True Love, the Sphinx, and Other Unsolvable Riddles

by Tyne O'Connell

  Still, I can’t deny that sneaking out under the cloak of darkness to see my girl appealed to the poet in me—or was it the ancient romance of my Egyptian soul?

  I’d shared my plan with Sam that afternoon.

  While we’d been moored in Kom Ombo earlier in the evening, I made a deal with a local fisherman named Siad who agreed to ferry me and Sam from our cabin over to the girls’ rooms on the other side of the boat.

  Mohammed had agreed to position himself at a local café to keep an eye out for Nigel. “Don’t you worry, I will take care of him!” he’d assured me.

  Siad picked Sam and me up at the prearranged time. We climbed out the window, into the felucca. So far our plan was going smoothly. “This is like James Bond stuff, man!” Sam joked. But I was crossing my fingers because when it came down to it, there were too many things that could go wrong if we messed up.

  The girls’ room was on the bank side of the Nile, so Siad helped us tie ropes around our waists and lowered from the bank to the deck where their cabin was.

  I was the first to scuttle down the bank but Siad’s grip wasn’t exactly what you’d call professional, and instead of landing Bond-style at the girls’ window, I was dunked headfirst into the Nile. By the time Siad managed to haul me level to the girls’ window, I had swallowed a few gallons of Nile water. “No problem, my friend. This is good luck for you,” Siad assured me. “Drinking the Nile means you will always return.”

  “Yeah, for his funeral,” Sam told him.

  And then it got worse. Instead of finding the window open as I’d requested in my text message, the window was firmly shut and the girls were curled up in bed watching television. This left me, face pressed against their windowpane, feeling like a dead insect on a windshield. I banged on the glass.

  Eventually I got their attention. “Hello,” Octavia said, opening the window. “What on earth are you doing here of all places? You look like a drowned rat.”

  “We told you to open the window at nine,” I reminded her.

  “Oh. We thought it was like a cryptic spy-thriller thing.”

  “What?”

  “You know, the eagle flies at dawn, that sort of thing,” she explained as she mimed speaking into an earpiece.

  “So, can I come in?” I asked, plucking something soggy and lumpen—I didn’t even want to imagine what—out of my ear. Rosie pulled me into the room.

  After Sam made his slightly drier journey down to the cabin, I gave Mohammed the all-clear and tied a bundle of notes to the rope for Siad. I figured I’d probably set him and his family up for life. And it was worth it to be with Rosie.

  Even though we could only glimpse the stars and we had to share the room with Sam and Octavia, that night definitely goes down as one of the most romantic of my life. If anything, Sam and Octavia being there enhanced, things. Somehow, the bizarre confusion of our getting together made it all the more magical.

  With Rosie tucked under my arm. I had never felt more in love or more Egyptian. I even told her I loved her in Arabic, and she repeated it back to me. Her British accent made it all the more adorable because like English, every Arab-speaking country has its own accent.

  We stayed up all night, talking and kissing and reminiscing. None of us spoke about how tomorrow we’d be flying home, or even whether we’d see each other again. Around dawn, we fell asleep for an hour before the call for breakfast. That was when the agony of parting really hit us.

  The farewells on the boat were formal. The staff all lined up to shake our hands.

  Mohammed came up to me. “Salah, you must always remember, it is noble to speak your heart, but it is not always necessary to speak your mind.”

  We kissed cheeks and hugged. I know it was kind of pathetic but Mohammed had pretty much summed up how I felt about life. People say a lot of things they really don’t need to. All the crazy stuff that had gone down between all of us on that cruise was pretty much a case of not saying what was in our hearts. Instead we’d played too many crazy head games.

  • • •

  We were all traveling together to the airport, but for a change hardly anyone spoke.

  Carol had bought Nigel a gold ankh from the souvenir shop on the boat and he’d undone several buttons to show it off, but not even that could make us laugh. A dark mood had descended on all of us.

  Our flight left later so we were in line with the girls when Nigel got all worked up about being seated at the back of the plane. Apparently he and Mr. Bell had paid for first class. Mr. Bell, who had no problem with his seat just said, “Bad luck, old man.”

  Nigel insisted he wasn’t going to take it lying down! His tantrum attracted a group of police.

  I could have stepped in and had a word with the police but the way I looked at it, Nigel kind of had it coming. So instead I took the opportunity to kiss Rosie one last time and pretty much everyone did the same.

  I found it interesting that Carol pretended to be immersed in a search for her passport as he was led away, yelling about “Bloody Egyptians!”

  “You can do better,” I whispered to her as the police led Nigel away, their automatic weapons aimed squarely at his shorty shorts. But I think at that stage, she knew that already.

  • • •

  As we stowed our trays for takeoff, I thought back to when we’d arrived and my fears that my guys wouldn’t get Egypt. Sam turned to me, slapped me on the back, and said, “Magic country,” and I felt almost choked because I knew then that Sam totally got Egypt, which meant in a nutshell, he got me.

  All the guys said pretty much the same thing. They totally got the crazy magic of Egypt. So I guess what I’m saying is, this hadn’t been just another school trip, all about hot foreign girls and partying.

  Not that there wasn’t plenty of that too.

  Chapter 24

  Rosie

  Coda: A passage of more or less independent character introduced after the completion of the essential parts of a movement, so as to form a more definite and satisfactory conclusion. Oxford English Dictionary

  When we arrived back at school the next day, there was a package with a card and some items from the Valley of the Kings and Queens waiting for Octavia from Sam. On the card was the love poem to Nefertari that Mohammed had recited in Abu Simbel.

  Nigel returned to school a week later. Only there was no more talk about us calling him Nigel, anymore—he was back to being Mr. Menzies with us again. But that didn’t matter because we were all calling him Shorty Shorts behind his back anyway. It was business as usual in geogers that first day. He handed out the work sheets we’d have to do about our trip.

  “Right, girls! The fun and games are behind us now. It’s down to real work. Exams are coming up and this trip will be an important part of your marks. I’ll expect these work sheets back by the end of the week,” he informed us.

  At the top of the sheet was the riddle of the Sphinx. Only not the one Sam had given Octavia.

  What walks on four legs in the morning, two in

  the afternoon, and three in the evening?

  We all asked what it meant.

  “Think girls, think! Humankind,” he said with a sigh after we threw out a few useless suggestions. “Think about it. A child crawls, an adult walks, and a senior walks with the aid of a stick. I thought it rather pertinent for all of us after our journey to the land of the pharaohs. We all grow and change with experience. I think it is true that all of us were changed immeasurably by our experiences in Egypt.”

  “Well, I much preferred Sam’s riddle,” Octavia whispered, turning over her sphinx to reveal his riddle and the answer, which he had scratched into the base.

  Q: What creature has two hearts?

  A: Octavia, for she has stolen mine away.

  I smiled even though I was a bit jealous (some things never change). I hadn’t heard from Salah since we parted at the airport.

  But wishes do come true because a postcard from Salah arrived a few days later. It was a postcard of Abu Si
mbel he’d bought in Egypt. After that, I received one every week, each one depicting one of the monuments we’d visited on our journey of riddles and misunderstandings. It is three months now and we are still e-mailing, texting, and calling. He’s coming to London in the summer with his father to have his suits made.

  Artimis and Perdie have other boyfriends now, but Octavia has kept up communication with Sam and she always has the sphinx he gave her on her desk at school.

  Out of all of us she’s been changed by Egypt the most. I mean, she’s still Octavia and madly over the top, but she’s dropped a lot of her crazy act. Like the Inner London thing—thank goodness.

  Or like the day we got home from Egypt, when she told me that her crumbling ruin of a house is literally falling apart and that her family is penniless.

  I said, “Who cares? You are still titled and fabulous and at least you don’t have a materialistic hypocrite for a father and a house full of horrible brothers who tease you all the time.”

  “True! Papa is a darling,” Octavia said. “Actually, Sam said pretty much the same thing—not about brothers and materialistic hypocrites but the who cares part. So, do you want to come and help me give the tours this summer?”

  I think I might. They have an “awesome” harpsichord I can play, and Octavia thinks the tour groups will love my atmospheric music. I think I’ll enjoy the audience. Salah has totally ruined computer composing for me—those programs just don’t do justice to the music in my head the way an audience can. It’s strange, but even though he’s so far away, every thought I have is filtered through him now. And while I can’t see the stars in the London night sky, I still look up and think of him. Once really, really late at night, he sent me a text.

  I thought I saw Osiris in the sky but it was just a bunch of planes circling overhead. It reminded me of you, S x

  Acknowledgments

  Egypt rocks in every way. The people, the history, and the customs all combined to work their magic on me so much so that I lived there for almost three years. Going back to research this book made me wonder what on earth possessed me to leave. Nothing beats sailing down the Nile for romance, but doing it with a bestie—my magnificent friend Katia Sergeeva—turned it into a party. Every day on Alexander the Great was like being the birthday girl. Our Egyptologist, Mohammed, was a scholar and a gentleman.

  Inspiration is all well and good, but every author dreams of the vision and talent of editors like Melanie Cecka and Stacy Cantor at Bloomsbury USA. Special thanks also to Laura Dail of the Laura Dail Literary Agency.

  As ever, shout-outs go to my family and friends but especially to my daughter, Cordelia, and son, Zad, for enduring, with grace, the horrendous existence of being children of an author.

  Also by Tyne O’Connell

  The Calypso Chronicles:

  Pulling Princes

  Stealing Princes

  Dueling Princes

  Dumping Princes

  Copyright © 2007 by Tyne O’Connell

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  First published in the United States of America in November 2007

  by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers

  Electronic edition published in October 2012

  www.bloomsburyteens.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Connell, Tyne.

  True love, the sphinx, and other unsolvable riddles: a comedy in four voices /

  by Tyne O’Connell. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While on a class trip in Egypt, two teenaged best friends from an American private boys’ school and two teenaged best friends from a British private girls’ school meet each other, and must endure many misunderstandings on their path to true love.

  [1. School field trips—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction.

  4. Egypt—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.O2168Tr2007 [Fic]—dc22 2007002596

  First U.S. Edition 2007

  ISBN: 978-1-61963-071-0 (e-book)