Excerpt from Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Naoki's dad has hair longer than mine, and he wears it in a big bun at the top of his head.

"Let's go!" He waved from the car. "Hi, kids."

"Hi, Mr. Wood," Thomas and I greeted in unison, in that upbeat but drone-like voice you have to use when you're talking to someone's parents.

"Bye." Naoki waved as she hopped into the car.

Thomas had a coffee date.

"Toodle-loo," he said, blowing me a kiss as he ran off.

Because I refuse to take part in any activities beyond the one I sort of created for myself, I had nothing to do. So I went home, comforted by the quiet, the warm breeze that is the autumn air in California, and the sound of my boots hitting the concrete as I marched to the bus.

* * *

I love my house.

It has a massive pine tree in the front yard that looks like we have a magical creature in a big, pointy, feathered hat squatting on the front lawn. Mama Kate is afraid that one day it will fall on the house, and my sister, Tesla, used to have these crazy nightmares from the shadows the branches cast on her wall. But I love it. It smells like rain.

After the obligatory parental hellos and a hastily zapped microwaved burrito (Monday being the one night of the week we are allowed to eat wherever we want), I bolted up to the cozy paradise also known as my room. As soon as I was in, I kicked off my boots; slipped into my supersoft and paper-thin FRANKIE SAYS RELAX T-shirt and gym shorts; and flopped into the supercomfy armchair I have set up by my desk, which was an old kitchen table so it still smells like onions in some spots.

"Oh, hello, Internet," I cooed as I flipped open the lid to my ancient but fully functional laptop.

I can lose a whole weekend ignoring the natural beauty of the fabulous state of California to read weird stuff online. Last year I spent a month obsessing over this woman who blogs and live-tweets about what she calls her "process of becoming a human cyborg." Later I read an article that said she had to give it up because she was hallucinating, possibly due to lead poisoning from all the bolts and screws she was inserting under her skin.

Which, you know, is a little scary.

After polishing off my burrito, I spent an hour just clicking around the web.

I find most of my Mystery Club topics through random searches, which I keep track of in this app I found that was designed for overachieving businessmen.

There's a happy-face list, originally for listing good habits, where I keep all the mysteries I consider worth looking into:

• ESP
  
  
• That thing that lets people bend spoons

And there's an unhappy-face list, which is technically for tracking bad habits, but I use it, because it's there, for tracking those things I do not understand and never will, and don't care.

• Flip-flops
  
  
• People's obsession with getting rid of all body hair

That night I was hoping to find a better psychic experiment and a more thorough explanation of how a person would actually see something psychically. I typed in a few questions along the lines of, How can you see something someone else is seeing if you're not in the same place?

Alternately, I had this idea that I would find something about crystal balls.

I clicked something. Read something. Got a root beer. Came back. Watched a video of kittens playing guitars. Clicked something, and then I clicked something else, and before I knew it, there was a link to this other thing and a link to a website. And presumably, that is how I ended up at:

Manchester's Academy of Magic,

Mystical Forces, and New Believers

Which is weird because I was really not looking for anything specifically mystical, or magic, and I don't remember clicking a link about anything like that.

Excerpted from Saving Montgomery Sole by Mariko Tamaki. Copyright © 2016 by Mariko Tamaki. Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.