Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki Page A

Feeling like lead and staring at Kenneth’s now empty seat.
    â€œHey,” 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 .
    â€œDo you have frozen yogurt?” I asked.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œNow,” 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.
    â€œWhere 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.
    â€œWould 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?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œNo,” 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.”
    â€œWhich 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.
    â€œI mean the original Doctor Who , Montgomery, not any of these new impostors,” Thomas charged.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter , Thomas. And it depresses me to think you’re drawing a