat.

  “Tell you what,” Sal said after a moment of silence. “There’s this place I know, over by the college. College women like high school boys. I got laid a couple times there,” he added nonchalantly.

  “You never told me about that.”

  “You were dating Jenny. Didn’t seem like you needed it.”

  “You’re dating Debbie!”

  Sal shrugged. “Yeah, well, what she don’t know.so, you in? I’ll take you there.”

  Kory realized that his friend was making a sacrifice, telling him about his “special place,” but he found the whole thing rather distasteful. “Nah. You know Friday and Saturday are the only nights Mom lets me play Warcraft.”

  Sal gave him a long look. “So play Saturday night.”

  “I can’t, I.look, there’s this group I’m supposed to go out with and.do some mission. Planet Death, it’s called. They’re going Friday night. I.I’ll go with you some other time, I promise.”

  And fortunately, Sal lost interest at that point.

  Friday night, Kory told his mother he was going out to the movies with Sal. She told him to be back by 11.

  “What movie?” she wanted to know.

  “Uh...” She’d never agree to Planet Death.

  “I don’t want you seeing an R-rated movie, Kory. Even if you are seventeen.”

  “I know. I’m not. We’re going to that Schwarzenotter movie, Girlie Men. It’s PG-13.”

  Her muzzle turned down. “Isn’t there anything better playing? Well, all right. A little more Hollywood decadence won’t kill you, I guess.”

  He caught the bus a few blocks away and rode to the Landmark, feeling a little giddy. He kept seeing Samaki’s jet-black muzzle and bright white smile in his mind. They’d talked on the phone every night that week, about homework and games and books and friends, and Kory was really looking forward to seeing the fox in person again, his worries about whether or not Samaki was gay pushed to the back of his mind, if not forgotten.

  The black fox gave him that smile and a cheerful wave as he walked up to the theater. “Hey, you found it. I got our tickets already. How’s your head?”

  “It’s fine, thanks.” He shook the fox’s paw and followed the fluffy black tail into the theater, watching the white tip bob back and forth. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay.” They stopped in front of the concession stand. “Do you want popcorn?” Samaki asked.

  “Sure.” Kory handed him a ten. “That cover the ticket?”

  “Yeah, it was eight...here.” The fox gave him a couple ones back. “You know, it’s cheaper if we get one medium instead of two smalls. If that’s okay.”

  Kory grinned. “Sounds fine. But I won’t share your drink.”

  He didn’t know why he’d said that, but Samaki seemed unruffled by it. “I drink Diet Coke. Most guys don’t like that.” He stepped up to the counter and placed their order.

  “Ugh.” Kory stuck his tongue out as they walked away with popcorn, drinks, napkins, and straws. “I hate that aftertaste.”

  “Yeah, but it’s healthier.”

  “I dunno, all those chemicals?”

  Samaki took his straw into his muzzle and sipped on the way to the theater. “Mmmm, chemicals.”

  Kory laughed and sipped his regular Coke. They settled into two seats in the theater and chatted until the theater darkened.

  Kory had never been big on people who talked in movies, but the first time Samaki leaned over to whisper a comment to him, it was exactly what he’d been thinking, only funnier. He coughed around a mouthful of Coke, and whispered back, and they kept that up through the whole movie.

  It was a terrible movie, and Kory couldn’t remember one he’d enjoyed more.

  “Who,” Samaki said as they left the theater, laughing, “would be frightened of little chipmunks?”

  “They did have bright red eyes,” Kory reminded him.

  “And claws of...what was it?”

  “Diamondine,” Kory giggled. “The hardest substance in the universe.”

  “Still...” Samaki cocked his fingers into a gun and aimed at imaginary chipmunks on the sidewalk. “Pow! Pow! Pow! Problem solved.”

  Kory chuckled. “No kidding. Man. That was awful.”

  The fox stretched. “I don’t feel like going home yet. You have time to grab a shake? I know a great place.”

  Kory checked. “Yeah, as long as I get on the 10:15 bus I’m cool.”

  “Forty minutes? Plenty of time. Come on!” Samaki dragged him down the street into a small shopping center, walking fast along the sidewalk to a small shop with a red and white-striped awning. He held the door and bowed. “After you.”

  Cool air ruffled Kory’s fur. He swung his tail in to make sure it didn’t catch in the door and breathed in the rich, sweet fragrance. Samaki led him through the small round tables to the ice cream counter, where a young goat raised a hand to wave. “Hey, Sammy,” he said, looking over Kory’s shoulder.

  “Hi, Chuck,” Samaki said. “This is Kory. First time here.”

  “Great!” The goat smiled. “You on the swim team?”

  Kory shook his head. Samaki chuckled. “No, he can have the full milkshake.”

  “Usual for you?” the goat sa
id, already starting to scoop some ice cream into a silver milkshake cup.

  “Yeah.” Samaki turned to Kory and grinned. “What flavor you want?”

  “What’s a `full milkshake’ mean?”

  “Oh, when I ran track they made me these frozen yogurt shakes. Almost as good and half the calories.” Samaki patted his stomach. “It’s hard to break the habit.”

  “Almost as good.” The goat grinned at Kory. “You get the real thing.” He shoved the cup under the old-style milkshake machine, and the whirr of the mixer filled the room.

  When it subsided, he poured the shake into a cup and set it on the counter. “So, what flavor?” he asked Kory.

  “Just vanilla.”

  “Malt?” Kory hesitated. “If you’ve never had it, I recommend trying it,” the goat said.

  “Okay, sure.” He returned Samaki’s encouraging grin.

  “My treat,” the fox said when the goat slid Kory’s shake next to his.

  “I can get mine,” Kory said, but Samaki waved a paw.

  “I dragged you here, I insist. You take me to one of your favorite places and you can treat.”

  Kory had his wallet out, but the fox was handing a ten to the goat, saying, “Don’t take his money, Chuck,” and when the goat took the ten, Kory thought he saw a brief wink back at the fox.

  They sat down, slurping the first cold mouthfuls as they went. “Wow,” Kory said. “Nice.”

  “I haven’t had a malted in a while.” Samaki sucked another mouthful and then clutched his head dramatically. “Ow! Brain freeze.”

  “Don’t gulp it,” Kory said. “That’s what my mom says.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Kory didn’t know what made him do it, but he slid his shake across the table. “Want a taste?”

  Violet eyes regarded him under one raised eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t want to share your drink with me.”

  “Not when it was a Diet Coke. That stuff’s nasty.”

  “All right,” Samaki said, and lifted his straw from his shake, tapped it reasonably dry, and opened the top of Kory’s shake to slide it inside. He took a gulp and lifted the straw out, closing his eyes. “Mmmm. That is heaven. Thanks.”