Waterways Read Online Free Page A

And had he gotten dressed a little too slowly, maybe showing off for Kory’s benefit? Kory pulled his tail to his chest and scritched through it with his claws, thinking about the luxuriant ebony tail the fox had. Maybe Samaki had been hitting on him. He should call up and set the fox straight.
    But what would he say? He didn’t really know any gay people that weren’t in movies or on TV. It was odd to think of Samaki that way; until that moment, he’d just been a friend, with a vast unexplored landscape, as if Kory had landed on a new planet. If he were gay, then all his actions took on a different cast, and maybe he really was more alien. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends. He just couldn’t ever tell his mom. But if the fox thought he might be gay… well, he should say something, he shouldn’t let that rest. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. He picked up the phone.
    But what if he were wrong? He weighed the phone and set it down again, continuing to stroke his tail. Gay guys had a gay-dar or something, didn’t they, to let them know whether someone else was interested? Surely he’d have seen that Kory wasn’t gay. No, maybe he was just another lonely soul, with nobody to talk to about the books he was reading.
    Hard to believe, though, as handsome as he was. Kory couldn’t believe the fox would have any difficulty finding any kind of companionship he wanted. So maybe he was gay, and that explained his loner attitude.
    “Grrr.” He clutched his head. Best just to finish up his homework and worry about it next time he heard from Samaki, which would probably be never. He’d probably just asked for Kory’s number to be polite, and walked away thinking what a dork he’d just swum into at the pool.
    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