“Usually,” said Lulu. “Are you saying yes?”
“There’s no reason in the world for me to say yes,” said Ms. Solinsky.
“Actually, there is,” said Lulu, a warning tone in her voice. “If I send out these pictures of my wrecked room to my mom and my dad, plus the entire universe, everyone will think that you’re the WORST babysitter in town, maybe the world. Sonia Sofia Solinsky, trained professional? Hah! Your reputation would be . . . dog poop!”
“You are without a doubt,” said Ms. Solinsky, “the most especially difficult of all the especially difficult children I’ve babysat.”
“But I wouldn’t be,” said Lulu, suddenly switching to a pretty-please tone of voice, “if I were being trained as a spy instead of being babysat by you. I’d obey your every command. I’d do whatever you told me to. I’d WANT to do brisk runs and bean-and-beet omelets.”
Ms. Solinsky, whose face had been as stern and as stony as something carved on a mountain, seemed to be softening—just a little bit. She did not want Lulu’s parents to come home and fire her. She did not want her reputation to be dog poop. And training a spy would certainly be more interesting than being a babysitter, even if the spy she’d be training was Lulu.
“TOTAL obedience?” she asked.
“Total,” Lulu promised.
“I’ll get back to you with my answer in an hour,” said Ms. Solinsky. “Meanwhile, clean up as much of this mess as you can.”
Lulu started to say no way was she cleaning up this mess, and then she realized that wasn’t a good idea. Instead, she stood up straight, clicked her heels, saluted, and said, “Yes, sir,” to Ms. Solinsky. Except this time, she was saying it so earnestly, so respectfully, so politely that Ms. Solinsky wasn’t not amused.
During the hour that Lulu worked on her room and waited for Ms. Solinsky’s answer, she started chanting a new, friendlier chant:
GFEDCBA,
Triple S has got to stay.
June or April, March or May,
Triple S has got to stay.
“She’s GOT to stay and train me!” Lulu kept saying to herself in between chants. “I really really really really really want to learn to be a spy.”
Sixty minutes later, Ms. Solinsky, now toting her duffel bag, was standing once again in Lulu’s bedroom. Looking around, she could see that though the room remained really wrecked, Lulu had tried hard to put it back together.
“I’ve considered your request,” Ms. Solinsky told Lulu, “and I am prepared to offer a qualified yes. By ‘qualified’ I mean, first, you can’t discuss the training with anybody. Ever. And second, if you challenge even one of my instructions, I will give up teaching you spy craft—at once!—and return—at once!—to babysitting you. Get it?”
Lulu was thrilled beyond thrilled. “I get it! Just give me my instructions. I want to learn everything!”
Today was still Sunday (in case you forgot) and Lulu’s parents were coming home Friday night, so Ms. Solinsky had only six days to train Lulu. And Lulu, of course, would also need time for her school and homework and trombone and dog-walking job, plus all her other busy, busy activities. But while Ms. Solinsky warned Lulu that becoming a full-fledged spy took years of training, “I’ll have time to teach you a set of important basics.”
Beginning, she announced, with Repair and Restore, which was also known as R and R.
Ms. Solinsky explained that spies, using special spy keys and other implements, can open any locked door they wish to open. However, she said, they may sometimes (like today) encounter certain obstacles (like a dresser) that require them to crash through a door instead. Spies also, said Ms. Solinsky, can leave any room that they have entered and searched (and wrecked) looking exactly as it had looked before, so that no one would ever know that they had been there. And that was why one of a spy’s basic skills was Repair (fix whatever needs fixing) and Restore (make it look as if it never happened).
“And that,” Ms. Solinsky told Lulu, “is what you now are going to do with your wrecked bedroom.”
“Ridiculous! Impossible!” said Lulu, sounding like the old Lulu again. “There’s a great big hole in my door and my dresser drawers are all smashed up, and my trombone is dust, and my chair . . .”
“Do ‘impossible’ and ‘ridiculous’ mean you’re refusing to obey?” Ms. Solinsky asked warningly.
“Of course that’s what it . . . ,” Lulu began, then—catching herself—continued, “DOESN’T mean. ‘Impossible’? ‘Ridiculous’? Not with Triple S as my spy teacher!”
“That is correct,” Ms. Solinsky said, “and now”—she reached into her duffel bag—“let’s get started.”
Out of her bag came a jar of extra-strength rug wash, a large tube of superglue, and a vacuum cleaner designed to retrieve and reverse. (I’ll explain about that in just a couple of seconds.) Barking out instructions, Ms. Solinsky guided Lulu as she glued all the broken pieces smoothly together and scrubbed that stinky green glop out of the rug, then used the vacuum cleaner to suck up (retrieve) all the trombone dust and rebuild (reverse) that dust into a (believe it or not!) as-good-as-new trombone.
When the work (most of which Lulu had done) was finished, and the furniture had been pushed back into place, no one would ever have guessed that it had been otherwise. No cracks where the breaks had been mended! No stain where the rug had been scrubbed! And when Lulu tested her rebuilt trombone, it (and she) sounded better than before!
“You have made a promising start,” Ms. Solinsky told Lulu, who smiled a proud smile. “And now I need to see you destroy those pictures you took of the room in its wrecked condition. I can’t take the slightest chance of having my reputation besmirched,” which is a fancy way of saying “turned to dog poop.”
Lulu kind of liked the idea of keeping those wrecked-room photographs in case she ran into problems with Ms. Solinsky. On the other hand she knew that there was only one thing she should do and that was . . . obey.
On Monday afternoon, after school, Lulu rushed into her house, yelling, “I’m home, Ms. Solinsky, and ready for training.”
(Some clever readers will wonder why Ms. Solinsky wasn’t waiting outside Lulu’s school. Some even cleverer readers will figure out that it’s because Ms. Solinsky is now Lulu’s spy trainer—not her babysitter.)
There was no answer. Lulu yelled a few more times, then ran upstairs and checked out all the rooms, repeatedly calling Ms. Solinsky’s name. Still no answer.
Back downstairs again, Lulu went racing from room to room, her heart beating fast as she called out, “Ms. Solinsky!” But the house was empty—at least it seemed empty—until Lulu reached the kitchen, where she saw someone sitting quietly on a chair. That someone definitely wasn’t Ms. Solinsky.
What Lulu saw instead was a stranger—a woman as beautiful as a movie star—with long blond hair and big blue eyes and a slinky blue dress that perfectly matched her eyes. And though, as we all know, our Lulu is not the kind of girl who frightens easily, she was shocked and alarmed to encounter this awesome blonde.
“Who are you?” Lulu demanded. “And why are you here? And what have you done with Ms. Sonia Sofia Solinsky?”
The beautiful stranger smiled at Lulu, tossed her long blond hair, and then replied in a voice as sweet as candy. “But, Lulu,” she said to her, “I AM Ms. Solinsky.”
Lulu was fainting. Well, not really fainting, but feeling so weak and wobbly in the knees that she had to sit herself down before she fell down. (And actually, though I’m the one writing this story, I also am feeling just a little faint.)
“I don’t understand. I’m so confused.” Lulu was almost babbling. “How can you be you when you have turned into a totally different person?”
Ms. Solinsky corrected her. “I have turned MYSELF into a different person. We’re finished with R and R, and now we’re moving on to basic spy lesson two, which is known as D and P—Disguise and Penetrate.”
Ms. Solinsky explained that an extremely important spy-craft technique wa
s the ability to Disguise your appearance so totally that even those closest to you wouldn’t know you were you. Just as important, she added, was being able to Penetrate, see through, others’ disguises, so you’d always be able to tell that they were them.
“We’ll work on D and P today and tomorrow,” Ms. Solinsky said to Lulu, who—completely recovered from her shock—said, “Great! Let’s go!”
Ms. Solinsky explained that she had spent all Monday morning searching through her duffel bag for various items to transform Lulu into—
“Into who?” asked Lulu, exploding with curiosity. “Who will I be?”
“You’ll see in due time,” Ms. Solinsky said. “We’ll do them one by one, and after each transformation you’ll look in the mirror. But remember, I want no complaining and no argument.”
No complaining? No argument? This was asking a lot—maybe too much—of Lulu.
Still, looking in the mirror after being disguised as a boy, Lulu had no complaints—she liked what she saw. With her hair tucked into a baseball cap, a sleek black leather jacket, and some fake brown freckles sprinkled across her nose, she’d been handsomely transformed from Lulu to Lou.
She was also okay—not thrilled, but okay—with the sight of herself disguised as a middle-aged woman, with glossy makeup, a raincoat, and high heels, though she certainly could have done without the ugly orange purse and the frizzy hair.
It was only when the mirror reflected—to Lulu’s absolute horror—a pudgy, pigtailed three-year-old girl in pink sneakers, pink ribbons, pink pants, and a pink T-shirt that Lulu had to—she desperately had to—say something.
(But before Lulu speaks, I’d like to say that if these transformations seem kind of impossible—and I’ll be among the first to admit that they do—it’s because we do not know the tricks of the trade. Spy craft can make anyone look shorter or taller; younger or older; female or male; animal, vegetable, or mineral. I may be writing this story, but the only folks here who know that stuff are Triple S, the former Head of All Spy Training, and Lulu, who is right now being trained.)
Except that maybe Lulu is about to stop being trained because—she cannot help herself—she simply HAS TO argue with Ms. Solinsky.
“A spy disguised as a pink and pigtailed three-year-old? This is positively the dopiest, dumbest, stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life!”
Ms. Solinsky looked long and hard at Lulu. “And this,” she said, “is gross insubordination”—a fancy way to say that you have seriously disobeyed me and you are doomed. “Since you have dared to question me, I hereby this minute resign as your spy trainer.”
Lulu, in a panic, sunk to the floor and, actually begging on bended knees, asked Ms. Solinsky to give her one more chance. And after a whole lot of “nos” from Ms. Solinsky and a whole lot of “please-please-please-please-pleases” from Lulu, Ms. Solinsky relented and said to Lulu, “I’ve already invested a great deal of time in your training. And therefore I will give you one more chance. I will also offer the following explanations, after which I will never again explain anything, and you never again will argue or complain.”
Ms. Solinsky proceeded to explain:
“If you wanted to put a spy in a playground or preschool or day-care center, who’s the LEAST suspicious person you could pick? The least suspicious person would be a little girl in pigtails, equipped with a hidden camera and a recording device. Have I made my point? Don’t answer. Of course I have.”
Ms. Solinsky cleared her throat again.
“And in order to prepare you for the next disguise we’re doing, so you won’t lose control when you look at yourself in the mirror, consider this question: If the bad guy you wanted to spy on was meeting another bad guy somewhere out in the country, with open fields and not a tree in sight, what disguise could you wear that would let you—without their having a clue—listen to every single word they said?”
Lulu, instead of trying to answer, took a look in the mirror. Calmly gazing back at her was . . . a cow.
By the end of Monday, Lulu had learned to disguise herself as anyone and anything. She had also learned to notice all the little mistakes and carelessnesses that would tip her off when someone else was disguised. On Tuesday, Lulu’s class would be taking a field trip to a museum, encountering many people during the day. Lulu’s spy assignment was to figure out which of these people were actually an in-disguise Ms. Solinsky.
Early on Tuesday morning, an eager Lulu was up and dressed, confident that she would ace her assignment. But after she had startled the substitute teacher and the driver of the bus by whispering, “Gotcha. I know who you are!” when she didn’t, she realized that she wasn’t that great at Penetrate. Concentrating harder and using the spy craft that she had been taught, Lulu got better as the day went on, catching Ms. Solinsky disguised as a tour guide at the museum and a cashier at the cafeteria. Her greatest moment of triumph, however, came at the very end of the afternoon, when she shrewdly figured out that the dog that was sitting in front of her house when she got home from school—a mutt that had peed profusely on her sneakers—was actually none other than Ms. Solinsky.
“I am impressed,” Ms. Solinsky told Lulu. “But don’t get carried away with yourself. We’ll see, tomorrow, how well you do when I’m teaching you H and C—Hacking and Codes.”
Hacking, Ms. Solinsky explained, was sneaking into other people’s computers—computers sending out messages (like Lulu asking Mabel to bring over cats, or bad guys plotting how to destroy the world) that you definitely weren’t ever supposed to read. Codes were ways of writing your top-secret messages so secretly that, even when hackers read what you had written, they couldn’t understand a single word.
Working with Lulu on Wednesday, Ms. Solinsky first taught her several nifty codes and then moved on to the tricks of hacking computers, solemnly explaining to her, “Hacking is wrong and not nice and against the law, but you need to learn how to do it to be a good spy.”
“And I do want to be a good spy. I do!” said Lulu—and then she dug in and learned how to hack faster than she had learned anything else in her life.
“You’ve got a natural talent,” Ms. Solinsky said to Lulu. “But don’t use it except when you’re an official spy. Because if you’re hacking to find out if Henry likes you better than he likes Nora Kaplan, you probably won’t appreciate the answer.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lulu told Ms. Solinsky, who patted her on her shoulder and replied, “You are so much better at hacking than at lying.”
G F E D C B A,
Triple S has got to stay.
June or April, March or May,
Triple S has got to stay.
Oink or quack or moo or neigh,
Triple S has got to stay.
Austin, Boston, Santa Fe,
Triple S has got to stay.
Lulu was chanting her friendly new chant as she fell asleep that night, wondering what Ms. Solinsky would teach her next. After Repair and Restore, Disguise and Penetrate, Hacking and Codes, she hardly could wait for the lesson that Thursday would bring.
Back from school on Thursday, Lulu was met at the door by Sonia Sofia Solinsky, who said to her, “We must hurry. Your parents return tomorrow night. Which means we haven’t much time for me to give you your final lesson in basic spy craft.”
She explained that this final lesson involved several clues that she had hidden all over the house, with each clue leading onward to the next. If Lulu succeeded in following them—which wouldn’t be easy to do—she would find, at the end, what the clues had been leading her to.
“Which is what?” Lulu asked. “Tell me, and I’ll get started. I’ll get started right now and be finished before bedtime.”
“I wouldn’t count on being done before bedtime,” said Ms. Solinsky. “And you aren’t permitted to know in advance what you’ll find. In fact, this particular lesson, which ends each set of my spy-craft lessons, is known as”—HERE IT COMES, FOLKS! HERE IT COMES!—“MM, which st
ands for”—YES!—“Mysterious Mission.”
(And that, I sincerely hope, takes care of that!)
MYSTERIOUS MISSION! Lulu totally loved it. And she knew without a doubt that she would succeed. Indeed, by now she was positive that she was the best spy-in-training that Sonia Sofia Solinsky—code name Triple S—had ever trained.
“Aren’t I the best spy-in-training that you have ever trained?” Lulu asked Ms. Solinsky.
“Let’s not get pushy,” Ms. Solinsky replied. Then she sat Lulu down in the kitchen, fed her an early supper, and handed her—printed neatly on a note card—the clue to where she should look for her next clue:
They have their ups.
They have their downs.
You do not like to use them.
This is the seventh one you’ve owned.
Because you always lose them.
Look inside it.
That’s where I decided
To hide it.
Lulu narrowed her eyes as she read and re-read and then re-re-read the clue. She read it to herself, and she read it out loud. After which she turned to Ms. Solinsky and asked, in a quite snippy tone of voice, “What kind of dopey, dumb, stupid clue is that?”
Good grief—has Lulu forgotten total obedience?
“Excuse me,” said Ms. Solinsky. “What did you say?”
Lulu, pulling herself together in the nick of time, replied, “Oh, I only just was saying that this clue is kind of confusing and was wondering if you could give me a little help.”
“Careful attention to each of the words,” Ms. Solinsky replied, “ought to give you all the help you need. And now I’m going up to my room and I don’t wish to be disturbed. You’re on your own.”