Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (6 page)

Now Berlin was skipping school to avoid me. What nerve. I ripped a piece of paper from my notebook and dug through my backpack for a ballpoint pen.

THE COWARD!
I wrote. I folded the paper into a boomerang and tossed it underhand to Daisy, who had been forced by George, our teacher, to sit three desks in front of me and one diagonal to the left to avoid this very scenario. Daisy and I were too slick for him, though. As my note whipped under desks, spinning a foot above the tile, Daisy swiftly reached under her chair and caught the flying missive, with a barely audible
thwap,
against her opened palm.

George turned from the blackboard. He narrowed his eyes at me suspiciously, but he’d missed the whole thing as usual. He liked to think that he ran a tight ship and that we all loved him because he encouraged us to call him by his first name, but we really thought he was an idiot, due to his obliviousness to the pandemonium that was taking place right under his nose.

It was a constant battle between the class and him, not because we were naturally unruly kids, but because he spent so much time trying to catch us in the act that we just had to respond by living up to his expectations—and thwarting him at every step.

Jordan Fitzbaum was the master at it. One time he managed to write the word
VAGINA
on the blackboard five separate times in one class period without George ever catching him.

George was still motoring on about the Franco-Prussian War when I caught a glimpse of Daisy wiggling her ears. That was my signal. Jauntily I headed to the front of the room to sharpen my pencil, even though I didn’t technically have a pencil. George’s eagle eyes stayed on me as I passed Daisy’s desk, but he was no match at all for that girl, who, with Houdini sleight of hand, invisibly returned the note into my pink cowboy boot.

When I got back to my desk, I unfolded the note and tapped my chin thoughtfully with my pen, which was somewhat battered from the pencil sharpener.
At lunch we’ll get Charlie,
Daisy had written.
Take the afternoon off. If we can’t get her at school, we’ll take the battle to the crook. Fight fire with fire trucks!
I pursed my lips into a satisfied pucker and looked up to see that George was heading in my direction. He had his pointer in hand and a determined march in his step. I smiled at him and shuffled my papers around.

“Your correspondence, please?” George snapped. I sighed with overblown dismay and handed him the decoy that I’d been saving precisely for an occasion such as this one.

“George, it just landed on my desk!” I said, shrugging, “I honestly don’t know where it came from.”

He unfolded it triumphantly and emitted a high-pitched gasp when he realized that he’d been fooled again.

The decoy was a dog-eared, elaborately folded piece of notepaper that read
VAGINA
in huge black Sharpie letters.

Score.

 

I’d gotten detention, but that was okay because no one bothered to go to George’s detentions. The worst he could do was give you more detention, which you still didn’t have to go to. He never bothered alerting the real authorities anymore because he and the headmistress, Dr. Felicia Bober, were sworn enemies. She’d ignored his pleas for disciplinary assistance ever since October, when he’d melted one of her precious overhead projectors by leaving it on overnight.

Daisy, Charlie, and I met at our usual sunny spot on the terrace for lunch. Then we got to work hatching our plan. Since Berlin had only transferred to Orchard in January, she wasn’t in the school directory, but we figured it would be easy enough to find out where she lived from one of her many boy toys.

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.