On his way home that morning Johnny tried to set his mind to practical matters and to stop dreaming. (He'd been imagining a life for Faye and himself living in a little house on the prairie, far away from the rest of the world, where they had some cattle, and he would spent his nights composing a book on Lemurian tales and stories, which would be a huge international hit, and he would travel the world as a famous chronicler interviewing lemurians everywhere, Faye at his side, and he'd bring Pearly...)
...Enough of that. He needed to address some very practical questions: where and how could Faye and he live together in this very real and hostile world? Could they move north, live in some place like Chicago or New York, where lemurians were supposedly much more accepted? Would mixed couples also be acceptable over there? He strongly doubted it.
He had spoken to other lemurians over the years who'd lived North, drifters and vagabonds who traveled through these parts. Some of them said they actually preferred the South to the more liberal North. Humans didn't bother a lemurian in the South if this lemurian kept their head down and knew their place. Sure, a lemurian had more rights in the North—on the condition one acted as human as possible. Dress like a human, walk and talk like a human, go to school, go to church, go to work. It didn't sound very terrible to Johnny.
Could he expect Faye to come with him? Leave behind her home, her family and friends, to set out with some scruffy lemurian for some unknown future? If she felt this love as strongly as he did, he most certainly could and she most certainly would.
At the edge of the shantytown he could make out Pearly in the distance, waiting for him outside their shack. She'd seen him, too, and waved.
She would wait like that for him every morning, and if he was home earlier than she, he would wait for her. She would now put a kettle on the fire, and cut some slices of bread, make tea and bake some eggs, bacon and beans. Pearly often acted more like his mother than their mother ever had. They'd sit and talk low, have their meal outside, not wanting to wake mother, who slept behind a curtain in the one room shack.
He saw Pearly's expression, her eyes, change as he walked up to her, and he immediately knew why—and he cursed himself, cursed his stupidity! He'd never before seen that serious expression on her face. "You'd better go and wash, wash up good before mother wakes," she told him, without any emotion in her voice.
How could he have been so foolish? How could he not have realized how much he smelled of Faye after such a night? If he'd been downwind Pearly would have sensed it a mile off.
She clearly hadn't been thrilled when she realized what had been going on between Faye and Johnny. She must have smelled there had been a change in Johnny yesterday, but hadn't said anything. He must have smelled in love, like Faye had smelled earlier that night. (Oh dear, his mother must have smelled this as well..!) Johnny wondered why it upset Pearly so. Hadn't she and Faye become great friends in a very short time? Shouldn't she be happy for the both of them? The way she had looked at Johnny... She had looked so coolly at him, cold, like... well, like his mother usually looked at him. She had reminded him of his mother, and it had made him shiver.
He arrived at the lake carrying a pail of soda. Lemurians normally didn't wash themselves, they brushed their fur every few days and it pretty much cleaned itself. But those lemurians that worked in, say, a slaughterhouse did have to wash themselves, obviously. A freshly washed lemurian always felt socially awkward, as someone's natural smell told a lot about them, and was in itself a form of communication, both consciously and unconsciously. Rat-catching was generally a rather clean profession, but often Johnny had to get under cellar floors, which were sometimes dry, dusty and cobwebbed, but often wet and very filthy, since rats would come out of the foul drains. So Johnny washed his fur regularly, out of necessity, but never enjoyed it.
The lake was still damned cold in the spring. He cleaned himself with gritty soda, cursing again his stupidity. Did he have to do this every time he got close to Faye? He cursed truelove, which was about to give him a whole lot of trouble and worry. Not only Faye and mother (oh, dear...mother...), but also the other lemurians in his community wouldn't approve of him colluding with a human girl. They had in the end accepted Johnny as part of the community; once they had got to know him, and had realized halflings weren't all that bad, really, and were even quite useful and served a purpose in this society where lemurians were dominated by homo sapiens. If they would just take the time to get to know Faye, Johnny thought, they would— He cut that thought off, he was being silly, and he cursed the Great Current for throwing him this curveball.
