Knowing Dimple spoke from experience put a different spin on the whole thing. Pinky felt her defenses lowering just a bit. “It’s really hard. I… He just gets under my skin.”
Dimple chuckled. “Yeah. I remember when that was Rishi and me.” She paused. “Samir seems like a good guy, though. Just get through this part with him, and then you don’t have to ever hang out with him again if you don’t want to, right?”
Pinky thought about it. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Treating Samir badly—even accidentally—hadn’t made her feel good about herself. If he left the escape room because of her, Pinky knew her conscience would eat her alive. She glanced at Samir and sighed. “I’ll apologize. This was all basically my fault.”
“Good.” Dimple smiled a little. “Also, can I give you another piece of advice you’re probably going to be irritated with me for giving?”
Pinky raised her eyebrows. “Okay.”
“Don’t close yourself off to guys with whom you think you have nothing in common. Sometimes those make the greatest love stories.” She looked at Rishi again, and this time he caught her eye and winked. Patting Pinky on the shoulder, Dimple began to walk toward him.
Pinky nodded to herself, wiped her slightly damp palms on her jeans, and walked toward Samir. The others moved away a bit, to give them room. “Hey.”
He looked at her, his brown eyes guarded. “Hey.”
Pinky looked down at her feet, gathering her thoughts, and then back up at him. “I’m, ah, really sorry. About what I said earlier, about you being messed up. I actually wasn’t trying to say anything deeper about you or what happened last spring or anything. I don’t know what got into me, but it was uncalled for, and I’m… I’m sorry. Please stay and finish the escape room. I’d like it if we could keep working together.” She held out a hand. Although Rishi, Dimple, Ashish, and Sweetie weren’t pointedly looking at them, she could feel the intermittent weight of their gazes land on her and Samir anyway.
After a pause, Samir took her hand briefly. Her heart leaped and thudded and pounded at the physical contact, but Pinky forced herself not to pull away before he did. “Okay,” he said, finally, without smiling. “I don’t want to disrupt the group anyway. And thanks for the apology.”
Pinky nodded. “Sure.” They turned to face the others, and Pinky shrugged. “Okay, guys. We’re gonna get back to solving the puzzle.”
Ashish clapped. “Good. We have fourteen minutes left.” And the others melted away to their own areas.
A little awkwardly, Samir and Pinky went back to looking at the stuff on the shelves. There was a pot shaped like one of those old-timey creepy gray statues without eyeballs, one of a sailor or the captain of a ship. There was fake grass growing out of the top of the captain’s head like hair. But something about the grass looked weird, as if it had just been placed lightly on top. Pinky reached out to grab the pot at the same time as Samir; his big hand closed around hers.
She jerked her hand back as if he’d pinched her, and he gave her a weird look. God, she seriously needed to calm down before he decided to leave again. “You look at it,” she said, her mouth like dry sand.
He gave her a long look but didn’t say anything. Then he reached for the pot again and pulled on the fake grass “hair.” It came off easily. He looked at her, his eyes bright. “Hey, there’s something in here.” Setting the pot back on a shelf, Samir reached in with two fingers and pulled out a long strip of paper, on which was a handwritten clue. He handed it to her, polite as always. “Would you like to read it?”
Pinky took it without looking at him. “Um, yeah. Sure.” She cleared her throat. “ ‘Armand, there are few oceanic voyages as romantic as the one these two take. Though one of them is a ghost while the other remains mortal, thus keeping them apart forever, I know yours and mine won’t suffer the same fate. We shall use our door to the future more wisely. Love forever, Guinevere.’ ”
“That’s interesting,” Sweetie said.
Pinky and Samir turned to see that she, Ashish, Dimple, and Rishi had all migrated over to their area of the room once again. “Are you guys done?” Pinky asked, glancing at the clock.
“Yeah,” Dimple said, a little apologetically. “We’ve been done. So we thought we’d come over to see if you guys could use any help.”
“Yep, we’ve been done too! So I guess you guys are the losers.” Ashish laughed uproariously.
Pinky glared at Ashish until his laughter petered out. He wasn’t the best at reading the room. “We just found a clue. Now, if you’ll please shut up, we can solve it.”
“Well, we solved our clue, but we don’t know what to do with the answer.” Dimple frowned and adjusted her glasses.
“Oceanic voyages,” Samir muttered, turning back to his and Pinky’s clue. “One ghost, one mortal…”
“Door to the future.” Pinky caught Samir’s eye as she said the words.
“No idea,” Rishi said to them. “None of that means any—”
“Garrett and Tiva!” Samir and Pinky shouted together as the epiphany hit them like a tsunami. “From the webcomic Tear Me Asunder!”
They stopped shouting and stared at each other. Pinky felt her cheeks grow hot. “You know Tear Me Asunder?”
“Yeah.” Samir looked equally shocked. “I was with them from the beginning to the end. You were one of their thirty-three followers?”
“Wow.” Rishi looked impressed. “I’m the king of obscure webcomics, and I don’t even know that one.”
Ashish began laughing again, looking from Pinky to Samir as if he were having the best time. “It’s like one mind, Pin-mir!”
Pinky and Samir both glared at him this time, and he held his hands up in surrender.
Pinky turned her attention to the other things on the shelves, clearing her throat briskly. She didn’t want to think about what it meant that Samir was also a Tear Me Asunder fan. A fan of one of the greatest webcomics of all time, a webcomic that had inspired her love of rebellion and protest, thanks to the main character Tiva. “So what do we do with that?”
“None of these other, ah, things on the shelves seem like they’ll lead to more clues,” Samir said after studying the trinkets for a few moments. “So weird.”
“Ours was like that too,” Dimple said again. “We have the answer—Emily Brontë—but nowhere to put it.”
“And we have this”—Sweetie held up a little plastic piece—“but no idea what to do with it. Ooh. Maybe our clues work together somehow?”
Rishi was nodding. “Yeah, that’s what I was just thinking. Maybe it’s time to put these things together.” He glanced at his watch. “We have ten minutes left in here.”
Samir snapped his fingers. “The padlock.” He rushed over to the padlocked chest, the others following behind him. “I thought there was something weird about it.” He knelt, looking at the lock closely, then up at the group. “There’s no keyhole.”
Pinky knelt beside him and tugged on it. It was firmly locked. “Wait, what’s this?” Her fingers tripped over a minuscule bump on the side of the lock. When she pressed it, the face of the lock sprang open to reveal an electronic touch-screen keypad inside. The keypad had six empty squares waiting to be filled. “So the code can’t be Garrett, Tiva, or Tear Me Asunder,” Pinky mused.