Andromeda Klein Read online

  There had been a good illustration of the Soror Imperfecta Disorganized-Collagen Effect in its classic form earlier that day, at the end of sixth-period Language Arts, when a girl she didn’t really know but who was also in her Key-boarding class had asked Andromeda Klein if she was into wicker. Her name was Amy something.

  Wicker? Andromeda’s first thought was of the rattan patio set the Kleins used to have back in the days when they lived in a much larger, much nicer detached home in the Hillmont hills and actually had a reason to own patio furniture—that is, a patio. Now all they had was a narrow deck and a driveway, and a semi-enclosed carport.

  So Andromeda’s response to Amy Something was: “Yes, I celebrate all furniture of the world.” Or rather, Alternative Universe Andromeda Klein said that. Actual Plain Old Universe Andromeda just muttered the word furniture and looked confused, then reflexively pulled her hair back from her good ear and murmured “What?” Amy Something rolled her eyes, said “Freak” or “Weak,” or possibly “Geek.” As usual, even as her mouth was forming the “What?” Andromeda had worked it out: “wicca,” witchcraft, she meant.

  There was more to Andromeda than her ouijanesse (the Daisy-Andromeda term describing their own spooky, occult experiments—pronounced “weedgie-ness”). She hated being looked at and analyzed, and she did her best to keep what was secret hidden. People with mildly disorganized collagen, the books said, could be “visually difficult to distinguish in the general population,” and the same went for the weedgie, if they didn’t advertise their ouijanesse. Most in the General Population saw Andromeda Klein as quiet, shy, too small, too skinny, nondescript, in her own world, even “stuck-up” because of her frequent insecure silences—a weak freak or geek, maybe, but not necessarily a weedgie one.

  Nevertheless, the Amy girl must have noticed something: Daisy’s ankh ring on her first finger or her tarot deck in her backpack when she was putting away her Language Arts journal, which Mr. Barnes had just returned with a See me note. Perhaps this girl was herself “into wicker” and had wanted to make friends, compare wicker notes? To gather information for some future program of harassment? Either way, the moment had passed. Making enemies was astonishingly easy. All you had to do was stand there.

  No, not “wicca,” certainly not. Andromeda and Daisy had had their witch phase, which they had called “doing spells.” This was their own Hellfire Club, one of many two-girl organizations they had dreamt up and dropped over the years till Daisy’s death put a stop to the process. The Stealers, the Dirties, Girls in the Mist, the Ninety-threes, the Ladies Spiritual, and many more—all harmless, except perhaps for the Murderers, which had overlapped with the witchcraft club in its herbalist phase, and also with Daisy’s murder-mystery kick and her idea to found a kind of Reverse Detective Agency, dedicated to plotting the Perfect Murder. That one hadn’t turned out so well. Poor old Mrs. Finn. Her illness, in fact, had had nothing to do with the belladonna, still less with any spell, Andromeda was sure of that. But they had shredded and burned their workbooks, of course, and never mentioned the project again. It would have been hard to explain.

  The Stealers, a two-girl shoplifting ring, had also ceased to be when Daisy had been caught and issued a warning and had been banned from entering any Mervyn’s for life, a ban that had now expired.

  All that wicker now embarrassed Andromeda faintly. Her views had changed a bit since those days, when she had always instinctively deferred to Daisy’s confident, yet uninformed, will. Real magick, Andromeda had come to believe, was a complex science that required far more training and study than most people could manage in a single lifetime. It was presumptuous to fake it, maybe even dangerous if you annoyed the wrong Intelligences with your yammering and blundering, or manifested and let slip Things you couldn’t control. Daisy had had no such qualms. She just charged in as though she knew everything, and the spells she “did” were a mishmash of poorly researched nonsense, culled from a variety of suspect sources. It was no wonder nothing had ever quite “worked.” Yet Daisy had had gifts, or at least luck; quite often her uninformed impulses had turned out to reflect real insight upon further study.

  It had always been maddening that Daisy put in such little effort yet did so well, while Andromeda slaved away tirelessly with little result. But reality had to be faced: it had been Daisy’s role to act and Andromeda’s to study and interpret, in magic as in much else.

  Daisy had used the words witchcraft and magick interchangeably, a common enough habit. Wicker isn’t a bad term, Andromeda concluded: a naïve, cuddly-wuddly, immature, reckless, faintly embarrassing, rather low form of shallow, new age, mock-religious garden furniture, constructed by techniques supposedly stretching back to remote prehistory but actually fabricated and plagiarized in the 1940s e.v. by a sad old English guy named Gerald and of no use whatsoever in the real world of narrow decks and driveways. Real magick wouldn’t be wicker: it would be a golden throne radiating astral light. Or perhaps merely a tree stump.

  “You are a good student, Andi,” Baby Talk Barnes had said after Amy the Wicker Girl had left them alone in room C-12. “But if you don’t put more effort into your journal, you will fail this class.” As though anyone with perfect attendance ever got less than a B in any subject at Clearview High School. Andromeda Klein’s Language Arts journal had had only two entries for the week. Five would have been an A, twenty points each. You could write almost anything in there and get a nineteen or twenty. Her entry about how giraffes have long necks had earned a twenty-five, because it had been almost a whole page. “Here are some other things that are long: roads, time, spoons, knives, poles, string, rope, swimming pools, sighs …” (Sighs had earned a red exclamation point.) Wide margins and large handwriting were the key. But Andromeda tended to have other things on her mind, and coming up with entries that were numerous enough to satisfy Mr. Barnes yet bland enough that he wouldn’t be inspired to turn her in for psychological re-programming was more than she could manage sometimes.

  “There’s no wool against shaking things up, if you don’t like kisses,” said Mr. Barnes.

  By “kisses,” he meant “essays.” “Wool” was how he said rule. Disorganized collagen was not to blame for that one: he had trouble with his Rs, as well as a slight lisp, which was why everyone called him Baby Talk.

  “How about a poem? Or dwaw a pick-thaw? Multimedia it up!” The expression on his face was evidently meant to be sly, or devil-may-care, or something.

  Despite the speech impediment, Mr. Barnes thought of himself as the Cool Teacher type, which was quite an impressive demonstration of the power of self-esteem. He had a leather jacket and wore cowboy boots, and tended to do things like trying to turn multimedia into a verb. “You owe me thwee,” he said with what might have been intended as a wink, “pwuff two fwom waft week and …” She didn’t catch the last part. She would have to come up with at least ten entries for next time, just to stay even.

  Andromeda Klein, now pedaling past the Community Bible Center Church on Broadway, envisioned a journal entry that went Thingv I am bad at: dwawing, witing poemv, multimedia-ing … making eye contact … Her thoughts strayed to less amusing avenues.

  Her red mom-phone vibrated in her backpack and she had to stop in front of the post office to dig it out.

  “Dromeda, honey, have you left school yet?” asked the mom.

  “Yes,” said Andromeda, hanging up, hating her name.

  “Bone to pick with you,” said the mom after vibrating in again, meaning she was ready to recite today’s list of instructions, schedules, and complaints. Andromeda hung up and pressed Reject when the phone vibrated again. Seven messages had been left since the morning switch-off. The mom had advice on everything: how to pour coffee, how not to drink water, how to pet the cat, how to read the newspaper, how not to shut the front door, the right way to stand or sit, the way you should and should not breathe, on and on. Complaints were generally texted in truncated form during the day and later elaborated into a full lectu
re. The day a person’s mother discovers text messaging is a dark day indeed. Delete All.

  “I am at work,” she texted back, and switched the red phone off and returned it to its usual place in her makeup bag.

  She panicked slightly when she couldn’t feel her blue phone—her “real” one—in her bag, but there it was in the outside pocket. No new messages, one saved, which was St. Steve’s deeply disappointing final text, now rather ancient:

  “Hi there just checking in hope ur well, miss me?”

  Hi there. There were no words for how much that “hi there” had hurt, and he’d had to have known it, too. It was still hard to look at. Before, it might have been “hey gooey” or “hi authe.” (“Authe” was a predictive text typo for “cutie;” “gooey” was “honey” though it could also be “goofy.”) She had texted back “toy away,” which meant “thinking of you and wild about you.” Wild was right. She had been wild, panic-stricken, as action-populated as she had ever been. There had been no response. That was when everything had finally begun to go wrong, as it had been intending to from the beginning. Then Daisy had died and the final spark had gone out of Andromeda’s life.

  As always, something prevented her from deleting the message. She stared at it, dwelling on the pain. Or maybe, to be honest, the name for this version of the “hi there” distress wasn’t really hurt, since at this late stage it was different from the frantic, desperate madness it had once evoked. A cold, mature despair, it might be called—a growing thing, becoming ever more complex as it aged. Bitter wine.

  Despite her best efforts to remain distant and neutral, thinking of Daisy and the “hi there” had its usual effect: Andromeda felt hot tears blown across her cheeks by the wind, sliding back into her ears, and prickling a little as they dried.

  You weren’t supposed to read the pictures on the cards literally, they were symbols, and Pixie’s pictures had little basis in the mainstream of traditional tarot anyway. But Andromeda Klein couldn’t help seeing something of herself in the Two of Swords girl. She made a quiet explosion sound against the roof of her mouth and imagined herself bursting into flames as she rolled down Glen Crest Boulevard. She was also thinking about her box, and about another sort of box as well.

  Here’s the reason for the sound effect, and how it tied into the Two of Swords, reversed, and why she was also thinking about a couple of boxes. At moments of minor stress, ever since she was small, Andromeda Klein had found relief and comfort in thoughts and images that most people would find repellent. They were not the sorts of things you said aloud, nor would anyone write them in a Language Arts journal. One was to imagine her own head being blown apart, either from outside as from a bullet or in the form of some pressure-relieving explosion from within. For a second everything disappeared, but not really. She knew a head explosion shouldn’t be a comforting thought, but it was, and she had given up trying to stop thinking about it. No one else knew about it, so nobody would have been impressed by her sacrifice if she had been able to prevent the thought from arising.

  Andromeda’s thoughts about head explosions and boxes were interrupted by a text message from Rosalie van Genuchten:

  “you will be very very VERY sorry if you miss AT today …”

  “AT” stood for Afternoon Tea, a semiregular after-school gathering where Rosalie and the other dime soda friends Andromeda had inherited from Daisy would congregate and attempt to drink the contents of this or that parent’s liquor cabinet.

  Andromeda was the same age but a junior, because she had been held back in elementary school in a vain effort to increase her size relative to her classmates. She had never been sure she and Afternoon Tea were cut out for each other, an attitude that had earned her the nickname Stick or Sticky, short for “walking around with stick up butt” (though it also could refer to her slender, featureless body, which everyone seemed to feel was fair game for ridicule—Anorexia Klein was another one, and so was Fence Post. Sometimes it was Stucky). Andromeda was always technically welcome to Afternoon Tea, but was formally invited like this, she suspected, only to bump up the numbers when it was feared there might be poor attendance. This had begun to happen more and more frequently as the girls in the group got real boyfriends, jobs, a life, etc. (Dime soda was AK lexicon for “kindasorta.”)

  Andromeda one-thumb-texted a polite, regretful RSVP as her front wheel cut through another puddle and she sped past what they used to call the Dog Area. There were no dogs out in the rain today, though she thought she could smell them and the smell of wet dogs always reminded her of St. Steve’s car.

  And with that, her thoughts returned to the exploding head meditation and then to the Andromeda Box. Thinking about the Box could put her in a kind of trance. She would picture herself tightly bound up like a mummy in raw silk, unable to move at all, in a box with an oval hole that just fitted her face. Her eyes were either bound shut, or they were covered with a gauzy fabric that revealed only shadows. Sometimes, a mask of heavy iron, with a small breathing hole, would be placed over her face and bolted to the box. A dark, silent figure would occasionally come to remove her mask, to give her food and water, and to ensure she was still alive. The binding and the box held her together when she felt she was falling apart, yet it also kept the world out. Symbols inscribed on her lid warned intruders of a terrible fate for their transgressions. The Andromeda Box meditation made her feel safe when nothing else could.

  She wasn’t quite certain why the Two of Swords, reversed, made her think of her box, but it did, and it soothed. It was a cheap and shaky sort of peace, but it was all her world had to offer at the moment, and she was happy to take it.

  Perhaps the association was due to another box, the one she had painted black and decorated with sigils and given to T ∴ H ∴ Daisy W ∴ to house her tarot deck in its Eye of Horus bag, from within which last night’s dream had seemed to unfold.

  Rosalie was on the phone, but Andromeda rejected the call. Andromeda was a girl with a mission, and she had one stop to make before the library. Despite the weather, she was pretty sure he’d be there, by the grove of elms on the border of the middle school’s lower fields, his group’s after-school spot. And she was right. There he was with his friends: Twice Holy Daisy Wasserstrom’s younger brother Den. Andromeda was not welcome in what had been Daisy’s house, so Den was her only way in.

  i.

  Andromeda Klein paused for a moment by the middle-school drinking fountains to regain composure and clean herself up. Her eyeliner was supposed to be smear-proof, but the eyeliner people obviously hadn’t tested it on weeping teenaged girls riding through drizzle-wind. Her Egyptian eyes were mere smudges. She swung her bike up the asphalt lane and stopped about ten yards from the boys. They scrambled to hide their cigarettes and whatnot when they noticed her. They were bear cubs, sparring, grappling, tumbling. Their loose-laced puffy sneakers were giant kitten feet. Their clothes … when, historically, had the males of the world lost the ability to dress themselves? Somewhere along the line someone had decided it was desirable to look like you had lost control of your faculties.

  One of the boys called out something that sounded like “pelican heater moosh mosh.”

  “I’d hit that,” said another, preposterously, “four times.”

  Den punched them goodbye and stumbled over to Andromeda. She thought she smelled pot.

  “Umba,” she said, in that “I’m gonna tell on you” way. But he knew she was kidding.

  “Ninety-three,” said Den. He had overheard Daisy and Andromeda greet each other like this. He had no idea what it meant—how could he?—and so it was in fact rather inappropriate, but it was a small way of invoking Daisy’s memory, a thing they could share. She always smiled at least a little when she heard it coming from him.

  “Ninety-three,” said Andromeda, feeling a little silly. Then she haltingly added “Ninety-three/ninety-three,” feeling even sillier. She wasn’t sure whether you were technically even supposed to say that part aloud. People on messa
ge boards had jumped all over her for using this abbreviation of the formal Thelemic greeting. That ended her participation in the message boards, though not her interest in the 93 current. “Any time people form groups,” the dad would often say, “they begin to worship dead things and to persecute heretics.” He was talking about the government and religion, and how his record store and label had been kicked out of the anarcho-libertarian collective. But it was as true of magick as of anything else. Magical nostalgia had little to do with the scientific evaluation and exploration of a live magical current. She was on her own, a solitary theoretician-practitioner, by design and default. (By Design and Default was to be the subtitle of volume X of Liber K, the only one bound in red, and meant to be shelved upside down.)

  Den was looking at her with a goofy half-smile.

  She asked, just in case, if his house had burned down last night, and he said it hadn’t.

  “That’s good. Because I need you to get something from Daisy’s room.” Then she added, “That’s not the only reason it’s good, obviously.”

  Den tilted his face and gave her a puzzled-dog look.

  “I mean, I’m very glad your house didn’t burn down.”

  Dog look.

  “Seriously.”

  He continued to stare till she realized he was kidding.

  Daisy’s bedroom had been kept more or less intact since she died. Den had let Andromeda in a few times, while his mother was still working a regular schedule. On one visit Andromeda had spent an entire hour kneeling by Daisy’s bed with closed eyes, smelling, remembering, missing her. She had also attempted to do some scrying, with Den assisting as scribe, in the cramped walk-in closet that had once been an altar site of the New New Temple of T ∴ H ∴ Tris, as well as the Barbie Hospital and Star Chamber of the Ladies Spiritual. (The scrying had been unsuccessful, as always. Andromeda Klein, like Dr. Dee, had scant talent as a medium, just as Den was useless as a scribe: his transcription page had in the end shown little more than doodles of a marijuana leaf and a guitar shaped like a machine gun. She had tried him out as a scryer, too—this as a scientific experiment to test whether Twice Holy Daisy Wasserstrom’s scrying ability might have had a hereditary aspect—and the results were clearly negative. Dennis Wasserstrom was no Edward Kelley. “I see a wine bottle,” he had said. “I see a candle behind the wine bottle. The bottle is on a card table in a closet. There is a girl named Millie staring at me with kissable lips….” Millie was one of Andromeda’s names, derived from the fact that according to Agrippa’s system of gematria for Latin characters, her full name added up to an even thousand; that is, M or mille. That was the name she had given St. Steve when he had asked about her M pendant, so he had called her Millie, when he didn’t call her goofy or gooey.)