Saving Montgomery Sole (15 page)

Queen or not, from the moment the lunch bell rang, Thomas was full-tilt working on sets, his skirts hitched up, an old-timey-looking apron tied around his waist, and a paintbrush in each hand as he slaved to make a realistic movable set of trees and classic cars for the upcoming production of
The Outsiders
. Mr. Gyle, true to his word, had hired a “choreographer” to help students with the fight scenes. Of which there were many. The choreographer showed up in a Raiders sweatshirt, hat, and jogging pants. He wore bright green sneakers. He looked like a football coach. And talked like a football coach.

I'm pretty sure he was a football coach.

Thomas said he overheard him saying stuff like “Hut hut hut” instead of, say, “Action.”

I was a few minutes into my volunteered lunch hour spent sitting in a plastic chair with a metal brush and sewing scissors, distressing jeans for the “actors,” before Thomas told me who I was distressing for.

The actor taking the lead role in Hinton's formidable tale of adolescent struggle? MATT TRUIT.

“
What?!
”
“When did they post it?”

“Friday,” Thomas said, stirring a can of classic-car crimson. “He was really the best of the bunch.”

“Are you serious?!”

Matt Truit? Really? How much injustice should one person have to endure?

How is it possible that someone who makes a sport of
making fun
of something then gets to
benefit from its existence
?

I'd heard a rumor in the girls' bathroom that Kenneth White had auditioned, too, but Thomas said it wasn't true. He said Kenneth showed up and sat in the back of the theater, but then, when they tried to talk to him, he just left.

“What's worse?” I sighed, tossing my newly—
Matt's
newly—distressed jeans on the floor.

“It's not so bad,” Thomas said, bending over to pick them up.

“
Pfft
is all I have to say to that.”

“While you're
pfft
ing you can put these on a hanger and onto the costume rack, please,” Thomas said, holding out the pants.

“
Fine.
I bet Kenneth didn't audition because it's such a disgusting, sinful play,” I chortled. “Poor Kenneth with all this sin everywhere.”

I hung up Matt's pants and grabbed the undistressed pair next in line. It was harder to do now that I knew I was distressing jeans for jerkoffs.

Thomas turned back to his can of crimson. “He looks a little like the older-brother character to me.”

How was it Thomas could stay so relaxed around people being crazy homophobes all the time? He dipped his brush into the new bucket of paint and brushed a stroke onto the door of a massive wooden car.

I tore into my new set of pants with the iron brush. “Did I tell you he corrected me in chemistry today?”

Thomas didn't look up. “Matt?”

“Kenneth.”

Basically, I was in chemistry and I'd said something about hydrogen in class, and Kenneth had chuckled.

Chuckled. Actually jiggled in his seat. Like, he went from nothing to chuckle. It wasn't even that funny.

He didn't turn around. He'd just said, “I'm pretty sure you mean oxygen.”

“Okay, well, in other news, the play is cast—hurrah,” Thomas said, moving from the car to the stack of trees in the corner of the room. “You know, now that I've had a closer look, Matt's not a bad-looking guy. I can see what you saw in him.”

I looked down at the jeans. I'd been scrubbing them so hard I'd almost torn them in half. “Whatever. I've got to go. I told Naoki I'd meet her by the Old Man.”

“Don't forget your cat ears,” Thomas called, pointing at my fuzzy ears with his free hand as he dragged a stack of trees onto the stage.

As I wandered outside to the courtyard in front of the school I noted that I was one of about twenty cats, a cat being the go-to minimalist costume choice. Only about half the kids at school had bothered to dress up. By the time you get to high school, no one's really trick-or-treating, so it's mostly a matter of who
actually
likes to dress up for their own interest. Mostly it's nerds, who will take on any excuse to dress up like their favorite action heroes or creatures.

There were a lot of Gandalfs wandering around.

 
Boys' obsession with wizards

There are four trees in the quad next to Jefferson High. One looks like a spaceship hovering on top of a pencil, which is where the teachers sit when they have lunch. One looks like an Afro, which is where people usually go to make out because it's the most tucked to the side. There's the super big pointy-at-the-top tree that popular people eat lunch under because it's supposedly the nicest. And there's Old Man tree, all bent over and crooked and knobbly, where the nerds eat because it's closest to the school and the Wi-Fi signal they hack into is better there, even though the ground is a little rockier.

Naoki was waiting for me under the tree, dressed in blue and gray and green, with little bits of things pinned to her. Leaves. Twigs. Moss.

“I'm a river,” she explained.

“Cool.” Of course, because I had like a zillion things I wanted to tell Naoki, about the Eye, the incantation, about Tesla's soccer game, I was suddenly struck completely dumb. Wasn't there a word I was going to ask her about? “Cool,” I said again for no reason.

Naoki smiled. “Okay, good,” she said, as though I'd just said something that could be described as “good.” “So, I have a question to ask you,” she continued, “about Mystery Club. And our membership. I want to suggest a new member.”

“Who?”

“He's new. And I haven't asked him, but I think we should,” Naoki added.

“Okaaay.”

There was a shriek on the other side of the school. The sun poured down between the branches and set a warm spot on the top of my head.

Naoki grabbed a lock of hair, twisted it artfully into a loop.

“Okay, so first I'm going to say it, then I'm going to explain. Okay. I think we should ask Kenneth White to join Mystery Club.”

“What?!”

The crowd of nerds, gathered several feet away for a few impromptu rounds of Magic, cringed.

Naoki put her hands out, palms up, like an offering. “Right, so I'll explain. Remember last week, with the crosses? Of course you remember. Okay, on that day, I started thinking about the word
cross
. About being ‘cross' as in ‘angry,' about the shape of a cross, and crossing paths. I thought about it all night.
Cross. Cross. Cross.
And the next day, I started crossing paths with Kenneth. Over and over. Our paths would literally cross, you know? Me coming from the north and him from the west.”

“Yeah.”

Like the Wicked Witch
.

“Sooooo,” I said slowly, “what are you saying, then?”

Naoki sped up. “Okay. So I thought,
Why is this happening? What is it about the word
cross
? Or about Kenneth?
I thought of the time I found you and Thomas.” Naoki started tracing out a path in the air with her index finger. “I was in the library. Waiting for a book to find me. And you were in your study hall, talking about mysteries. And I'd been thinking about being lost. And the mystery of lost. How lost is a mystery. And I just thought, you know, that maybe there is no book with what I'm looking for. The word
book
felt so far away. And I was walking down the hall and I heard you say ‘mystery,' and I thought how life can be a perfect mystery. And then I found you.”

Her index finger pointed at me. Naoki smiled.

“Okaaaaay.” I could feel the little stones on the ground digging into my feet.

“I think what all this cross and crossing paths means is that Kenneth is supposed to be in our cross paths.” Naoki took a deep breath. “That's it.”

“I don't get it.” I could feel myself coiling inward. “Uh,” I stammered, “just so we're clear, this is the guy who glued a cross to my locker.”

Which I still had in my bag, incidentally.

The gravelly rhythm of sneakers grinding against dirt roused in the distance. Naoki's face stayed still, soft but frozen like a snowman's. “Are you sure it was him?”

“Uh. No, if by ‘sure' you mean I saw him do it.”

Naoki tapped her finger on her lip. Her nails were painted green and blue. “Hmmmm. I don't think it was him.”

“Puh!” I scoffed. “Why not?”

“I just, I don't see it. I can't explain it. I just feel this overwhelming thing, like we are supposed to cross paths.”

“Well, maybe you're supposed to cross paths with him separately.” I could feel my words speeding up, running hotter and hotter.

Naoki paused. Tapped her lip again. “I mean we, like, all of us.”

“Well, I don't want to have to hang out with a homophobe.”

“Maybe he isn't.”

“Maybe it's less of a big deal for you if he is,” I spat.

Naoki shifted and crossed one foot over the other. Waiting. Maybe for me to say something else. I don't know what.

“Hmmmmm,” she said finally. “Could we say we're going to think about it?”

It was pointless to say no. I mean, technically, it was my and Thomas's club more than it was Naoki's. And technically Naoki had no business even really thinking about who should be a member. But it seemed mean to point that out.

In the ground I noticed a sharp rock sticking up out of the dirt. I kicked it lightly with the toe of my boot. There is an art to dislodging rocks like this. You have to wiggle them very gently until they come loose like a tooth.

“Monty?” Naoki tilted her head.

The rock wasn't budging. I gave it another kick.

Hey, guess what
, I thought. It was also true that, for a really nice person, Naoki was actually acting like kind of a homophobe. I'm sure, I thought, she would never think that. Even though it was true.

I could feel my brain filling up with angry bits, piling up like Ho Ho wrappers on a binge day. Like homework on a Sunday.

Naoki stared at me. I stared at my unmoving rock.

“Okay, well…” is all I got past my lips.

“Okay, well. Let's just see,” Naoki said, her voice a whisper in the breeze.

“Sure.” I gave the rock one more kick.

“Okay. Amazing.” Naoki started to turn back to the school. “Hey, so what's up with the Eye of Know?”

“Uh.” I looked down. Picked some stray threads off the leg of my jeans. “Maybe later.”

“Maybe later.” Naoki shrugged. “Bye.”

And she gathered up her stuff and waved goodbye. Coincidentally, the sun tucked itself away into a little gray cloud, which decided to take up residence over my head.

On my way to class, I spotted him, Mr. Kenneth White. Not in costume. Unless he was dressed up as someone who wore the same son-of-an-evangelical-preacher non-outfit of denim and white every day. He was looking out the window, his arms crossed.

I had this thought where I would go up to him and say, “I've seen your dad's videos, you know.”

I had. On Friday night, as Tesla celebrated, while I waited for Naoki to IM me back, I'd sat and watched a bunch of his dad's videos.

There were a lot of them.

“I saw a video of you and your dad in New York,” I would say, “when you were protesting a wedding. It was a video taken by someone who was supposed to be filming the wedding of a friend or something. And the lesbians getting married are in white, and they're standing in a park with their friends and family. Just some little park with ducks and stuff. And one of the lesbians is wearing a suit and the other is wearing this big dress. And the video goes in and out of focus. And all of a sudden, your dad walks in with a bullhorn, screaming about saving the American family. And the last thing the camera zooms in on is his stupid face. In his stupid white suit. At someone else's wedding.”

Maybe he would look at me. Then I'd get to say, “And there is no way you're going to be a member of the only other group outside my family that I care about in this world.”

That's what I should say
, I thought.

Not that you would hear it.

Even though it's true.

Suddenly I thought of the Eye. I flipped my bag off my back and started digging inside for it.

But then Kenneth looked up and started walking, and it occurred to me that we were about to cross paths, so I picked up my bag and scooted back and around the other side of the building.

See, it is possible to avoid a prophecy, I thought. It just depends on where you step.

It was still a few minutes to bell, so I headed to my locker, bumping into Thomas, in full Queen.

“Going to your locker?” he asked in sing-song.

“Yeah.”

“How's Naoki?” he asked in regular voice.