Robbie 1

Friday, January 7, 2011

"Robert Patrick Willowdale?"

For just a moment, Robbie wasn't sure he would be able to make a sound. The snowy white fox standing at the front of the classroom practically glowed even under the fluorescent lights. His headfur was fairly short on top, but it cascaded behind and merged into the ruff of fur at his neck to form a mantle of spun, pale antique gold almost like a lion's mane over his shoulders. He was casually dressed, no three-piece suit or anything so pretentious. No doubt he had an overcoat stashed in the Teacher's Lounge, considering the cold outside, but here in class, he wore dark wine-colored corduroy pants, a mock-turtle sweater of black-and-white mottling with several slim leather stripes down the front, and the open-necked collar of a dress shirt dyed in a color that the rabbit would forever come to call "dusty rose." The color combination itself was hypnotic, but the fox himself was even more so.

"Here," the high school junior finally managed.

Golden hazel eyes locked on his own over some gold, half-rim reading glasses that seemed somehow completely professorial... which fit, since he was, after all, a college professor.

"Welcome," the fox said, smiling, and put away the list and his reading glasses. Robbie's name was the last on a list of 15. "Just to make sure I'm in the right place, this is AP English, right?"

The students laughed a little.

"Good, good; I wouldn't want to think that I was inflicting myself on a math class or something." The fox's eyes twinkled gently as the class laughed a bit more. "Okay, my good kits... welcome to the Friday portion of your AP class in literature and rhetoric. For the rest of each week, you're to pay strict attention to the esteemed Mr. Youngblood." He waved magnanimously at the brown mouse who had taken a position at the back of the classroom. "On Friday afternoons, you shall be my captive participants in a university course that I call 'Shakespeare and the Price of Rice.' We're still sort of beta-testing it, at the high school level, but if nothing else, it should keep you sufficiently entertained that you can end each week on a high note. I shall be your host and lecturer, Grayson Deschenes." He put up his forepaws, smiling. "Save your applause and let me hear it all at the end, real big."

Robbie let himself laugh fully, as did most of the class. As far as he was concerned, this guy could read to them out of the local phone book, and he'd be completely content.

From the front of the classroom, the visiting professor began handing out stacks of pages stapled together. "Take one and pass the rest, please, you know the drill. This will be the syllabus for your Friday classes with me for the rest of the semester. Now if you'll all... what's so funny?" The fox looked around in mock annoyance, as the class members each received a packet with the words SILLY BUS at the top. "It's like the short bus, but more fun."

At this, even the mouse could no longer hold back the laughter. The fox smiled at him, saying, "Good room, here; thanks for warming them up for me!" He turned back to the class, still smiling. "It's fair to say that Mr. Youngblood and I have different teaching styles, but I'm serious about paying attention to him. He's one of the best students I ever had come through my college classes, and I know he's a fine teacher, so be good, or I'll hear about it." He looked again to the mouse, sketching a short bow in his direction, and the rodent's small round ears reddened with a touch of embarrassment, his furless pink tail twitching slightly. Robbie raised his estimation of the professor another notch. Graciousness took style and confidence.

"I'll go through the bus with you in just a moment. First, I want to give you an idea of what this course is about, and why it's being offered here at your high school. If you put my name into the search engines, you'll discover that I'm a published writer. You might also hear about a fracas in the college cafeteria regarding a dessert known as 'spotted dick,' but it doesn't mean what you think it does... and the chef had it coming, pardon the joke."

Males and females alike turned various shades of pink and red, either from embarrassment or trying to hold back gales of laughter. Robbie found himself suffering from a bit of both.

"Let me provide you with a disappointing statistic," the fox continued softly. "Studies show that, in this country, 90% of college graduates never pick up another book in their lives, once they've left school. Think about that - 90% of college grads don't read." He paused looking around at his charges. "And the same study shows that about 95% of high school graduates, the ones who don't go to college, don't read either."

Something in Robbie found this more disturbing than he'd have thought. Of course, he was one of those kits who had to be doing something nearly all the time, and reading was one of the great somethings to do. He wasn't sure if that was just one more thing that made him such a strange person, along with playing the violin, being respectful to his mates and opponents alike on the football field, and being openly gay in a high school still trying to accept the twenty-first century much less homosexuality. The fox's next words actually made the rabbit's eyes widen.

"I blame our educational system. Not specific teachers, and certainly not Mr. Youngblood here. It's the system that is at fault. We spend so much time trying to teach you how to read that we forget to teach you why you should want to."

Professor Deschenes paced across the front of the room for a moment. "This is exactly the issue that we're trying to address with this portion of the AP course. You may have heard the phrase used, 'What's that got to do with the price of rice in China?' It refers to the idea that whatever is being discussed isn't relevant to the point. Now, Mr. Youngblood's job remains the same, and it's a good job; he's going to show you everything you never wanted to know about writing college papers but we're going to tell you anyway." The fox grinned. "If you were as old as I am, you'd get that joke, but never mind. What I'm going to do, my young friends, is show you not only that recreational and informational reading can be of benefit to you personally - uh huh, I see a few shaking heads already! - I'm going to show you that you have the right to your own opinions, that you can think beyond your known boundaries, and that your mind is truly unique. As writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.' And I, in my humble capacity as your lord and master for your last hour of school each week, intend for you all to get your minds stretched to whole new horizons.

"So..." the professor picked up his own copy of the small sheaf of papers he'd passed out before. "Let's have a look at this silly bus and see where we're going to be driving this semester."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"I'd say someone's had a good day at school... or is it just because it's Friday?"

Amanda Willowdale grinned at her son as he chuckled, "Okay, what gave me away?"

"We're already into the fifth season of Criminal Minds. That, and you've got a glint in your eye that I'm very glad to see there. Usually, after the holidays, you're a bit reluctant to go back."

Robbie had to nod in agreement. He didn't really mind school, but sometimes it was more chore than pleasure, even for someone who enjoyed learning, as he did. He had propped himself on the stool at the kitchen bar, watching his dam preparing dinner for an early night. The Parents Willwodale were going out for a movie tonight, partly just for their own enjoyment, and partly to give Robbie time to be in the kitchen by himself. He had mastered a chocolate chip cookie recipe that used corn flakes as a base, which he'd found in the first JoAnne Fluke mystery novel, The Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder. The family had invited guests for a slightly-belated Twelfth Night party tomorrow evening, and Robbie was to make up several batches of the now-famous cookies.

"There's been a change to the English AP class," the younger rabbit said, nonchalantly snagging a slice of carrot from the salad bowl. "We've got a professor from Billingsley College coming in every Friday to present his course on Shakespeare and the Price of Rice."

The dam stopped her preparations and looked her kit in the eye. "You get to explain that one to me."

"I think it's going to be fantastic." Robbie was nearly bouncing on the stool. "It's about creating a desire in students to be lifelong readers. He actually said that he thinks the educational system is wrong,_that it teaches us _how to read but not why we should want to read." He felt himself shiver a little as he quoted the professor directly. He tried not to notice.

"Pretty good point," Amanda conceded with a nod. "School does tend to shove things down our throats without much thought about whether or not we really want it. This guy sounds like he's got some good ideas. What's his name?"

"Professor Deschenes."

"Grayson Deschenes?" Robbie's mom stopped her preparations entirely. "You're getting taught by Grayson Deschenes?"

"You know him?"

"I know a few of his books. One Last Landing_was terrific - a space opera and love story wrapped into one. _Stories Made of Starfire was a great collection; a lot of the tales are like Bradbury's work. He said that his inspiration came from the music of Zeryx Starfire. Apparently, they know each other."

The young buck was amazed. "He said he was a writer, but I didn't know any of his books."

"Not everyone is on the best-seller list, hon," the dam smiled. "A lot of really good writers never get that far, sad to say. Word-of-muzzle is still the best advertising. And a lot of folks don't read that much anymore."

Robbie repeated the statistics that the fox had given at the beginning of his lecture. "For some reason, that really makes me sad," he said. "It's like losing the ability to imagine things."

"It makes for functioning zombies." Amanda shook her head and went back to fixing dinner. "I'm sorry, hon. I guess it's one of my sore spots. When I was in college, more and more students were getting away from the liberal arts. They went into engineering and business and ways to make a fast dollar. It was like watching people sell their souls. And then budgets for arts in schools were slashed or cut out altogether." She glanced up, tossing a smile at her son. "It's why we've never complained about paying for your violin lessons, and why we're so glad to hear you practicing. And now, you've got Grayson Deschenes for a teacher. I didn't even know he was living here. That's really fantastic."

The buck was more than willing to agree. "He's the Writer-In-Residence at the college. Do you still have copies of his books?"

"You know how rarely I toss out a book!" the doe laughed. "I'll have a quick look for them later tonight."

"We'll have four papers to write over the semester, just for his part of the class. They have to cover a different book for each paper, and the last one has to be something we've never read before. I think I'd like to read one of his."

"When's your first paper due?"

"Next week."

"He expects you to read a book in a week?"

"No, no," Robbie hurried to explain. "The first paper is a short one about a book we've already read, for class or something. Second one, too, and for the third, we have the option of a book we've already read or reading a new one. Only the fourth has to be a book we've never read before. I have a feeling I'm going to want to read his work slowly."

"He's a fox, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"I've seen his picture on the covers of his books. Nice looking fur."

Robbie looked up at his mom with something like shock. She was paying full attention to her dinner preparations, although there was a little hint of a smile on her muzzle. He wondered about it. Maybe she knew something about the professor that he didn't.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The warm, dark bedroom was quiet, save for the panting breaths of the two young males. Robbie lay on his belly, furclad on the bed, as Donnell collapsed on top of him, pressing close from without and within. The buck treasured all of his moments with his slim otter friend, but these moments, these afterglows that were all too brief, were unquestionably his favorite. They had discovered each other a few years ago, but this part of the discovery was relatively new. Generally, their coupling was quick (all jokes about rabbits aside), mutual, and of the moment. When this new activity was explored, they needed time and a safe space, first to get the nerve, then to get past the first fumbling efforts (online porn pictures made it look simple, not to mention painless), and finally to achieve the act itself. Robbie found that he was particularly fond of having Donnell love him this way. It felt more like love, at least, and he held the feeling warm and close whenever he had the chance.

The varsity swimmer covered the rabbit completely, his chin resting on Robbie's right shoulder, his breath warm and quick in the buck's ear. He made little contented noises, even nuzzling Robbie's neck a little. Even so, the buck knew that this wouldn't last much longer. Donnell was every bit a male, in these situations; it wasn't long after the climax that he would recover his breath, become limp, and slide out from within, shortly before rolling off from above. The buck didn't really mind, truth told; after all, it was just the way the otter was. Robbie did wonder, though, if that (as the old song went) was all there is.

Oddly enough, the thought brought the professor back to mind, because it was reading -- the many books and stories that he'd read -- that had given Robbie the peculiar notion that perhaps there was more to sex, to love, to life, than was part of his current situation. Books by Patricia Nell Warren, Armistead Maupin, Sherman Alexie, even mystery writers like Joseph Hansen and Lawrence Block, all of them taught him a little something about relationships, even when he wasn't sure if it described what Donnell really was to him. The buck knew that he meant more to the otter than simply being a convenient alternative to pawing off, but he wasn't really sure if the word "relationship" in this case meant anything more than its most basic, almost logistical definition. Affection, camaraderie, even real help at times (Donnell was a little slow at basic lit, and he was a good gym pal to help Robbie keep up with his free-weights routine), and the sex could be good even when it was short, sharp, unexpected. Even so, Robbie knew that this part - the cuddling part - was sometimes even better than the thrill of climax. He hoped that he would find out one day, because you could cuddle for a longer time than you can--

He felt Donnell shifting above him, starting with his hips, the slipping out, then the rolling off to Robbie's left side, the otter's shorter-haired coat sliding over the buck's luxuriously full pelt, ultimately leaving the otter lying on his back, a smile on his muzzle that one could almost describe as rapturous. "Damn, Robbie," he said to the air in general. "Baby, your booty really got it goin' on."

"Glad you still approve." The rabbit smiled softly as he moved to nuzzle against his friend's welcoming embrace, the warm scent of his musk adding to the lapine's languorous pleasure. The otter's comment was an old joke that never actually got old, no matter how many times the he said it. They'd watched some kind of porn anime, dubbed in English, and kept laughing over the crazy lines and jokes, and that was one of them. "Good for you, then?"

"You couldn't tell?" the otter laughed.

"I did sort of get an idea when you went into overdrive right near the end there."

"My boyfriend started smoking, so I slowed down and applied lube."

Another of the jokes, like an oft-heard comedy routine. Robbie's laugh felt just the slightest bit forced. "How's your first week back? I didn't get much chance to ask, when you first got here."

The otter's grin revealed itself in his voice. "About the same as usual. Over the winter break, the only thing I ever really miss about school is the heated pool to swim in. Otherwise, I've got nothin' to make me want to come back. Senioritis. You'll have your own case of it, next year."

"Looking forward to college?"

"Looking forward to the scholarship ride, that's for sure. It's like getting paid to swim, how cool is that?"

"For you, that's like being paid to breathe."

Donnell laughed, reached up to skritch Robbie's chestnut headfur for a moment. "Or you playing soccer. Or reading. You've always got your muzzle in a book."

"Sometimes, I have it elsewhere," the rabbit snarked, nibbling at the dark brown fur at the otter's neck.

"If I held an open book over my crotch, you'd be there all night."

"As long as you're turning pages; my paws might be otherwise engaged."

"So how about you? How's classes and all?"

"My AP English class is gonna be great," Robbie said with enthusiasm, rising up on his elbows to regard his friend directly. "There's this professor from Billingsley who's coming in to teach on Friday afternoons. He's a published writer, guy named Deschenes."

"Never heard of him."

"He doesn't write scripts for videogames."

The otter proved the worth of his tongue by offering a supple and eloquent raspberry. "Well, you're obviously gonna be in heaven this semester. Still got time to help out a dumb jock once in a while?"

"Do you want help, or do you want to help yourself to me?"

"We can't do both?"

"Not at the same time."

Donnell laughed. "Yeah, that would pretty well kill my concentration, one way or another."

Looking into the otter's eyes, Robbie felt something in his belly turn over lazily. "Donnie," he said softly, "how come we never kiss much?"

"Just not my thing, I guess."

"You do a lot of other stuff."

"Yeah." Donnell shrugged a little, the sound of his thick tail thapping agitatedly against the bed telling Robbie a bit more than he wanted to know.

"You kiss females at school. You gave Sondra a lip-lock in the hall that actually stopped traffic."

"I got a reputation to maintain." The otter grinned. "Not like I could kiss you in the hall."

"Why not?"

"Everybody knows you're gay, Rob. I gotta keep down-low."

"Why?"

"You're fulla questions tonight," Donnell grinned more as he rubbed a webbed forepaw across Robbie's chest, his side, finally cupping the rabbit's muscular rump. "Maybe I didn't do as good a job as I thought I did. Need another ride, bunny-boy?"

The protective part of Robbie's mind distracted him for a moment with the fact that his parents would be home eventually, and the house would no longer be his alone. This triggered the memory that he was alone in the house because he still had corn-flake chocolate chip cookies to bake. That reminded him of where he'd first heard about the recipe, in that JoAnne Fluke novel, where the main character had wanted to make cookies for her sister, but because she had no oats in the house (which she usually used), she used the corn flakes instead. That, in turn, reminded him of an online article he'd read about how corn flakes were invented by a physician named John Harvey Kellogg, who created them as part of a bland diet to help prevent folks from masturbating. And from there, there was no stopping the thoughts that really needed to be tended to.

He was still six months shy of his 16th birthday. Apart from the usual instruction that yowens get about sex (10% hints in "Health" class, 10% rumor from other students, and 80% random porn found wherever possible), Robbie's mom and dad had taken time to give him facts, statistics, personal experience, and a lot of loving conversation with an always-open-door policy from the start. He found out that corn flakes didn't have any effect on him, as far as Dr. Kellogg would have been concerned, and making cookies from them only seemed to intensify things (or at least that's what his dad had joked). He had a healthy view of sex and sexuality, or at least he thought so; from his other readings, he thought he had begun to get some handle on what a relationship looked like, or could look like. What he had yet to do, though, was figure out how the two of them were supposed to happen at the same time.

Donnell was good at what he did, and in the "old way" of sex, he gave as good as he got. He was never shy about what he wanted when he and Robbie got a little time alone; his soldier would salute pronto, always ready for recon down the alimentary canal. The otter was not churlish about reciprocation; he didn't keep his own country unknown to the rabbit's exploratory probes, whether behind securely-locked doors or the occasional foray into more dangerous locations, where the possibility of getting caught was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. Lately, however, Donnell had decided that he preferred to assess the situation from the opposite direction, and in this, he was exclusively the explorer rather than the explored. It wasn't something that Robbie ever objected to; he got his own fun out of it, in various ways, and the otter seemed to be as perfect a fit as any cylinder could wish his piston to be. To use modern parlance, it was "hawt."

It was even affectionate, sometimes to the point of tenderness. And sometimes it wasn't. With Donnell, you could never really be sure. When everything was going well, he could be playful, as was the nature of his kind. Occasionally, he was perfunctory, simply about his physical gratification. There was also that one time. The day after a huge and very public screaming match with a female mink he had been involved with, the otter had come to see the rabbit, and there followed a long night of the swimmer drinking way too much unlawfully-acquired beer, some incoherent babbling, and something happening outdoors amid the thick bushes behind the school aquatic center, something that Robbie had tried very, very hard to forget, before Donnell had passed out, and the rabbit spent time curled up in a trembling ball of gray fur, trying to figure out how to explain the bruising and ruined clothing. The otter had remembered nothing, or so he'd said, and various attempts at coercion and pleading had led them back to doing what they had just done. What Donnell now wanted to do again. Rather than talk. Rather than kiss.

In the second and a half that it took Robbie to have all this flash through his brain, the last thing he felt was the smile on his muzzle that didn't reach his eyes, and the last thing he heard was his own voice saying, "Sure."