Andromeda Klein (40 page)

Other witnesses, according to Rosalie’s account, had described mass hysteria and bizarre rituals in the school cafeteria and even accusations of conspiracy to commit assault on the person of one Empress Katoa, who suffered a broken leg from a fall allegedly precipitated by a person or persons unknown.

“So basically, what you’ve got is a perfect storm of juvenile delinquency,” concluded Rosalie. “You’ve got your fraud, your harassment, vice, arson, drugs, terrorism, conspiracy, assault, predatorism, contribution to the delinquency of a minor. Everybody’s looking for you. You’ll be famous.”

Rosalie’s phone rang and she held up a finger and went into the hallway to take the call. It was, to judge from Rosalie’s side of the conversation, Rosalie’s mother, who had finally arrived home and wanted to know where the Gimpala was. This was going to take a while.

The thing to do, of course, Andromeda decided, was turn herself in. That was the only option. It would soon become clear to any sane observer that she was an innocent, if eccentric, victim of circumstance and coincidence.
Come on
, said Huggy, bubbling through the sound of the refrigerator fan,
your father taught you better than that
. But the risk of reform school or community service seemed preferable to a life of hiding out in a van, to Andromeda Klein’s mind.

Andromeda’s eye lighted on Rosalie’s half-open bag and noticed a newish, unfamiliar-looking cell phone. So, Rosalie’s using the mom-phone system, thought Andromeda. Except of course she wasn’t, because she was at that moment talking to her mother on her regular phone. Andromeda picked up the phone and pressed the side button to light up the display, but there was a lock on it; it was password protected.

You’ve got to be kidding, Andromeda was saying to herself as she lifted her sleeve to read the St. Steve password tantoon and enter it into the phone. The display cleared and the phone made a wind-chime sound. The last three messages: “take off your bra,” “take off your bra,” and “jj8kk!”

Motherfucker. She dropped the phone and it bounced once, then slid under the stove.

“I don’t know why I’m even bothering to ask,” Andromeda said, after she had snatched Rosalie’s phone out of her hand and pressed End Call. “But can you possibly explain this?”

She raised her right arm, pulled back her sleeve, ripped off the bandage, and pointed to the healing tantooned PIN. Rosalie stared at it for quite a while, her face moving in seeming slow motion through a series of expressions of puzzlement before her eyes widened and she said:

“Oh, okay. Yes, okay. Right, you’re right. That was bad. That was a really bad one. Should not have done it. At
all
. My bad. I take full responsibility. Won’t happen again, sir.” And she saluted.

“Your
bad
?” Andromeda was at a loss.

“Okay. You’re right. Worse than bad. Really really really not nice. Totally stupid. My fault. It was a joke that went … Wait a minute: why do you have my PIN number tattooed on your arm?”

Andromeda walked wordlessly back to the kitchen and reemerged with the sword in hand. At least Rosalie had the decency to look frightened, raising her hands in the air as though someone had said “Stick ’em up.”

Andromeda was pushing her toward the door with her free hand. It was maybe kind of funny, maybe kind of. It would have been very funny if it had happened to someone else. Maybe they’d laugh about it later, twenty years on, when Andromeda finally got out of prison.

Rosalie was talking at lightning speed as the door was swinging closed: “It was only for my Social Studies altruism project and it wasn’t like the first time—it was only meant to help you with your self-esteem and shyness issues then it got too interesting and fun and hey—”

Rosalie blocked the door with her shoulder. “Question: do I still have any money in my bank account?”

Andromeda slammed the door.

xxi.

The number programmed for UNAVAILABLE didn’t match the number tantooned upside down on Andromeda’s stomach. They (and she had to assume that “they” included Amy the Wicker Girl, at least, and maybe even the lovely Bethany) had clearly reprogrammed it when she was upstairs in the kitchen meeting the boy who was to become the Precious Sponge. Hence the giggling, the locked door.

But how had they even known about St. Steve and UNAVAILABLE? The only possible answer to that was: Daisy. Daisy was the only person other than herself and St. Steve who had known about the UNAVAILABLE trick. They had to have learned about it from her.

Oh, Daisy. Had Byron been in on it too? Andromeda didn’t think he possibly could have been. He’d have to be a phenomenal performer to act that dumb.

Just how many people
had
been laughing at her carefully composed encouraging texts, her desperate texts, her pathetic phone messages? It seemed like it had involved people other than Rosalie, as the PIN number texts almost certainly had resulted from accidental entry of the password on the part of someone who wasn’t used to entering it, and Rosalie herself would presumably have been able to do this with no difficulty.

She tried to listen for Huggy in the refrigerator fan and the sighing freeway sound. She ran the water in the kitchen tap. No words of comfort or abuse bubbled out.

Calls to Bethany and Byron reached voice mail: of course, they would be in switched-off school mode by then.

Oh my gods, she thought all of a sudden. The photos.

Andromeda had decided to turn herself in to the school rather than the library or the police. But as soon as she walked into the office of Mr. Venn, the counselor, she regretted it. Rosalie’s summary of the charges against her were by and large accurate, and neither Mr. Venn, nor the assorted principals, nor even Baby Talk Barnes, was interested in hearing about the “Friends” of the Library and their scheme to destroy the International House of Bookcakes for personal gain. They certainly weren’t interested in her own personal journey of spiritual discovery.

Here’s what they were interested in:

“‘Joy to the world,’” said Mr. Venn, clearing his throat. “‘The teacher’s dead. We cut off his head …’ Did you write that?”

“No,” said Andromeda.

“So you deny it?”

“No. I quoted it,” she said, realizing as she did so that this could well add plagiarism, or citing without attribution, to the list of charges against her.

Mr. Venn said he’d come back to that, and fiddled with his computer’s mouse. Up popped a dark, grainy, blown-up picture of Andromeda making a kissy face in candlelight.

“We take these matters very seriously, Andromeda.”

“May I go to the bathroom?”

One of the few benefits of being seen as a mousy, shy, nonthreatening girl is that no one imagines you will try to make a run for it when you ask to go to the vacuum. Andromeda slipped out and dashed for her bike. She could ride very fast when she had a mind to.

That accursed Rosalie. Only the thought that the dissemination of that photo might have been unintentional and Andromeda’s own good heart prevented her from uttering a formal, exceedingly harsh curse directed at Rosalie. There would be time enough for curses by and by.

Andromeda was halfway home when a call from the Precious Sponge vibrated in.

“Do you have your Agrippa with you? You’ve got to help me check something. This gematria can really wreck a person’s mind. I was up all night but I think I found something, I mean I found a lot of things, I think—”

Andromeda brought her bike to a stop in front of the Safeway.

“Just tell me if you knew about the phone,” she said.

“Oh, is this the Rosalie thing?”

Fuck. She hung up.

Byron was in his car waiting for her outside Casa Klein when she got there, and he did look like he had been up all night. It took a full half hour of back-and-forth between them before Andromeda satisfied herself that the Precious Sponge hadn’t known about Rosalie’s prank impersonation of St. Steve. By “the Rosalie thing” he had meant that Rosalie had called him earlier that morning to ask if he knew where Andromeda was because, Rosalie said, she had taken Rosalie’s phone and had hidden it somewhere.

When Andromeda told him the story he said: “So all those texts from the mystery Waite man really came from Rosalie van G.? Wow, that’s twisted.”

“We should go inside,” said Andromeda. “The cops are looking for me.”

“What, because of the phone?” He was to remain confused for some time thereafter.

“I went a little gematria happy,” said a slightly sheepish Precious Sponge. His legal pad had pages and pages full of scribbled numbers and calculations. “But check this out.”

He flipped a few pages. “I tried it different ways—”

“Boy, I’ll say,” said Andromeda. Byron had listed and calculated the values of hundreds of names and terms related to their recent activities and discussions in various forms and combinations, including
Two of Swords
(2320),
Houses of the Holy
(1090),
GAAP
(69),
International House of Bookcakes
(1125), and even
the Gimpala
(241) and
Rosalie M. van Genuchten
(1434).

“Detroit Tigers?”
she said quizzically.

“My dad’s favorite team,” said the Precious Sponge. “Six-three-nine. But check it out,” he continued.
“E. James Madison Jessup
, two thousand.
Twice Holy Daisy
, One-nine-nine-nine. Same number.”

“That’s not the same—”

“It is according to the Rule of Colel,” said Byron. “You can add or subract an
aleph
, a one.” He gave her a “Come on, get with it” look.

Andromeda had momentarily forgotten all about the Rule of Colel.

He’s good
, said Huggy, rustling under the windblown curtains.

The crazed eyes of the Precious Sponge smiled at her triumphantly.

“Okay,” said Andromeda, “so?” and his face fell.

“So,” said the Precious Sponge, adopting Andromeda’s own phrasing, “according to Agrippa and the Rule of Colel, both your friend Daisy and E.J.M. Jessup are forms of the number two thousand.”

“Yeah, I got that,” said Andromeda. “But what are we saying, then?”

“Well, just that maybe Twice Holy Soror
Daisy
was E.J.M. Jessup’s future self, the one he had been preparing his library to inherit, only she died. And the message of the dream was not about her tarot deck but was instead: save the Eejymjays. Come on, you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in this stuff.”

“That is pretty good,” said Andromeda, with faint reluctance. Her mind wasn’t really on Agrippa’s system for Latin gematria at the moment. She was thinking about St. Steve and Rosalie and Bethany. And Daisy. So the final message from St. Steve had been that “hi there” after all. Rosalie had done it because, well, because she was Rosalie. As for the others … Andromeda sighed.

“Okay, so what about the Two of Swords, then?” she said wearily, because Byron had retrieved it from
Sexual Response in the Human Female
and seemed to want to say something about it.

The Precious Sponge said he still thought it was a date late in the decan, just before the transition to the Three of Swords. He consulted his notes again. “That would be right near the end of the first decan of Libra, September twenty-ninth or thirtieth of last year. With a gibbulous moon and a low tide, right? So what was going on at that time? What were you doing?”

Andromeda sighed heavily.

“Just the usual stuff,” she said. Crying, being yelled at, reading Agrippa, stroking Dave’s M, doing St. Steve sigils. Etc. “Okay,” she said after a lengthy pause, humoring him. “I was at Lake Shasta with my crazy family. There were Lemurians. There was a burning truck on the roadside. St. Steve broke up with me.”

“You mean, he said ‘hi there.’”

Andromeda nodded and felt herself blushing. “Yes, he said ‘hi there.’ And Daisy was mad and not speaking to me.”

“And why was she mad at you, exactly?”

Andromeda hesitated. “Because of St. Steve, because I wouldn’t tell her about him. And because I went away to Shasta on a weekend when she wanted to do some magic. But it would have blown over if she hadn’t died. She was always getting mad and she always got over it.”

“I want to check something, if that’s okay,” said the Precious Sponge.

Andromeda was having trouble giving the Precious Sponge her full attention, which was occupied with replaying in her mind each fake St. Steve message she had received over the past week.

Byron rummaged in the Daisy bag and retrieved the smashed-up cell phone.

“I’m not sure it’ll work, but—”

The Precious Sponge pried out the SIM card from Daisy’s phone.

“Okay, this won’t work with mine,” he said, “let me see yours.” Apparently Andromeda’s phone wasn’t the right sort to work with Daisy’s phone chip either, because he added: “Got any other phones around here?”

Andromeda nodded and motioned for Byron to follow her downstairs to the kitchen. She used the sword to sweep under the stove and slide out Rosalie’s St. Steve phone, along with a great deal of dust and a couple of Dave’s fuzzy mouse toys.

Back in her room, when the Precious Sponge replaced the chip in Rosalie’s handset with Daisy’s chip and switched it on, there was a chime.

“We’re in,” he said, tapping his phone’s scroll wheel. “No call data. Ten saved texts. Last message received on October fifth.”

That would have been two days after Daisy died. Andromeda took the phone. Four of the messages were between Daisy and Rosalie van Genuchten, rather poignant in a way, because the two of them were discussing plans for an Afternoon Tea gathering that Daisy would not attend, because she would have died the day before, on October 3. A fifth message appeared to be from Mizmac and was also quite sad when you considered the context: “honey where are you?”

The remaining five were from Andromeda’s phone, all identical and unanswered: “Daisy?” Three of them would have been from the time when Andromeda had been with her family at Lake Shasta, and Daisy had been giving her the silent treatment and refusing to answer. The remaining two had not been answered because Daisy would have been dead when they were sent.