Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (8 page)

“Sol? You hear me? You’re part of the team.”

“Yeah. I hear you.” Sol choked the words out past the roughness in his throat.

Part of it was that for the last year, Sol had been terrified that he would let something slip about being gay. It had started out innocently enough, a couple weeks over the summer reading some material online, the burst of realization, the growing wave of guilt afterwards. He’d created an anonymous e-mail account to post to a forum for gay teens, where Carcy’d been one of the people to tell him there was nothing wrong with him. E-mail had led to IM had led to texting, and Sol had gotten his head around his sexuality without having to talk to anyone in his family, or at his church. Or the team.

Then came December, and the shower. Meg had told him that just getting an erection in the shower didn’t mean you were gay, and he’d told her that he was, and she’d shrugged and said that in that case, maybe it did mean that, but who cared? The guys on the team cared, and though they probably knew that there were lots of other reasons a guy could spring a boner in the shower, they teased him with ferocious abandon all the way up to Christmas break. If he’d been able to laugh it off, he was sure it would’ve stopped sooner.

That was the only time he was thankful for Natty’s absence. Had his brother been around the school, he would’ve told Mom and Dad in some disarming manner, and then they would’ve known, and there would have been Talks. But Sol kept his parents unaware, both of the symptom and the cause, and the price he’d paid for that silence had been more silence.

At dinner that night, his father regarded the meatless pasta sauce with the vegetables and garlic bread with a frown before helping himself, but remained quiet. Probably it was just because he loved spaghetti, although at the end of the meal he did remind the family about the work picnic that weekend, and he glared at Sol as he said that it was a barbecue. Which, of course, meant burgers and ribs and maybe chicken, and Sol had no idea how he was going to get through a barbecue without eating meat. He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get through a barbecue without
wanting
to eat meat, even with the prospect of life with Carcy to keep him strong. But that was days away, and rather than think about the many school days and baseball practices between now and then, he focused his energy on getting excited about trying absinthe.

He walked over to Meg’s after dinner, in the chill of early evening with fireflies winking among the stars overhead. Fortunately, her parents were clothed this time, reading next to the pool in the living room. Sol greeted them and walked into Meg’s room, his stomach starting to flutter with whole new worlds of anxiety. What if he did throw up from the absinthe? What if it gave him weird hallucinations, like that afternoon’s, only stronger?

“That’s the point,” Meg told him. She was sitting at her desk, intent upon something in the focused light of her desk lamp, and she didn’t turn around to talk to him when he came in. The rest of the room was completely dark; the ceiling light was off and her computer was closed. Reflections glimmered on the surface of the water in her pool in the corner, yellow-white and…green.

“But what if they’re bad hallucinations?” He walked around to see what she was doing.

Over the scars Meg had inflicted on her desk (the A-within-a-circle of ‘anarchy’ was particularly prominent), two glass goblets sparkled. Beside them, the otter was holding a nondescript bottle, clear glass with a bright green liquid in it. As he moved, Meg lifted the bottle, passing it in front of the lamp.

Light transformed the absinthe. Around the edges of the bottle, the green liquid appeared dark and murky, but where the light shone through it, Sol’s eyes hurt from the dazzling emerald glow. Flickers of green played over the two goblets and the metal spade laid across the top of the nearer one, which held a large sugar cube. “There’s no such thing as bad hallucinations,” Meg said. “Anything is better than reality, right?”

“Uh.” He couldn’t look away from the glimmering green liquid. She poured it slowly into the glass, to one side of the sugar cube rather than over it. “What’re you doing?”

“You start with the absinthe and then pour ice water over the sugar. The water is what liberates the essence of the absinthe and frees the dreams locked within.”

“And what does the sugar do?”

“Makes it sweeter, idiot.”

Sol scowled at her, showing his fangs over his lower lip. She flashed a grin. “You have to add sugar and water or else it’s way too bitter. Don’t worry, it’s still strong enough. This is how they used to sweeten it back in the 1900s.”

She poured absinthe into the second goblet to the same level, about two fingers high, and then set the absinthe bottle aside to pick up a carafe of water, its surface clouded with condensation. When she poured, this time she poured the water over the sugar cube. It streamed through the sugar and somehow through the metal spade. Peering closer, Sol saw holes in the spade. “Where did you get that metal thing?”

“My vampire fox friend sent it to me. It’s an absinthe spoon.” The water spread cloudy tendrils through the glass, curling lazily into intricate swirls. They twined around one another and grew, merged, until no trace of the clear green remained.

The sugar cube had dissolved, leaving residue on the spoon. Meg tapped it on the edge of the goblet and then laid it across the top of the other glass. She placed a second sugar cube on it and tilted the bottle, letting the water stream slowly down through the sugar.

The ritual was hypnotic: the steady stream of water, the vanishing cube, the dancing emerald reflections growing fainter as the water spread and obscured the brightness.

“I saw you on the field on my way out.” The sugar had dissolved. Meg tapped the spoon against the rim of the glass to shake the last of the sugar into it. The last threads of clear green turned cloudy as she mixed it in with the spoon.

Sol shook his head, looking up from the mesmerizing swirling liquid. “I stayed as late as I could.”

“Just get that car.” She shoved her chair back from her desk and got up, a book of matches in one paw. Humming softly, she lit each candle on her dresser. She’d added three—no, four black ones to the white ones. When all of them were flickering in a row behind her, she turned off her desk lamp and turned to face Sol. He could barely see the glint of her eyes in the halo of light that traced the edges of her head and ears.

“Are you ready?”

His stomach fluttered. “It’s just alcohol.”

“It is not just alcohol.” Her eyebrows lowered, hiding her eyes behind deep shadows. “It is dreams and inspiration. It is pain and suffering. It is art…in a bottle.”

Sol swallowed. “I don’t need more pain and suffering.”

“Come on, Sol. This shit’s expensive.” She sighed. “Look, don’t you want a drink after the day you just had?”

“You said it wasn’t just alcohol.” But the tension in him, perhaps, was as much from his dad, from Tanny and Taric, from hours of swinging, as it was from the suspense over the absinthe.

Meg’s voice got that tone that meant she was about to stop talking to him. “So-ol.”

“All right, all right.” He leaned against her bedpost in what he hoped was a reasonably appreciative pose.

“Now,” she intoned, “prepare to receive the gift of the Green Fairy.”

The candles smoked. An acrid, herbal scent tickled his nose. “What kind of candles are those?”

“They’re just candles.” Meg sounded peeved. “I’m burning some incense of frankincense.”

“Frankincense?” Sol closed his eyes for a moment and saw the red and gold of the Moulin Rouge, the portraits of dancers on the walls.

“Yes.” Her voice grew deep again. “It will allow us to commune with the spirits of the Mont-marter area.”

“Montmartre,” Sol murmured, inhaling. His fur prickled slightly. Silly, to let Meg’s voice affect him. But even when she stopped talking, the uneasy feeling remained. He was sure there was someone just outside her window, watching, waiting to see if he would take that drink.

“Take your drink,” Meg said, again in her normal voice.

Sol’s eyes flew open. He managed to keep steady, to reach out and take the goblet Meg was holding out. As he lifted it to his nose, he stared at her window, but the curtains were drawn. Then he inhaled, and the powerful smell drove the imaginary watcher from his mind.

The scent of alcohol, curiously, did not overwhelm the herbal, anise smell the way alcohol overwhelmed most liqueurs. The combination of smells in the drink mixed with the frankincense and smoky candle smell to make Sol slightly dizzy. He closed his eyes again, and when he opened them, Meg was holding the goblet to her lips. The candles flickered through the glass, the liquid, her fur.

“Take us back,” she intoned.

“Seriously?” Sol lifted his own glass. His stomach felt knotted, which was ridiculous. Whatever Meg said about dreams and anything else, this was just alcohol. It was a drink. He’d had plenty of drinks. But his nerves were no longer worry about the absinthe. He was, again, excited, thinking back to Jean’s narrative of the Moulin Rouge. He would have this drink and then go back to the book, and he would understand it better.

“Shh.” She closed her eyes. “Take us back to the Mont-mar-truh,” one eye cracked open to look at Sol for approval, and when he didn’t correct her, it closed again, “of nineteen-hundred. So that we can kick ass on our report.”

Sol suppressed a giggle. Meg’s eyes opened and met his. “This is serious stuff here. I looked it up on the web. People had visions. Artists became inspired. There was this seventeen-year-old poet, he was a weasel, and when he started to drink absinthe, he wrote the most amazing poems.”

“Seventeen?”

She winked. “Maybe you’ll become a poet. Or finally write something, anything, instead of just sitting around whining about it. Bottoms up, dear friend, and let us meet on the other side of dreams.”

“What?” She was already drinking from her goblet. Sol hurriedly lifted his and gulped the first drink.

He had a moment of warning before anise and alcohol and a host of other herbs exploded on his tongue. Licorice stung his nose as the alcohol burned his throat. He’d had beer at home since he was thirteen, had had stronger liquor at some of the parties his teammates had thrown over the last two years, had even done a couple shots of Wild Turkey and Southern Comfort. He’d never tasted anything like absinthe.

It burned his throat like whiskey, but without the harshness. The warmth in his stomach grew rather than faded. For a moment, he thought the candle lights in the room all flickered green, but when he looked, they were yellow again. Magic, he thought briefly, and smiled.

“Not bad.” Meg sounded disappointed.

“Any hallucinations yet?”

She took another drink. “Nothing. Tastes okay, though, right?”

“Right.” He took another drink as well. The anise, which had been fading, surged again.

Meg peered at him. “What about you?”

Green flickered across her eyes, though the candlelight was yellow. But Sol was not really inclined to trust his senses any more today. “Nothing.”

“Maybe it takes a while.”

They finished the drinks in silence. Sol sat on Meg’s bed while she rocked back and forth in her desk chair. “So,” Sol said. “This is what artists did then? Just sat around in dark rooms drinking absinthe?”

He was starting to feel buzzed, but it was a little different than a beer buzz. On beer, he just felt lightheaded and generally happy. Here, he felt lightheaded, but he also felt as though his words were echoing—or, perhaps, that he was hearing them a moment before he said them. Also, it now took about two and a half beers to get him buzzed. He’d gotten this from one small cup of absinthe.

“Pretty much.” She paused. “I kind of feel something. Do you?”

The world felt free from its moorings, but not out of his control yet, definitely not spinning like an amusement park ride that wouldn’t stop no matter how much he yelled. He remembered that spin from the last time he’d been drunk, at a party at the first baseman’s house. Three bottles of beer followed by two shots of Wild Turkey had led to him vomiting all over the carpet and partly on the sofa, with all his teammates watching. That had been two months before the shower.

He tested the thought of that party, the baseball team gathered there, the white-tail and the fox, the rabbit and the weasel, even the other wolves. It did not bring with it the ache of loss he’d felt at practice. Why should he care about them? He’d never been a part of the team even when his name was on the roster. He was not a planet in their solar system; he was a bright green sun, with Meg in orbit around him.