The Mystery of the Third Lucretia by Susan Runholt Page B

East Enders, with Celia shaking her head the whole time.
    â€œWith that phrase and a black leather jacket, you’ll pass for a Londoner anytime,” Robert said. “Specially if you hang a ring through your eyebrow.”
    As it turned out, two days later, one of us did just that.

13
    Rags, Treasures, and the Women’s Loo at the National Gallery
    The same kind of thing that had happened at the restaurant happened again the next morning. We’d thought being in the British Museum with Mom would be a real bummer, and we just wanted to get it over with. But it turned out to be pretty good.
    The big thing was that we were dressed in some of the new clothes Camellia had bought. My outfit was the black skirt and the crinkly white blouse with the big cuffs. Having a new outfit always makes me feel special.
    Even Lucas seemed to like wearing her green polka-dot dress. A person couldn’t help noticing again that it was a perfect color for her. And because she knew she looked good in it, she looked even better, if you know what I mean.
    We were dressed up because we were going to have our pictures taken for the magazine. That meant we also had to get all made up by Mom, and that was also cool. Mom said if she’d thought about having us in the pictures ahead of time, she would have gotten a professional makeup artist, and that would have really been fun, but since they weren’t going to be close-up shots, it didn’t have to be a perfect job. After Mom was finished with us, we were wearing more makeup than either of us had ever worn in our lives. We even had on eyebrow pencil and lip liner. We both looked very grown-up and sophisticated, or at least I thought so.
    The museum itself was another reason why we ended up having a good morning. Of all the museums I’ve seen so far, the British Museum is my favorite. Lucas loves it, too. They have Viking stuff, ancient jewelry from almost everywhere you can think of, probably the best collection of coins in the whole world, and room after room of things British explorers brought back from Egypt. And that’s only about one-millionth of what they have.
    That morning it was especially exciting because we were there before opening time and had it all to ourselves.
    We had to pose in the big room with the Parthenon Sculptures, which are beautiful statues and wall carvings of gods and goddesses that some English guy took away from the ruins of a famous temple in Athens, Greece. Mom especially wanted to write a story about it because I guess the Greeks want all the statues back, and there’s a big fight about it.
    It’s funny how being almost alone in that room made me feel. When I’d been crowded in there with enough tourists to about populate the entire state of Ohio, the statues and carvings were just interesting things to look at for a while before we went into another room to look at a few more things.
    But now that there were way more gods and goddesses than there were people, the statues seemed different. All of a sudden I realized they’d been around for centuries and centuries, and they’d still be there after I died, and after my children and grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren died. They’re permanent, and we’re all only temporary. It was a weird feeling, but it made me glad I’d decided to be an archeologist when I grow up. Uncle Geoff says that’s the kind of feeling he gets when he finds something old, and that’s what archeology is all about.
    Anyway, we posed for a while, which was mostly boring and made us feel silly, especially when ten o’clock came and tourists started pouring into the room. Then we went through the museum with just Mom and the photographer and pointed out our other favorite things. Every place we went, we had to say why we liked what we were showing them, and Mom recorded what we said and took notes to use when she wrote the article.
    Then it was lunchtime. And