Gold Standard Page 6

  “Bye,” Kory said. “It was really nice to meet you.”

  She giggled as she climbed into the back seat, where she sat and watched him.

  “Bye, Sammy,” Mrs. Roden said, and kissed him on the muzzle. “Mrs. Hedley’s going to drive you back home. That way I don’t have to wait for your father to come home to come pick you up. I know you know the way, Kory, but I wrote down directions for her anyway.”

  “Okay,” Kory said. “Thanks for letting Samaki come to dinner.”

  The vixen laughed, and her eyes sparkled as she put a paw on Kory’s arm. “Oh, bless you, Kory, but I couldn’t have kept him away. I think he’d have snuck out and taken the bus if he had to.”

  “Mom!” Samaki protested.

  “Sorry, dear,” Mrs. Roden said, but she gave Kory a quick wink and he grinned back widely. “I told your mother we want to have you over for dinner too, maybe next week or the week after.”

  “Thanks.” The wink made Kory feel warm and confident. “I’d love to.”

  “All right then. Be good!” She waved to them and got in the car.

  They waited until she’d rounded the corner and then went inside, where the smell of salmon was already pervading the house.

  Nick showed up, dressed but still damp, right as the rest of them were sitting down at the table. When his mother had finished serving the salmon, she started on Samaki, asking him about his school and his family before she’d even gotten all the food on the table.

  “And what does your father do?” she asked as soon as they’d said the “Amen,” in which Kory saw Samaki join.

  “He works at the Ford factory outside town,” Samaki said, “and over at the Hilltown campus of the state U. at night.”

  “Oh? What does he do at the University?” Kory saw his mother’s interest perk up a little.

  “He’s a Facilities Maintenance Technician,” Samaki said. “He started there so he could get benefits for my sister to go to State.”

  “That’s great.” They ate in silence a little longer. “What’s your sister studying?”

  “Sociology,” Samaki responded promptly.

  “Do you know what you want to study?”

  “Not yet.” He smiled. “I’m interested in lots of things. Journalism maybe.”

  “Are you going to go to State too?”

  “Probably.” He gulped down a bite of fish. “This fish is terrific, Mrs. Hedley.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled, but Kory saw her muzzle purse slightly. State was not one of the colleges she’d sent him to look at.

  Over the rest of the meal, she asked about his church, his neighborhood, his family, and his school. Kory and Samaki told her how much overlap there was in their subjects, and Samaki said he was taking some advanced work in school, which she praised him for.

  He remained poised, polite, and proper throughout the meal, and actually seemed to be enjoying talking to Kory’s mother. Nick stayed quiet for the entire meal, except to ask to be excused, and Kory didn’t say much more. He felt a strong relief when his mother finally said, “Well, you boys probably don’t want to sit here talking to me all night. Go on. I’ll clean up, Kory.”

  “Want me to send Nick in?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’ll be all right.”

  “Thanks for dinner, Mrs. Hedley,” Samaki said. “It was delicious.”

  “Thank you, Samaki,” she said. “Go on, go play.”

  “I think it is so cool that you have a pool inside your house,” Samaki said as they walked back through the living room. He crouched by the edge and trailed his paw in the water, his tail resting on the living room carpet. “Why would you ever go out to a pool?”

  “To get away,” Kory said, trying not to remember Samaki crouching in his swimsuit at the side of the municipal pool. “This pool’s small, too. Even the municipal is bigger.”

  “Caspian’s pretty big, eh?” Samaki stood up. “I love this bridge, too. It’s like a little Japanese garden.”

  Kory grinned. “Watch your footing. It’s always wet.”

  “A railing would be nice,” the fox said.

  “Then we couldn’t jump up onto the bridge from the water. I used to put my brother in jail under the bridge.”

  Samaki laughed, stepping safely onto the far side between Kory’s and Nick’s doors. “I used to make my brothers be chickens and put them in the `coop’.”

  Kory felt a flutter of worry, opening the door to his room. He watched Samaki’s muzzle as the fox stepped in and looked around, watched the violet eyes take in the posters, the computer desk, the bed, and the pool.

  “This is awesome,” Samaki said. “The pool comes in here, too. So you can just slip in and out through the water. It’s like having a secret base!”

  “Everyone else can get in, too,” Kory pointed out.

  Samaki grinned at him, padding from one side of the room to the other, looking at everything, his tail wagging. “I think it’s really cool.”

  Kory saw only the room he’d grown up in. Then he looked again at Samaki’s expression and looked around and saw the pool, the posters, the computer, and slowly, he smiled.

  Samaki ran his fingers along the posters on the wall. “Cool dragon,” he said with a grin, his tail wagging. “ELO... haven’t heard them. Good?”

  “I thought everyone knew them.” Kory turned around to put on ELO’s Greatest Hits, and when he turned back, Samaki was at his computer desk, looking at a scrap of paper. “Hey, uh...”

  The fox read slowly, “Water spills from the morning / coating the grass to start the day / the night is washed away ...” He looked up. “That’s good. You wouldn’t let me read any of your poems before.”

  “Now you know why,” Kory took the paper from him. “That’s not good, really. Just some stuff I was scribbling.”

  “It is good.” Samaki looked around. “You have anything else?”

  Kory weighed the question. “I’ve got a couple things.”

  “I’ll show you some of the stuff I wrote, if you show me more poems.” The black fox leaned against Kory’s desk and swished his tail.

  “The articles you were talking about for the yearbook?”

  Samaki nodded. “And some stuff from the school paper.” He flicked an ear. “This is ELO? I like this song. I never knew who it was.”

  Kory nodded, and sat down at the computer. He stalled, pretending to decide which files to open, really wondering what he should show the fox. He badly wanted to show him the poem, but the fox might misinterpret it. After all, he hadn’t even shown it to Jenny.

  Of course, he hadn’t wanted to.

  No, he would start with some earlier ones, about dragons and swimming. Those weren’t too bad. He pulled them up and let Samaki sit down.

  While the fox leaned forward, eyes scanning the screen, Kory paced behind him. If he doesn’t like them, he told himself, it’s okay, a lot of people don’t like poetry. He found himself pressing his paws together, and sat down on his bed, trying not to look anxiously at the fox and failing.

  Samaki turned his head and saw Kory on the bed. He smiled, warm eyes setting Kory at ease before he even spoke. “They’re good. I like them.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah! Why would I lie?” The fox chuckled. “You could enter a poetry contest or something. This is as good as anything I’ve seen in our school.”

  At the mention of a contest, Kory stiffened. “I, uh...I don’t think I’m good enough to win a contest,” he said.

  “Sure you are,” Samaki said. “I’ll make it my mission to make you believe in yourself enough to win a poetry contest. I hate seeing talent go to waste.”

  “No, really, I...”

  The fox slid from the chair and was sitting next to Kory on the bed in a moment. “I told you, I think if you’re good at something, you shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.”

  The proximity of the fox brought his musky scent back to Kory, full force. The otter tried to ignore it, but couldn’t help jumpin
g a little when the fluffy black tail brushed his long brown tail on the bed. His whiskers twitched, the dream returning to his mind until he forced it out. Don’t think about that now, are you insane?? But he had to keep his paws held firmly in his lap to keep them from wandering over to the soft black fur.

  “It’s just not...” He struggled for words, forcing his other thoughts down. “You’re the first person who’s really liked them.”

  “Your mom doesn’t?” Samaki spoke softly.

  Talking about his mom helped. “Oh, mom doesn’t count. I could write `the cat sat on the fat mat’ and she’d think it was Milton. I mean, my friends...you know, maybe if I wrote poems about sports, or boobs...”

  The fox laughed, and patted his knee. “You have to write about things you’re interested in.”

  The warm paw on his knee, the scent, the brush of the tail, and the residue of his dream were making Kory’s jeans tight. “Strange Magic” was playing on his stereo. “I’m interested in boobs,” he blurted out. “Uh...I mean...” He looked at Samaki’s expression as the fox withdrew his paw. The vulpine muzzle was smiling, but the smile seemed forced and a little sad.

  “Look, Kory,” he said. “Uh...I didn’t want to bring it up, but I don’t want you thinking and wondering about what Kasim said...”

  “It’s okay,” Kory said. His heart was pounding.

  Samaki was quiet for a bit. “I’m not interested in boobs,” he said. Only then did Kory register the stiffness in his posture and the way his paws were clenched together tightly. He realized how hard it must be for the fox to tell him that, harder than it had been for Kory to show the poems to him. He reached out and rested a paw on the black-furred wrist closest to him. He could feel the fox’s quick pulse beneath the warm fur.

  “I was wondering,” he said. “It’s okay. I don’t care.”

  Samaki’s shoulders sagged, his smile brightened. “Really?” And then he chuckled. “You mean you can tell?”

  Kory grinned. “You were kinda hitting on me at the pool.”

  The fox’s large ears flicked and violet eyes smiled. “I tried to be subtle. I figured if you were interested, you’d pick up on it, and if not, you wouldn’t notice. Most straight guys couldn’t even imagine another guy hitting on them.”

  “I had to ask,” Kory admitted. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Samaki laughed. “You asked someone? Who? Someone online?”

  “No,” and Kory now found himself embarrassed to admit that he’d asked Sal.

  “Your mom?”

  “Oh, no.” Kory looked at the bedroom door and his smile faltered. “She’d freak.”

  “So who?” Samaki poked his side. “Come on.”

  “Hey!” Kory giggled. “My friend Sal.”

  “Sal?”

  “He is an expert in flirting. I kind of pretended you were me and I was a girl.he said I was getting a lot better at flirting.”

  “I guess that’s a compliment.” The fox swished his tail against Kory’s again, and the otter felt that shiver. His tail was sensitive, that was all. Jenny used to like to stroke it, too.

  “If you want to take a compliment from a guy who goes to college bars to get laid.”

  “I’ll take whatever I can get.” Samaki smiled. “Hey. I appreciate you being cool. I know it could be awkward and all. But really, I won’t hit on you any more.”

  “Okay.” For some reason, Kory’s heart was still racing. His paw still rested on the fox’s wrist, warm black fur under his pads. He was remembering the fox taking his paw down that dark street.

  “Too bad,” he thought he heard Samaki murmur, and the fox certainly had a coy smile on his muzzle as if he’d said something like that. But Kory couldn’t be sure, and the next thing Samaki said was about Foundation, which he’d picked up and started to read. “It’s interesting,” he said, “This whole theory about predicting large group behavior.”

  Kory’s heart slowly returned to a normal pace. “Cool to think about.”

  “What I want to know,” Samaki said, “is what if you want to predict what just one person is gonna do? Or two?”

  “Individuals are unpredictable,” Kory said. “That was part of his point.”

  “Are they? Or is this Seldon guy just too full of himself to bother with them?” The violet eyes sparkled.

  Kory laughed. “I’ll have to ask the group about that.”

  “Your online one?”

  “Yeah. Hey, did you want to join?”

  “Maybe. What kind of stuff do you talk about?”

  Kory scooted to the computer to show him some of the old messages, kicking off another round of conversation about Foundation and about the friends in the online group. Before they knew it, Kory’s mother was knocking on the door to take Samaki home.

  Kory scooted into the back seat with Samaki rather than ride shotgun, their tails bunched up on the seat between them. They started off talking about books again, but his mother intervened at the first pause in the conversation. She took up where she’d left off at dinner, and the half hour dragged on, Kory staring at the fox’s white tailtip on the seat between them, forcing himself not to reach out and touch it. Twice he looked at Samaki and caught the fox looking back with a bright white grin as he answered some inane question or another.

  At the Rodens’ house, Kory got out to say goodbye. As they shook paws, Samaki said, “My mom was serious about you coming for dinner. Let’s set up a time.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to my mom and work it out. Maybe next weekend.”

  “Sure. Hey, Kory.thanks again. For being cool.” Samaki squeezed his paw.

  “No problem,” Kory said. “I don’t want to find someone else to talk to about Foundation.”

  Samaki laughed and waved, walking back to his house. Kory watched his tail wagging behind him as his mother pulled away. He felt warm and good, a feeling that lasted exactly halfway home.

  His mother was talking about how nice Samaki seemed, even though she hoped he wouldn’t visit often because the smell lingered. That made Kory think of the scent as the fox had sat on his bed and told him he was gay. He started to wonder if they could remain friends, with one of them potentially interested in the other, even though Samaki had said he wouldn’t push anything, and he didn’t even know if the fox was interested in him. The lurking feeling that his body was interested, even if he thought he wasn’t, made him shift uncomfortably in his seat. He stared morosely out the window. Samaki is gay, he thought. I acted like an idiot, when I could have asked him...what? Not that I wanted to try something, he thought, though he knew he was only saying that to reassure himself. His body knew what he wanted more than he would admit to himself. Whenever Samaki was around, it told him so, loud and clear.

  If this happened every time he thought about Samaki, he might have to stop seeing the fox, and he enjoyed the fox’s company more than he enjoyed being with any of his other friends. To cut himself off from that friendship felt wrong. But the alternative.he didn’t, he couldn’t.

  He barely noticed when his mother handed him his cell phone. “I’m tired,” he said, but instead of going to bed, he sat at his desk surfing the web, looking for anything about high school kids attracted to the same sex. The only postings that made it through the parental filter were both stories of boys in high school talking about how they’d realized that they were gay. One was a wolf; one was a muskrat. Both of them said the same things. I liked looking at boys. Girls didn’t do it for me. I finally had to admit to myself that I was gay.

  Frustrated, he switched off the computer. That’s not me, he said to himself, pacing around the room. Finally, he undressed and dove into the water, letting its silence surround him. His mother rarely swam anymore, and Nick was already in bed, or else had snuck out as he often did, so he had the indoor pool to himself. He swam round and round in circles, thinking about nothing, rushing through the warmth and looking around at the uniform blue all around him.

  After a ten minute swim, he really was too tired
to continue. He climbed out and lay down on his mat on the floor, and fell asleep while he was drying off.

  Everyone else had brought their swimsuit to the pool, but he was naked. If he got in the water, he thought, they wouldn’t notice. And nobody seemed to, until it was time to do the couples swimming. He looked around and grabbed Jenny’s wrist, but when he looked into her eyes, they were violet, and her muzzle was black and slender. “Hey,” someone said, “are you gay or what?” No, no, he tried to say, but he was holding Samaki’s wrist and they made him get out of the pool. But when he got to the locker room, Samaki was Father Joe, looking sternly at him. The sheep said, “you know better than that, Kory. It’s only okay if you come see me.” He made Kory lie down. “No, no,” Kory moaned, shifting back and forth on his mat. The pool, the locker room, he could smell them, and he just had to get up.

  Dazed, he opened his eyes, expecting to see the big sheep’s horns. Instead he saw his ELO poster and felt his own mat under his damp fur. He got to his paws and knees and crawled into bed, where he pulled the covers around himself, shivering. His room was dark; his mother must have looked in on him and turned out the light. He closed his eyes, willing himself to get back to sleep, but as soon as he did he saw the locker room again. His eyes shot open. He tried tracing the patterns of the stars on his ceiling, but they brought him no rest.

  Jenny had given him a small stuffed dragon to hold at night because they couldn’t stay overnight together. He found it under the bed, where he’d kicked it weeks ago, but it gave him no comfort. Samaki’s scent overwhelmed even the faint traces of Jenny’s that Kory wasn’t sure he wasn’t imagining. Kory shoved the dragon away and pulled his pillow over his muzzle. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t equal to this kind of temptation.

  He didn’t sleep. All night he stared at the ceiling, wondering if he would be fighting his body and its urges his whole life. If not, if he gave in.would that be so bad? whispered a voice into his head, as the serpent must have whispered to Eve, he thought. He remembered reading stories about people who’d given in to temptation, how it was the first step on a slippery slope that led them to ruin. I like girls, he said firmly back. He thought about the great times he’d had with Jenny when his mom was away, rolling around on the bed, and the voice came back and whispered, they weren’t that great, were they really?