Séances
Séances
Tea leaf readings
Ouija
People who write about Ouija on the web have the spookiest websites. One time I accidentally left one open, and halfway through the night I could have sworn I heard whispering coming from my computer, which, needless to say, meant I spent the night sleeping in my moms’ room, curled up on the floor.
The general consensus among communicating-with-the-dead experts seems to be that Ouija is a kind of remedial way to talk to spirits. This one site I found said that the best thing about Ouija is its clarity. So there’s all this chatter, this guy said, made up of all the souls of the universe, and the Ouija reaches out into the void and pulls out a single sound, yes or no.
I don’t have that many dead people in my life that I’ve known, well, except for Momma Jo’s parents, who I never met but I’ve seen pictures of, mostly on vacation in places like Florida and Mexico. In most of the pictures, they are on the beach, fully clothed. Like, shoes and everything.
“That’s how old people vacation,” Momma Jo had said.
This one time, I found an online Ouija board, where you could put your mouse in the center of the screen and ask a question.
Call to your spirit, the site had read. If the spirit is there, he/she will answer.
So I asked if Momma Jo’s parents were there.
NO.
Then I asked if my biological sperm donor was there. Because I have had this thought, from time to time, that maybe he’s dead and maybe he’s alive. And it’s weird sometimes not to know … if he is or not.
“Is my biological sperm donor there—I mean, dead?” I whispered.
NO.
I feel a little guilty whenever I think about or talk about my bio sperm donor. There was a time when I was little, like eight or something, when I was always asking my moms about it, about what I’d called “the stuff” (i.e., sperm).
I’d wanted to know what it looked like.
“What what looked like?” Momma Jo asked. I think on that occasion we were waiting in line at the grocery store. “What stuff?”
“The man sperm!” I yelled, frustrated.
“Ha! Well. Geez. You’re asking the wrong person.” Momma Jo smirked.
It’s not like I want to find him. The donor. I don’t need to find him. He’s just there, I guess, and sometimes I step on him in my brain, kind of. Like a sock left on the floor.
I don’t know if the Ouija thing could be taken as proof that he is alive. I guess it would depend on whether the spirits know what a biological sperm donor is.
No one in Aunty has a clue.
There are some people who consult various forms of spirit communication as a way of preparing for the day. There are apps that will show you your tarot reading every day, presumably so you can decide whether to take the bus or just stay home.
It might be nice to know what’s coming your way.
To have an app or an Eye you could touch and say, “Trouble?”
And it would say, “Yes! Avoid the letter L at all costs. Also the letter K and anything white. And watch out for short men with facial hair.”
Or just, “Yes! Go back to bed. Do not pass GO. Do not leave your room until you receive further instruction.”
* * *
Morning Music Medleys
Backmasking
If there is one thing the entire student population of Jefferson High, Mystery Club included, can agree on, it is about the Morning Music Medleys. They are just about the worst thing in the world. Imagine if someone took the ugliest parts of every song ever written, in all of time, and mushed them together into one terrible song.
Whoever decided that song should be played in the hallway every day, top volume, from 8:55 a.m. to 8:59 a.m., is not a nice person.
The rumor at school is that this is a punishment, although the official word is it’s an effective way to get students to class on time.
I think whoever wrote this so-called medley must look like some sort of cartoon villain. I bet he sleeps on a bed of nails. Naked.
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.
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.
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.