Saving Montgomery Sole (8 page)

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.