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.