Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (13 page)

“Well,” the Teener said, “we heard you were at Club Halo last night, dancing on a tabletop with
no underpants on.
”

Without meaning to, I let out a shriek.

“Listen, Teeny,” I said coldly, “I went to bed at nine-thirty last night.”

They all just laughed. They didn’t believe me! I could feel my blood beginning to boil.

“Someone must have slipped some crack into your Bugles,” I finally snapped. “Because I would never hang with the Stratfords. And anyone spreading rumors to the contrary is out of her mind.” I stalked away and pulled the door to the next car open, making an escape.

 

It takes forever to ride the subway to the Halo City Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s in a gloomy, out-of-the-way neighborhood full of warehouses and junkyards and God knows what. Every corner has some barking rottweiler throwing itself against a chain-link fence in an attempt to eat you alive.

Once you find your way inside the actual office, it’s a lot shinier and more official seeming than the surrounding neighborhood—but it’s no less depressing. It’s like being inside an old Nintendo game with terrible graphics and that annoying, blippy music. You have to stand in line for an hour and then, when you make it through that line, they send you to another even longer line. So you’re bounced around like Super Mario in the land of the bureaucratic nightmare.

The whole experience takes an entire afternoon, and that’s assuming you actually get through it at all. Two out of the three times I’d tried it before, after making it all the way to the head of the second line, I’d been sent home for some idiotic infraction—like I forgot to bring a copy of my great-grandmother’s immigration papers or I was wearing white go-go boots in winter. Stuff like that.

I think they design the system purposely to screw with you, because if it’s too easy, if you had those spare hours back, you might use the time to try to overthrow the government or invent a tasty, nonfattening alternative to high-fructose corn syrup, thus wreaking total havoc on the U.S. economy.

Anyway, the point is that when you need to replace your driver’s license you must bring a book, or at least a
Vanity Fair,
to the DMV. I hadn’t brought either of those things. All I could do was wait.

The problem was, the more I waited, the more focused I became on the mystery at hand. Or rather,
mysteries.

There was the missing purse, the anonymous phone call, the weird girl known as Sally Hansen, the disappearance of Berlin Silver, and—scariest of all—the dead shark girl. They had to be related to one another—except maybe Sally Hansen—but for the most part, I couldn’t figure out how.

With nothing left to do and facing an endless wait, I whipped out my cell phone and called Daisy, who was busy at home, baking an angel food cake for her aunt’s birthday. I filled her in on the events of last night—and this morning.

She thought the tattoo thing was weird, but she didn’t think, at first, that I should worry about the phone call.

“Are you sure it wasn’t just part of your nightmare?” she asked. “You know how sometimes you think you’re awake, but you’re actually still dreaming?”

“Daisy,” I said firmly. “It was not a dream. Someone with my voice, claiming to be me, called me at four o’clock in the morning, insisting that I had her cell phone.
My
cell phone, I mean. What is going on?”

She paused, then had an idea. “Okay,” she said, shouting over the noisy whir of an electric beater. “What if it was Rachel? Charlie told me that you ran into her last night and that she had some kind of bone to pick.”

“Rachel?” I asked doubtfully. “Why would she have made a stupid call like that? I mean, why pretend to be me? Couldn’t she have just asked if my refrigerator was running or something?”

“I don’t know—why does Rachel do anything? She’s crazy; you know that better than I do.” There was the clatter of cookware and then the distinct crack of an eggshell.

Why did Daisy always have to be so sensible? As usual, she had come up with a much better explanation than I had. And unlike Charlie, she was almost managing to make me feel better. As we mulled over the idea that Rachel was responsible for the phone call, I realized that I’d never completely ruled out the possibility that she was the one who had stolen my purse, too.

“You know, maybe you’re right,” I said. “In which case, I’m just overreacting about that call. Well, I’m done. Rachel can bug me all she wants. I’m just going to ignore her and maybe she’ll go away.”

“Good idea,” Daisy said.

But then I thought a little harder.

“Wait a minute. That still makes no sense. Even if Rachel did make the phone call, Genevieve still saw
Berlin
with my purse. And then there’s the dead girl with the tattoo, and Berlin’s ransacked room, and Sally Hansen, and . . .” I was about to start hyperventilating.

Daisy sighed. “I suppose you have a point. Something strange
is
going on. I wouldn’t go so far as to suspect murder, but . . . I wish I was there with you now, Lulu. You’re in a sketchy neighborhood. Be careful. I don’t want you to turn up decapitated in the back of a Chevy Caprice.”

“Thanks, Daisy. That’s, like, such a comforting thought.”

“Oh, I’m just joking,” she said, with a nervous chuckle. Then added, “Sort of. So listen, I’m working tonight. Why don’t you and Charlie come over to Little Edie’s and we’ll all sit down and figure things out?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

Daisy and I continued talking for the greater part of an hour. My dad was going to kill me when he got the bill, but what else was I supposed to do? The line for a new driver’s license was moving ever so slowly. While we talked, I fidgeted, hopped up and down in place, fiddled with my hair, and I’m sure drove all the other misbegotten DMV patrons crazy.

I heard a timer ding in the background. “Cake’s done. I have to go,” Daisy said.

“No! Don’t leave me!” I whined.

“Lulu, don’t worry, you’re going to be fine,” Daisy said. “I have confidence in you. And obviously if someone attacks you, you know that the most prudent thing to do is to turn your enemy’s own strength against her. Like, okay, if she rushes you with a machete, or one of those big, round hammers with spikes all over it, or a battle-ax or something, what you do is grab her under the—”

There was a sizzle of static.

“Daisy? Wait—Daisy? I can’t hear you!” I checked the phone’s display. The line was dead.

Great. I was out of batteries. Now I would never know what to do if my enemy rushed me with a battle-ax.

Even though she’d been trying to comfort me, Daisy had just gotten me more worked up. With no further recourse for distraction, I was pulled into my own imagination.

I was thinking about dead girls and stolen driver’s licenses and evil clones of all sorts. Teenage shark witches floating in the bay, green and decaying, blue hair full of seaweed, just itching to pull another victim down into their watery sisterhood.

If the shark girl in the police morgue wasn’t Berlin, who could it be?

Maybe it was the phone call I’d gotten or the fact that I was standing in line to get a new ID, but I started wondering, what makes someone herself? If you get your driver’s license stolen, or you put it through the laundry one too many times, or you never bother to get one in the first place, are you still you? If you have nothing to prove it to anyone, how can anyone be sure of who you are? Is it your clothes, or your hairdo, or your voice, or what?

Deep down I knew that it was your friends. My friends, I mean. I was sure that no matter what, Daisy, Charlie, my dad—and maybe even Genevieve—would always know me. I could go into the witness protection program, get radical plastic surgery, cut off all my hair, cover my body in tattoos,
whatever:
they would track me down and each of them would recognize me without a moment’s hesitation. With their eyes closed, their hands tied behind their backs.

That thought was a comfort, but it made me sad, too, because Berlin didn’t have that. In some ways I was the closest it got for her, and I was looking for her for purely selfish reasons. I wasn’t a real friend—or even a fake friend. I just wanted my purse back! No one else was even curious about her disappearance; no one else seemed to have noticed that she was missing.

If what Charlie’s friend Adam had told us was true, even her parents were blissfully ignorant—somewhere on the other side of the world while their daughter was most likely dead.

I knew then that as much as I did
not
want to be a girl detective, I had a responsibility to get to the bottom of things. Because no one else was going to do it, and even if Berlin was a bitch, no one, absolutely no one, deserves to die by herself. It was an issue of fairness and justice.

No,
I told myself,
/ am not a girl detective. But / care about truth, and, you know, justice and all that. / am not about to stand by and let bad stuff go down.

That was it the key thing. Here I had been pondering these silly questions about what made me
me
when I knew the answer all along. I was Lulu Dark, and no one could take that away from me. I only wished that Berlin could have had the same luxury.

“Next!” a clerk behind the DMV counter called.

The small bald man behind me gave me a poke on the shoulder.

“Next!”
the clerk called again.

I blinked. I had been lost in the mysteries of the universe for so long that miraculously, I hadn’t even noticed I’d made it to the front of the line! Before I knew it, I was facing down the surly DMV clerk, answering her clueless questions, and finally sitting in front of the blue screen for my new picture.

I was prepared for the snapshot to be terrible, because although I consider myself to be dead sexy in real life, I’m one of the most un-photogenic people alive, which is sort of funny considering that I myself am a brilliant photographer.

It’s just that when I’m on the other side of the lens, I get so nervous. It always takes longer than I’m expecting for the flash to go off, and when it finally happens, I’m caught in between two totally dopey expressions, which, together, never fail to add up to the “I just farted” face.

This time, though, things were different. Unbelievably, the picture was great. I looked like nothing other than my most perfect self. A sweet, killer scowl played on my lips and my dark, wavy hair framed my face in an unstudied lion’s mane.

I was going to hold on to this driver’s license until the end of time, long after it expired. Because in this very picture, I was starting to figure myself out.

And that was the meaning of hot.

I didn’t know what last night’s prank caller was playing at, but she was pretending to be me, and that was not okay.

Besides, what was the point? Was I supposed to say,
That’s right, you’re Lulu Dark, and / must have been mistaken about it for the last sixteen and a half years
?

Was the caller trying to scare me? Intimidate me?

It was mysterious, but I knew I would get to the bottom of it. For the first time in a week I had confidence pumping blood to brain.

 

Nothing lasts long, though, especially certainty. It’s like water in the desert—gone before you know it. And before you realize what’s happening, you’re parched again, looking for a new oasis.

My rude awakening came while I was on the train heading back downtown. I was just standing there, turning my new license back and forth, admiring the picture, when I looked up and saw, for the second time in one day,
Sally Hansen!
She was standing on the platform, waiting for the train doors to open.

I quickly elbowed my way to a back corner and stood behind a heavyset businessman reading a copy of the
Halo City Times.
I crouched down and peered over the edge of his paper. Sally was getting on the train.

Seeing her once today had been jarring enough. Now I was downright frightened. This girl was totally following me. Luckily she didn’t appear to be aware of my hiding spot. She had pulled out a magazine and was leaning against the door on the far side of the car.

It seemed possible that she was trying to look inconspicuous, although that would have been hard in the outfit she was wearing. She was all high-glam lunacy—with caked-on Cleopatra eyeliner, cartoon cleavage, and platinum hair teased into a white-blond nimbus. She was wearing pink hot pants and gold stiletto heels that laced all the way up her calves. Naturally, her French manicure was impeccably maintained.

I took out my notebook.
SALLY HANSEN- PINK HOT PANTS!!!
I scribbled, adding a third exclamation point to emphasize that this was my fourth run-in with the obsessive filer. You never knew when such information would come in handy.

I tried not to panic. Other than calling me a cow and shooting death rays at me with those heavily masacara’d eyes, she hadn’t actually done anything to me. Not yet. And at least she wasn’t carrying a machete or a battle-ax.

I was straining to see what magazine she was reading when my businessman camouflage abruptly closed his paper and shuffled off the train, leaving me an open target. I freaked and leapt behind a small elderly woman chewing a wad of gum.

“Excuse me,” the old lady hollered, calling the attention of the entire car. Sally’s head shot up and she looked me right in the eye.

The train was about to pull out of the station, so I made a furious break for the door, hoping that I could lose her. As I rushed through the turnstile, out of the station, I looked over my shoulder and saw that she had managed to make it out of the train too.

Sweat formed on my forehead. There was no doubt about it now. I was being followed by a manicure-crazed, hot-pants-wearing freak. A freak who
could
be a murderer!

WITH SALLY ON MY TRAIL, I scurried up the subway stairs.