The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison Read Free Book Online Page B

sweater— something Mom bought me in seventh grade from the Gap—and wave shyly at them. I’ve never been good at art, at turning the inside-out. Oren was the artist—the illustrator, the rhyme-maker, with a voice like maple syrup.
    Flynt turns the wide board in his hands, yells over his shoulder as he travels: “I’ll be right back.”
    He disappears behind a curtain. I count nine dislocated wooden planks in the ceiling of the old warehouse; the calm perfection of the number wraps itself around me like a second coat. It’s going to be a good day—I can really let myself believe it now. Seraphina, Marlow, and Gretchen go back to their projects. Flynt reemerges seconds later, sans wood, but paint-smattered as ever. “Let’s go.”
    He offers me his arm. And this time, I take it.

    “So, I just … throw it?” I lift a chair between my legs, preparing to shoot it into the pyramid of trash cans Flynt has set up in an abandoned parking lot. Flynt is teaching me how to “trash can bowl”—a common game here in Neverland, apparently. I’ve never bowled with anything but duck pins in a big air-conditioned room at the birthday parties my mom forced me to attend as a kid.
    “Yep. Just chuck it, hard as you can. But, you’ve gotta get a feel for the chair, aim it with just the right angle.” He swoops his hands and arms through the air in demonstration. “It’s beautiful, if you do it right.” He smiles coyly. “No pressure, though.”
    Just as I’m about to send the chair flying, a car backfires somewhere, and the noise makes me jump—still nervous, still twitchy from the memory of the gunshot.
    My chair flies sideways in the air and splinters into several pieces as it hits the ground, three feet away from the perfectly pyramidal arrangement of trash cans. A half second later, Flynt, with a running jump, propels his body into the trash cans. They land with a tremendous clattering, and he leaps to his feet and jogs back toward me.
    “Whoa! Lo! You got them all! Look at that!” He grabs me by my waist, spins me around, and cheers, trying to get me to do the same. My body feels like jelly, loose and uncontrolled, and I wriggle myself from Flynt’s hold as quickly as I can. I stare down at the arms of my coat and realize they’re covered in paint. Flynt’s multicolored handprints—the paint he was using at Malatesta’s must have been still-wet on his hands. I can trace the places where he’s touched me—shoulders, waist, the backs of my hands. And I can’t help but smile, hoping Flynt doesn’t see how violet my ears must be turning.
    “I broke the chair. I’m no good at this.”
    “Then how did all of those trash cans end up on the ground? Answer me that, Lo!” He quickly runs toward the Dumpsters and returns with a new chair. “And if you broke the chair, then why is it perfectly intact?” A smile spreads across his face. “Hey. What happened to your coat?”
    I look up at him. His eyes are flecked with gold. I play mock-innocent. “What do you mean? It’s always looked like this, Flynt.”
    “Right, right, of course. Sorry—the sun is so bright—makes me see things.”
    “Stop trying to distract me from my winning streak.” I narrow my eyes, set my mouth into a line, and bend my knees and arms into a fighting stance. “Set those trash cans up. I’m gonna knock ’em down again.”
    Flynt sets them up for me. I raise the new chair over my head—a slim cherry oak missing a leg—close my eyes, and fling it ahead. A wild crashing—a tumbling explosion—makes my eyes pop open. I did it.
    “Score!” Flynt cries dramatically, arms raised to the heavens.
    There’s a wind picking up, making my bangs blow off of my forehead, making the trash cans spin against the gravel, a dragging sort of beat. We skip to it in looping circles, hand in hand. And then I realize that our hands are touching and let his go and run to the other side of the parking lot to set up the cans for him. He knocks them