Ring of Solomon, page 1
Praise for Ring of Solomon
“Jam-packed with action and humor, Ring of Solomon is a rip-roaring good read. Buoyed by the fast pace and excitement of this Jewish mythology-inspired adventure, I plowed right through until there was no more left. I already miss Zach and the endearing cast of characters. Please, I need more!”
—Graci Kim, author of The Last Fallen Star
“This exploration of a boy’s self is full of fun, humor, and Jewish mythology that I never knew could be so cool.”
—Rex Ogle, author of Free Lunch and The Supernatural Society
Aden Polydoros is an author of MG and YA fiction. Although he enjoys going to flea markets and antique fairs, he hasn’t yet had the fortune of finding a magic ring.
AdenPolydoros.com
Ring of Solomon
Aden Polydoros
Dedicated to all the kids who are still waiting for their enchanted cupboard, haunted house, or magic-school admission letter.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
1
Naomi was gone.
One second, she was there, smack-dab in the middle of San Pancras’s downtown flea market, wearing her huge pink sunglasses and the baseball cap Mom had bought her at Disneyland last summer. And then I turned around just for a moment. By the time I looked back, she had vanished into the swarm of bargain hunters and chattering tourists.
My stomach dropped. No, no, no. Mom was going to kill me.
“Naomi?” I pushed past a man haggling over an overpriced snow globe. By sheer luck, I avoided crashing into a vendor selling plates and bowls. Considering how ugly the dishes were, breaking them would’ve been an act of mercy.
I swiveled around, searching for Naomi in the crowd, which was so densely packed that it wiggled down the street like a blob of Jell-O. She wasn’t crouched over the battalion of stuffed animals and action figures lined up on one man’s carpet. She wasn’t tossing her empty soda bottle into the trash can or scraping gum off the bottom of her flip-flops.
“Naomi?” My voice cracked like an old record. It had been doing that a lot lately, ever since I turned twelve, but it wasn’t just puberty this time. My throat tightened in panic. “Naomi?! This isn’t funny.”
A hand yanked on my sleeve. I turned, not knowing how nervous I’d been until I swallowed and felt my lips tremble. There Naomi was, just standing there with her stupid sunglasses and Minnie Mouse cap, her blond hair poking up in random directions. She inherited Mom’s upturned nose and serious eyes, but her dimpled chin and goofy smile were all Dad’s.
“Where were you, you dolt?” I asked as she slurped down the rest of her Coke. “I told you not to wander off.”
She grinned. “Zach, you have to come see this. I found the perfect thing. Mom’s gonna love it.”
Naomi pulled me down the rows of vendors. The sun beat down on us, the air ripe with the smells of pizza grease and coconut-scented sunscreen. All I wanted was to go back home and play video games, but Mom’s birthday was this Monday. Turning forty seemed like it deserved something special. Roses and drawings wouldn’t cut it this time.
Every month, Mom would drive nearly an hour up to San Francisco to drag us to the famous Alameda flea market. Next to it, the San Pancras swap meet was a cheaper knockoff than the plasticky purses a pink-haired woman was hollering were real Gucci. There were only three things our coastal town was known for—its quiet streets lined with Spanish mission–style houses, the abandoned cement factory at its outskirts, and having a name that sounded suspiciously like a human organ.
Naomi led me to an old man stooped in front of a card table heaped with musty paperbacks, brass vases, and picture frames. There was so much stuff, I expected the table legs to collapse at any moment, drowning everything within five feet in a tsunami of junk. The fire department would have to dig us out.
“Naomi.” I looked at her. What did she expect to find here, except for rat droppings and mothballs?
“One second. It’s right around here somewhere.” Eyes sparkling in excitement, she dug through the tangle of jewelry sitting in a glass ashtray. Mostly just Mardi Gras beads, plastic bangles, and brooches so gaudy even our mom would turn her nose up at them. Naomi fished a ring from the bottom of the pile and showed it to me.
It was a thick golden signet ring. The circular panel on top was engraved with a six-pointed Star of David and surrounded by crimson stones. Garnets maybe, but probably just glass. Hebrew letters encircled the band, though for all I knew, they could’ve been an advertisement for Burger King.
I tried the ring on my finger, but it slipped right off. “Naomi, it’s going to be too big for her. It’s a guy’s ring.”
“But don’t you think she’d love it?”
Mom went a little crazy when it came to Jewish stuff, even though she was about as religious as a bacon cheeseburger. She collected menorahs and dreidels, Yiddish pamphlets and Hebrew books none of us could read, corny old paintings of wizard-bearded rabbis and clarinet-playing klezmer musicians, and more. An entire corner of the kitchen was devoted to her hoard, but over the years, the stuff had overflowed into the rest of our home as well. Somehow, one of her weird oil paintings had ended up in my bedroom. You think Nosferatu or Frankenstein is bad? Try falling asleep beneath the bearded scowls of an entire room of Torah scholars. That’s what I’d call nightmare fuel.
I turned the ring around in my hand. The sunlight danced across the red gemstones. Big, gaudy, and very Jewish. Mom would go totally nuts over it.
“Come on, Zach,” Naomi said, tugging on my sleeve. “Come on. It’s perfect.”
Sighing, I held up the ring. “Excuse me, how much is this?”
The old man leaned over the table, squinting past his half-moon glasses. He smacked his lips. “Twenty dollars!”
Twenty dollars? Talk about a rip-off. We could buy Mom a ring from Kohl’s or an entire box of fancy chocolates for that much.
I didn’t want to haggle, even though people haggled at flea markets all the time. Haggling would feel like leaning down to pick up dropped change, and I’d stopped doing that since Jeffrey Cooper in history class threw pennies at me. I knew there was nothing wrong with it, but just the thought made me cringe in embarrassment.
I turned. “Naomi, it’s too...”
She had her lower lip jutted out and was giving me the kind of puppy-eyed look that was basically kryptonite for big brothers. A shiver of dread passed through me. If I left now, the tears would start, and then the screaming. Trust me, her tantrum would make World War III look like a schoolyard fight, no joke.
“Zach, you have thirty dollars,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, but there’s the field trip to the zoo on Monday, and I want to have enough for the gift shop.” But it was more than that. I knew that Dominic Bianchi would be there, and since we were in the same homeroom, maybe we’d end up in the gift shop at the same time. I could see it in my head—he’d be walking down the aisle, running his fingers over the shelves’ contents, looking longingly at a souvenir or two. He really liked wolves, so maybe he’d be eyeing a T-shirt or poster in the carnivore section. And I would come up, money already in hand, and buy it for him.
“Zach, please.” Naomi begged at me with her eyes. “Mom will love it.”
Reluctantly, I counted out the crumpled bills. Five, ten, twenty. I only got ten dollars a month for allowance and two-fifty to play with our neighbors’ cat, Mags, when they were away on business. Oh well, there probably wasn’t anything interesting at the gift shop, and it wasn’t like Dominic would even notice me. Why would he? We weren’t friends, even though I wished we could be.
“Here,” I muttered, handing the money to the man.
He pocketed the bills. “Smart choice, kid.”
“Is it an antique?” I asked, already regretting my life choices.
“Who knows.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“It was in a fish.”
“A fish,” I repeated stupidly.
He nodded. “A sea bass. When I cut it open to cook it, the ring was buried inside its stomach. Those bass, they’ll eat anything.”
“Really?” A small smile touched my lips. Talk about a wicked origin story.
“Ew, that’s so nasty,” Naomi said as we walked back to the flea market’s entrance, where we had promised to meet Mom and Dad at noon. She made a face. “Let’s not tell Mom.”
For once, I agreed with her.
2
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I muttered, propping my foot against the back of the driver’s seat. A blur of blue ocean and beachfront houses rippled past the window. “Do I really have to go, Dad? Can’t we just go to the beach instead?”
“It’s too late to complain now, kiddo. You’re stuck.” He grinned and met my eye in the rearview mirror. “Remember, you used to love going to Grandma’s.”
“Yeah, like when I was ten. I’m almost thirteen now, Dad.”
“Don’t remind me.” He rolled his eyes. “Besides, I don’t hear you complaining at Christmastime.”
That was because Grandma gave the best presents. I was pretty sure it was her way of trying to convert us, like if she showered me and Naomi with enough stuff, we’d go over to Team Jesus.
“It’s not even a holiday,” I said in annoyance. “Why have a barbeque in the middle of the month, for no reason?”
“Because she wants to show off the new tile,” Dad said.
I groaned. “That’s even worse.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Oh? So, you’d rather be moping at home now?”
“I’d rather be playing video games with Sandra than spend my Saturday stuck listening to Grandma brag about her floor.”
“Zach loves Sandra, Zach loves Sandra,” Naomi sang, knocking her head against my shoulder.
“Shut up, gnome.” I shoved her lightly in the arm. My cheeks burned, and I was pretty sure if I glanced in the mirror, my face would be redder than a fire hydrant. “We’re just friends.”
“A crush is nothing to be ashamed of, sport,” Dad said with a laugh.
“It’s not a crush!”
Mom looked back and gave me a smile, an almost reassuring one. Sometimes, I wondered if she knew the truth. If she could tell.
I reached into my pocket for the ring I’d bought at the swap meet, just to make sure it was still there. The more I thought about it, the more I worried it was a piece of junk.
Grandma and Grandpa lived in the fancy part of San Pancras, where people were so snobby that even their dogs seemed to sneer down at us. Our grandparents’ chunky white house overlooked the beachfront. Mom said the style was midcentury modern, whatever that meant. To me, it looked like a pile of Legos with windows. If I were a millionaire, I’d build a castle for myself, complete with a moat and drawbridge.
There were already several cars parked in the driveway. We found a spot at the end of the line. Our station wagon looked so lame next to my grandpa’s fancy-schmancy Porsche and my uncle’s huge Hummer.
Dad ran his fingers over the Porsche’s glossy paint job as we walked past it. He sighed. “This is why I shouldn’t have gone to art school.”
“Then you wouldn’t have met Mom,” Naomi said, because like me, she had heard the story about our parents’ first date a gazillion times.
“Tuck your shirt in,” Mom told me, ringing the doorbell. “And Naomi, stop chewing on your hair.”
“Sorry,” Naomi said through a mouthful of her ponytail. Her hair was as light and wispy as corn silk, just like our dad’s, whereas mine took after our mom’s—brown, wild, and the sworn enemy of hairdressers. I was pretty sure that my cowlicks alone defied at least three laws of gravity and physics.
The door opened and our grandma waltzed out like a star on the red carpet. She wore a sparkly silver dress and had her blond hair done up in a fancy do that kinda made it seem like she was wearing a beehive.
“Oh, Peter, it’s so good to see you!” Grandma cooed, hugging my dad. “And Emily. Stunning as always, dear.”
Mom smiled stiffly as Grandma leaned in to kiss her cheek, looking like she’d much rather lock lips with a fish. Ever since Grandma had told Mom that she wanted Naomi to get baptized, things had gone nuclear between the two of them. When it happened, I remembered how back in preschool or kindergarten, Grandma had taken me somewhere where a strange man had sprinkled water on my head. I was a little worried that I actually was baptized, and what that really meant, and if I was Jewish still or not.
Sometimes, I didn’t feel Jewish enough, no matter how many menorahs and seder plates Mom managed to cram in her china cabinet. We only went to temple for the big holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and if you got between Naomi and her bacon, she’d go rabid. I would know—a few months ago, Naomi had nearly bitten off my thumb when I tried stealing half of her Bacon ’N Egg McMuffin.
Of course, Jeffrey didn’t care whether I felt Jewish enough or not when he started bullying me. At first it was the penny thing. Then he’d knocked off my baseball cap at recess and asked me where my horns were. I wished I could stand up to him, except he had an entire gang of friends, while I just had Sandra. No doubt, my best friend could throw a mean right hook, but I wasn’t about to test my luck against Team Neanderthal.
Once Grandma finished smothering Naomi in hugs and kisses, she turned to me. Twelve was way too old to be hugged, but I toughed it out anyway, and groaned inwardly as she kissed me on the forehead. I hoped she hadn’t left a mark.
Dad clapped a hand over my shoulder. “Mom, you’re embarrassing him.”
“A grandson shouldn’t be embarrassed to hug his grandmother.” She pulled back to study me and Naomi closely. She always had to do this. No matter the occasion, she’d complain about something. Maybe it would be the length of my hair, or the style of my clothes, or how a girl Naomi’s age should be wearing dresses instead of shorts. It was an honored family tradition for her. This time she just plucked a piece of lint from my shirt, clucked her tongue, and gave my mom a long look. “Wrinkles. You really must do a better job of ironing their clothes, Emily.”
Mom’s eyebrow twitched. She looked half-tempted to turn this beach party into a bloodbath. “Not all of us can afford to pay people to wash our clothing, Catherine.”
“Shame.” She swiveled around and strode inside. As soon as her back was turned, I rubbed at the greasy patch her lipstick had left on my forehead.
Dad sighed, herding us into the house.
We hadn’t been here since last Christmas. The silver globes and gold snowflakes hanging from the staircase railing and shelves had been replaced by pink roses and cut crystal. Naomi raced to the bowls of pink-and-white M&M’s on the snack table, but I held back, itchy with the feeling of being watched. My fingers strayed to my pocket, tracing the ring’s worn engravings.
“Hey, kid, get me a hotdog!” a raspy voice said from behind me.
I swiveled around, drawing my breath in sharply. The hallway was deserted except for my grandparents’ Afghan hound, Clarence. With the dog’s long flaxen hair, he looked, well, a lot like Grandma. Give him a beehive, and they’d practically be twins.
I chuckled nervously. I had probably just imagined the voice, even if it did look like Clarence’s mouth had moved.
Clarence nudged me with his snout. “Oh, come on, kid. Do you know how gross kibble is?”
My jaw dropped. No way.
“Naomi, did you hear...?” I looked over my shoulder, but she had already followed the grown-ups out to the patio. As Clarence settled on the shiny new marble floor with a heaving sigh, I squatted down next to him.
He rolled his deep brown eyes up at me. “Well, kid? You keep your mouth open like that any longer, a bug’s gonna fly in.”
“Am I asleep?” I whispered. “Or dead?”
“If you were dead, do you really think you’d be here?” he asked, giving a weary look around us.
Well, to be fair, being trapped at snobby family get-togethers was the closest thing to hell on earth, next to fourth period with Jeffrey.
“Since when did you learn to talk?” I asked. “Can all dogs do that?”
“Hotdog first, kid. Then you can ask all the questions you want.”
I went out to the patio, feeling kind of dreamy. Maybe I was asleep after all.
Along with Grandma and Grandpa, there was my aunt and uncle, and my teenage cousin, Samantha. Samantha was basically the superstar of the family—head of the drama club, an all-expenses-paid scholarship to Otis College of Art and Design next year, Instagram influencer, yada yada yada. Every time we had a barbeque or holiday dinner, my aunt and uncle boasted about her accomplishments, and all I could say was that I’d scored a C on my math test or had a very impressive bowel movement.
