Golden Boys Read Online Free

truth she admires strangeness, and likes the new neighbours for it. She strides along, ignoring her sister’s scrabble to keep up, the air balmy as it weaves between her fingers, the sun a molten crown on her head. In a minute they’ll be home – once they cross this road she will be able to see the white post-and-rail fence of their house. If her brother Declan were a friend of Colt Jenson’s, he would bring him to the house sometimes. That’s a fact, but Freya knows little about the friendships of boys, how they meld or repel. A stringy green weed pokes over the path and she plucks it as she passes, swishes it violently. ‘Well, who cares,’ she says, and doesn’t answer when Marigold asks, ‘Who cares about what?’ Instead she will think of what she does know, the sturdy posts in her life. The year is coming to its close: soon the long school holidays will begin, stretching past Christmas and into the new year when, returning to classrooms, she will be starting secondary school, the baby of the schoolyard but a baby no more. She’ll be thirteen, a teenager, a creature of change. Already atheism sits inside her as comfortably as an egg in a nest. Next Sunday, when she refuses to go to church, her mother might rage, and to defend her position Freya will call upon the example of her father, which is something she would only do in an emergency and actually has never done before. And it will feel like a betrayal, using him against her mother. It
will be
a betrayal. The heart is wicked. Freya sighs.
    They are within reach of their house – the spindly pine in the front yard, the clangy metal letterbox, the rut in the naturestrip where the station wagon cuts the corner; no sight makes her happier than the sight of home – when thoughts of her mother make Freya think of something else. She remembers Elizabeth saying, ‘There’s always another one coming.’
    The words are written on one of the imaginary castle’s innumerable doors, a warped and ponderous door which requires a mighty shove before it will open; but when it does, and when Freya sees what’s behind it, the dismay dazes her.

Avery Price looks like a pixie found shifting through dandelions at the end of an overgrown garden; he should have wings jutting out his shoulderbaldes. He is small for his age and as translucently white as a pearl. Grey-eyed and fair-haired, with the pretty bowed lips of an infant, he is delicate, origami, he looks as if the only sustenance he requires is the occasional lettuce leaf sprinkled with sugar, and indeed he hardly eats anything more sustaining. Beneath the dainty façade, however, Avery is a wild child, the kind of boy-without-boundaries that other children enjoy having as a friend because there is nothing he will not do. He isn’t a complainer or in any way a sissy – he’s a smiler, a forgiver, there’s no meanness in him. Despite this, it’s evident that Avery is destined to follow a hard path through life – it’s as obvious as the bruises, the unbrushed hair, the dirt-lined fingernails and the cheap, inadequate clothes. There’s a sense that one shouldn’t grow too fond of him. He’s only eleven, and already the world is striving to be rid of him: when a dog rushes a fence and startles him into slipping off the gutter he’s been stepping along, this most minor accident skins a great gouge from his knee, such an over-abundance of damage that Syd and Declan Kiley are stunned.
    He’s as tough as a boot, however. After hopping about on the road gasping, ‘Ow, ow,’ Avery sits on the kerb and inspects the wound with stoic curiosity. It’s a gruesome thing, rag-edged, pipped with stones, as broad as a boy’s palm. Crimson blood runs down his shin, crests his meatless calf and drips onto the road. Declan and Syd perch beside him, peering like scientists. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Declan.
    â€˜I