Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls

by Bennett Madison

  The first guy we talked to was Adam Wahl, Charlie’s friend. We found him in the school parking lot, sitting with his new girlfriend on the hood of his red Saab convertible. Adam was a slack-eyed prepster in a tight blue Lacoste polo. He had the collar turned up, of course.

  “She lives alone, you know,” he told us as his gorgeous girlfriend, Kathy Ramirez, copied his math homework—which he, of course, had copied from Daisy during history. Other than that, Adam had no idea about Berlin’s address.

  “What else do you know about her?” I asked.

  Adam shrugged. “She’s gotten kicked out of like ten boarding schools, so her parents decided to send her here to live in Halo City. Orchard was the only private school in the country that would take her.”

  I was sort of surprised to hear that, really. At school Berlin was mostly just a slacker, not the kind of wild child you need to be to get kicked out. I filed Adam’s tip away for later, even if it wasn’t going to help me with my immediate problems.

  We didn’t have much luck after that. We talked to just about everyone else we’d ever seen hanging out with Berlin, and none of them had gotten close enough to her to ever go to her house. It was looking like a lost cause, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

  Good thing. Because a second later a thought occurred.

  “We’ve been so dumb, you guys,” I said to Daisy and Charlie. “Mrs. Salmon has Berlin’s address. Let’s go get her to cough it up.”

  We made our way to the main office, where the school secretary, Mrs. Salmon, guarded the entrance to Dr. Felicia Bober’s office with zeal. Mrs. Salmon, a pleasant fortyish woman, wasn’t mean. But as we quickly discovered, she was completely unmovable.

  We pleaded with Mrs. Salmon. We cajoled. Unfortunately, she wasn’t about to give up Berlin’s address.

  Daisy tried turning on the charm. “But Mrs. Salmon,” she pleaded sweetly, “I need to send Berlin an invitation to my birthday party!”

  Mrs. Salmon gave the three of us a pleasant yet firm smile. “No can do,” she chirped, then went back to her task, willing us to leave.

  We turned from the office. There were only a few minutes left—lunch period was almost over. If we didn’t have Berlin’s address by the time the bell rang, we’d have to go back to class.

  “Daisy,” I said after considering the dilemma for a few minutes. “Are you still friends with those skaters who hang out in the park across the street?”

  Daisy’s face lit up. She’d guessed my plan and she liked the sound of it. No surprise there—Daisy always looks best amid chaos.

  “Right this way.” She turned, walking quickly to the front door of the school. Charlie looked at me quizzically, wondering what Daisy and I were up to. I just gave him a mysterious look. He was going to have to wait and see. We followed Daisy outside, down the front steps of the school, and across the street to the concrete park where all these rowdy skater boys hang out twenty-four-seven.

  Daisy marched to the center of the plaza by the big, showy fountain and formed her hands into a megaphone. “Hey, Tripp!” she bellowed. “Come out wherever you are!”

  There was a rustling under a bench twenty feet away and a sleepy, wiry skate punk in shredded jeans and a skintight T-shirt emerged from a pile of newspapers. He sidled up to Daisy, hands backward on his hips.

  “What’s up?”

  Daisy leaned in toward him and whispered our plan. Tripp nodded throughout. When it was over, she gave us a thumbs-up and led us back into the school.

  “Five minutes,” Daisy said, barely able to conceal her giddiness. “We just need to wait outside the door to the office.”

  After the allotted five minutes of impatient waiting, I heard a low rumbling in the hallway. Slowly it built into a thundering clatter. A red streak flew through the air and Tripp Ratface landed gracefully in front of me.

  A second later another wiry skater boy came flying around the corner, then another and another. Before I knew it, the entire hall was jammed with at least fifteen guys on boards, all ollying their hearts out. They bounced off the lockers, turning fancy tricks and stretching their sinewy arms for the fluorescent lights. I burst out laughing. The kids coming out of class just stood there, open-mouthed, staring in amazement.

  The door to the office flew open. Mrs. Salmon emerged, carrying a flyswatter like a sword. She chased the punks around the hallway, swatting at them whenever they came close enough. “Out! Out! Out!!” she warbled.

  For a second I almost forgot the point of our plan. This scene was too out of control for words. Luckily Daisy grabbed my hand. We slipped into Mrs. Salmon’s office, undetected, to grab the file we needed.

  Twenty minutes later we were on the subway heading to the Primrose Hotel for Young Ladies, where Berlin’s stolen school records claimed she lived. It was strange that Berlin lived in a hotel, but then again, she was a strange girl.

  “Daisy,” Charlie moaned, the subway vibrating under our feet. “I don’t know about this. If I have another unexcused absence, I’m going to lose credit in art.”

  “Not to sweat,” she said breezily. “I’ll bring Carla some chocolate.”

  Daisy was in the killer position of being the student assistant to Carla Taylor, the attendance secretary at Orchard Academy. Daisy gave her beauty and weight loss tips, and Carla kept trying to set Daisy up with her son Nathaniel, a twenty-three-year-old med student at Halo University. They were like this, and Daisy was able to smooth over a liberal amount of class cutting as a result.

  We found the Primrose Hotel on the northeast corner of Halo Park. It was a dilapidated, ornate building with gargoyles and gables and everything. Clearly it had seen better days. Still, it was pretty cool.

  “I’ve heard of this place,” Charlie said, staring up at the edifice wide-eyed. “My old nanny told me she used to live here when she first got to Halo City.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If it’s a hotel, why do people live here? And why is it just for young ladies?”

  “It’s, like, where girls can come and live when they’re just getting on their feet,” Charlie explained. “There used to be places like it all over the city. The point of them is that they’re pretty cheap, but you just get a room, not a whole apartment, and there are all these rules that you have to follow. Like you have a curfew and you’re not allowed to have boys in your room. It’s some old-fashioned thing.”

  “Considering how much money Berlin’s family has, you would think they’d be able to afford an actual apartment,” I mused.

  “They must have figured a place like this would encourage her to be less of a troublemaker,” Daisy said. “With the curfew and all.”

  “Nah, my nanny told me that the girls here are always sneaking out and having big parties,” Charlie told us. “You know how those young ladies can be.” He gave Daisy a wry look.

  The proprietor of the Primrose was a stocky woman in an oversized hockey jersey with a short, gunmetal gray hairdo. Her name, according to her name tag, was Mel.

  “No boys allowed!” she barked at us when we walked in. She was sitting behind a big oak desk with one of those little reception bells at her fingers. She banged on it a couple of times for emphasis, a jittery ding ding ding. “This is a home for young ladies!”

  “Oh, Charlie’s not coming upstairs,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “Well, ask away,” Mel responded jovially. She tapped the bell a few more times before she folded her arms behind her head and leaned back in her chair. “I know everything about this place and the girls living in it, too.”

  As she spoke, I noticed a buff guy in just his boxers sneaking out of the elevator behind her. He slowly tiptoed behind a big potted palm, where he stood, stick straight, trying to blend in with the leaves. Mel didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m looking for a tenant named Berlin Silver,” I said, trying to ignore the half-naked interloper.

  Mel nodded knowingly. “Yep, yep,
Berlin Silver. Quite a gal. With looks like that, she should be one of them models or something or a whatchamacallit. An actress.”

  “I need to see her,” I said.

  “She’s in school. Least she better be. Nope, you can’t go up.”

  “So she lives upstairs?” Daisy asked. It was the dumbest question ever, but miraculously, it worked.

  “Of course she lives upstairs,” Mel said in a patronizing voice. “You’re on the ground floor right now. She lives in 3C. I gave her that room so she could study—her being a student and all. Now, if I’d given her anywhere on the fifth floor, that would have been a problem. Them girls up there think they’re rap musicians and so forth.” She shook her head ruefully.

  “Always making a racket, those fifth-floor girls. I don’t call that music myself. Me, I call it noise. I said to those girls, I said, ‘Ladies, I know a thing or two about music, and if Celine Dion couldn’t sing it, it’s not very musical, now, is it?’”

  As she sat there, lost in thought, the naked guy emerged from the potted palm and went streaking out the door of the hotel, making an expert getaway. I could see that Mel had a lot in common with George the history teacher. Daisy and I knew just how to play her. Finally she opened her eyes again.

  “Where are your friends?” She seemed confused.

  I turned to my left and found myself as befuddled as she was. Daisy and Charlie had disappeared.

  “Maybe they went to the bathroom?” I bluffed.

  “Oh. Okay. Well, that puts me in mind of a story. I remember this one time that . . .”

  Oh no, I thought. Does it never end?

  But before Mel could get into her story, there was a clatter from behind her. She swung around. Three girls looked up with panicked faces that said BUSTED. Between them they were trying to roll a keg of beer from one elevator to the next. I gave them a sarcastic thumbs-up. Good job, guys!

  You could tell it pained Mel to have to interrupt her story, but keg parties were obviously against the rules of the Primrose Hotel.

  “Amanda! Charlene?! Elizabeth Prives!? What’s going on here?” Mel demanded.

  I wanted to stick around for the scene, but I had a feeling that I knew where Daisy and Charlie had gone. I needed to find them.

  Taking a chance that the heavy swinging door next to the entrance led to a stairwell, I snuck toward it at full tiptoe speed while Mel confronted the girls.

  “But Ms. Raymond! We were just practicing for the big barrel-rolling competition next week!” I heard a shrill, whiny voice protesting as I pulled open the door.

  Bingo! Stairs.

  No time to eavesdrop. Letting my stealth drop, I raced up the steps two at a time. The stairwell smelled like a foul combination of gym clothes, Victoria’s Secret body-spritzer, and nail-polish remover.

  When I got to the third floor, I was out of breath.

  At the top of the flight Daisy stood next to the door, back pressed against the wall. She put a finger to her lips. “Charlie’s trying to get into Berlin’s room,” she whispered. “You should help him—I’m going to stand watch here.”

  I nodded and swung open the hall door. Charlie stood in the hall, hunched over the doorknob to room 3C, busily fiddling.

  “What are you doing?”

  He looked up at me like I was an idiot. “Picking the lock, duh.” He clutched a subway fare card, which he slipped smoothly into the crack between the door and the door frame.

  “Since when do you know how to pick locks?”

  “I don’t, but I’ve seen them do it on TV a bunch. Plus this looks like a really cheap lock.”

  I wanted to help him, but Charlie was too busy showing off to accept any assistance. He fumbled, trying to press the lock back with the flimsy fare card. All it did was hang flaccidly in the door crevice.

  “Maybe if you watched more TV, you’d be better at it,” I teased. He shot me a withering glance.

  At that moment Daisy’s head came popping around the hall door. “Hide!” she whispered urgently, then disappeared.

  Charlie grabbed me by the waist and, in one motion, pulled me into the broom closet directly across the hall.

  Those two had some nerve accusing me of being a wannabe sleuth. Charlie and Daisy were the ones who were acting like this was some big mission: impossible.

  There were muffled voices in the hall. I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I felt reasonably confident that Daisy would be able to handle whatever Mel threw at her. Charlie, on the other hand, was a different story. He couldn’t talk his way out of a brown paper bag. If he was caught up here, we were dead meat.

  I was so busy straining to hear Daisy that I barely noticed the fact that Charlie was still clutching me around the waist. My face was about this close to his neck, and he smelled like a funny combination of laundry detergent and milk. I know that sounds gross, but there was something comforting about the smell. We were both breathing quickly, nervous that we were about to be discovered. When I paid close attention, I almost thought I could feel his heart, thumping nervously in his skinny rib cage.

  Suddenly there was a rattle at the doorknob.

  It was Mel, and she was about two seconds from discovering us. “Never seen so much beer on the floor in my life,” she was telling Daisy. “Well, maybe back in seventy-nine, when I was bartending at Annie Oakley’s. But that’s another story. Man, I never did like those sixth-floor girls. Think they play by different rules. Now I gotta mop up their mess.”

  The doorknob was still jiggling. “Dang,” Mel huffed. “This door is always jamming. Now, if I could just get one decent repairman in this place . . .”

  Charlie pulled me tighter, and even in the dark I was afraid he could see me blushing.

  Please, Daisy, I thought. Work your magic. And hurry!

  “You’re going to mop up their beer?” Wonderful, loyal, true Daisy’s voice sounded. “Don’t you think that since they threw the party, they should clean up the mess themselves?”

  A long silence. I held my breath.

  “Sweet cakes,” Mel finally said, “you’ve got a point there. Gotta teach them kids a little respect.” I could hear footsteps and the voices receding.

  The sound of the swinging stairwell door echoed through the hall outside, and I exhaled heavily in relief.

  “Close call,” Charlie whispered. His face was unexpectedly near to mine. I could feel his eyelashes on my cheekbones and his slow breath on my face. A small tingle went up the back of my neck and a strange thought entered my head.

  Charlie was about to kiss me.

  If I’d been thinking rationally, I would have backed away, or turned my face, or something. But I didn’t—I guess I was in shock or something because I just stood there and closed my eyes, waiting for his lips to touch mine.

  Thank goodness Daisy swung open the door just in time.

  Me and Charlie? Please. My life was complicated enough. The adrenaline pumping through my veins must have induced some form of temporary insanity.

  When the light from the hall came bursting into the broom closet, I jumped about a mile in the air and then realized that for the third or fourth time that day, I had been rescued by perfect timing.

  Daisy didn’t seem to notice the fact that Charlie and I were in a somewhat intimate position. “I’m brilliant!” she congratulated herself. “Now let’s break into Berlin’s room.”

  I quickly composed myself and stepped out of the closet. “Charlie was having a hard time with the door,” I said with, I guess, a hint of snark.

  “Can’t I leave you two in charge of anything?” Daisy asked. She stepped toward Berlin’s door and pulled a bobby pin from her back pocket. She poked it gracefully into the keyhole. With a thoughtful expression and a never-mind flick of her wrist, she coaxed a satisfying pop from the bolt. “What a cheap lock,” she said.

  Charlie was annoyed. “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  “There’s this magical box in my living room that, like, makes pictures that move?
It’s called television. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  “You’re going to have to teach me that trick,” I told her.

  “You’ll need it if you’re going to be a famous girl detective,” she said.

  I decided not to dignify her comment with a response.

  Inside, Berlin’s bedroom looked like it had just been demolished by a mob of angry Jerry Springer guests. The drawers had been flung open. There were clothes all over the floor. The bedsheets and blankets had been ripped off the bed and strewn all over the room. At the sad little wooden desk in the corner, a sad little wooden chair had been flung on its back with the dead and gory aspect of roadkill or unsold purses at the end of a sample sale.

  “What a pig,” Charlie said. “You’d never guess it from looking at her, would you? This is practically as filthy as my room.”

  “No, it’s not,” Daisy and I said, almost in unison.

  “Your room is full of dirty dishes and half-eaten food, and you never bothered to sweep up that wastebasket you knocked over a month ago,” I reminded him.

  He frowned. “I was going to sweep it up tomorrow,” he said. “And what if I want to eat some of that food later? It’s still good, you know.”

  The thing is, Berlin’s room really wasn’t like Charlie’s room at all. Aside from the clothes and sheets and general disarray, there wasn’t much in it. I couldn’t imagine that this was how Berlin really lived. Girls like her may be messy, but their mess usually involves lots of fashion magazines.

  “There’s something weird about this room,” I said, taking the opportunity to reapply my lip gloss.

  “Yeah. It’s like she has no personality at all,” Daisy said. “There are no decorations or anything.”

  “True, but that’s not what I mean. I can’t quite put my finger on it.” Then a thought occurred to me. “You know, it looks like Theo’s apartment . . . after it got broken into!”