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Monday he had almost been friendly. Now I was some sort of pariah he couldn’t be seen talking to—never mind helping. Several rows back, Elaine watched our interaction with a smug look on her face.
    In class, we were reading Act 1 Scene 2 of Hamlet and Michael was asked to read the lead part. With his slight accent, the lines rolled off his tongue naturally. He was the perfect Hamlet. Judging from the faces of all the girls in class—even Heather’s—I wasn’t the only one affected by the sound of his voice. Hamlet’s grief-stricken first soliloquy— O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt —blazed through the room, melting a few of us in its wake. As he breathed new life into my favorite Shakespearean character, I felt like he was reading the words right to me.
    The rest of the week, the teachers doubled everyone’s homework. I was assigned a six-page Gov/Econ report, pages and pages of math problems, and a quiz for Latin. Elaine had a permanent smirk, no doubt pleased by how much her article had humiliated me. Kids I barely knew whispered in the halls and gave each other looks as I walked by. Some of them asked me if the story in the Gazette was true, and a few junior girls asked me about being carried by Michael Fontaine—as if I needed reminding!
    In class, Michael kept to himself. By the end of the week, it was like the incident in the forest had never happened. I wanted to ask him if he’d been at the hospital that Saturday, but he was even less approachable than usual. I’d hoped to see him at lunch or catch him alone in the halls, but outside of class he practically disappeared.
    ***
    On the weekend, my brother Bill came up for a short visit. Mom took Saturday off and the three of us went sightseeing around the waterfront and Pike Place Market. My ankle was almost healed, so I could walk normally again. We even had a mini heat wave.
    Sunday afternoon, Bill took me to the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History, so we could see an exhibit on ancient Egypt. He and I had been talking about it all summer and he’d promised to go with me. Though I’d first heard of ancient civilizations in grade school, Bill got me a book on Mesopotamia for my fourteenth birthday. I’d thought it was a joke at first, because it had mia —my name—in it. But since then, I’d been fascinated by the prehistoric civilizations, especially around the Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent.
    The entrance to the exhibit was designed to resemble the temple at Luxor, with its high columns and hieroglyph-inscribed stone. If I squinted, I could pretend I was actually there. The main room opened up to be much larger than I expected, big enough to accommodate the crowd. The walls surrounding the glass cases were painted faux sandstone, and each case was labeled with the era it came from—Pre-Dynastic and Early Dynastic, and the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. Inside the glass cases were artifacts ranging from bronze and iron weapons to jewelry, hand mirrors, and cosmetics cases. On one side of the exhibit were replicas of paintings from inside a step-shaped pyramid; on the other side were mummies, mummy cases, and tombs. Bill and I saw a few items together, some scarabs and clay pots, but when I took my time reading everything, soaking it all in, Bill wandered off to look at things on his own.
    I was inside a full-sized stone replica of the tomb of Kitines, examining an ornately painted mummy case, when Bill sneaked up behind me and grabbed my shoulders.
    “Ahh!” I shrieked and stumbled backward into him.
    Laughing, he caught me. “Gotcha.”
    “Jerk!”
    I punched his arm but he dodged it, heading toward the tomb’s exit. “You gotta admit this stuff is pretty creepy.”
    “It’s not. It’s cool how advanced they were.”
    Outside the tomb was a case of mummified animals that had served as pets in ancient times, mostly cats, but there was also a hawk and a tiny crocodile.
    “Still want to be an