Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) by Kyell Gold Read Free Book Online

magnets on the fridge. “Cor kept knocking me down. And those kids from Summervale never let me score.”
    “Sweetie,” his mother said, “I know. I just think if you really put your mind to it, you can do anything you want.”
    “I guess I can’t.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the kitchen. As he walked up the low staircase, he heard his mother picking up the magnets from the kitchen floor.
    The light in the upstairs hallway was off, but a thin bright line glowed beneath his father’s door. He shouldered into his room and slammed the door behind him. The sound echoed satisfyingly in the silent house.
    Sol put one paw on the wall near the light switch before turning it on and rested his muzzle against it, breathing in his scent and his brother’s. The number of times Natty had leaned against the wall here, talking to Sol, it was no wonder his scent had stuck, even if it had faded a bit over the last few months. If he stood right by the wall, it felt as though Natty were just outside the door. “I’ll kill myself before I go work in the cannery,” Sol muttered.
    The weight of the evening’s events and threats came home to him all at once. He leaned against the wall and let his brother’s scent prop him up. Before he knew it, his phone was in his paw, and he’d called up Natty’s number. But then he thought about what he would say, and how everything would inevitably lead back to his brother asking the question, “why don’t you like baseball now?” And Sol couldn’t tell him, because Natty would see through anything he made up, and would mock him for the truth. He put the phone away and slammed his paw against the light switch.
    Another switch turned on his iPod player. Heavy guitar filled the room and, he hoped, seeped out into the hallway to bother his father. But no stern knocks sounded at his door by the time he’d sent a text to Carcy, started up his computer and logged in.
    Meg had updated the shared folder they were using for their project with the painting she’d shown him, plus three others in which washes of color formed dreamlike countrysides and cityscapes where light browns and blues surrounded arresting spots of bright red and yellow. He pulled up one that looked like a windmill, but it was not the mill atop the Moulin Rouge. Curious, he did a web search for paintings of the Moulin Rouge windmill and found one by an artist named Auguste Chabaud.
    The night encroached on the mill around the edges, but its red paint and sails shone. Sol thought he could see what Jean had seen in it, the incongruity of the huge red windmill rising out of the old slate roofs and wood timbers. Below it, the words “MOULIN ROUGE,” spelled out in flickering points of light, were barely visible, and they did not need to be; the mill spoke for itself. Sol could almost see the crowd below the mill gazing up at it, though only a few people had been painted in the picture. He imagined he was looking at it through the window from a small painter’s room, the odor of oil paints and oil lamp filling his nose. That was the world their painter had lived in, and the Moulin Rouge was at the center of it.
    He threw his shirt onto the pile near his closet, lay down, and opened his phone. Carcy still hadn’t responded. Sol wanted to send another text, but sometimes he felt like the ram was annoyed at him, and he couldn’t let that happen, not now with the car in jeopardy, when he might need to ask for even more from his boyfriend. He hadn’t told Meg about that one question that he hadn’t gotten up the nerve to ask Carcy, and she hadn’t asked, probably because it was such a basic question that she couldn’t conceive that he would start making plans without having asked it. After all, she already knew she had a cousin she could stay with.
    And it wasn’t that big a deal. Sol was pretty sure Carcy would be okay with him staying there. Once he asked.
    He tossed those uneasy thoughts aside and flipped to the