Saving Montgomery Sole

by Mariko Tamaki

  I jumped up from my toadstool. “Did you see the crosses this morning?”

  “I did,” Thomas said. “My grade didn’t get hit though.”

  Thomas peered into his kale chips bag in search of whatever you would expect to find in a kale chip bag. “Wouldn’t it be so much nicer if instead of a cross they gave you a present? Like, ‘Hey, here’s just something for you because I think you’re special.’ Like a Jesus sweater. I would wear a Jesus sweater, if it was tasteful.”

  “I’d wear anything that’s not ‘Your parents are gay, you’re going to hell.’ That’s White’s thing, right?” I’d only seen the one article.

  “Probably,” Thomas said, “after a while most of them blend into one big blob of bigotry, to be honest.”

  “Until they move to your town.” And suddenly I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  “Right,” Thomas said. “So. Anyway, a new local celebrity. More YouTube famous than famous famous, but still. Exciting.”

  “I guess.” My stomach started to twist.

  Thomas flipped his phone out of his bag. “We should look up his videos. Could be good Mystery Club material.”

  “No.”

  “No?” Thomas tilted his head back into his throne, deep in thought. “You know, I assumed it was this White kid who put the crosses on the lockers, but that seems a little obvious, doesn’t it? Do you think it was the allied forces?”

  There’s a Students’ Christian Alliance here, formerly run by Harley Car, actual name. It was currently seeking new leadership because Mr. and Mrs. Car split up and Harley moved to Las Vegas with his mom.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Hard to imagine them organizing in advance without new management. Are the crosses still there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hey!” Naoki said, marching down the auditorium aisle like a majorette. “Are you eating fries and talking about stuff?” She grinned.

  “Some of us are not eating fries,” Thomas said, shaking his kale snack.

  “Yeah,” I sighed.

  Naoki jumped up onto the stage and looked at Thomas. “Some of us are a little on edge today,” Thomas added.

  “Oh,” Naoki said quietly. “I see. Ready for bio, Monty?”

  I stood up. “Yes. I have to go do something first.”

  * * *

  As I walked down the hall, my heart hammering in my head like a car alarm, I could see the rows of crosses ahead. Still there. Glad the administration is all over it, I thought.

  Guess it wasn’t a huge priority for the staff to remove a cross. Because, you know, what’s the big deal?

  It’s not the end of the world or anything, a voice in my head fumed. Right? It’s just someone tagging someone’s locker with a religious figure? Who doesn’t love a Jesus on a cross?

  It took two regular pencils, a mechanical pencil, and a ballpoint pen, but I eventually pried the thing off my locker. The stream of post-lunch kids slowed to a crawl behind me, slowing down the way you do at a car accident. I could hear Naoki in the background talking but not what she was saying.

  Then, right before I wrenched it off, I could swear I heard someone chuckling. But I spun around, and it was just Naoki.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Let’s just go.”

  The cross left a huge navy hole in the paint of my locker. It looked like someone had cracked it with a cannonball.

  “You want to go home maybe?” Naoki whispered.

  “No, I’m fine. It’s fine.” The tips of my fingers were all raw. I shoved the cross into my bag and stomped to class.

  It wasn’t hard to spot Kenneth White, son of the Reverend White, in bio. I mean, all I had to do was look for someone I didn’t know. I tried not to stare as Naoki and I made our way to our spots, until I was behind him and better able to glare freely.

  He was football-tall and stocky, with a big, wide neck. His hair was so blond it was almost see-through. It looked like doll hair. When he turned to look out the window, I could practically see his veins.

  “That’s Kenneth White?” I whispered.

  Naoki nodded. “Yes, it is. He’s in my Spanish class as well.”

  He looked as if someone had chipped him out of marble.

  We spent the class drawing cells. Naoki drew hers with the faintest pencil line, thinner than an eyelash.

  “Your cells look like ghosts,” I whispered, pointing.

  Naoki looked down at her sheet of paper. “Do ghosts have cells?”

  Something about having Kenneth White in the room made my head hurt. Maybe it was how hard I was staring at the back of his head.

  The bell rang and students started jumping out of their seats, slinging bags over shoulders. Shouting across the room. Stuff like, “Wait up, dick!”

  I felt light-headed and heavy all at the same time.

  Kenneth stood, like some sort of Neolithic creature, propping his hands on the desk and shoving his chair back. He must have been over six feet tall. He practically had to unfold himself to get out from under the desk. He was wearing leather boots like the kind construction workers wear, neatly tied up tight. Not like some sort of cool hipster thing. Like someone planning on digging a hole or something.

  A hole for sinners.

  I didn’t want to get out of my chair. I kind of wanted to crawl under my desk.

  I mean, seriously, it’s one thing to have a school full of idiots to deal with; it’s something else entirely to have to sit with someone who you know, for a fact, thinks you’re going to hell.

  So I just sat for a bit. Feeling like lead and staring at Kenneth’s now empty seat.

  “Hey,” Naoki said, touching my shoulder lightly with her finger. “What are you doing after school?”

  I swung my head back in a gesture that might have looked a little psychotic. “Ah. Nothing, I guess.”

  Slipping her stuff into her bag, Naoki smiled. “Why don’t you come over, and we’ll watch a documentary? Or just have a snack.”

  Clearly there is something medicinal for me about the word snack.

  “Do you have frozen yogurt?” I asked.

  “I’ll make some,” Naoki said, rubbing her hands together. “I can totally do that.”

  * * *

  Naoki’s house smells like Japanese food. Maybe that’s a little racist to say, because her mother is Japanese Canadian and her dad is Cree. I’m not saying I think all Japanese people have houses that smell like soy sauce. Plus I think it’s an amazing smell, and I love that it hits you as soon as you walk in the door. Both her parents travel a lot, so her house is usually empty. Her dad is a famous sculptor, and her mom directs documentaries. Naoki says she likes to be alone so it doesn’t really bother her. Which I totally get because sometimes I just want, like, five minutes of uninterrupted me time without a knock on the door asking me how I am and if I want something.

  Or, Have you seen your sister’s socks?

  We walked in the door, and she dumped her bag and kicked off her little black ballet flats onto a little kitten-shaped mat.

  “Now,” she said, grabbing my bag and tossing it in the same pile as hers, “what should we put in our frozen yogurt?”

  Coconut. Oreos. Avocado. Greek yogurt. Soy milk. Honey. Ice.

  All whipped up into a masterpiece I ate out of a little purple-and-yellow rice bowl with a little pink spoon shaped like a rose petal.

  “Where do you get this stuff?” I gasped, turning the spoon over in my hand.

  Naoki smiled. “My dad makes most of it. Also, his family does ceramics. So they send us things every year.”

  We sat in her dad’s garden on these two massive beanbag chairs. I lay back and felt the day kind of wipe away with every bite of cold white and green.

  “Would you rather see the future clearly or have a perfect memory of the past?” Naoki asked, reaching out to run her finger along the leaf of some crazy alien-looking plant I’d never seen before.

  I paused to suck on my petal spoon to think and
to savor the joy of homemade frozen yogurt. “See the future. Definitely. Oh yeah, I told you about the Eye of Know, right?”

  “You did, just a tiny bit,” Naoki said, burrowing deeper into her beanbag chair so it swallowed her up like a cocoon. “It sounds like the name of a book of magic.”

  We squished our beanbags together, and I tried to find a picture of it on the Internet, but the site wouldn’t load on my phone. So I drew the Eye on a page I ripped out of the back of my bio textbook.

  “So it’s like a mirror,” Naoki said, balancing the drawing carefully on the flat of her palm, like it was some sort of ancient artifact.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, it’s for seeing, but I think it’s for seeing, like, other things. I mean, I read the description as gaining knowledge into things that people … like regular people … can’t see.”

  “Which is a lot of things,” Naoki said, raising her eyebrows.

  The first time we met Naoki, Thomas and I had only been doing the Mystery Club for a year or so. We were sitting in the clubs room, arguing about Doctor Who, which Thomas thought was an appropriate subject to discuss in the Mystery Club and I did not.

  “I mean the original Doctor Who, Montgomery, not any of these new impostors,” Thomas charged.

  “It doesn’t matter, Thomas. And it depresses me to think you’re drawing a distinction.”

  “This level of rigidity doesn’t suit you, Montgomery.”

  “It’s a mystery club, not a crappy TV club, Thomas.”

  “Take that back right now or I will wal—”

  And Naoki just knocked on the door. And we both sat up in our chairs, like, “Uh, hello?”

  Naoki stepped into the room, like some curious alien descending from its ship onto the crusty desert sand, her body draped in what looked like a silver parachute, her hair, which was black then, tied up in blue ribbons. And I think she said, “Did you say this is a Mystery Club?”

  “Yah,” I said.

  “Good.” She walked in and sat down. “I’m here for the mystery.”

  Like, at no point did Naoki think she was going to see a club that would involve reading whodunits.

  It’s like she knew she was walking into a different kind of mystery. And that was why she walked in.

  Naoki believes that nothing is random. Like, technically there’s actually this thing called probability, which is a math thing that tells you what the possibility is of something happening, like rolling a die and getting a two. Naoki’s basic theory is, yeah, sure, there’s math, but on top of it, there’s this un-math. In Naoki’s un-math, everything happens not because of math but because of stronger, often inexplicable forces pulling things this way and that.

  Which is kind of interesting because Naoki’s also really good at math.

  It was kind of perfect, I thought, that I would find something like the Eye of Know now, when I knew someone like Naoki. Someone who would actually (a) think that something like the Eye of Know was possible and (b) think it was cool.

  After we finished our yogurt, we watched a video about cats that can smell cancer, which is also on my list of mysterious things.

   Extra-sensory powers of pets

  Around us, crickets chirped. The wind chimes Naoki’s dad made out of clay clinked and clanked.

  There was a rap on the patio door, and Naoki’s tiny mother, who I swear is, like, three feet tall and looks a little bit like that fashion designer in that movie from Pixar, tapped her watch. Dinner.

  “I better motor,” I sighed, rolling out of my bean bag.

  “Okay, well.” Naoki stood. At her feet was a figure eight drawn out in little stones. Which I hadn’t even noticed she was doing. At the door, she smiled a big smile. “Hey. I just want to say, I’m glad you are my friend, Montgomery. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I felt my smile pull at my face, which was clearly kind of an unfamiliar shape for my face to make. “Thanks! Me too!”

  How is it Naoki is just so nice? I wondered. It seemed so easy for her. Even when people treated her like some sort of ditz at school. It was like she just didn’t care. Like it wasn’t important.

  I could have taken the bus home, but it was so nice I decided to walk. It’s twenty minutes if I walk fast. Plus I wanted to add some stuff to my app before I forgot, and I can’t type and ride the bus, because it makes me nauseous.

   Random vs. non-random things or coincidences

   The Eye of Know and how it works and whether it lets you see through time

  I licked my lips. They still tasted like coconut.

   Why homemade fro-yo is better than Yoggy’s

  I cut through the park and ran up the slide and down the slide and just felt kind of amazing. Which was amazing considering what a crap day it was. Which I tried not to think about.

  By the time I got back, the house was totally quiet. Like, still.

  Soccer practice, I thought.

  The only light on in the whole house was the one over the dining room table. It glowed like a beacon.

  I turned the corner.

  The box, placed in the center of the table, was brown and scuffed, like some kind of ancient package rescued from a war effort, scratched and torn at the edges. It was about as big as a shoe box cut in half. Perfectly square.

  I spun it around. Taped to the outside was an envelope, with a printed card that read:

  * * *

  TO: Montgomery Sole

  FROM: Manchester Technology

  Please enjoy the enclosed EYE OF KNOW!

  Every great adventure begins with a new discovery.

  Please read your EYE OF KNOW instructions carefully.

  Thank you for shopping with Manchester. We hope you’ll visit our site again soon!

  * * *

  “Oh my gosh!” I grabbed the box and rocketed up the stairs, stumbling through the darkness, slamming on light switches. I burst into my room and closed the door, even though no one was home.

  Sitting on my bed, I tore it open.

  There, nested in a handful of crinkly brown paper stuffing, was … the Eye of Know?

  It … wasn’t white. But black. Solid. Black.

  “What the eff?”

  Was this going to be more or less disappointing than the book of spells I’d ordered for $10.99 that had ended up being a blank book for writing spells in, instead of a book of actual magical spells?

  Hard to say, I thought, foraging through the rest of the packaging.

  The only other thing in the box was a little white pamphlet of instructions, which was really more of a folded card, like a greeting card. On the cover, it read:

  In sight

  not see

  On the inside, the left side had a drawing of an eyeball, with the eye open. And a picture of a black rectangle.

  On the right side was a picture of an eye colored black, and a white rectangle.

  On the back, in writing that was kind of fuzzy, was this:

  black light

  not be

  I flipped the card over and back.

  In sight

  not see

  black light

  not be

  Tossing the card, I picked up the stone and held it to the light. It was the shape of a domino but without the little dots on it.

  The cord was just a piece of white string.

  “Wow,” I said to my empty room, the den of disappointment. “Not even an adjustable leather strap!”

  I flipped the rock over in my palm. It was perfectly black. No cracks or little white flecks. Nothing. Against my skin, it looked like this perfect black hole. Like there was an actual rectangular hole in my hand. A doorway to some sort of endless darkness.

  “Okay, so,” I said, this time to the stone, possibly. “Time for great insight.”

  I closed my fingers around the stone and squeezed it a little.

  Thinking back to my extensive research, I closed my eyes and tried to arrange my thoughts like I was setting a table.

  Clear away
everything else. Away, math. Away, TV. Away, thoughts about food.

  What did I want to know?

  “Kenneth White,” I whispered.

  Come on, Eye. Kenneth White—what is he up to? What horrors will he bring to Jefferson High?

  Trouble?

  Yes or no?

  The stone sat silent in my hand.

  I heard, felt nothing.

  Okay, I thought. This time I’ll just clear my mind. See what shows up.

  I sat up on my bed. Crossed my legs. Cleared my mind. Now.

  …

  Nothing.

  My first absolute blank mind in forever. Quiet as a pillow.

  And nothing.

  I opened my eyes and the Eye of Know stared blankly at me.

  Suddenly there was the distinct racket of two soccer moms and a soccer kid piling into the front door.

  “Mon-ty! Is this your mess?”

  “Mamaaaaaa! Monty ate my fro-yo!”

  “There’s another one in the freezer!” I screamed.

  “There’s only banana!” Tesla howled.

  “Monty, come here and clean up these dishes!”

  “Geez!” I yelled, carefully placing the Eye in my bag. “Coming!”

  Ping!

  On the computer there were two messages from Thomas.

  Thomas: Are you there?

  Thomas: I’m watching Back to the Future on Netflix. Golden oldies! You’d hate it. It’s not witchy at all. But this guy, whoever he is, is CUTE cute cute.

  5

   Messages you find—in food or possibly in other inanimate objects

   People who can talk to objects and hear their histories (only a TV thing?)

   Mind control

  I’m off and on about the whole mysterious-messages-from-the-beyond thing, maybe because all the websites on the subject are kind of tired. A lot of what I’ve found on the web is about people who see divine images in the things they eat. Especially toast. Toast is a big medium for spiritual symbols and portraits, most specifically of the kind relating to Jesus Christ. I’m not sure why this is. It seems like such a weird way for a deity to communicate something really important, like a Second Coming. I mean, isn’t toast something you eat in the morning when you’re sleepy and not really paying attention? Wouldn’t it be better to put a holy message in something like a rock? Something that’s going to stick around if you don’t notice it the first time? Something that’s not going to go bad if you need to hold on to it for a while?