Andromeda Klein (29 page)

“There,” said Rosalie to Bethany, turning Andromeda’s face toward her. “Now, that’s what Daisy looked like. Except less frightened and emaciated. Or is that emancipated? What is it, mance or mace?”

“I think it’s mace,” said Andromeda dryly.

It was true: she was wearing Daisy’s wig, and now she was also wearing a kind of Daisy mask. She didn’t really look like Daisy, but Rosalie had captured something of Daisy’s style, and it did look pretty good with the blond wig. Andromeda felt like a piece of art.

“I think I lost one of my cards at your house the other night,” said Andromeda abruptly, remembering the missing World. “Did you maybe see it?”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Rosalie, waving away the question. She was repacking her purse and shifting around preparing to open the door and get out of the car. She reached behind the seat and handed Andromeda a book. It was a big, heavy hardcover book, but it was too dark to read the title. Andromeda didn’t realize she was sniffing it till Rosalie said: “How’s it smell?” It actually smelled very nice, with a slightly different type of mustiness than the older IHOB books.
Dave’s head
, said Huggy.
It smells like the back of Dave’s head
, and It was right. Andromeda had always loved Dave’s head’s dusty smell, but this was the first time she had realized that Dave smelled like a book. Suddenly, and somehow, in a tiny, tiny way, just a sliver, her world made a little more sense. Perhaps that was all this night was meant to teach her. If so, she was ready to go home right now.

Rosalie was already out of the car and on her way down the sidewalk to the station with Bethany close behind and didn’t even hear Andromeda’s “What is it?” There was enough light when Andromeda opened her door to see the title:
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
. Another classic Rosalie joke: off-the-wall, vaguely insulting in some indefinable way. Perhaps the joke was, Andromeda needed a reference book to know about that topic? She would open the book and it would be inscribed something like:
So you’ll know what to do if the time ever comes
.

That seemed to be the thrust of it, because Rosalie called out to her without looking back, using Andromeda’s least favorite of all her names: “Come on, Man-dromeda, step it up!” But then she added, “I mean, Androma-Daisy!”

“Josh,” said Rosalie to the boy in the booth as she set down her shopping bag of supplies. “Where’s Darren?”

“Who are you?” said the boy apparently named Josh, looking puzzled and a little sleepy. “And who’s Darren?”

Rosalie pulled her hair back and put her face right up to his: “Remember me, from last night? I had my hair up?”

“Oh, right,” he said. “The crazy Derek groupie from the high school who claims she goes to the College Behind Mervyn’s. Fifi, right? I didn’t recognize you with all those clothes on and being able to stand up without falling down and stuff.” So he was just teasing her after all. Andromeda really had to marvel at people like Bethany and now this Josh, who could handle Rosalie so easily. Nuit knew, Andromeda couldn’t do it, but those who could manage the right dismissive, faintly amused manner could render Rosalie eager to please, almost deferential.

“It’s Felicity,” said Rosalie. “And these are the girls I was telling you about, Stella and Georgie. So where’s Darr—uh,
ek
? Really? It was
ren
, I thought. No, I’m sure it’s
ren
. But never mind. We have brought refreshments. We made cupcakes.” The last bit was said in a kind of pleading manner. She was craning her neck, as though the elusive Darren-ek might be hiding coyly behind the Coke machine. “He said how much he liked cupcakes.”

You’ve got to be kidding
, said the distant Huggy voice, and Andromeda shared Its skepticism about the proposition that Darren-ek had said anything at all about liking “cupcakes” while the two of them had been doing whatever it was they had been doing while “Felicity” had been, apparently, not overly dressed and falling off her shoes last night. But there were the cupcakes in a Tupperware tub in Rosalie’s hands. Andromeda was trying to work out whether she was supposed to be Stella or Georgie in this scenario. If you’re going to do alternate identities, as Rosalie often liked to do, it’s a good idea to tell your accomplices beforehand, isn’t it?
Stella
meant “star,” so it would have been more apt for Bethany;
Georgie
was boyish, the one who kissed the girls and made them cry, so that was about right; it just figured. Not that it made much of a difference. Andromeda was planning to remain completely silent, whatever her name was supposed to be, and to wait it out. The prospects for a surprise beer-and-baked-goods party seemed fairly grim, and as the actual target of the scheme was nowhere to be found, it didn’t seem like it would last too long. She looked at her phone (no messages) and imagined getting home early enough to take another picture for St. Steve or even attempt another tantoon ritual. In the meantime, perhaps she could find a quiet corner where she could read
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
. Possibly there was a chapter on cupcakes that would explain everything.

Andromeda liked how this Josh referred to the target as Darren-ek dryly and without missing a beat or making a big deal of it, exactly as Andromeda herself had been doing in her head since Rosalie had said it. Other than that, he was not particularly impressive, a generic, uninteresting guy. Darren-ek wasn’t working tonight, he said. There was a chance he might stop by later, but probably not. When Rosalie suggested that Josh call him to let him know they were there, Josh said: “Why don’t you call him yourself? Oh, that’s right, he didn’t give you his number!” The secret was in the easygoing, confident, joking tone. Andromeda couldn’t have pulled that off if her life depended on it. He was probably a Sagittarius, like Rosalie herself, born with a quiver of arrows and a license to be an asshole.

He said he would text Darren-ek, and he made a big deal out of poking his fingers at his phone, but it looked like pretend-texting to Andromeda. Everybody was smiling good-naturedly, though. Bethany looked nowhere near miserable or annoyed at being dragged there, as Andromeda felt she had a right to be, and even Rosalie’s crestfallen look was comparably mild.
Darren-ek doesn’t want to be reached
, said a vague, buzzy Huggy vibration from somewhere behind Andromeda’s upper jaw.
He’s protecting him. That’s what friends are for
. Protection from unwanted Rosalie action—everybody could use a Josh, really.

It was decided that they might as well drink the beers and eat the cupcakes while waiting for Darren-ek to arrive.

“Stella can tell our fortunes,” said Rosalie, sitting back against the tiny office’s partition wall. “She has a gift. Stained flowers.” “Strange powers,” she probably meant to say. “She did readings the other night and they all came true. She predicted that my fuck-head ex-boyfriend would cheat on me and even could tell the names of the whores he did it with.” She continued with a rather inflated list of other aspects of Andromeda’s readings that had proven to be accurate, including Rosalie’s own activities with Darren-ek (“I’m sure he told you about it, the full play-by-play—and that one she did
over the phone
. That’s what I’m talking about.”) and her mother’s being “called away” on “important business” for the weekend and taking the car keys with her, and being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There were other ones Andromeda hadn’t even known about, such as Bethany’s father getting a new job, and Bethany coming into money of her own (she apparently had gotten news of having won a scholarship of some kind) and Empress falling ill and maybe having to go to the hospital.

These interpretations were all iffy, exaggerated reports of Andromeda’s own charlatanism, and some were flat-out wrong: the Empress card in a spread suggesting illness or infirmity did not really indicate that someone who happened to be named Empress would get sick. Some of the readings, like the fact that Amy the Wicker Girl had lost four pounds, she didn’t even remember having done all that clearly. But the way Rosalie told it, and with Bethany nodding confirmation, it did sound impressive. That’s not the way it works, was what she had said at the time, and she also said it now, looking sheepishly at her shoes and wishing herself far away. The Book of Thoth pointed to deep secrets of the Universe, of the complex interplay of forces on the inner planes, not trivial details about what base you get to with a guy whose name you don’t quite know, or who has the keys to the family Volvo. Yet on the other hand, it did seem to work that way. Rosalie seemed convinced at least. Perhaps the Universe speaking through the Book of Thoth revealed trivial details to trivial people? There was, maybe, something in that.

In spite of herself, Andromeda felt an ever-so-slight weedgie tingle on the skin of her neck and ears, sparked, perhaps, by the feeling that such an insight about the attitude of the Universe to trivial people was just the sort of thought a nontrivial person might have. Or perhaps it had arisen through the simple act of imagining, for the sake of argument, that she really did have Stained Flowers. It was dark and rather misty as well, and the gas-station office’s fluorescent light was flickering in the way that in the movies often heralds the approach of a serial killer or psychotic child. That could have been part of it too.

“So do the lottery numbers,” said Josh, holding out his hand facetiously, as though he really believed she could read the lotto numbers in his palm. It was like he’d single-handedly rolled back most of the weedgieness, like he’d done a particularly strong banishing spell. “First thing I do when I win is quit this job, and quit school, and then I will buy you all drugs and guns, all the drugs and guns you want.”

Rosalie and Bethany seemed to think that was a terrific idea. Rosalie was already getting that buzzed, distant look, like her eyes weren’t quite seeing what they were looking at. After the obligatory “It doesn’t work like that,” Andromeda explained that she didn’t have her cards with her.

“Duh,” said Rosalie, kicking
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
toward Andromeda with her toe. “In there. You are so dense. You can thank me later, in Barbados, after we win big. Just so long as you don’t shoot me with all your guns.” A drunken Rosalie was a centered Rosalie. She had started teasing Josh in return, and was definitely more at ease now that they were seated and drinking and had more or less acknowledged that Darren-ek was probably not going to be stopping by. She was looking at Josh with the flirty half-smile. If things progressed down the usual avenue she would soon start leaning against him, then touching his arm, and eventually would wind up pretending to be drunker than she actually was, with her head on his shoulder or knee or something.
Better her than us
, said the Huggy voice,
better her than us
. Us?

Andromeda shook away that confusion and opened the book. Inside, beginning at page fifty or so, the pages had been neatly cut away in a tarot-sized rectangle. Inside the rectangle was a Pixie deck. The card at the top was the Three of Swords, very nearly a fairly major synch. She turned it over and let the cards fall into her hand and recognized the diamond pattern on the backs. They were a vintage deck, a pre-U.S. Games edition of the Rider-Waite deck, and she would have recognized it anywhere. Daisy’s Pixie deck. Not the one Den couldn’t find—that was a Thoth deck, which Andromeda had given to Daisy to replace this one, which had been, supposedly, lost. This was the lost deck, the deck from the dream. The “they are burning down my room” deck. The King of Sacramento deck.

The cards were heavier than hers. Weighty. And whatever the cause, they seemed to bear some type of “spirit” heft as well. Andromeda imagined she could feel them vibrate slightly in her hand, as though all the little figures, the kings and pages and artisans and above all the blindfolded, bound girls, were almost but not quite imperceptibly trundling and squirming inside the deck. Her ears rang and her skin tingled and her eyes felt hot. Now, this, this was
ouijanesse
.

“Daisy’s cards,” she said, dazed. How on earth had Rosalie acquired them? The deck was supposed to have disappeared (“dematerialized” was how they used to say it). Somehow, evidently, it had since rematerialized in Rosalie’s possession, carefully hidden inside
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
.

This was not the time to ask such questions, as Rosalie made plain by directing Andromeda to stop “Alzheimering” and get on with the lottery numbers, but first get two more beers from the office cooler and one more for herself if she wanted.

“I’ll get them,” said Bethany, getting up and squeezing Andromeda’s shoulder as she did. She was giving Rosalie a funny look, a look of distaste. It was either because of Rosalie’s bossing Andromeda around like that during such a momentous, emotional moment, or it was to register disapproval of her behavior toward this Josh character. True to form, Rosalie was slumping toward him slightly and had positioned her hand so it was grasping her own leg but also barely touching his with the palm’s edge; a slight shift would sandwich the hand, the back of it against his thigh. It was so utterly predictable. The fact that he seemed oblivious and profoundly uninterested merely meant that she would persist with even more determination.