Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (3 page)

Their low two-story house stood amidst many other similar limestone houses at the top of Prospect Hill, which the kids in school called Wolf Hill. Sol loved the solid look of the houses; he’d learned last year that his neighborhood had been mostly built twenty-five years ago, but to him the houses looked like pale green ancient monuments. Even in this past year, with all his family troubles, Sol had never felt safer than sitting in his room, the weight of stone around him holding his scent and reminding him that he belonged there—as long as he didn’t feel invisible eyes on him, a new development he hoped was not permanent. But he liked Meg’s house more than she liked his (she said the heavy stone and scent-holding walls made her feel “twitchy”), which was just one of many reasons Sol always visited her.

It was only a ten minute walk, fifteen if Sol went the long way around by Prospect Park, down the side of Prospect Hill through his neighborhood of brick houses, flower gardens, and low white fences. The park tonight was quiet, though Sol could see cars on the other side of the park where a lot of his classmates went to make out, and on one of the benches was a lump that might be a homeless person. None of them paid any attention to him. He’d only ever come to the park at night to watch fireworks or to chase fireflies with his brother, years and years ago. A few hovered out of his reach as he padded down the hill; he made half-hearted grabs at their yellow-green glows out of habit.

At the base of the hill, he went on past the park while most of the fireflies remained behind. One blinked at the corner of his vision all the way down Gooseneck Lane with its cramped three-story row homes that smelled of fox and weasel, across and along the main street. Whenever a firefly seemed to be following him and Natty home, Natty would say, “Let’s ask Mom if we can keep him!” None had ever followed them as far as this one was trailing Sol, though.

The distraction helped ease his frustration for a few moments. He jogged ahead, stopped suddenly, and it sped up or stopped with him all the way to the corner of Meg’s street, where the smell of lake water and lily pads rose to meet him. Then he turned to look for it and it was gone. They could disappear quickly, when they wanted to.

Meg Kinnick lived in a smallish house with rounded walls and circular windows, like most of the houses along the lake. In the daylight hers stood out because of its bright yellow dome roof and lime green trim, which Sol had more than once heard called an “eyesore,” but at night, the green softened and the yellow turned a lovely silver. It was granite, older than Sol’s house, though they’d had the roof replaced just last year.

“Hi, Mrs. Kinnick,” he said at their door, which had a huge daisy painted on it. “Meg and I have a project to work on.”

“C’mon in, Sol.” The skinny otter beamed up at him. Water glistened on her mostly-exposed fur and pooled around her feet as she stepped back carefully to let him in. He avoided the water and breathed in the floral, humid air of the large, open atrium. To his right, in an irregularly cut-out third of the room, was the opening to the communal pool where Meg’s father floated on his back, wearing nothing but a damp towel loosely draped across his midsection that floated in the water. Sol was sure it had only just been dropped there. “Hi, Mr. Kinnick,” he said.

Meg’s mother slid back gracefully into the water, so smoothly and quietly that Sol’s whiskers caught the motion while his ears heard nothing. Her husband raised a paw as she swam out to him. “Well met, Sol,” he said. “Universe treating you well, I hope?”

“Most of it.” Sol glanced upward at the paused movie projected onto the screen that hung below the roof’s metal framework. “How are you doing?”

“Quite well, quite well.” Mr. Kinnick looked up as his wife rejoined him, and stretched an arm out to the remote floating on the water at his side. The image on the ceiling sprang to life, resolving into splashing, singing, dancing otters.

Figured it’d be a musical. Sol hefted his book bag over one shoulder and padded across the wide atrium to the black-painted door whose silver skull glared ineffectually out at the bright pastel colors. Flower patterns in cornflower blue and marigold orange, rose and violet, daffodil yellow and grass green spattered the walls, fading in some places, streaked with Meg’s clawmarks near the floor, her growth measured in the three-foot watermark when she’d given up scarring the flowers ‘by accident’ and had focused her decorating impulses on her own room.

“It’s Sol,” he called, fingers lightly touching the doorknob.

“Yeah” was as much of an invitation as anyone ever got from Meg. Sol opened the door and stepped into another world.

Black velvet hung down the walls, dotted with images of bands whose members wore black cloaks and dyed their fur black. On Meg’s dresser, candles sputtered; they were white because her parents kept white candles around the house and made Meg buy her own black candles, so she only burned those on special occasions. The carpet was yellow, but covered with black t-shirts, and the bedspread was a deep black night sky dotted with stars—fewer than it had been originally. Meg took a black marker with her to bed sometimes.

This world matched his mood much better. He closed the door behind him and leaned against it, glancing down at his bare arm. Only here, in Meg’s deep black sanctum, did shades and highlights really show in his black fur. He trailed a claw through the fur to see his lighter skin and undercoat.

“Stop admiring yourself,” Meg said. “Fucking jock.”

She was stretched out on her stomach atop her bed, one of her thousand black t-shirts draped around her torso, black canvas pants loosely defining her legs. The white underfur of her thick brown tail made a stark line across her leg, away from Sol. Silver piercings over her eyes and in her nose and ears flashed and glittered with the reflection of her laptop screen against the dyed-black fur of her head.

“You’d be proud of me.” Sol didn’t wag his tail, but thwacked it against the door, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder at that too. “Lost my starting spot.”

“So?” She punctuated the word with a snap of her chewing gum. Away from the floral miasma of the atrium, Sol’s nose caught the licorice smell, sharp across the stale alcohol in the room. “That’s a relief, right? ‘Less opportunities to fail’?”

“That was—” Sol flattened his ears. He wasn’t in the mood to do his ‘why baseball’ speech for Meg right now. “I didn’t want to get
replaced
. And it was Taric. That makes it worse.”

Meg squinted. “Because…?”

Sol exhaled. “He’s Tanny’s brother.”

“Is he as big a dick as his sister is a bitch?” Meg turned back to her laptop, but just for a moment. “Oh,” she said, looking back at Sol. “Coyotes. Yeah, your dad wouldn’t like that. So, gonna quit now?”

“Can’t.” He grabbed her desk chair and sat across it, letting his tail drape off the seat. “That’s the other thing. I don’t get the car if I don’t get it back. Dad said.” Saying it out loud settled the weight of his failure in his chest, made him squirm even though he knew Meg wasn’t judging him.

She did snap her head up from the computer, muzzle twisted in a grimace. “Fuck him, he can’t do that. How’re we gonna get jobs in Millenport this summer if you don’t have a car?”

“Sorry,” Sol said. “I’ll run right back and tell him how much he’s inconvenienced you.”

“You better.” She rolled onto her back, lifting the laptop into the air.

“I’ll get Natty to do it.” Sol rested his muzzle on his arms. The back of the chair dug into them, but he relished the discomfort. “Maybe then he’d listen.”

“Or you could feel sorry for yourself more.” Meg’s tail hit the bed solidly. “That always helps. Oh wait.”

“What do you know? Your parents let you get away with anything. You and I could be having sex in here and they wouldn’t care.”

“They think we are.”

Sol flicked his ears towards the door, where the music and dialogue of the movie filtered through, as flowery as the scent in that living room. “Really?”

“That’s why they like you so much.”

He lowered his ears. “If my dad—well, I guess my dad wouldn’t mind if I did something normal like have sex with my girlfriend.”

Meg bent her head backwards so far that it made Sol wince. Her eyes met his. “If you think that will get you the car, I’m game.”

Sol stared at her and then snorted. “He’d just tell me I was doing it wrong.”

“So you have to get better at baseball.”

“I
can’t!
” He kicked the desk behind him to feel the satisfying thump. “Taric is just better than me. I can’t—I can’t just become a better hitter by practicing.”

Meg stared levelly at him. “Do you even know how practice works?”

“I mean…” He took a breath. “Some people are just born with better paw-eye coordination, right? I can’t make that better.”

“Could you practice harder than you have been?”

“You sound like
him
now.”

“Could you?”

He pulled at the fur on his bare arm, until a clump of it came out with a bright flare of pain that focused his attention, cleared his mind of the turmoil in it for a second. “Probably.”

“Because I’ll do this whole goddamn project on my own if I have to. You go be Daddy’s good little straight-boy alpha-wolf jock for another month or two.”

“You don’t have to do the project yourself.” Sol rubbed the sore spot on his arm where the clump had come out, pushing it apart so he could glimpse the pink skin through the black hairs, then letting the fur fall back into place. “I’m not going to practice more. Just harder.”

“Do more, too. Just in case. You been a lot less into the whole baseball thing this year, so you better do everything you can to get that car. And I don’t mind doin’ it myself, just fix my essays when we’re done. You’re way better at writing than I am. Hey, you know what? Maybe this whole ‘get back on the team’ thing can be your story.”

Sol smoothed down the fur on his arm. “What?”

“Well, you’re always crying about how you want to write about your life but you don’t do anything interesting—true story, by the way.”

“Thanks.”

“So here you go.”

Sol shook his head. “Baseball’s boring.” Even here in Meg’s house, he could feel Natty’s disapproval of that, as though his brother could hear him all those miles away. “I mean, it doesn’t take a lot of thought to get better. So I…I take a few more swings at batting practice. I field grounders for an extra hour. So what?”

“I got news for you, champ. The real world is boring. Why do you think Ronald and Valinda spend their evenings baked out of their skulls watching crappy musicals on the ceiling? If you hadn’t gotten me on this project, I’d be stoned right now too. Oh!” She rolled back onto her stomach, her body rippling with the bouncing of the bed. No matter how she tried to hide it below baggy clothes, her sinuous form found a way to shine through. “You gotta come over tomorrow night, though. My vampire fox buddy sent me some of his special absinthe. Should get here tomorrow.”

Sol’s ears shot up. “The green poison stuff?”

Meg’s eyes, scornful, rose over the top of her laptop screen. “It isn’t poison. It’s mystical. It was banned because people were afraid of it, but now the government can make money off it, so it’s legal again. The artists and bohemians drank it all the time back then. It’ll give us the right feel for the project.”

“The feeling of being wasted?”

“Not wasted,” Meg said. “People had incredible visions on it. They wrote them down. It happened all the time.”

“Why do we need visions if we’re just doing a biography of Vincent van Gogh?”

“Because he probably tried it. He was all in that…” she circled her paw in the air, tracing lines on an invisible map. “That Mont-marter place.”

“Montmartre.” He pronounced it the way his French teacher did,
moan-MAHR-tr
, swallowing the end of the last syllable. On his phone, he texted Carcy.
Told my dad.

“You can give the presentation.” Meg disappeared behind her laptop again. “Mrs. Mercher automatically marks a letter grade down every time I open my mouth.”

“If you didn’t curse at her, she wouldn’t.”

“If she wasn’t a stupid fat arctic fox-bitch, I wouldn’t have to curse at her.”

Sol grinned all the way back to his cheeks, the first real smile he’d had in hours. “She gave us this cool project.”

“She gave
you
this project, which sucks only minorly less than all the other inane crap we have to do in Dickfield Senior High School Prison. She likes you because you’re a wolf. And a jock.”

Carcy’s response beeped.
About being gay, too?

“I’m not so much of a jock now.”
No
, he texted.
Just about losing baseball spot.

Guess he didn’t break your thumbs.

Sol started typing out
I also decided I’m going to stop eating meat, starting tonight. Dad didn’t like that
, and said, “So how do we have to break this up?”

“Why’s your tail wagging?” Meg looked suspiciously around the side of her laptop. “What’d your boyfriend say?”

“Dunno yet.” He hesitated, but he’d told Carcy now, even if the ram hadn’t responded yet, so he could tell Meg too. “I stopped eating meat.”