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“Yes. Thank you for breaking my fall. You didn’t have to do that.” I did not want to be jealous, and I sure didn’t want him to know I was jealous. How could I be jealous of someone who may have once marked him with her lipstick? What was wrong with me?
“I’ve always got your back, Sadie. And your front.”
His eyes lit up when I laughed at his stupid joke, and we fell in step, side by side, taking lefts and rights at random until we reached the next obstacle the maze wanted to throw at us. We were stopped by a door requiring a four-digit passcode to open. On the wall was our clue.
Texting in the 1990s meant using a 10-digit keypad.
Nokia released the first phone that could text in 1993. Remember it?
Go old school and dial MAZE to get out.
“Well, that’s not too bad.” Denver pulled out his phone. “Okay, maze is 6293.”
I put in the combination and gave the handle a tug, but it didn’t open. “Maybe it’s 1993?” I put that in. And 1990. Those didn’t work either. I stepped aside so Denver could try the same numbers again, not even mad that he didn’t believe me. I would have done the same thing.
Denver stared at it in frustration. “Maybe this door isn’t meant to open.”
“Like we went the wrong way, and this is how we find out? I guess that’s possible.”
We retraced out steps and took a right where we’d taken a left and kept going. Taking this route, we had to crawl through a tunnel and slide down a set of desks angled together, and then we came to a locked door just like the one before, but with a different clue on the wall.
The pin tumbler lock originates to 2000 BC in Egypt. However, they may have adopted the technology from the Mesopotamians. The modern pin tumbler lock we know today, which opens with a serrated-edged key was invented by Linus Yale in 1848. Don’t get LOCKed out.
Denver sighed. “I hate these. I can’t tell if they’re trying to be clever or super obvious.” I watched while he put in 5625 for LOCK, and when that didn’t work, 2000 and 1848. None of the codes unlocked the door.
I stared at the clue on the wall next to us. It was just a laminated sign attached with Velcro, and when I gave it a good tug, it came right off, giving legs to a theory I wanted to test. Because if there was one thing I knew, it was that sometimes people were jerks and they did rude things for dumb reasons. “Try maze on this one.” I checked my phone. “6293.”
Denver put in the numbers and tugged on the handle. It opened. Of course it did. Because people were sign switching.
I stuck the sign back on the wall, only upside down, so no one would take it seriously.
Denver pulled his pager out of his pocket and hit the button. “So, I guess we wait here for the museum people so they can fix everything.”
“I guess.”
Our eyes met. And I knew exactly what Denver was thinking. He wanted to finish, and so did I. They had cameras. They’d find us eventually.
The door we’d opened made a beeping noise and slowly started to close. It was on a timer so the next group to come across it would face a locked door. We could have waited and put in the code again, but Denver grabbed my hand, and we squeezed through at the last second like real adventurers.
Continuing on, we passed a narrow draw bridge, followed by a section where mannequins popped out of actual cubicles and scared us. Denver’s scream after the first one was something I’d cherish forever. We wound our way through what seemed like a dozen turns, and then Denver stopped short. “I think I hear Colton and Ainsley. Listen.”
Bits and pieces of excited conversation had been the constant background noise to our travels, but just when I was about to tell him I couldn’t hear them, I picked out their voices.
“Don’t drop me!”
“I’ve got you, just tell me what you see up there.”
Ainsley groaned like she was lifting weights and then we saw her appear over the top of a cubicle about two rows ahead, and she was wobbling. Or maybe the wall was. It didn’t matter. Both options were bad.
“Oh, no.” I took off in a sprint, not the least surprised when Denver passed me up. We needed to get there before the museum people did. I picked up my speed and rounded the next corner, narrowly missed running face-first into a wall and kept going, catching up to Denver at the last second as we reached them at a dead end.
Colton was leaning against the wall Ainsley was perched on top of, and they were still arguing.
“What do you see?” Colton asked, shaking her foot that was dangling down on our side.
“I don’t see anything. This can’t be the way out of the maze.”
“It’s not. Get down,” Denver reached up for Ainsley. “Colton, stop leaning on this wall. It’s not stable.”
