Breed

Chapter Twenty-three

"But there will be girls there?" Iago asked.

"There will be representatives of the fairer sex, yes, but I kind of think they'll be preoccupied by the bigotry and injustice."

"So feminists, then?" he asked wryly.

"Mostly."

"In all seriousness, I'm not trying to hound. I'm just trying to get out of my bubble, a little. I realized I've been 90% of my time cloistered with Drake, Pete and Cris. I'm on a long, lonely path towards just looking at one of them and saying, 'eh.'"

"That's not what makes people gay."

"I know. I'm not talking about being gay. I'm talking about giving up, and just deciding to dry-hump whatever's nearby. If I were a bear, I'd be molesting a pine tree. And Drake's too fast- plus, despite the fact I've never actually seen him talk to a girl, present company excluded, I see a lot of them leaving his room the next morning. For a while my working theory was that it was like a reverse Narnia situation, that fantasy folk were fleeing out of his closet. But a fair few of them have walked around the apartment without pants, so I can safely say not a one of them was a fawn."

"Every single one of them was foin."

"Drake, we talked about this. What are the house rules?"

"No masturbating in the living room?"

"Okay, but rather than go through them from funniest to least funny, what's the pertinent one?"

"I'm not allowed to say 'foin,' especially not in the pursuit of a pun. In exchange for you not wearing those sweatpants outside of your room anymore."

"Sweatpants?" Mikaela asked. "Do I even?"

"You didn't, but I'm telling you anyway," Drake said. "He's got these sweatpants that I'm fairly certain must me older than he is. They cling so much, and they're fraying enough, that it's like he's wearing nothing but saran wrap. I still can't eat sausages; I even swore off hot dogs, for a while."

"It can't be that bad."

"If you want to know for sure, he can show them to you- but only in his room."

"The point being that I need to get out more," Iago said. "Not necessarily to creep on women, but just to move among them again, you know, reacclimate."

"You realize there are women literally everywhere you could go on campus."

"Yeah. But I think that's the problem. I don't go much. Mostly to Pete's. And classes. Then back here."

"Okay. There will be women. Happy?"

"Actually I'm feeling kind of self-conscious about the whole thing now, to tell you the truth."

"Drake?"

"Philosophically I'm there, but this..." he started to turn up the volume on the TV, "gives me pause."

It was the news, showing stock footage of a policecar with its lights flashing behind and anchor talking. "...fourteen year old Elijah Givens was killed when police kicked in his door. Authorities have now confirmed that the death was related to an online argument the boy became embroiled in concerning the transhuman protest downtown."

"God," Mikaela said, and dropped down on the couch beside Drake. "I met that kid," she said.

"Really?" Iago asked.

"Yeah. He was previewing the campus my first day."

"That's why I'm hesitating," Drake said. "This isn't just us waving our polidicks around in the frigid air. There's repercussions, knock-on effects, and unintended consequences."

"But that's exactly why we have to go through with this protest," Mikaela said. "Because the reasonable response to protests- or worse, arguments about a protest- can't be murdering a 14 year old boy. And we can't let it be police violence and oppression, either. The more violent the cops get, the louder our protest has to get."

"That's starting to get awfully close to 'turning the other cheek,'" Drake said, "and I'm way too atheist to be comfortable with that."

"The conflict already started." Mikaela said.

"We didn't start it but we tried to... fight it doesn't really work in a nonconfrontational context, does it?"

"There's going to be a confrontation; that can't be helped. But we either make peace or we make war, there is no third way."

"And either way, the other side's going to be fighting like we want their extinction. Okay. But I may kick the first person who tells me to give peace a chance."

"Seems fair."