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i.
Nick is 6 years old when it’s been a year since his father left his mom and him alone, to themselves. Nick is 6 years old and it’s been slow and gradual to get over it but now just the two of them is enough for him. He is six years old when his mother has him sit next to her on the couch and have him listen to what she has to say.
“Nicholas,” she says (and at this part Nick perks his ears, because he knows his mother only calls him Nicholas when there’s something serious she wants to talk about),” I need to tell you something. And you have to listen very carefully, got it?”
He nods his head up and down for yes.
She smiles at him, and ruffles the fur on his head. “Good. Now here’s the thing.”
And then she goes on something about animals and how people thought differently about them, what people thought of foxes, in particular, but the bottom line was clear.
“Nick. You can be whatever you want to be, and don’t you ever let them tell you there’s anything you can’t be just because of who you are.”
Nick starts nodding his head up and down faster and his mother laughs and ruffles the fur on his head again and gets up.
“I’m going out for the groceries. Be back in a bit, alright?”
“Alright!”
When she comes back, she has a surprise – a whole tub of strawberry ice cream for the two of them. Jumbo sized. Nick jumps up and down with excitement because it feels like its been forever since they had so much ice cream ever since Dad left and Mom got extra busy. She lets him stay up late, as they watch cartoons and eat ice cream together, sending him back at 10 to his bed, after getting him to brush his teeth. She tucks him in with a kiss.
“Sleep tight. Sweet dreams, son.”
Nick’s already half asleep but he smiles a little.
He is six years old. He doesn’t understand what his mother means but he hopes to, soon.
ii.
Nick is 8 years old now, and he thinks he understands a little more about what his mom said to him that day, because sometimes he hears snippets of conversation with his Mom on the phone and he can just hear how trying it is for her to convince some of the customers she sells to. After one particularly long and dreary conversation, she sighs, exasperated, and collapses back down into a chair. Lighting a cigarette, she says, “Sometimes nobody will ever believe a fox.” And it made him mad, because his mother was the most honest animal that ever lived.
iii.
Nick is 9 years old when he hears about the junior scouts – an all prey club for kids his age, a club majority of his classmates have joined, and talk about during lunch. NICK’s eyes gleam with excitement as he hears about them and he decides right there that’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to join the junior scouts. And when he tells them this, there’s a look of apprehension passed around everyone, until Craig, the outspoken zebra, goes, “Gee, Nick…you do realize you’re a predator right?”
There’s an awkward silence, but Nick is still grinning. “Yeah? So?” He holds up his paws and shrugs his shoulders. “What’s that got to do with anything?” But even now theres an edge of doubt creeping into his voice because he knows exactly what that’s got to do with it.
More looks are exchanged between the animals at the table, until Blake, a short goat with curly brown hair, speaks up. “Well, it’s just…there aren’t really any predators in the scouts, y’know?”
“So, I’ll be the first one then!” He announces with an air of decision, as if it’s already done.
Everyone stares at him a little bit, until someone starts talking about some cartoon that aired last night, and soon that’s what the whole conversation shifts to. Nick takes part too, but all that’s in his mind is how much of a great scout he’s going to be.
His Mom comes home from work at around 8, tired and carrying a bag of fast food for him, because she’s too tired to cook dinner tonight, and even when she does cook, she’s the worst cook anybody ever met, because no matter what she made it would all be reduced to the same lousy charcoal looking lump. The second she sits down on the couch, with a sigh of relief, Nick instantly jumps up and starts talking nonstop about the scouts and everythind they do.
“And, and this one kid! Jack, right? He told me that every Saturday they have a bonfire! And also! Also…”
And so on and on he goes, with his Mom listening, so excited that the words are just spilling out of his mouth like sand through fingers.
But it’s only later that he figures out how expensive it is, when he looks it up online and the price of the uniform is over the top itself. Still, he can’t help it. He imagines looking himself up and down a mirror wearing it, at the bonfires, and all the other activities, and he can barely contain himself. But still, the reality of it is a nagging feeling at the back of his head.
It’s too expensive.
Too much for him and his mom anyway, he decides. But he allows himself to continue dreaming, when he goes to bed and until he falls asleep.
“Dreams really do come true!”
This is what Nick whispers to himself, a week later, when he’s staring down at a crisp new brown uniform in his paws, amidst the cheap wrapping paper he’s just teared off it. He immediately looks towards his mother, who stands over him smiling, and grins so wide that it almost hurts. He immediately jumps up and gives her the best hug he can.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” And then he’s already spreading the clothes out, ready to wear them before he’s stopped.
“Hey, you aren’t going to be wearing those anytime soon, mister.” She tuts. “Not without a shower, anyway.”
So Nick scrambles to the bathroom and around an hour later he’s standing in front of the mirror, fur still a little damp but clean as ever, with the uniform on and a bright light in his eyes. He was going to be the best scout ever.
Nick is 9 years old when he runs out of the basement and storms out of the door, and outside, the laughs of his scout mates, no, former scout mates, still echoing cruelly in his ears. And then he collapses next to a dirty brick wall and puts all his force into taking off the damn muzzle. He finally manages to rip it off his face and he flings it away from him and stares at it.
Tears well in his eyes, threatening to fall, until he finally realizes there’s no one to see him crying anyway, so he lets them go. Sobs choke his throat and he gets up, ready to head home, because there’s no point in waiting around since there’s nothing to do now anyway. He takes the longer route back, because his mom wouldn’t be expecting him to come home so soon. He regrets it because on the way, a car drives past him and into a puddle, dirtying his pants with muddy water.
And when he finally trudges up to the front door of the dingy apartment they live in, he stops for a while wondering what he’s going to say. His mother may have been truthful, but that didn’t mean he had to be. She would worry.
Finally, too tired to come up with something on the spot, he opens the door and walks in. His mother looks up from the couch, where she’d been watching TV and smiles at him, waving at him to come over and sit by her. So he does, and when he sits down, she asks, “So, how’d it go?”
“It was great!” he exclaims with a smile. One lie, and it rolls of his tongue easily enough.
“What did you do?” she asks.
“Lots of things, but I’m too tired to talk about them all right now, to be honest. I’ll tell you tomorrow when you get home from work!” Another lie. It’s getting easier.
“Alright then. Though I cant say I’ve ever seen you too tired from anything other than homework,” she says with a laugh. “Go to bed. And – oh Nick what did you do to your pants? They’re all muddy.”
“O-oh, these, I – uh,” he falters. “I got splashed by a car on the way home. Sorry…”
“It’s alright,” she sighs. “I was going to go to the Laundromat tomorrow, anyways. Night, champ.”
“Goodnight!”
Nick is 9 years old when he’s finally understood what his mother meant, and another thing too. That she was wrong.
iv.
Nick is eleven years old when he realizes theres been a change in his mom, but its only when he catches her coughing into a tissue that’s stained red and when she’s done that he realizes how servere it is. He asks anxiously if she’s alright and a bit angrily how long it’s been going on.
She hesitates a bit. Only a bit and then answers, “No. Not really, and it’s been around a month now. Don’t worry, I’ll see a doctor soon.”
He worries anyway.
The next few months after the visit to the doctor, he sees sadness slump his mother’s shoulders back and several words being tossed about. He hears talks about radiographs and chemotherapy, and the trips to the hospital become regular.
He is eleven years old when his mother is admitted into the hospital on account of lung cancer. He’s eleven when he has to stay by her bed all night that day and watch over for the next few weeks, while she’s reduced to skin and bones. He’s eleven when he realizes what this means. That if – and it’s a very painful, because it reminds me him that it’s not definite whether it will happen – she comes home, then the hospital bills will have them in debt for what might as well be the rest of their lives.
So, he decides to take it into his own hands and one day he takes a brand new box for a cordless telephone, stuffs a rock inside , reseals it and pays a little deer kid ten dollars to sell it to a pawn shop at the other side of the city for $85. It’s just as easy as lying, and by the end of the week he’s managed to make $217. It’s not what he would’ve wanted to do, but what he does because he’s a fox, and that’s what foxes do best.
v.
Nick is twelve when his mother dies. He’s twelve when he goes to her funeral, where he can count the number of guests on his fingers. He’s twelve when nobody knows what to do to him, because he has no one else, aside from a grandmother that had turned her back on her daughter and probably wouldn’t think much of him either.
Eventually they put him in care, but it doesn't last long because he runs away. He runs away every time, because he has enough money and enough ways to make more and enough people to help him, and because even there there's kids and grown ups alike who wont trust him for who he is. A fox.
So that's exactly what he's going to be.