Waterways Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 and 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