Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls Read Online Free Page B

number to a fink like her, he would have, so what’s the point in stealing?
    Anyway, it was a yellowish spring day, and the sunlight bursting through a leafy filter gave the streets in Dagger Park an aspect of unreality—like they’d been built for Disney World or something.
    Daisy and I were standing outside Rachel’s house, where she lived with her mom.
    Casa Buttersworth-Taylor is a tricked-out old town house with a big oak door and ivy crawling the walls. Daisy and I found ourselves staring at that door together. We’d come all this way, and now neither of us wanted to push the buzzer.
    “You do it,” Daisy said. “It’s your purse.”
    “No, you do it. Rachel hates you less. Maybe I’ll just hide here in this shrub.” I gestured nervously at a tiny neon azalea at the foot of the granite stoop.
    “No way,” Daisy scoffed. “If this is happening, you’re going to have to be the one to do the deed.”
    I hesitated. Much as I hated to admit it, Rachel was a worthy foe. She had a crazy recklessness that I almost—that’s almost— admired. Who else would have had not only the nerve but the straight-up, messed-up, evil spark to pull that trick with the dead fish?
     
    It happened freshman year, during the school production of Fiddler on the Roof. Because our school’s so small, participation in the stupid play was always mandatory. Daisy, Charlie, and I all wound up in the chorus, which ironically is where they stick everyone who can’t carry a tune. Basically, if you’re in the chorus, you just stand around a lot with some kind of prop—in my case a bottle of Manischewitz (empty, unfortunately)—and you sort of sway and mumble along while everyone else is singing. Sometimes you have to do really humiliating stuff like skip around in a circle and curtsy fifty times in a row, but in general, chorus seemed like the best place to be. I was so mortified to be in a lame school musical in the first place that as far as I was concerned, the tinier the part, the better.
    Rachel, on the other hand, was beyond peeved to have landed such a meaningless role. Apparently she had decided that she was going to be a famous actress—never mind the fact that she had a face like a Thoroughbred.
    She’d assumed all along that the lead was hers, no prob. But when the parts were posted, she hadn’t even gotten a speaking role. Rachel informed everyone that it was just as well, that she needed to save her voice for commercial auditions anyway, but you could tell she was crying on the inside.
    Personally, I always sort of wished Rachel had gotten to be the star, because it would have been a riot watching her try to sing. Daisy and I listened at the door during her audition and it turned out that Rachel Buttersworth-Taylor was the only person I knew who could sing “The Wind Beneath My Wings” to the same tune as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
    Anyway, Rachel hated me already, and she’d pretty much been shut out of her dreams of school-play stardom, so you can imagine her total rage when, somehow, I wound up with a line instead of her.
    One stupid line! All I got to do was run across the stage, twirl, and shout, “L’chaim—to life!” during the wedding scene, but the fact that Mr. Milford picked me to do it was about as much as Rachel could take. If Mr. Milford had, you know, asked me, I would definitely have turned it down, but when I suggested that to Rachel, she looked at me like she’d caught me picking my nose.
    So then, the day after Mr. Milford picked me, in the dressing room I opened up my backpack to find a real live dead fish in it.
    It was jammed haphazardly into the math section of my binder. Seriously. It still had scales on it and eyeballs and everything.
    There was a note too, written in red lipstick on my laboriously plagiarized precalculus homework: LULU DARK SMELLS LIKE TUNA.
    I was horrified, of course, but unfortunately, I had to admit, at that moment it was true.
    The day the incident occurred, I