Saving Montgomery Sole (9 page)

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?

I found this blog once about how corporations are putting images into foods as a kind of subliminal messaging system. It also has instructions on how to home compost, but mostly it's all these pictures people have taken of food with “distinctly political” messages in it. There's a picture in there of a soup stain on this guy's tablecloth that does actually look like an elephant eating a donkey.

This guy also said government cheese is all implanted with a chemical that makes people vote Republican.

I told Tiffany about this once, you know, thinking she'd be concerned as a person working in the food service industry, and she was basically like, “Yeah, tell me something I don't know.”

Tiffany's theory is that we, that is, us members of Western society, are constantly having symbolism, in her words, “crammed down our throats.”

“It's everywhere. Messages on what to eat, who to love, what to buy—all that is pretty much already set in our corporate system and disseminated through everything from television to pizza,” she noted as she grabbed a blueberry from the toppings bar and sucked it from her fingers to her mouth. “You know I wrote my thesis on beauty pageants and their connection to the fast-food industry, right? I told you that, right?”

“Uh,” I stammered, staring intently at Tiffany's fingers, which, I had just noticed, did not look like the cleanest in the world. “Do you always eat that stuff with your bare hands?”

“Oh”—Tiffany pressed her hands against her chest—“pardon
me
, Miss Manners. Do you want your free toppings or what?”

There was a moment of silence while Tiffany bored holes into me with her purple-black eyes, and I tried to do as quick an analysis of Tiffany's fingers as possible.
Are they more or less gross than Tesla's hands?
I asked myself, because I eat what Tesla has her fingers all over all the time.

Less.

“Free toppings, please,” I concluded.

“I thought so.”

All this has led me to wonder if maybe there was some connection between bread and Christianity that merited further investigation. Like, was there some commercial thing behind Christians' obsession with bread? Or maybe it was chemical?

 
Subliminal messages

 
Hallucinogens

*   *   *

The next morning, I was swimming in crosses. Everything looked like a cross to me: telephone poles, the plus signs on the blackboard, roads intersecting on my drive to school.

Kenneth White, meanwhile, spent the day vying for the title of Quietest Person in Aunty. Math, silent. Bio, quieter than cement. I can only imagine he ate his lunch in silence, too. Every class, he just sat, slumped, in his seat, his arms folded over his chest. Like he was posing for a painting or something. He never looked around. Never talked to anyone. Just sat there with his book open and his pencil on his notebook.

Staring.

At.

Nothing.

Maybe he was confused because all he did at home was Bible studies. Maybe he was snickering in biology because we were looking at what Mr. Jenner called the building blocks of life, and Christians think the building blocks of life are … I'm not sure, actually. Probably not gooey cells, though. Sometimes, I'd sneak a look and he'd be squinting ahead or looking out the window. His face as still as glass.

The only audio evidence of his existence in Aunty was the heavy, rubbery sound of his big boots clomping down the hallway from class to class.

At the Mystery Club meeting after school, Thomas shook up his healthy snack-in-a-bottle (which looked like kale and smelled like garbage). “Those boots are killing me,” he moaned. “I mean, he's not a terrible-looking guy. But those
boots
! Puh-lease! Those boots are o-ver.”

“Yeah, and his dad thinks we're all going to hell,” I said, licking the remnants of my snacks of cheesy twists off my fingers.

Thomas paused midshake. “That does not change the fact that his boots are ugly, Montgomery, but thanks for bringing that up,
again
.”

It was Thomas's turn to pick a topic for Mystery Club, and so we talked about superpowers and what superpowers Thomas thinks are over- and underrated. Thomas's list of overrated superpowers is very long. Basically anything you've seen any man do in a comic book, he's over it.

“I think we've all had enough of flying, yes?” he said, grabbing a piece of chalk and starting a superhero cartoon sketch on the board. “And lasers.”

“I always thought the laser thing was kind of confusing,” I added from my semi-prone position on the floor, “because technically a laser should just shoot through a person, but it never does. It just, you know,
zaps
. And pings off things.”

“I think it's time we refocused on people who can melt and reform into different objects and creatures,” Thomas concluded, stepping back from his drawing. It was a very bumpy superhero.