Andromeda Klein (20 page)

“Now,” she said, closing the computer. “Time for phase two.” Then she whispered the “Come on, everybody, drink” that she would have shouted if her mother hadn’t been just upstairs.

Phase two of Rosalie van Genuchten’s small and sensual gathering was a bit of a surprise. She wanted Andromeda to do drunken tarot readings for everybody.

“Come on, Drom-drom. You want to. You’ve always wanted to. It is the skill that makes you you,” Rosalie said, quoting from a motivational sign that hung above the main entry to the school quad. “And now’s your chance. Make yourself useful for once. I’m just kidding.” Amy the Wicker Girl and Bethany were looking on expectantly, and the Thing’s four eyes were also looking at her from across the room, as Robbie What’s-his-face had returned to assume his place as the Thing with Two Heads’s masculine half. They clung to each other like each was the other’s home base, as though if they lost physical contact they would shrivel and crumble to dust in the harsh alien atmosphere. It was disgusting. But the two heads were arguing into each other’s ears about something and Siiri seemed extremely agitated.

Back in her corner, Andromeda was shaking her head. She didn’t do readings for other people, especially not for people who made her nervous, and especially not when drunken.

“I only do them for myself,” she said, “and I don’t really know how to use them that way anyways.”

Daisy used to say, and Andromeda had no idea where she’d gotten this, but she had said it with authority: every time you tell your own fortune you lose a day of your life in compensation. She had obviously said this to Rosalie as well at some point, because Rosalie said:

“It’s like smoking cigarettes, though, right? Every time you do one it takes a day off your life?”

“So then,” said Amy the Wicker Girl, “depending on how long you were going to live, you could kill yourself by doing it over and over till you use up all your days?”

“And the last reading would say: and then she died.” This was from Bethany, who was crowding a little too close for Andromeda’s liking.

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Andromeda, but she was thinking, Damn, there’s suicide method number twenty that hadn’t been listed yet. But if that counted, you could also count smoking or drinking or just waiting around for natural causes, so really the rules ought to be revised to specify that the death has to take place quickly, or at least in a single sitting.

“Well then, just do it however it works. We need guidance.” Rosalie’s face assumed a dramatic, serious expression and she raised her clasped hands in a pleading gesture. Then she added, “Daisy would have done it,” which was probably true. Daisy was game for anything. And she would have done it well, too. She had been intuitive, sensitive, able to see things without understanding why. Andromeda’s mind was just not like that, however much she might have wished it were otherwise.

Rosalie relit the vanilla candles on the table and started turning off the lights in the room and drawing the curtains. “She would do it in the dark, with candles like this, probably, right?”

Bethany asked if Daisy was the girl who had died of cancer, and it somehow wasn’t enough just to say yes, that’s the one. Rosalie and Siiri began to talk about Daisy, as though they intended to tell her whole life story. It was very strange to hear them describe Daisy to strangers, to Bethany and the Wicker Girl and Stacey, who hadn’t known her at all. Had they really held her in such high regard while she had been alive? Could they have? And they all kept glancing over at the still-damp wig hanging on the coatrack while they were talking. Andromeda was trying not to think about the fact that Rosalie and Siiri had been invited to the funeral while she hadn’t, but trying not to think of something never works, so she started thinking about how these were the sorts of things people might say at a funeral for someone and soon there were tears in the corners of her eyes that she would really rather not have had there. Somehow, Afternoon Tea had turned into a kind of impromptu memorial service for Daisy Wasserstrom.

“Daisy and Andromeda were super close,” said Rosalie. “She was a teenage witch too. They had a coven and wands.”

Occultist
, thought Andromeda, teenage
occultist
. She could certainly have used an arch comment from Altiverse AK, not to say aloud, but merely to bring her back to earth and settle her emotions, but AAK had completely deserted her, as it usually did when she found herself in groups of more than two people; AAK was even shyer than primary Andromeda.

Rosalie grabbed Andromeda’s right wrist and held it up. “And
that’s
Daisy’s ring, and
that’s
her wig.” The thought foremost in Andromeda’s mind was that she really had never understood Daisy very well at all, hadn’t really known her while she was alive and sure couldn’t understand whatever part of her was still lingering.

The living Daisy had spent more time with Rosalie and Siiri, doing things Andromeda was shut out of: skiing, dancing, the boys with their endless rock groups, even the church youth group with Siiri and Daisy’s mother toward the end. All Daisy had shared with Andromeda was the
ouijanesse
. And now that she was dead, maybe that was all that was left?

“We weren’t that close,” Andromeda said, “really.”

“You were,” said Siiri. Then, turning to Bethany: “They were unseparatable. Everybody always thought they were gay together with each other.”

This was partially true. At least, Mizmac had thought so, and had blamed Andromeda, going all the way back to the time she had come home early from work and had found them drawing on each other’s legs with marking pens (for vampire tantoons that never happened because they outgrew the idea by the time they got real ink and enough unsupervised time). That was when she had started calling Andromeda an abomination.

“Oh no,” said Rosalie. “No, Andromeda likes penis. Whether or not it returns the favor. I’m just kidding.”

You could bang your head against the floor till you bled to death. That was number twenty, not counting the tarot method. Then they seemed to notice that Andromeda was borderline crying, and since Bethany was starting to look like she was liable to zoom in for an unsolicited backrub or something, Rosalie added quickly, “No, don’t, she doesn’t like to be touched,” which was usually quite true, but which also made her sound like kind of a dick, so she started to lose it just a bit more. Fortunately, her tears remained silent, subtle, and dignified, little more than a mist, like those of Niobe the Lydian princess mourning the slain Niobids.

Bethany focused a series of what seemed like increasingly reproachful “knock it off” looks on Rosalie and Siiri.

“Well, she’s totally skinny and her parents are still together,” said Siiri. “What could she possibly have to be upset about?” This was something Andromeda had heard hundreds of times, and she doubted either Siiri or Rosalie had ever experienced anyone expressing disagreement or disapproval of it, even if they did know Andromeda’s parents. But Bethany obviously found it shockingly insensitive in the context and fixed Siiri with a clear, solid “what the fuck” look.

The only person in the room who grasped anything of the powerful effect the casual “memorial service” had had on Andromeda was the one she had just met. Bethany leaned slightly against Andromeda, a clear “I’m joining your team now” gesture, and Andromeda let her. Once she gave in, it felt nice. She was telling herself to suck it up buttercup and pull herself together when she noticed that, as though evoked by the conversation about her, Daisy’s scent was flooding into the room, citrus and cinnamon and something sour and unidentifiable, first coming underneath and soon overwhelming the vanilla candle scent. Was there any way to ask if the others could smell it too, without seeming like a total freak? No, there was not.

She felt Daisy in the room, as though she had just walked in, almost as though she had been conjured. Deeper shadows amongst the shadows in the corners of the room in the flickering light seemed to move if she squinted, but she couldn’t make out their lines. The tears dried up. She was tense, wary now. Bracing herself, feeling a deepening chill.

“Okay,” said Andromeda. Something weedgie this way comes. It wouldn’t do to waste it, in case it was something instead of nothing, even though it was an unlikely venue for consulting the Book of Thoth. “We can look at the cards a little.” You take your
ouijanesse
where you find it.

The actual reading was a bit of a dud to begin with, but it ended with a kind of bang. First, Andromeda had to go back up to the bathroom once again, because she suddenly remembered that the mom chip was no longer in the red phone and she wasn’t sure what would happen if the mom were to try to call or check her stats while it was still rattling around in her pocket, so she wanted to switch it back just to quiet her anxiety and to be on the safe side. It was unlikely that St. Steve would reply to the “toy away” message till the next day, anyway: he almost never texted in the evenings as a rule, but rather in the day or afternoon, from work.

But when she looked at her phone there was a message, and it was puzzling and a little disheartening. “toy away?” it said. How could he have forgotten
toy away?
Slightly disoriented, she replied, with no cute typos in order to make it crystal clear, “thinking of you and wild about you!!!” surrounded by several asterisks. Gods. What was wrong with him? But she didn’t text anything more than that because he didn’t like drama and she was trying to start over and behave herself properly this time around. When she replaced the mom phone chip in the red phone, she noted three “good night honey don’t forget to …” texts from the mom and another one that said “fucking griefers,” which meant that Wildman_B’s smashed-up virtual Harley-Davidson had had its intended impact.

She could hear the other girls laughing and whispering and scuffling around as she went down the steps. When she entered the candlelit playroom, however, they were seated in the middle of the floor, looking up at her expectantly. They had pushed the table out of the way to clear a space. The room was still dark and shadow-flickered, and the Daisy scent remained faintly. The
ouijanesse
had abated considerably by the time she sat down, but Andromeda’s feet and fingertips were still cold from before and her skin was tingling. Daisy had often talked about being “frozen out” by spirits and entities, a phenomenon Andromeda had never experienced with anything like the same intensity. How strange to think that Daisy might well be the one doing the freezing.

“Siiri and What’s-his-face and their dear little Jesus friend What’s-her-name had to go,” said Rosalie. “All this devil worship is against their religion.”

Hermetic divination was hardly devil worship; quite the contrary. The exploration of the Universe was a holy thing. Even if there was a dark reality on the nightside of the bright tree, how could anyone object to seeking to understand these balanced processes? That was why Siiri had been so cranky and agitated, and it figured. Mizmac and the other steak antlers in the Community Bible Center Church had been the same way about tarot cards and Ouija boards, one reason Daisy had had to hide her tools and materials so carefully. Unlike the dad, Andromeda did not despise the steak antlers. There are certainly worse and less understandable things in this world than to be dazzled by Tiphareth.

Andromeda’s usual method of interpreting tarot spreads involved several books scattered around the room and a notebook and sometimes even a calculator with which to make sketches and diagrams and to test the astrology and the gematria and other correspondences. She would bound from book to book and page wildly through them. It could take hours. In Rosalie’s playroom she had none of her reference books with her, no Agrippa, no Master Therion, no A. E. or Frater Achad or Mrs. John King van Rensselaer. This would be more like a game, more like a performance, or a stunt, a test of how well she could fake it, unless the
ouijanesse
returned and took over. She would have to make do, all alone, with the rudimentary little white booklet from her Pixie deck, whatever she could remember of the Tree of Life and the Hebrew alphabet, and the broad structures and analysis of the as-yet-unwritten
Liber K
, the concentrated, unexpanded raw material of which rested somewhere in her deep mind, like a dense unhatched egg.