Saving Montgomery Sole (7 page)

That said, when they started playing the medleys two years ago, the number of kids left in the hallways after bell dropped from tons to, like, four.

This morning, instead of fleeing, I was standing in the hallway so I could record the medley on my phone as part of an independent experiment I was doing on backmasking. Backmasking is this thing where musicians put weird messages in their music, which can only be heard when you play the tracks backward.

Mostly it's just jokes or nonsensical things, like “Who's eaten all the spaghetti?” According to Wikipedia, the rock band Pink Floyd used, “Congratulations. You've just discovered the secret message!”

Of course, all this was back when people had vinyl records and enough time on their hands to play records backward. Which is probably what I would do if I had a record player.

I had this idea one night that maybe there was some sort of messaging in the Jefferson High medley. Something brainwashing like, “Be true to your stupid football team.”

Mostly what I was discovering was how much music can penetrate earplugs. Kind of makes you wonder if they're really plugging anything. $5.99 down the drain.

As the music swirled around me, like an angry mob, I stepped up to my locker in a funnel of muffled noise and looked up to see … a cross.

When I say “cross,” of course I mean a Christian cross, not an
X
marks the spot, although it was probably a little of both. It was white plastic, wallet-sized. Jesus pressed to the front like he was part of the cross instead of nailed to it, his body fused to the slats, his face all contorted and hard to read.

I dropped my bag, suddenly stuck by the cold wave every queer-related kid gets when they see something stuck to their locker that they didn't put there.

See also:
KICK ME
stickers,
MONTYZ MOMZ HAVE AIDS
signs,
MONTY IS A LESBIAN
Post-it notes. You name it. I've had it. It hits, in the same soft spot, right under the lung, every time.

Students dumped their books into bags, slapped lockers closed, scrambled to get out of the hallway.

I felt a tear in the corner of my eye and squeezed it back.

“
No
way. No way. No way. Stop, stop, stop,” I whispered. “Stop, stop, stop.”

I yanked at the edges of the cross with the tips of my fingers, but it was stuck there. Not even taped. Like, cemented.

Suddenly there was a hard tap on my shoulder.
“Wha wha wha!”

I jumped and turned to see Mr. Grate, VP, his mouth flapping open and shut like a crazed puppet.

“Wha wha wha!”

“What?!” I popped out the earplugs, only to be flooded with noise.

Mr. Grate's face turned red like an overripe tomato. “Class, Miss Sole. Now!”

“Mr. Grate! There's…” My face exploding. My fingertips sweaty as they pressed into the hard plastic edge of the newest intruder on my sanity.

“I know, I know. The crosses. We're dealing with it, Miss Sole. There's no need to—”

“I-I don't want it on there!”

“Miss Sole.” Mr. Grate leaned so far forward I could practically count his hair plugs. I could definitely smell the cologne he was soaked in. “Our administration will deal with this matter swiftly. In the meantime, you have class. Go. Now.”

Looking down the hallway, I saw it. Rows of crosses. Not on every locker, but almost.

“Not the end of the world,” Mr. Grate grumbled as he turned and plodded down the hallway, barking out orders. “You! Maxwell! Get to class! You too. Class! Denton! Class! Taft!”

Who made you the authority on the end of the world?
I seethed.

No big deal?

I pressed my lips closed and slammed my locker so hard it made my fingers ring. I snatched my bag and trudged down the hall, awash in a noise that lingered in my brain all through math and Mr. Deever, who despite continued ridiculous sweating, wore a turtleneck to class.

By the time I got to second-period English, my head was throbbing with a magical evil headache. Mr. Gyle, Dramedy Club head, stood at the front of the class with a big yellow sign-up sheet and an unnatural happy grin on his face. Mrs. Farley motioned me to my seat and clapped her hands.

I slid into my chair.

“Okay, class, well today. Yes. Yes, Mr. Totter, sit
down
, please. Yes, so today we have a special announcement and a special guest. This year, Jefferson High will be presenting a full production of
The Outsiders
! Isn't that fun? And Mr. Gyle has agreed to come to class to tell us a little more. Isn't that exciting, class?”

Silence. A sure sign that something is
not
going to be exciting is when a teacher starts talking about something like it's exciting.

Besides, audition lists had been up in the hallways for weeks. It wasn't exactly
news
.

“Thank you, uh, Mrs. Farley. So. Yes. It's a very tough play,” Mr. Gyle explained. “I know you're reading the book, so you know, um, that, well, it's a play with a lot of good themes. But it's not, uh, just literature. Uh, there are fights, and stabbings, so it's a-uh action-type of play. These greasers, these boys, as I'm sure you're noticing in your studies with Mrs. Farley, they were very tough boys, uh guys, and, uh, you know they were the jocks of their time. The, uh, heroes. As it were.”

The herd sat lifeless.

“Will there be actual fights onstage?” this kid Todd, amateur rapper and some sort of sport player, asked.

“Oh, uh, yes! Yes, there will definitely be … fights. We will be, uh, choreographing, uh, that is to say, uh,
staging
fights.”

“Fiiiight,” someone whispered in the back of the classroom.

“Looks like Tanner's going to get his butt kicked,” someone else chuckled.

“Kick your butt first.” Tanner, who I believe is also on a sports team, because he dresses that way, high-fived the kid next to him.

“Kick all your butts,” someone else laughed.

“Sign up. We'll see,” Tanner barked.

“Okay, enough! Class.” Mrs. Farley clapped her hands. “That's enough butts for today.”

Looks like it's butt-kicking time
, I thought.
How thrilling for us all.

Just to be clear,
The Outsiders
is a book by S. E. Hinton about this kid named Ponyboy, who has a great name but is also really poor. He's what is called a Greaser, which is what the really poor kids from the town he's from are called. And the whole book is about this ongoing battle between the Greasers and the Socs, who are the really rich kids. And the really rich kids beat up and make the Greasers' lives miserable because they can and because they're rich and they get to do whatever they want.

There is no way in hell that the Greasers in
The Outsiders
, by any literary interpretation, are “jocks.”

I stared wide-eyed at Mrs. Farley. Like, really? Really, this is happening?

By lunch, the sign-up sheet was a list of almost every jock at Jefferson.

Thomas wanted to eat lunch on the stage in the auditorium, which he has a key to because Mr. Gyle gave him the key two years ago, then forgot to ask for it back. The stage was covered in little taped out X's for where the set would go.

Thomas perched himself on the throne from the
Knights of the Round Table
set, and I sat on an old toadstool from the production of
Alice Through the Looking Glass
many moons ago, balancing my cafeteria fries on my knee. “Did you
know
that Mr. Gyle was going around telling all the jocks they should sign up because it's going to be like Jock Fight Club?”

“
The Outsiders is
about conflict,” Thomas sighed, leaning back into his throne and sipping pomegranate juice. “A huge part of the book is fights. Besides, it's an almost all-male cast, and no one was signing up.”

“And you care because?” I asked, stabbing my fry into a mound of tangy red goop.

“Because I am a patron of the arts, Montgomery, and I'm on set and wardrobe. And art is art. Art
transcends
.”

“Half of these guys can't even read,” I grumbled.

Pulling a bag of kale chips out of his pocket, Thomas shrugged. “Well, we're cutting most of their lines for time anyway. It's not worth getting upset about.”

“I'm not upset,” I said, picking at my toadstool.

“So”—Thomas rolled up his sleeves—“new topic because I don't want to argue about this anymore. Ready? Did you hear about the new student?”

“What new student?”

“Kenneth…” Thomas paused. Waited for me to finish chewing my fry, possibly for dramatic effect, possibly because he wanted to let me know I was chewing too loudly. “White.”

I paused, mostly because Thomas had just paused, and I wanted to make fun of him a little. “Should that mean something to me?”

Thomas leaned in, eyes wide. “Reverend White? Reverend John White? Reverend ‘I'm going to save the American Family' White?”

The image of the Reverend White, blurry under a Buzzfeed headline I'd scanned a while ago, popped into my brain. “Oh my God.”

“Exactly. God!” Thomas pointed excitedly at the ceiling, “Here!” He pointed at the ground.

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.