Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) Read Online Free PDF

excitement of being part of the game that he hadn’t felt since the previous summer.
    The image faded; the excitement went with it. He stopped the slight wagging of his tail and said, “You don’t think the car is enough motivation?”
    “I dunno, is it? Better be. Fuck if I’m gonna spend another summer in this prison camp of a town. I’ll kill myself. Maybe take you with me.”
    Sol sighed. He smelled the echo of steak in his nostrils again, twisting his stomach into a painful knot. “Yeah, seriously.”
    She stared at his phone. “Get your boyfriend to give you a car.”
    “He’s not rich.” Sol swiped his finger to turn to the first page of the book. “He just has a beat-up Yari.”
    Meg lifted her gaze to glare at him. “I’m not one of your car-obsessed musclehead friends. What the hell is a Yari?”
    “It’s just a little compact car.” Sol had looked it up on the Internet because Carcy wouldn’t send him a picture.
    “Sounds like a winner.” She lowered her head to her screen again. The reflections of the images she was looking at danced across her eyes.
    “He…” The black walls of the room stifled the words before he got them past his throat. He turned to the words on his phone.
    “What? Loves you?”
    Meg had a “love” speech like Sol had a “baseball” speech. “Yeah.”
    “All love is fake. It’s insecurity, it’s an act we put on because we’re afraid of being alone.”
    “You’re not afraid of being alone?” Sol scrolled the screen up and down without reading the words.
    “No. I know I’m alone.”
    He exhaled, fogging his screen briefly. “Thanks. Glad I count for so much.” He watched the mark of his breath shrink and fade, revealing the words beneath.
    “Don’t be a twat. Hey, this is a nice picture, look.” Meg lifted her laptop and turned it, showing Sol a nighttime scene of city lights reflected in a river, the blue sky dotted with glowing yellow beacons.
    “Sure,” he said. “Who did it?”
    Meg’s muzzle, perpetually fixed in an expression of weary scorn, fell into a wearier, more scornful look. “Vincent van Gogh? The artist we’re studying?”
    Sol rubbed a finger along his whiskers, pressing them down along his muzzle and letting them spring back up. “This wasn’t one of the pictures in the assignment.”
    “He painted nine hundred pictures in his life.” Meg lowered the laptop and turned it around. “This one was about being all alone, like I was saying.”
    “There’s a bunch of those yellow thingies, though.” Sol’s phone went dark; he turned it on again. “Are those fireflies? They’re not alone.”
    “They’re stars, idiot. They don’t have fireflies in cities.” Her eyebrows lowered and she went back to the screen. “Let me write about the art, ’kay? You can write about love and shit if you want.”
    “Love is real.” Sol checked the time. He could plausibly stay out another half hour or so, and he had no desire to go home. The message indicator on his phone remained blank; nothing more from Carcy. He focused on the book.

Chapter 2
    “The Confession of Jean de Giverne”
    (translated by Holliset Marchand, 1922)
     
    Dear père , I know that this is not what you meant when you said you wanted all of Lutèce to speak my name. From the prison window, I hear the scurrilous rumors and whispers, and it pains my heart to think that you may be hearing and believing them. They make me out to be devoid of morals, the exemplar of the bourgeoisie and their contempt for the peasants. They call for the return of the guillotine, for my head to be mounted at Les Halles as assurance to the lower classes that the government has their interests at heart, that it is not an attempt to re-create the monarchy. As if my head could bear all of those meanings! Dearest father, my story is a love story, a story that could be told between farmer and flower-girl, between landowner and minister. That it was told between a senator’s son and a common