Andromeda Klein (34 page)

The stuff in the carport, however, had been quite jumbled up and disarranged. It looked like a cyclone had hit it. The mom wasn’t going to like this at all. Papers, circuit boards, tools, wires, magazines, boxes, were all upended and scattered.

She was unlocking her bike, looking around for any stray magazines that might be of interest to Den, when she noticed a small, crumpled and damp pile of papers that had the unmistakable look of Emily’s drawings. They must have been tucked somewhere and dislodged and accidentally excavated by the dad’s search for his own incriminating documents amidst all the remains of all the previous inhabitants this house had ever known. She picked it up and got a jolt from the mother of all synchs, because on the top sheet it said, in clear though faded and also slightly running blue ink,
KING OF SAC
. Closer inspection revealed that the full text was actually
THINKING OF SAC
, above a map of the state of California. It looked a lot like someone’s school assignment, and perhaps it had been, but then someone had scribbled little skulls and crossbones all over it, as though to mark the cities. She ran inside to spread the five sheets out to dry over her bed, noticing some of the tarot-y themes from her other Emily drawings: the flying eagle motorcycle, the crowned pentagram boy, the burning towers, the demon-alien child clawing its way out of a stick figure’s belly, though these seemed a bit less carefully drawn, yet somehow more mature. She sealed her door with a quick “Curse be on all who enter” hexagram ritual, and also said a little prayer to Isis that the mom be prevented from intruding. Now she was going to be late for sure.

There was a smashed-up old portable tape player in the mud by one of the carport posts. Andromeda would have thought nothing of it, except that the partially exposed, grubby, and peeling label of the cassette sticking out of it had some strange writing on it, and when she picked it up it was another huge-ass synch, because though it was very hard to make out what it said, it began with a
ZOS
(clearly a reference to Austin Osman Spare’s
Anathema of ZOS)
and it ended with a
666
. Now, that was weedgie.

What could be on the tape? It was her understanding that Cthulhu rock was a fairly recent phenomenon, and this cassette was clearly very old. She removed the tape and pocketed it. She was sorely tempted to blow off school entirely and sift through the newly uncovered carport layers, but she was already near her missed-days limit for the year and she had no intention of repeating the whole asinine junior year if she could help it. Once was far, far more than enough. The total content of her eleven and a half years of formal education, including the years at the Gnome School, could easily have been covered, minus bullying and training in awkward social interaction, in a mildly paced two-week seminar.

“Why don’t they at least give you that option?” she asked Dave, who was sitting in the middle of the driveway eyeing her coldly, clearly having no answer for that one.

She regretted sending her “when can I see you?” reply text to UNAVAILABLE the second she pressed Send. Too much, too much. That was how she’d lost him the first time. And of course, there was no response, though to be fair, he often failed to respond even when there was no possible reason for him to be exasperated with her.

She was giving herself the “You are such an idiot” lecture under her breath as she pedaled to school, while speed-dialing Byron’s number, and the timing was such that he picked up just as she was saying it.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” said Byron.

“No, not you,” she said. “Some stupid girl.” She cleared her throat, thinking about how it was no wonder he had been hurt by her offhand dismissal of the song earlier, and how he might well be hurt by her admitting to not actually having listened to it till now. “So, I listened to the song. I’m sorry, really sorry I didn’t notice it before, and …” She braked to let a bus go by. “It was, well, just thanks. It was super nice of you to do.” She felt like she was going to start crying again, so she hung up.

That went well
, said Huggy.

Was it her imagination, or were people at school looking at her with even greater puzzlement and revulsion than they usually did? Did she look weirder than usual? She was buzzing from the electricity of the successful dream invocation of the King of Sacramento, and vibrating inside from the memory of his gentle, loving, commanding silk kiss—if she had been a cat it would have come out as a gentle purring. She worried about St. Steve. She was inexplicably emotional about the emogeekian’s dorky song, though maybe,
possibly
, that could just be period hormone emotions run amok. She was worried about the dad. She was thinking about Daisy. She was listening for Huggy. She was just the same as she always was, except maybe more so.

She was also arrayed in Daisy gear: the vinyl coat, the studded belt with the skull buckle, with new holes punched in it to fit, and the knitted fingerless gauntlets. But not the wig. Rather, a plastic headband that looked kind of mod and hurt her scalp satisfyingly. Few would remember Daisy, or even know about her, but maybe they sensed the weedginess. Andromeda liked the clothes. They made her feel closer to Daisy. And maybe they would help attract Daisy and induce her to reveal more of whatever the hell she was up to out there. Daisy’s scent hovered everywhere around her as she rode, then walked, like she was in a little Daisy cloud.

Even Baby Talk Barnes seemed to be eyeing her strangely. When he handed back her Language Arts journal, it was another fairly major synch, because the score he had given her on it was a 93. There had been lots of weedgie items in this one, the GAAP and AMY sigils, the little story about A. E. Waite learning to ride a bicycle and getting his mustache caught in a tree, and the spooky cannibalized Emily drawing of the burning church that looked quite a lot like the Tower. Maybe he was secretly a weedgie person, and this score was a coded greeting. She stared at him, expecting a wink or something.

“Ninety-three,” she said tentatively, going up to him after class.

“Ninety-what?” he said. She couldn’t tell whether he was teasing her, or really clueless.

“Just, you know, ninety-three,” she said.

“Oh, wight,” said Baby Talk Barnes, catching on. “Good jou-ah-nal sco-ah.” He always pronounced
Rs
as “ah” when they were at the end of syllables.

So it was not a message after all; just a synch.

Then
came the wink. A.E., she oathed, how would she ever know?

“I weally loved the dwawing,” he said. “Gweat stuff. I had no idea you had such talent. Mo-wa like that, please.”

Rosalie caught up with her on her way to Nutrition.

“Okay, Androma-Daisy,” she said. “Ran out of your own clothes or something? Anyhow, it’s an improvement over the Grim Reaper look. Leg warmers for your arms. That’s hip. So: good news. The Samoans and the Mexicans all think you put a curse on Lacey Garcia that backfired on to Empress and made her fall and break her leg. So they all want to kick
your
ass now. Well, more than they did before.”

“Good news?”

“Oh, yes,” said Rosalie, “actually, now that you mention it, that’s not really instinctively good news, is it? In fact, it’s a little bit bad. But on the bright side, they’re all scared of you now, and you can easily outrun the big ones on those sweet little legs of yours. No, the good news is Charles has come crawling back to me and is begging for my forgiveness. He’s coming home this week and my plan is to torment him. And I owe it all to you and your gift of prophesary. So, quickly, you have to help: I need you to give me some hickeys for the big night.”

“What? No, that would be too weird. What about Gas Station Boy?”

“Joshua’s hickeys are no longer welcome in this jurisdiction,” she said. “Besides, I’d like a friend to do it. You’d do it for Beth, no fucking doubt. Skidding.”

Andromeda turned bright red. Her headband itched.

“I’ll think about it,” Andromeda finally said. The whole thing could be a big joke, or it could be real. Either way, it was nearly impossible to say no to Rosalie van Genuchten. “Not here, though. I’m sure that would be an expellable offense.”

“Fucking pshaw,” said Rosalie. “Those socks are just not staying up on you, are they?” And she was right. Andromeda’s legs were too skinny for her over-the-knee stripey socks. She had put on two pairs of black tights underneath to add thigh girth, but it just hadn’t been enough.

In the vacuum, while Andromeda was sadly taking off the socks, Rosalie explained what she really had meant by good news before she got sidetracked by Empress and revenge hickeys and socks. Word had gotten out about Andromeda’s special powers of “prophesary” and pretty much everyone wanted her to do their cards now.

“You trust me,” said Rosalie, “there’s going to be a line around the block at lunch today. Try to keep it positive, string bean. And don’t say I never did anything for you. Remember to have them cross your palm with silver. Make enough money, maybe you can afford to finally put your mom in a home like you’ve always dreamed of.”

It was in Trigonometry that Andromeda Klein looked over her Language Arts journal, and thought about MacGregor Mathers and his plagiarized conjuring missteps and the monk copyists with their senseless quills, and it clicked. The GAAP and AMY sigils in the journal. The King was hinting, wasn’t he, that simply drawing their sigils might have managed to evoke them by accident, and that now they were bedeviling her, complicating her world and causing mischief?

Then Andromeda said, out loud, it looked like, because everybody turned around and stared at her: “You know, it isn’t actually as cool as you seem to think it is to say that all the time.”

This was because Huggy had said
Bingo. Okay
, It added,
how about: You are correct, Miss I Think I’m So Much Cooler Than My Own Holy Guardian Angel
.

Andromeda didn’t even wait for Ms. Kendall-Hauptmann to kick her out formally. She just wordlessly gathered her stuff, left the classroom, and headed for the café, grateful for the unexpected free period. She saw a couple of Empress’s friends in the distance and waited around a corner, just in case Rosalie was right, or not joking, that they were actively seeking her destruction rather than just passively approving of the idea in general as usual. The last thing she needed was to hear them coming up behind her telling her she dropped something or asking if they could ask her a question. That never, ever ended well.