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

her two years ago, he would never have discovered how funny and smart she was. It had taken him a while to convince her that a jock could be as smart and sarcastic (sometimes) as a disaffected goth, but it had been worth it. He’d never seen anyone else from their class over at her house, and at school they rarely talked. Meg and the other goths sat in the back of the bus and at the same silent table at lunch, content to leave high school alone as long as it returned the favor. In private, Meg confided in him that she couldn’t stand the other goths, and suspected that each of them hated the group just as much, which was why they all kept quiet.
    Not that Sol had many friends himself, anymore. In his two-bus, two-hundred-student school, the senior class knew each other well, but Sol’s best friends had always been on the baseball team, not in classes, and this past year he’d let even them drift away. For the last six years in homeroom, he’d been seated between a goat named Cheffy and a boar named Polly, neither of which he’d said more than a couple words to in years. The seat in front of him was now occupied by a short red fox, a foreign exchange student who’d moved into the area only the previous year. Like the goths, he kept to himself, though more likely it was out of shyness and lack of comfort with the language.
    And the seat behind him was occupied by Taric’s older sister Tanny, which Sol knew was going to be trouble. Even when Taric and Sol had been workout partners, she had ignored him, but as he plopped himself down this morning, the pink-ribboned coyote gave a high laugh. “I heard you finally got knocked down to the bench where you belong,” she crowed.
    Sol ignored her. She leaned forward so he could smell her sour breath. “It’s about time, too. If Mr. Zerling Fathead wasn’t a wolf, you’da been off the team a month ago. Finally Taric gets to be where he deserves. And so do you.”
    Cheffy and Polly turned, then met each other’s eyes across Sol’s desk. They each gave a little sniff and turned back to their own work. Sol kept his eyes forward and pretended to be going over his math homework.
    Tanny leaned back and said, louder, “I guess you’ll like it better. That way you can watch all the pretty boys, right?”
    Sol’s tail curled under his chair. “Shut up,” he growled.
    “Which one do you like? Is it Xavy? He’s cute.”
    “Shut up.” His fur was rising on the back of his neck. Fear and anger tightened his paw around his pencil.
    Cheffy gave him a curious look and then went back to drawing guitars on his biology textbook. Sol picked up his pencil and traced over the numbers he’d already written on his paper, hard. The angles of the mechanical pencil dug into his pawpads and he almost tore the paper. It was going to be like last December all over again, only this time it wouldn’t stop with Christmas break. This time it would go on ’til the end of school.
    Tanny taunted him once more. “Can you still shower with the starters?”
    Sol dug the point of his mechanical pencil into his paper and snapped it off. Before he could vent the terrified fury building inside him, the bell rang, and the old bear, Mr. Fortune, called the class to order.
    The classes were okay. It was in the sanitizer-scented tiled hallways in between and in the chaotic crowds at lunch that the bad things happened. Taric had a little coyote gang he ran with in the junior class: one scrawny ’yote who was famous in the school for being able to get any drug you wanted, and one who was a backup on the football team. Until yesterday, the football player had been the leader of the gang, but now when they sauntered down the halls, it was Taric in the lead.
    Meg wouldn’t be much help to him in school, so Sol tried to stick with the other senior wolf jocks. They didn’t object to his presence, but he had to keep dodging through other groups because they also didn’t make an effort to make sure he stayed