Shay Lark and the Pyramid of Cholula

The door to Room 203 flew open with a bang.

“Dad! Dad!” Shay Lark’s voice echoed through the lecture hall, her icy blue eyes wild with excitement. She burst in from the back door, backpack flailing off her shoulder, a tattered book clutched against her chest. “You won’t believe what I found!”

She made it three steps before the silence hit her.

Dozens of faces stared back at the teen. Graduate students sat there, notebooks open and laptops glowing. And at the front of the room, her father stood frozen mid-gesture at the whiteboard, dry-erase marker still raised, wearing an expression she knew all too well.

Crap.

She’d just been hunched over a computer in her high school library, heart pounding as article after article confirmed what she’d suspected. She’d found something.

Something real. Something that couldn’t wait.

Apparently, it could have waited another ten minutes.

“Shaylyn Lily Lark!” Professor Thomas Lark’s voice boomed across the lecture hall, each name drawn out for fatherly effect. A few students snickered at the full name as they’d heard it before. “What have I told you about these theatrics, and about crashing my class?”

Shay’s face burned. She clutched the book tighter, sticky notes bristling from its pages like colorful quills. “Not to do it. Again. But…”

“And what is your punishment?” Her father cut her off as he crossed his arms, lofting a warning look at any student who dared to laugh.

She sighed. “I have to recite the entire Greek alphabet backwards. You’re really going to make me do that now? But…”

“You may begin at your leisure.”

Snickering now spread throughout the class as the humiliation began. A few students even pulled out their phones to record her punishment.

As if this could get any worse.

She’d practiced this at home, her father’s favorite punishment. She took a breath and rattled off the letters, each one a careful step on a tightrope, knowing a single slip meant starting over.

“Omega, psi, chi, phi, upsilon, tau…” Interrupted.

The door behind her slammed open.

“I told you to slow down!” Cassie Grimes stumbled into the lecture hall, wheezing, her backpack half-unzipped and trailing a pencil. “I can’t run as fast as…”

She froze.

Never mind. It did.