Andromeda Klein (3 page)

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 message 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.)

At any rate, now that Daisy and Den’s mother no longer had a predictable schedule, such visits were out of the question. There was no telling what would have happened if she’d caught Andromeda there. Andromeda had once dreamt that Mrs. Wasserstrom had stabbed her through her sleeping bag, and Daisy had claimed that her mother used to threaten her with knives when she was little. Since then, Den had managed to retrieve some books and clothes, the ankh ring, and a few other items for Andromeda. Daisy’s mom was no longer Mrs. Wasserstrom, though; she had gone back to her maiden name, MacKenzie, and now called herself Ms. like some sad teacher. Andromeda and Den had called her Miz MacKenzie, or Mizmac, sarcastically, ever since the change.

Andromeda wore the ankh ring on her first finger, of course, in the manner of the classical Renaissance mage. When the ring was on the right finger, she was supposed to manifest a Jovial, vibrant, warm, and open-hearted temperament; when it was on the left, she was supposed to switch her mood to a Saturnine, brooding, inspired melancholia. The personas were supposed to have opposite tastes and opinions, which was meant to loosen the bonds of the ego and teach tolerance by showing the arbitrariness of opinion. (This was something she had adapted from Mr. Crowley, who had imposed the exercise on his students.) Andromeda constantly found herself slipping back into Saturn regardless of which Ring Day it was. Realizing she had failed again, she switched the ring from right to left and bit the back of her hand as a punishment, but breathed an inward sigh of relief because Saturn was so much more comfortable.

“What’s my percentage?” Den was saying, meaning, what would he get in return for his services. They had been trading things for favors since they were both kids.

“What do you need?” Not drugs, she promised herself, I won’t get him drugs. The ankh ring had been exchanged for candy, but since then his tastes had …

“Feel you up?” he said.

… matured, she had been thinking.

“Gross,” she said. “How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

He looked so hurt at how hard she snorted at this that she actually made a sincere attempt to straighten out her face.

“That?” she said. “Is not going to happen.” He was twelve. She wasn’t a
complete
degenerate. “Anyway, there’s nothing to write home about on me. I wouldn’t want to cheat you.”

“Bagel worm agony,” he said.

“What?” Andromeda pulled hair and hood back from her right ear. “Wait: did you just say ‘Naked girl magazine’?”

He nodded, a very serious expression on his face that almost made her giggle again. Hadn’t computers solved the boys’ dirty-magazine problem forever? Perhaps he wanted something he could take to the elms to share with the other cubs. Well, it wasn’t as bad as drugs. She’d try to keep it as clean as she could. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She described where he would find Daisy’s tarot deck, in a yellow and purple Eye of Horus bag inside a black box with a silver glitter eight-rayed star of Ishtar on the underside of the lid, and on the outside, a heptangle glyph—a simplified version of Dr. Dee’s Sigillum Dei Aemeth painted on it in true gold leaf. The bag and the box had been Saturnalia gifts from Andromeda to Daisy a couple of years back; Andromeda had painted the sigils herself, after carefully outlining them with a compass and straightedge.

“She’d have hidden the box somewhere, away from the light and where your mom couldn’t find it, probably. A big pack of cards about this big.” She held out her hands. She took out her Moleskine notebook and drew a clumsy star of Ishtar, a squiggly version of Dee’s heptangle, and finally an Eye of Horus. “See? An eyeball. Growing from a … stalk. And a, kind of, curly branch. And an ear. And, a nose. And … an eyebrow!” She tore off the page and handed it to him. “Ta-da.”

If only it were so easy to talk to everyone. This is how privileged socially secure people get to be all the time: comfortable, unconcerned, in charge of the situation. It was hard to draw geometric sigils without a compass and straightedge, but she was very comfortable drawing Eyes of Horus freehand, partly because the more off-kilter they were, the better they looked. If there were a way to do it professionally she’d have it made.

She and Den had always gotten along. They both missed Daisy. They were both scared of Ms. MacKenzie. If only the rest of the world missed Daisy and were frightened of Mizmac to the same degree, the entire social landscape would be transformed in her favor…. Comfortable, unconcerned, in charge of the situation. The feeling passed.

The drizzle began to turn into actual rain. The bear cubs were gathering their stuff and trip-waddling down the field. Den kissed a peace sign and ran after them, holding his pants up with one hand and stumbling over his shoes. Why do they all want to show the world their underwear? “Because,” replied Alternative Universe Andromeda, “they don’t let you have belts in prison,” which actually did seem like a good point.

“See you Thursday,” he called out.

“Word,” she said quietly. Daisy and the texted “hi there” and the Two of Swords reversed were still hovering, darkening the world. Then she mouthed an expression that had been Daisy’s: “Oh, life.” She zipped up and pushed off down the path. She would be soaked by the time she reached the library.

“Trismegistus,” she said, looking toward where she supposed the sun might be if it weren’t for the iron-gray clouds.

“Jesus, Andi,” said Marlyne, one of the library assistants. “You look terrible.”

“What?” said Andromeda Klein, even as she caught up to what had been said. Then: “I try.” People who knew her well had learned not to answer every “What?” right away.

“Could you watch the desk for like ten minutes while I go get my lady on?” Marlyne meant fix her makeup. The chances of anyone coming to the front desk in the next ten minutes were close to zero. As always, the library was almost completely deserted, except for staff and a few elderly, half-alive patrons. It was the quietest place Andromeda knew, like a church or a museum, or something abandoned. The main building had a big, steep, pointed roof in front. It almost looked like it might have once been a church of some kind; though it could just as plausibly have been an International House of Pancakes. Whatever it had once been, it was now the most underutilized branch of the system. Most people went to Central, which was bigger, better located, and allegedly nicer, though Andromeda preferred the shabby, crumbling stillness of the International House of Bookcakes. The recently remodeled and modernized Central Library looked like a place in a futuristic movie where people take their kids to get their brains replaced so they can be controlled by robots.

She stared at the clock and thought about swords and blindfolds and boxes and robots in order to avoid glancing at any shiny surfaces: she didn’t even want to see what she looked like after that ride. Andromeda checked her blue phone. “Get your bony non driving ass over here jk,” said another charming text from Rosalie van Genuchten.

“I can’t think why you come here on your day off,” said Marlyne, when she returned looking marginally more sparkling. Then she added something else that sounded a bit like “Large bundle of Arthur eggs.”

“Mm,” said Andromeda. Sometimes it wasn’t worth even trying to figure them out, and
mm
was the thing to say. It meant “How interesting, and exciting.”

Andromeda only worked two weekday evenings during the school year, but she had somehow managed to leave the impression on the mom that she worked quite a bit more. At this point, though, she didn’t have anything to do on her fake work nights. Daisy had officially left this world, or most of her had. And St. Steve would not be calling up to offer to take her to the Old Folks Home. Rosalie and Siiri and Co. meant well, but they could be their own special flavor of nightmare unless you were in the mood for them—the International House of Bookcakes was the least unpleasant thing on an unsavory menu. It was quiet, and expected little of her, and it was free.