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I've never been to the Cornelian Museum before today. I mean, why would I go visit their ancient Egypt exhibition when it costs money and I've been up close and personal with various artifacts that have tried to kill me? However, I jumped at the chance to visit for free.
Fabian's the only other person who's actually excited for this field trip, so for my sanity, I decided to stick by him instead of hanging with anyone who wouldn't properly appreciate these exhibits. So he and I have been walking around the exhibition, excitedly pointing at each and every artifact and taking pictures of each other in front of them. I've been sending every photo to Amber and Nina in our group chat—Nina keeps saying how jealous she is of us and Amber's pretty much only responded enthusiastically to the pictures I've sent in front of the jewelry, though she has responded to more than just that. Mostly that, though.
Expected, but I was hoping for something along the lines of Don't get cursed!
"Oh, Ash, Ash!" Fabian exclaims, grabbing my arm and pulling me away from a particularly gorgeous clay Ankh before I get a chance to make him take a picture of me and my own Ankh charm in front of it. "Look at this."
He drags me over to a large stone that's not encased in glass. Not the most exciting thing that's in here, but the plaque says it's from the Valley of the Kings, which has me gasping and opening up the camera on my phone. "Fabian, say King Tut!"
Fabian smiles at the camera as it flashes on the screen. I open up the photo and show it to him, and he nods. "I'm making that one my new profile photo."
"You two are such nerds," a voice says—Jerome. He's standing near us with his arms crossed and eyebrows raised. "It's a rock. Not that exciting."
"But it's from the Valley of the Kings," Fabian responds.
"And?"
Fabian turns to me. "How are you dating him?!"
Jerome rolls his eyes. "It's just a rock," he repeats, walking closer. And then, he has the audacity to try and lay his hand on the stone—but he fails, because Fabian immediately smacks his hand away. Behind us, I hear Cassie and Erin talking to each other. From what I can make out, Cassie has a crush on Jerome and Erin's pointing out that even they've heard about the bet. "That was unnecessary."
"Jerome, you were about to touch a probably priceless artifact," I reply. "It's justified. Nice reflexes, Fabian."
As I high-five Fabian, Jerome glowers at us. "Right," he says, taking my hand, "so I probably shouldn't be left alone to my own devices, so I'm taking you." Again, I'm pulled away from the exhibit I was looking at, but he unwittingly drags me back to the clay Ankh, which has my face lighting up. "I'd ask how you're not extremely bored—"
"Hey, take my picture," I interrupt, handing him my phone. Jerome's eyebrows raise as I find the spot in front of the case that would get both me and the Ankh in the photograph, holding out my charm. The camera goes off and I take the phone back, opening up the photo. Smiling widely, I turn it around to show him. "I look cute."
"You always look cute," he responds. "Send that to me, I'm making it my homescreen."
I press a kiss against his lips before preparing to send it. As I press send, Alfie's voice near us says to Willow, "Two more days, and it'll be Alfie and Willow: The College Years."
"Ah, I can see it now," Jerome says, putting his arms around Alfie and Willow. "You guys big guys on campus."
"The biggest!" Alfie agrees. "Right, Willow?"
"Enormous," Willow states, way less excited about the prospect than Alfie is. I look at her weirdly, noting how she's been so unlike herself this entire week.
"What's wrong? Aren't you excited?"
"The biggest day of our lives," Willow replies, sounding like it's actually not. "Massive excite." Jerome and I share a glance as she goes to another nearby case. "Oh, cute tools." Tools? Oh, this is gonna weird her out if they're what I think they are. "You wonder what they were used for. 'Egyptian organ removal.'" Yeah, they're what I think they are. "Yuck."
As Willow walks away, Alfie says, "Dude, you don't think Willow's having doubts about college with me, right?"
"Well, she is only human," Jerome replies and laughs.
I hit his arm, tilting my head at him. "Really?"
—
"Oh, oh! Look at this," I say, grabbing Jerome's blazer to pull him over to the exhibit I'm looking at. Ancient Egyptian pottery, complete with hieroglyphs on them! "Look, look—"
"I can't look any closer, Ashley," Jerome interrupts. I sheepishly let go of his blazer. "You know, I don't get why you're so excited about all of this. You've literally been up close and personal with the Cup of Ankh and the Mask of Anubis."
"Don't forget the Staff of Osiris."
"My point exactly," he remarks. "Ancient Egyptian mysteries have tried to kill you and your friends several times—why does all of this have you acting like a kid in a sweets' store?"
"Because none of this," I gesture to the artifacts around us, "is gonna try and kill me. It's pottery, Clarke. None of this is from a pharaoh's allegedly cursed tomb, none of this was placed here by Robert Frobisher-Smythe. This is just history, plain and simple. And this pottery's got hieroglyphics."
As I turn back to the exhibit, taking out my phone to snap a picture so I can translate what it says (just for decoration probably, or maybe something about an offering to the gods), he says, "Haven't you had enough hieroglyphics for a lifetime?"
"Hey, I haven't even finished translating the symbols in Lily Henry's diary yet."
"I thought you had. I thought it was foreshadowing the whole Amy thing."
"Ammit," I correct, rolling my eyes. He hasn't once said Ammit right since it all went down. He keeps saying Amy, and I think he's just trying to mess with me. "And Joy and I did finish those. After it ended. But now she, Fabian, and I are working on the other pages stuck together—look at what we translated last night." I reach into my bag and take out my Sibuna notebook, flipping to the page with the translations from the third set of pages stuck together in the diary. "See, look."
Jerome looks over it, questioning, "Pyramid and Ra? I think it took, like, decades for the Great Pyramids to be built. Nothing's going to happen with some pyramid in the next two days."
"I know. I never said it would," I say. "But I just wanted to decipher all of these so that maybe we get some final answers. The second set of pages in the diary that were stuck together—those actually had clues as to the Cup of Ankh. Imagine, everything we needed was right under our noses the whole time—and Nina and I never even noticed there were a whole bunch of pages stuck together."
"Well, I hardly did either," he responds, "but I did find them. You should be thanking me."
"I did thank you. Wait, how did you even figure it out, anyways?"
"The pages felt thicker. But it took me a while to try and get the first two unstuck."
"Ah, well," I turn back to the pottery. "Whatever the translation says, you've got to agree that 'pyramid' and 'Ra' being in the same set of hieroglyphics Lily dreamed, especially since Ra's typically not associated with pyramids, it's interesting. But he is spoken about in pyramid texts—"
"Okay, you're starting to sound like Fabian," he points out. I frown; that's not a sentence I ever expected to hear about myself. "But I've got a suggestion. We've got two days left before we graduate so now's probably one of the only times we have left to sneak around before we leave." As he speaks, he's slowly pulling me away from the exhibit hall, around the corner by a door that I assumed was a broom closet. "So maybe..." All without taking his eyes off me, he opens the door we're by. "We sneak around one last time."
I glance inside the closet, shrugging. "All right." Before he gets a chance to react, I grab his blazer again and pull him into the closet, pausing only to gently close the door back so no one knows we're in here.
So I won't go into details, but what started off as an intense make-out session in a closet (one of the last we'll have while living in Anubis House together) ends when my phone vibrates in my pocket. His lips on my jawline, he mumbles, "Ignore it."
"Too late," I respond, more than slightly out of breath and my face hot (and probably way red), as I glance at the home screen. A confirmation screenshot of a plane ticket. "Yes! It's all coming together..."
"Did you just completely forget I was here?" Jerome questions.
I look at him, clicking the screen off so he doesn't see the text. "They're probably missing us. We should go." But as I go to open the door, the knob won't turn. As my eyebrows furrow, I try again, pulling on it. "It's locked! Did you lock us in?"
"Of course not," Jerome replies. "You're just not pulling hard enough." I set my hands on my hips, watching him try and pull the door open himself. As expected, he fails—and fails hard enough to fall back onto the ground. "Okay, so it's locked. This probably isn't good."
"Of course it's not good," I retort. "And it's locked from the outside—someone locked us in."
"Really?" He sounds skeptical as he stands. "And who would do that?"
"One of the newbies," I respond immediately, opening up the contacts on my phone. "They know we hate them, this is one of them getting revenge."
"Do you know how stupid that sounds?"
I ignore him, hitting the call button on Alfie's photo. One ring, two—and then his voicemail message. I pull the phone away from my ear. "Alfie didn't even answer! He didn't even have the decency to let it ring out. I'm annoyed."
Outside the door, a muffled voice asks, "Ashley? Is that you?"
"Mara!" Jerome shouts, pushing himself off the wall. "Listen, we're locked in, can you get us out?"
"I'll have to find someone with keys—" says Mara.
"No, don't do that," I interrupt. I really don't want to be lectured by an adult for sneaking into a closet to make-out with my boyfriend. "Hey, get Fabian. He knows how to pick locks."
"Why does Fabian know how to pick locks?"
"He's roommates with Eddie, I think that says it all."
"All right. I'll find him, just... don't kill each other."
As Mara's footsteps fade, I glance at Jerome, pushing my phone back into my pocket. "So which one of the newbies do you think is sneaky enough to steal keys and lock us in?"
Jerome shrugs. "Uh, none of them. We probably got locked in by accident, Ash."
"But the door was unlocked when we came in. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to get in. Ergo, someone locked us in deliberately."
"Or the custodian did without realizing anyone was in here."
"Not possible. You weren't exactly being quiet."
"Oh, right, says the girl who—"
Before he can finish, the door opens. Fabian's standing there with Mara behind him, holding a bobby pin in his hand, likely from her. "Really, guys?" he asks, looking at us disapprovingly. "Like you guys don't sneak off enough."
"Hey, someone locked us in," I tell him, pointing my finger as I eagerly exit the closet. "It's not like we locked ourselves in there on purpose. So, 'fess up—which one of the newbies was loitering around here ten minutes ago?"
Jerome rolls his eyes. Fabian and Mara share a confused look before the latter says, "None of them. We've all been in the main hall, looking at the exhibits."
"All right," I say slowly. "Let me amend my original question. Which one of you thought it'd be a fun idea to lock us in a closet? I know you all were in on the bet."
"Ashley," says Fabian, "we stopped trying to lock you two together in rooms when you started going out. Now we just hope we don't walk in on you doing anything untoward—like getting locked in a broom closet to make out."
"All right, that's fair."
"You're being paranoid," Jerome tells me. "It was an accident."
I bite the inside of my cheek, glancing inside the main hall. Cassie and Erin are still walking around together, Sophia's with Eddie, and who knows where Dexter is. Something's off about them, or at least one of them, but I don't know what. But maybe I am just being paranoid. "Yeah," I agree reluctantly. "An accident."
( the scene with jashley getting locked in a broom closet was inspired by a comment quotev dot com user bethisabear left! loved the idea so much i decided to put it in here )