"Nobody will have to know, just hit me with a text."- Jason Derülo

Whitney hurried into homeroom and jumped into the seat beside Maggie. "Hey, is anyone sitting here?" she chirped, setting her book bag on the floor.

"You are," replied Maggie, yawning and sitting up.

"I'm so excited to be back at Smithson," she said, pulling a binder out of her backpack and setting it on her desk. Maggie stared at her. "What?"

"How are you so…" she trailed off, searching for the right word.

"Energetic?" supplied Whitney.

"Awake," said Maggie. "I've had three cups of coffee already this morning and I can't keep my head off the desk."

"Oh," said Whitney, slipping a pencil case out of her bag and unzipping it. "Jet lag. This afternoon I'll be crashing."

"Does Henry ever get jet lag?" Maggie wondered aloud, cracking her knuckles.

"I think he's gotten used to it," said Whitney. She was wearing a new sweater she'd bought just before leaving Russia with Henry. When she decided to move back to DC, she'd realized that none of her new Georgia clothes would be warm enough.

"Speaking of Henry," began Maggie, "I heard that you two are kind of a thing." Whitney blushed.

"Yeah, a little bit," she sang. Maggie opened her mouth to say something else, but just then Professor Bowers stalked in.

"Quiet!" he yelled to the silent class. He slumped into his desk and began to call roll. All through class, Maggie wrestled with the temptation to write a note to Whitney. She was desperate for information- how had this happened? What was it? Normally she wasn't interested in gossip of any kind, but Henry was her best friend. Really, she and Whitney had also been good friends before Whitney had moved. Maggie was a little angry at him, too, for being so unpredictable. It threw her off. Nobody, especially her, had ever expected someone like Henry Griffin to start dating. It was as unlikely as…

She frowned. It was as unlikely as the idea of her and Jasper dating. Something made her feel like Henry was close to finding out about them.

o-o-o-o-o

That afternoon, Jasper was stretched out on the couch, watching Tower Prep, when Henry came in from driving Whitney home. "Hey, Jasper," he said. "I accidentally took your phone instead of mine this morning, and Maggie sent you an e-tweety text."

Jasper straightened up, worried. "Oh?" he said, pretending to sound uninterested. He was still staring at the television screen, but not really absorbing anything.

"Yeah," continued Henry, shedding his jacket and dropping it in front of the door instead of hanging it in the closet, like Jasper had been pestering him to do since he'd moved in. "It says, 'Thanks for the love poem, sweetie'." Henry glanced up at him, raising his eyebrows. "Sweetie?"

Jasper bit his lip, thinking. He saw two options: lying and escaping out the window. Because he knew that Henry was faster than him and would catch him before he'd unlatched the window pane, he decided to come up with what was hopefully a convincing story. "It's a typo," he said. "She meant 'sweaty.' That's what she calls me when she sees me after Gym."

"Then what did she mean by 'love poem'?" asked Henry. He looked suspicious, but not certain. Jasper guessed that he knew something was going on, but he hadn't yet grasped what that something was.

"In English class we were supposed to be analyzing one of Shakespeare's sonnets," he lied quickly. "But she left hers at home, so I made her a copy."

"What about this little heart?" he persisted, holding out the phone towards Jasper so he could see a red cartoon heart at the end of the text. Stupid emoticons.

"That's her way of reminding me that we have Biology homework tonight on the cardio-vascular system," he said, crossing his fingers behind his back both for luck that Henry would believe him and because he wasn't being truthful. Henry shrugged.

"Okay," he said, sitting beside him on the couch. "Hey, guess what?"

Praying that they'd avoided the secret Maggie-Jasper topic, he replied, "What?"

"I figured out what was in that box in the DOUM shed." He was excited, eager to be exploring and discovering again. He was back in his element- something about which Jasper was both happy and terrified.

"I know, it's a mummy," said Jasper. "Maggie and I opened the box while you and Whitney were making out in the DOUM rooms."

"We were not 'making out'," said Henry defensively. "And yeah, it's a mummy, but listen. I was talking to Garko today, and apparently, that mummy was found in the ground below the tomb of the great pharaoh Tutankhamun." Jasper stared at him.

"You mean King Tut?" he clarified. Henry nodded.

"Apparently, someone was digging around there and they found this big sarcophagus embedded in the ground," continued Henry excitedly.

"That's amazing," said Jasper tonelessly, getting worried. "Listen, Hen, don't get sucked into this one. Please?" Henry wasn't listening. He appeared to be plotting.

"Maybe there's some account of an official higher up than King Tut in the museum's archives," he said, the feverish glint that Maggie and Jasper feared so much creeping into his eyes.

"'I'm going to the DOUM rooms,'" Jasper mimicked under his breath, anticipating his cousin's next words.

"I'm going to the DOUM rooms," said Henry, not having heard him, standing up and grabbing his jacket from the floor. "You coming?"

"Nah, I think I'm just gonna chill," he said, sliding his cell phone closer to him with what he hoped was a guiltless expression.

"'Kay," said Henry, stepping out the door. "See you later."