Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (11 page)

“So what’s the plan now?” Charlie asked as we wandered up the bustling street, being spare-changed left and right by kids who probably live in mansions when they’re not busy playing homeless. Charlie bounced on the toes of his Pumas and reached his arms for the moon. “Are you ready to go out?”

“Not really,” I said. “But Dad and Theo want us to come by for poker. The girls from the softball team backed out.”

“Sounds good to me,” Charlie said. “I’ll win big.”

We headed off to my place.

 

Dad and Theo are totally different from anyone in Charlie’s family, and I think he’s a little jealous. His parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and sister and even her dog are all variations on the same theme: the most stuck-up, anal-retentive beings in the universe.

Every now and then I think Charlie even wishes he had parents like mine. And that includes my mom, because she’s allegedly such a “free spirit.” Personally, I think “free spirit” is just a nice way of saying
irresponsible lunatic,
but whatever. She’s fun to hang out with when she’s in town.

My mom and dad got divorced when I was five, but mom didn’t move away until I was almost ten. I guess she left because she freaked when Dad started dating Theo, but still, she could have considered her only daughter before moving all the way across the country.

The thing is, even when she was supposedly “around,” she hardly paid any attention to me—except when she needed a child as an accessory, like to pose with for
People
magazine profiles.

My mom’s name is Isabelle Dark, and she used to be slightly famous. Now she’s pretty much a has-been, although sometimes people still recognize her on the street from her most famous movie,
Sorority Vampire Party.
In that movie she played the president of an evil, bloodsucking sorority that preys on drunk frat boys and turns them into zombie slaves.

Nowadays she plays, like, sassy judges, mean social workers, and Julia Roberts’s neurotic mom. And that’s when she works at all.

Mom’s always been insane, which according to my dad is why he liked her in the first place. He says it’s also what makes her a good actress.

Lucky for me she lives on another coast, because I don’t think I’d be able to cope with all of her issues. That responsibility falls on the shoulders of the endless parade of beefcake models that she dates—and more power to them.

 

While I’d been thinking about Isabelle, Charlie and I had made it back to my neighborhood, where my dad has lived since he was a twenty-two-year-old starving artist. Our street used to be all factories and warehouses, and I guess back in the day it was considered pretty sketchy. But over the years a bunch of artists moved in and turned the warehouses into really cool places to live. Lucky for Dad—he got in when it was really cheap, and now it’s pretty much the best place to live in Halo City.

Since Mom moved out, it’s just been me and Dad, which is the way I like it. I never bothered to ask Dad what his deal was—why he married a lady and then got with a guy. It seems like his business, not mine, and everyone is happy with the arrangement at this point. Sometimes Theo talks about moving in with us, but I don’t think it will ever happen. He lives only a few blocks away, and he spends so much time at our place anyway that it seems pointless to go to the trouble of making it all official.

When Charlie and I entered the apartment, Dad and Theo were chilling in sweatpants, with the stereo pumping and popcorn popping in the microwave.

“You kids ready to get your butts kicked?” Theo asked. “I’ve been reading up on strategy since last time.”

Yeah, right,
I thought.

Every single time we play poker, I take everyone for all they’re worth. They’re always saying they’re going to beat me, and it never happens. You should see my bluff: it’s unstoppable.

“You guys look fancy,” my dad said. “How was your date?”

“It wasn’t a date!” I yelled, without meaning to.

“Jeez. Sorry,” Dad said. He was trying to look very serious, but he had a smile in his eyes. “I had no idea. All I know is that when someone takes me someplace like Medardo and dresses up in his fanciest Gucci suit, it’s a date.”

“I don’t even
have
a Gucci suit,” Theo pointed out, piling on. “I’m strictly a Men’s Warehouse kind of guy.”

Charlie looked like he wanted to turn around and run for the hills. He’s not used to having my dad make fun of him. It tends to be the three of them against me.

“Charlie and I are just friends,” I told Dad and Theo judiciously. “You guys should know that by now. After almost
seventeen entire years.
”

“Thank you for reminding us,” my father said. “You guys just look so good together that it’s easy to forget.”

Charlie’s face had turned a sick shade of green. “Let’s just play,” I said, mustering all of my magnanimity.

We all sat down at the card table, gearing up. I put on my customary poker visor and began shuffling the cards, pulling a few flashy moves to intimidate everyone.

“No way,” Theo said. “We are not letting that card shark deal anymore. She cheats. She has some trick.”

Sometimes Theo can be such a baby. I looked to Charlie for support, but he just put out his hand. “I’ll deal,” he said.

“Whatever, you guys,” I told them. “You’ll see who’s laughing when I win again.”

“In your dreams, Lulu,” Theo challenged. “My new strategy is unbeatable.”

 

As I raked in the chips like always, I told Dad and Theo about my terrible afternoon. I left out all the Berlin Silver stuff because I didn’t think Dad would approve of my sneakiness and I didn’t want him to do something embarrassing like call the headmistress and demand to have Berlin suspended.

“And then,” I was saying, “he pretended not to know me! He acted like a complete stranger!”

Dad and Theo were both laughing, which I didn’t appreciate.

“He told me I must be looking for some
other
Alfy Romero! As if!” I said indignantly, trying to bring the point home. They weren’t having it at all.

“It’s
not funny!”
I finally yelped, when it became clear that they had totally missed the point of the story.

“I’m sorry, Lu,” Dad said. “It will seem funny in a few months’ time, trust me.”

“It will not! It will always be humiliating. When I’m old and withered like you guys, it will still be humiliating.”

“Who are you calling old and withered?” Theo said. “I’m only thirty-one.”

“Exactly,” I snapped.

“Whatever,” Theo said. “You’re too boy crazy, Lulu. It’s clouding your judgment.”

“You should have seen her at that concert,” Charlie said. “Every time he glanced anywhere near her direction, it looked like she was about to pass out. Like a starstruck eight-year-old at an *NSync show.”

“That’s my girl,” Dad said. “Lulu has always been very passionate. Just like her mother.”

I shot them both my patented Lulu Dark death stare. One eye for each of them. Sometimes being the only girl in a room full of guys can be a trying experience. They have, like, no respect.

“You people are such hypocrites. Especially
you,
Theo,” I said. “You have some nerve calling
me
boy crazy. I’ve watched those
ER
reruns on cable with you. I see how you swoon over George Clooney. Anyone who thinks George Clooney is sexy has got to be
old.
He’s at least sixty himself!”

The only good thing to come out of the argument was that it seemed to be taking everyone’s mind off the poker game. Everyone except me, that is. I laid my cards triumphantly on the table to reveal that I had a truly golden hand.

The guys sighed as I pulled another pile of change to my corner, cackling.

“I told you she cheats,” Theo complained. “She has some trick involving mirrors and rubber bands.”

“Lulu’s sneaky,” Charlie said. He smirked. “You don’t even know the half of it.”

“Well, no worries. This is all part of my strategy,” Theo said. “I’m going to make a comeback in the second half.”

He didn’t, though. In fact, he was the most hopeless player out of everyone: the type who would play a pair of twos as if it was a full house, raising and raising, expecting me to fold under his bluff. Unfortunately for him, Charlie was right when he said that thing to Berlin the night that my purse was stolen. Not only can I see through walls, I can also see through crappy bluffs. So we kept on playing and I kept on winning. No one was really that grumpy about it. They had gotten used to it, and for all their bluster, they accepted my superior skills.

In the end, I bankrupted everyone. I let out a whoop and immediately began counting the spoils of my victory, loudly proclaiming each dollar.

“Give it a rest, Lulu,” Theo finally said. “You can count your riches later. Not that I know what you’re going to do with a big pile of nickels: you need a quarter to even buy a gumball in this day and age.”

“It’s legal tender,” I gloated. “I’m going to roll them up and take them to the bank. I’ve got at least ten bucks here.”

He didn’t pay me any mind, though. “Hey,” he said brightly, bare feet on the coffee table. “I forgot to tell you guys about the brilliant inspiration I got this morning.”

I can’t quite tell you what Theo does, but I know that he’s pretty successful—borderline famous, in fact, like my dad. He sort of writes plays, except that he doesn’t call them that. Every time you ask what he’s working on, he gives you some crazy new answer that makes no sense, like that he’s working on a one-man avant-garde electro-musical. He always talks in hyphens like that, which is totally silly but endearing.

“Oh yeah,” my dad said. “Tell them about your new play.”

“It’s not a play,” Theo corrected him predictably. “It’s more like an experimental neo-drag cabaret performance piece. It’s going to be called
/ Was a Teenage Shark Witch.
”

Charlie wrinkled his forehead. You could see he had no clue what Theo was talking about.

“So in other words, it’s a play,” I clarified.

Theo gave me an exasperated look. “I
suppose
you could call it that—if you insist. Anyway, it’s about a girl who’s half shark and half teenager. Kind of like an evil mermaid who likes to go to the mall. Oh yeah, and she’s dead.”

“Tell them where you got the idea,” Dad said eagerly. Clearly he thought Theo’s idea was totally brilliant—which I didn’t understand. Then again, Theo’s ideas always sound dopey when he talks about them. Then he goes ahead and wins a Pulitzer or something, so you never can tell.

“From the newspaper this morning,” Theo said. “There was this article about a body that they just found in Dagger Bay. A teenage girl. She was dressed to the nines in designer clothes. And here’s the cool part—she had a tattoo of a silver shark on her hip bone. And it’s like, why a silver shark? Why was she in the bay? Who was the girl? Why did someone want to murder her? And . . .”

Theo was going on and on, but I wasn’t listening. The room was spinning and I was afraid I was going to throw up. Unless I was hallucinating, things were a whole,
whole
lot worse than one stolen purse.

Why? Because Berlin Silver had that exact same tattoo—right on her hip bone. No one had seen her in a week.
And
her apartment had been ransacked!

My brain was throbbing, as if it had just expanded to twice its normal size. A murder had taken place. There was no way around it. Berlin Silver had been
murdered!

I didn’t want to worry Dad by telling him—he probably would never let me leave the house again if he knew that one of my class-mates had been offed. But Charlie had to be thinking the same thing as me, and I needed to figure out what to do. This was just too much for me to handle alone.

“I need to get something from my room,” I said, abruptly standing up. I signaled to Charlie to follow me, but he already knew what I was thinking. He followed with a haunted look on his face while Dad and Theo just looked on, bewildered.

“Are you okay, honey?” my father asked.

“I’m fine,” I croaked.

“I guess the lovebirds are retreating to their nest,” Dad teased.

Theo rolled his eyes. “Leave them alone,” he said with a snort. “I’ve heard that teenage girls need some privacy now and then.”

We reached my room and I slammed the door, barricading us inside.

“Okay, I’m completely freaking,” I wheezed.

“Don’t freak,” Charlie said at precisely the same moment.

“How can you say that!? Berlin Silver has been brutally murdered, and you tell me not to freak out? What is wrong with you?”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” Charlie said. “I know it’s a weird coincidence, but there’s no reason to think Berlin has been murdered.”

“Charlie, how can you be in such denial? They found Berlin in the bay this morning.”

“No,” he said calmly. “They found a woman with a shark tattoo. There’s a difference.”

“But—it
has
to be her. How many people have that exact tattoo in that exact same place?”

“Probably a lot,” Charlie replied. He’s very good at coming up with explanations that have no other purpose than to make him feel secure about the world. “Think about how many people have Tweety Bird tattoos. Or Betty Boop. Or ‘I Heart Mom.’ I think you’re jumping to conclusions. Trust me.”

He put his hands on my shoulders, trying to keep me calm, but it wasn’t working at all. His explanation was straight up not plausible.

“Charlie,” I said, “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s
got
to be her. She’s been missing for a week, her room was trashed,
as if by a criminal,
and the dead girl has the exact same tattoo.”

Suddenly another thought occurred to me. “And my purse!” I gasped. “Charlie, someone murdered Berlin and now they have my purse, with my ID in it and everything!”