Room Service

by Maren Stoffels

  I touch the wound on my head. This is all one big nightmare.

  “So what’s his name?”

  Isolde looks at me. “Did he hold your braid too when you kissed?”

  None of this makes sense. “What?”

  “The alias,” says Isolde. “Claus. Shuffle those letters.”

  Shuffle the letters? What’s she talking about?

  “Lucas,” comes a voice from the floor. Fender is still staring straight ahead. “If you rearrange Claus, you get Lucas.”

  Claus and Lucas are the same person.

  Claus was an anagram for the biggest secret she was carrying around. There was no way she could use Lucas’s real name, so he became Claus.

  She made Lucas into a character, as she often did with strangers.

  She’s so very good at it.

  She could become a writer.

  I look at the boy with the blond braid in front of me.

  This can’t be her.

  She’s dead.

  “Lucas is your best friend. You would never have believed me.” She rests a hand on my arm, but I pull it away.

  This is too much.

  I can’t do this.

  When I turn around, I see that Lucas has disappeared. Where’s he gone?

  I jump to my feet and head into the hallway. Someone calls my name, but I ignore it. I’ll talk to Lucas first. I need to hear this from him.

  I look left and then right. At the end of the hallway, I see someone darting around the corner.

  I run down the hallway. Ahead, a door with a red-and-white sign on it is clattering. The emergency exit. Lucas is escaping onto the roof.

  The stairs up there are steep. With every step, Claus’s words echo through my mind.

  It’s me.

  Claus is Lucas.

  C L A U S = L U C A S

  At the top of the stairs, I fling the door open, and the wind blasts into my face. For a moment, I’m overcome by the darkness outside, but then I see dozens of lights from the buildings around me.

  “Lucas!” He is standing right by the edge, looking down. “What are you doing?”

  Lucas looks around. “Stay there, Fender.”

  “Please step away from the edge.”

  “I said stay there!”

  “Okay, okay. Calm down.”

  Lucas looks down again. His feet are just a couple of inches from the edge. My shirt flaps around my body.

  “Lucas, listen to me,” I say quietly. I think about how Linnea found me this afternoon on the windowsill. She calmed me down by talking to me. As long as we’re talking, Lucas can’t jump.

  “I know it’s not true. There’s no way you can be Claus.”

  The wind carries my words away. Did he hear me?

  “You’re my best friend, aren’t you?”

  Down below, car horns are hooting. I can hear an ambulance nearby, as if they’re already on their way.

  Then Lucas starts laughing. It’s high-pitched and shrill. “Is that what you think?”

  He slowly turns around.

  “Do you really think we’re friends?”

  I shake my head. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”

  “I already knew Isolde before she came to our school. Did you actually know that?”

  What’s Lucas talking about? I take a step forward.

  “We met at camp. For days, all we did was kiss. I was really upset when we had to go home. Little did I know that two weeks later she’d step into our classroom.”

  What is he talking about? All three of us saw her for the first time that day. I remember the moment well. I immediately had the feeling that I was walking more upright, as if someone had put a string on the crown of my head and pulled upward.

  “That first day, I took her aside and kissed her, but she didn’t want to anymore. The day after that I tried again, but then she told me that I liked her more than she liked me.”

  Lucas has gone crazy. He’s making this up. He has to be.

  I’d have noticed if there was something going on between Lucas and her. They were right under my nose every day!

  “And then she started to like you. I could see it happening, but I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want it to get out of hand like that, but she didn’t understand. She thought the two of you belonged together.”

  “We did,” I say.

  “You did not!” Lucas screams. “What we had was real. I’ve never felt that way about a girl before!”

  His words make me dizzy.

  “I couldn’t look at the two of you. You were touching someone who belonged to me.”

  “But she was my girlfriend,” I stammer. “Not yours.”

  I look at him. Lucas inches backward. His heels touch the edge of the roof.

  “You had everything and I had nothing. Kate is head over heels in love with you, but you never even noticed. Linnea was the first one not to fall for you. In fact, she hates you.”

  Is that why Lucas kissed her? I shake my head.

  “Please step away from the edge.”

  “Why should I?” Lucas moves back a little more. His heels are over the edge now. One gust of wind and he’ll fall.

  “It’s all over, Fender. When I saw that wrecked room, I already had a suspicion that Isolde was behind it. And when I heard the name Claus, I was sure of it. She wanted to punish me for what I’d done. And she involved you guys because it’s our fault she got mutilated.”

  “But it wasn’t like that!”

  “We murdered her, that’s how it feels to her. She’s insane.”

  “Don’t talk like that about her.” I take two steps forward.

  “Stupid Fender, are you still in love with her? After all these months? Even now that you know I had her first?”

  I look at the boy opposite me. Is this the same Lucas I woke up next to at camp? The boy who dragged me through the hardest time ever?

  All I really want to do is turn around and walk away, but at the same time I know I’ll never see him again if I do. I never want to have that feeling again.

  He deserves to be punished, but not like this.

  Even Linnea rescued me from the window, although she hated me.

  In a reflex, I reach out my hand and grab Lucas. With a sharp tug, I pull him away from the edge and we fall backward together onto the roof.

  The gravel jabs into my body and I feel Lucas’s weight on top of me.

  It’s over.

  Isolde hasn’t moved. She’s been sitting on the floor this whole time, with the wig in her hand.

  Kate and I stare at her, without saying anything.

  Fender and Lucas are sitting out in the hallway, a few feet away from each other. They haven’t said anything about what exactly happened between them, but I can guess.

  I’m mainly happy they’re both back, even though the thought that Lucas kissed me makes me nauseous. I was an Isolde replacement for him as well. The girl with the blue eyes and the blond braid.

  Kate reaches for my hand and entwines her fingers with mine. I want to pull my hand away, but I leave it there.

  This is not the time for a fight.

  “Linnea van der Zee?” Kate and I are both startled by a voice behind us. When we turn around, we see two police officers.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “You’re the one who called us?” The male officer looks at us. “Can you explain exactly what happened?”

  I look over at Isolde. The edge of her mask is visible where her real hairline begins.

  How did she disguise herself so well? There’s no sign of her scars or her damaged eye.

  But more important: how did she manage to identify so closely with a character who was based on the person who started all this misery?

  Claus see
med completely real.

  At least for a while.

  “No,” I say quietly. “I can’t.”

  * * *

  “Let’s go to the station to continue our discussion.” The female officer looks at Isolde. “Your parents are going straight there.”

  We just told the officers everything, but Fender had to keep stopping because it became too much for him. Kate and I took over from him then. We worked together like a well-oiled machine.

  Isolde starts moving. Throughout the whole story, she’s been staring at Lucas, but he hasn’t even glanced back at her.

  I look at Isolde again. Part of her mask has come loose now and is hanging from her face like a piece of meat. Underneath, I can see some of her scars emerging. She has removed her green contact lenses. Her one good eye is blue. That’s another similarity between us.

  The male officer points at the stairs. “Our fellow officers are taking care of the other parents downstairs. Maybe it’s a good idea for you guys to wait down there too.”

  My mom and dad…When I was in Claus’s room with that trash bag over my head, I thought about them. And what it would be like if I didn’t survive.

  How am I ever going to explain to them everything that happened here? When we told the whole story to the officers, it was like I was talking about someone else.

  How can anyone ever understand how I felt?

  * * *

  In the lobby, I look up at the gold clock above the entrance one last time. The hands show that it’s long past twelve.

  It’s now officially Kate’s birthday.

  One year later.

  I look at the signs around the edge.

  “What is Isolde’s star sign?”

  Kate looks at me in surprise. “Libra, why?”

  I breathe a sigh of relief. Not Capricorn, thank goodness.

  “Kate?” The voice of Kate’s father booms around the lobby. “What’s going on? Why are the police here?”

  Frank puts his arms around his daughter and hugs her tight.

  I look at them for a moment, then head outside. The doorman tips his hat as I walk past.

  If only I could turn back time to yesterday. When Lucas was still just Lucas, and Claus was no more than a plan in Isolde’s head.

  We were going to have a great weekend, with great food and swimming in the dark. After all, you can see the stars through the glass dome.

  I drop down onto the edge of the sidewalk and sigh deeply.

  Behind me, I hear a voice.

  “Can I come sit with you?”

  “Can I come sit with you?”

  Linnea looks up at me. “Why would you want to do that?” Her voice sounds muffled, as if she’s under a silver dome.

  “I was looking for the only honest person here.”

  Linnea nods. “Sit down.”

  We sit in silence, but this time it’s not bad. We have nothing to say to each other. Or maybe too much.

  The officers come out, with her between them. She glances in my direction. Her mask is coming off, and I recognize every line in her face.

  How many times have I thought about what it would be like to see her again?

  It never went like this.

  In my mind, I see her running along the jetty. She loses her sneakers, but still goes on running. Stumbling, just to get to me as quickly as possible. She joins me in our hiding place, and the two of us make characters out of the people in the harbor.

  Now she’s being led away by a police officer, toward his car. I look at the officer. What could his name be? Probably something short. John, or Bob, or something like that. I bet he has a dog. One of those yellow Labradors, which stinks when it’s been for a swim.

  “Why are you smiling?” asks Linnea.

  I look up. “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  Maybe Linnea’s right, although there’s certainly no reason to smile. I’m exhausted, but we still have so many hoops to jump through.

  My parents are sure to have a hundred questions. Not to mention her parents. Have Tom and Jeannette spotted the death notice placed by their daughter, who is still very much alive?

  I gaze up the sky. The stars aren’t nearly as impressive as they were last year, but still I see the same constellations.

  Look, my star sign.

  She was comforting me at the moment when it should have been the other way around.

  I cup my hands around my mouth and, for the first time in a year, I shout her name.

  “Isolde!”

  GUESTBOOK

  The five-star hotel in the city where I used to live was always a part of Amsterdam that was out of reach.

  What would it be like to sleep there?

  With that question in mind, I started writing.

  That’s the great thing about making up stories: you get to go to places that are normally off-limits.

  When I was writing this book, someone I know also gave me a tour of a five-star hotel. Thanks to Lilian, Riverside suddenly took shape!

  I’m just not sure I’d ever dare to spend the night at a five-star hotel.

  Because I’m far too scared that I’d be sitting in one of those luxurious rooms and suddenly there’d be a knock at the door.

  “Who’s there?” I’d ask.

  And the answer would be: “Room Service!”

  —Maren Stoffels

  Don’t miss another un-put-downable thriller from Maren Stoffels.

  I can see It from here.

  It can’t see me.

  It has to pay.

  For everything.

  All I need is a sign.

  Please.

  Give me a sign that I can begin.

  “He’s gay. For sure.” Sky’s sitting on the backrest of the bench, right behind Alissa and me. It’s just the three of us. The rest of the park is deserted.

  “Don’t think so.” Alissa takes out her wallet. “How much do you want to bet?”

  I have no idea who my two best friends are talking about. Their conversations often pass me by, like I’m on the other side of a wall.

  Alissa waves a five-dollar bill around. It reminds me of the first day of junior high. I thought Alissa had made a bet then too.

  She came up to my desk that first morning and asked if the seat next to me was taken. Alissa was the kind of girl who could have sat anywhere. She was so incredibly beautiful. Her eyes were the color of the sea on the Italian coast, where I’d spent the summer. I looked around suspiciously. Where were her giggling friends, laughing at me from a distance because I’d fallen for it?

  But there was no one else there. We were the only ones in the classroom.

  Sky’s voice brings me back to the present. “Let’s bet for a pizza,” he says. “And Miles can deliver it. Perfect.”

  So they’re talking about Miles, who works at the pizzeria with Sky. I’ve never seen him before, but Alissa’s mentioned him a few times.

  A girl with blond hair and a red scarf around her neck comes jogging into the park. As she passes us, she flashes me a quick smile.

  “He’s on his way, so now we just have to wait and see.” Sky puts his phone in his pocket and casually rolls a cigarette. He never has actual packs of cigarettes. Sky always does everything just a little bit differently from everyone else.

  “Did it hurt?” I hear Alissa ask. I’m back on the bench in the park. What were they talking about now?

  I follow Alissa’s gaze to Sky’s eyebrow piercing, which he had done a while ago. When he turned up at school the next day, the skin around the piercing was red and swollen. I touch my own eyebrow, which also hurt for a few days.

  At first I thought it was a coincidence, but then when Alissa broke her wrist in gym, mine was painful for weeks too.

  Can I feel other
people’s pain? Is that possible? It feels supernatural, weird. And if anyone finds out, I’ll get even more of a reputation for being crazy.

  Sky points at his eyebrow. “So much gunk came out! I could have made it into a smoothie.”

  Alissa gives him a shove and he nearly falls off the back of the bench. “Stop! You’re going to scare me out of it.”

  Since when has Alissa wanted a piercing? I try to imagine what it would look like on her, a little ring through her eyebrow.

  A couple weeks ago in Textile Studies, we had to make dresses out of garbage bags. Alissa pulled hers over her head, grabbed hold of it on one side, and shot a staple through the plastic. Then she paraded around the classroom like she was on a catwalk. Some of the boys started whistling. Even in a garbage bag, she was stunning.

  “Where’s that pizza?” Alissa asks impatiently.

  “Miles has half an hour to get here. After that, the pizza’s free.”

  A few minutes later, a scooter with a big blue trunk on the back drives into the park.

  Sky grabs my wrist and looks at my watch. “Bang on time. Typical Miles. You see? He’s a punctual gay guy.”

  My stomach’s churning, like I’m about to take an important exam.

  “Stop it.” Alissa quickly straightens her T-shirt. It’s a small gesture, but I can tell she’s nervous.

  Miles brakes in front of our bench and gives Sky a wave. When he lifts the visor of his helmet, I see two bright-blue eyes, like Alissa’s. But there’s something cold about these eyes. They have nothing to do with the Italian sea, but are more like icy water. I get a weird feeling that I can’t quite identify.

  “One pepperoni pizza?” The boy takes out a pizza box. The scent of melted cheese makes my mouth water.

  “Yep. It’s for us.” Then Sky points at Alissa. “She’s paying.”

  “You think?” Alissa looks at the boy. “Hey, Miles.”

  I don’t like it when people know my name and I don’t know theirs. Feels like I’m down 1–0.

  I’ve seen this girl before. She meets Sky after work sometimes. I noticed her immediately because she has the same blue eyes as me. Dad used to say I was the only one except him with blue peepers like this, but he was wrong. This girl’s eyes are hypnotic.