Ry slips his hand into mine and squeezes.
I squeeze back.
A throat clears behind us and I whip around to see Michelle. She’s staring at the room with a grin on her face, but a tightness around her brown eyes warns me that there’s something wrong.
“What?” It’s not the room. It can’t be the room. Amun-Re, the room is perfect. She has to think the room is perfect. We pulled it all off, in record time, and it looks amazing. She can’t hate it. She can’t.
“We have a problem,” she croaks. Her voice is tortured; it sounds like sandpaper scraping along her vocal cords. “I can’t do the tour for the guests.”
Tyler holds her hands up in the air like someone has a gun on her. “I can’t! I haven’t practiced anything! Oh, gosh, I’ll end up babbling and saying something completely inappropriate and forgetting everything I ever knew about ancient Egypt. I’m forgetting it all even thinking about doing it. I’ll quit right now before I’ll ad-lib a tour.”
Ry’s hand is still in mine, and something about the skin contact and the completely irrational and inexplicable electric current it’s sending buzzing through my body makes me feel buoyant and invincible. I was supposed to drift on the edges tonight, but it’s still my night, and I’ll own it.
“I can do it.”
A little over an hour later, and the bravado I felt volunteering has collapsed and sits sour and flopping like a dying fish in my stomach. I’m in the hall corner outside of the still-closed room, leaning against the wall, looking at all the people. There are so many people. Why are they here? They shouldn’t be here. This is going to be a disaster. Why do I even need to talk? Surely the room speaks for itself.
I wish Michelle hadn’t told all the bartenders that Ry, Tyler, and I were too young for drinks. I hate wine, but anything sounds like a good idea right now.
“Hey,” Ry says, and I startle, unaware he’d made his way through the crowds to stand next to me. “Nervous?”
“No,” I say, but it comes out a whisper.
“You’ll be brilliant. I know it. I’ve got a present for you.”
I raise an eyebrow, glad to have something to focus on other than my impending embarrassment. “Oh?”
“I didn’t have time to wrap it, but . . .” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gold cuff bracelet, open on a nearly invisible hinge. It’s been etched with a design—scarab beetles, pushing the sun around the edges—and an oval jade stone in the center has raised gold around it to make it into the body of a scarab. He takes my hand and slips it over my wrist, closing it with a tiny snap. It fits like it was made for me.
“Scarabs,” I say, unable to take my eyes off it.
“Yeah, I know they’re bugs and that’s weird, but I thought because of what they symbolize—”
“Hope and rebirth.” I trace my finger along the smooth, cool jade, then look up into his eyes. “It’s perfect.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
His smile is sunshine, and he reaches up and traces his fingers along my green stripe. “Plus it goes with your hair.”
“You thought of everything.”
“You’re pretty much everything I’ve thought of for a while now.”
My heart flutters and I have no idea how to respond to that, or to this gift. That same giddy current has resumed its path of havoc through my veins. “Orion, I—”
Michelle taps a glass and croaks that the room will open now with a special tour from the designer and daughter of the collectors. She gives a slightly painful preamble about ancient Egypt and its invaluable place in history, and the Egyptians’ science and culture. And then she stops and I realize it’s my turn.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I go up on my tiptoes and kiss Ry’s cheek, then dart past him so I can’t see his reaction.
I stand in front of the still-closed doors. “We can learn the most about a culture by studying what was important to them. And in the world of ancient Egypt, they worshipped life and death in equal parts. Isis and Osiris, the focal points of our exhibit, represented those opposite”—I pause, realizing I mean what I’m about to say—“but equally beautiful and necessary parts of the human existence.” I open the doors and walk in.
Everyone follows, crowding the doorway, the silence either awed or bored. I really, really hope it’s awe. Standing in front of the first item, a remarkably well-preserved sculpture of my mother with the Pharaoh Thutmose II as a baby on her lap, I say, “I give you Isis, Mother of the Gods, Light Giver of Heaven, Mistress of the House of Life, Lady of the Words of Power. Goddess of Motherhood, Magic, and Fertility. First daughter of the Earth and Sky. Protector of beginnings.” I pause, then smile. “Perhaps the greatest evidence of Isis’s magic, however, was her breasts’ ability to remain so round and perky after nursing hundreds of pharaohs.”
There’s a pause, then Scott, standing in the front row, bursts out in raucous laughter, which quickly spreads through the room, and I know I have them. Thank you, maternal nudity. Who knew you’d save me? Sirus, near the back with Deena, rolls his eyes at me with a grin.
I move to the next exhibit, a statue of my father, with the atef crown and his crook and staff, sitting in his throne. It gives me an odd pang of homesickness. “Isis isn’t complete without her husband and counterpart, Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, Lord of the Dead, Lord of Silence, Lord of Love. Osiris was the god of the underworld and afterlife, but unlike many cultures’ underworld deities who lorded over damned and trapped spirits, Osiris was also celebrated as the god of reincarnation. His domain was one that was carefully planned for and optimistically anticipated.”