Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  “I need to use the bathroom,” she had said.

  “What?” he said, pulling his hair behind his ear just as she always did when she said that. “The vacuum?” From then on, just between them (though also in her own mind), any bathroom was a vacuum. Or sometimes it would be an ashram, or a mushroom.

  Andromeda had tried to explain it to Daisy without revealing who she was talking about, yet had been unable to conceal her enthusiasm.

  “Vacuum,” Daisy had said. “Mushroom.” Then she stared at Andromeda for a long, long time, expressionless, as though carefully composing her response. Then she tilted her head slightly, and her face softened into a beatific smile.

  “That,” she said brightly, “has got to be the gayest thing I have ever heard in my life.”

  They laughed so hard they both fell over.

  She never mentioned the St. Steve lexicon to Daisy again, however. And with great difficulty she suppressed the impulse to explain, to boast, about how St. Steve looked like the younger A. E. Waite, and how his initials were actually A.E., and how his baseball cap had had an I on it, suggesting the Roman numeral one at the top of the Magician card, and how his true name in Agrippa’s Latin gematria added up to 1234.

  But Andromeda for once kept her wits about her and the details to herself, and managed to leave the impression that this mysterious stranger with “item” potential happened to be a boy of their own age, from another school, passably good-looking, good at conversation, and kind enough to indulge some of Andromeda’s eccentricities, such as the lexicon. She did say his name was Steve, which Daisy lengthened to Steven whenever she mentioned him, conveying a vague sense of derision. “Is Steven at least cute?” she had asked.

  “He’s okay,” said Andromeda. “Cute” was not how you’d describe St. Steve. Andromeda might have said “handsome” except that she would have been ridiculed, and she doubted any of the Rosalie girls would have been charmed by the mustache, so she said only “okay.” The ridicule took the form of a recurrent joke, begun by Daisy and soon taken up by Rosalie and even, it could be argued, by Andromeda’s own mother, that Andromeda had an imaginary boyfriend. This was a convenient way to keep the secret, and Andromeda reinforced the misapprehension at times by making similar jokes herself, even though she didn’t much care for the implication that attracting a mate was so obviously beyond plausibility where she was concerned. But Daisy was no fool, and she was certainly not fooled, despite how good she was at Steven jokes.

  The vacuum lexicon, an important cross-referenced appendix to the main Andromeda lexicon, expanded over time. At its best it was a spoken code only the two of them could understand. It had developed without premeditation, on its own. In a similar spirit, they would consistently choose the incorrect option, technically known as a typo, when texting. “Of” was always to be read as “me.” A “headacid” was a headache. Andromeda hadn’t been able to resist telling Daisy about all the puppy jokes, and Daisy had conceded that that was marginally less lame than “mushroom,” and was even interested enough to quiz her on other meaningful typos, but Daisy wasn’t interested enough to join in when Andromeda tried to typo-text her. That was okay, though. The predictionary was better as just a St. Steve-Andromeda thing.

  The only rule was Rule P. P was short for PSDTN, which was short for “p.s.: destroy this note.” She was to delete each message after she read it, no exceptions. Andromeda had more or less obeyed Rule P too, except for that last “hi there” message and one other transgression. There were some messages that meant too much to her to lose forever. These she had dutifully deleted from her phone, but—and this was a transgression even though it didn’t technically break Rule P—she had also written some of them in a notebook, disguised as a poem entitled “Preto,” beginning with “hex acad” and ending with “loud wa,” which was the closest St. Steve had ever come to saying he loved her. She had even included this “poem” in her Language Arts journal earlier in the year, with no one the wiser, not least Baby Talk Barnes, who had given her double points on it and written More like this, please in the margin. More like this, please, indeed. And how.

  As for “St. Steve”?

  “I’m a St. Steve guy,” he had said, when the subject of his almost supernatural ability to pick up on her thoughts and moods came up that first night.

  “What?” she said, realizing almost immediately that he had meant “sensitive.” He was joking, but it was true in a way all the same. He probably would have been a good scryer or tarot reader, a thought that was rather amusing. He was especially good at reading her, knowing her concerns and worries almost before she understood what she was implying when she tried to express them. No one had ever seemed to understand her so well, and certainly no one had ever seemed so interested in giving it a shot. Most people, pretty much everyone, even the few-and-far-between boys who had pursued her for whatever reason from time to time, gave up on that in advance. Somehow, it was always assumed that she was the deficient one who had to shape herself up to meet the other’s standards, something she accepted even as she resented it, and at which she was rarely even close to successful.

  When she and St. Steve were together, they were, she felt, a functioning system; he was an ally who knew what he was getting into and didn’t mind; she felt calm and clearheaded, filled with a sense of purpose and vibrating beneath her skin—all things that had been unfamiliar to her before.

  But of course, she hadn’t been calm and clear-headed, not in the least. She had been in a desperate panic, in fact, and spent a great deal of her time consumed with fear that she would lose him. From almost the first time she spoke to him, that fear was hovering, and it had in the end proven to be justified; reverse “what would happen if” magic again, perhaps. The calm, clear-eyed Andromeda she remembered was more a potential Andromeda, an ideal, the one she thought of when she imagined some future time when the uncertainty and complications would vanish somehow, leaving only the vibrating happiness and sense of purpose—which had been genuine enough.

  In real life, his sensitivity and understanding of her was the worst part. The sudden disappearance, the period of radio silence, and then the strange, almost cruel spate of maddeningly bland messages following the silence that had seemed to offer hope but that had come to nothing—he would have known how much she was suffering, and obviously, he didn’t care. “Hi there,” for gods’ sake.

  Andromeda was so caught up in thinking about St. Steve that she rode right past the school. There really should be some kind of law against thinking while biking: it’s a public menace.

  Empress plus two other girls and two boys were sitting on the bike rack, blocking the empty slots. Candy, sugary drinks, and all junk food were forbidden on Clearview High School’s grounds at all times in order to HELP THE STUDENT BODY STAY IN SHAPE, as one of the signs in the main lobby put it. And as the dad was apt to point out in his tirades about the War on (Some) Drugs, as soon as something is forbidden, a black market immediately pops up, creating crime where there once was none, and providing a pretext for state oppression of individuals. “Ban Tinker Toys,” he would say, “and you’ll wind up chasing Tinker Toy dealers out of the park and fishing the corpses of Tinker Toy victims out of the bay.” Then he would patiently explain what Tinker Toys were—round wooden blocks with holes that you put sticks into, a real Gnome School type of toy. Then he would give another example, like “Ban pizzas, and …” PREVENT FOREST FIRES—REGISTER MATCHES was one of his van’s oldest stickers, the one that had gotten him barred from the Gnome School parking area when some other parents complained, not wanting their children exposed to such a message. Plus, the van was ugly. Everybody else’s parents had much nicer cars. He had had to park down the road when he picked her up from then on. Another of his van’s mottoes was LEGALIZE BREATHING. These people were only proving his point, he was fond of saying.

  Most schools with a candy ban have at least one student who fills the gap by selling candy and soft drinks at a slight profit over t
he 7-Eleven price, and at Clearview High School, Empress was it. Andromeda had nothing against Empress but stayed out of her way because she shied away from large groups and Empress was always at the center of a crowd. Andromeda stood in front of the bike rack, waiting for the girl to Empress’s left to move aside for her.

  “I need to lock my bike,” she said at last, finding herself unable to make eye contact with the big, immovable girl in front of her, though she did try. High school survival skill #1: Learn to avoid eye contact, which may be regarded as provocative, without appearing to be trying to avoid eye contact, which may also be regarded as provocative.

  “If you want me to move out of your way,” said the girl sitting on the rack in front her, “you can just ask me. You don’t have to—” Andromeda didn’t catch what she didn’t have to do, but the phrase ended with what sounded like “… a toe-ass butter-sucking fish …”

  “What?” said Andromeda instinctively, pulling her hair and hood back from her ear.

  The girl grabbed her by the chin and pulled her face up and stared Andromeda in the eye.

  “What? What?” she said, mimicking her. “Here’s what, Concentration Camp. Next time you want something, you can ask for it respectfully like a person and not just stand there like some sucking …” Andromeda missed that, too, but it also seemed to involve a fish. The girl released her face. She could still feel the impression of those fingers and their sharp nails. The boys and the other girl were laughing. Andromeda’s face was bright red, she could feel it.

  Empress came over from where she had been dispensing Bubblicious to a couple of freshmen and said, “Hey now, leave her alone. KK’s all right, aren’t you, KK?” She was smiling a broad “such commotion is bad for business” smile straight out of a movie about the mob. It took Andromeda a second to realize that “KK” referred to her—“Concentration Camp,” apparently a testament to how Empress couldn’t spell and a reference to Andromeda’s skinny body, which seemed to make everyone so angry or concerned or condescending or hostile, depending on temperament. Was that her new name now? It was even worse than Anorexia Klein. “Come on, Drommie, you’re sorry, aren’t you?” Drommie. Trismegistus.

  Andromeda was not in the least sorry for anything but having bothered to get up that morning.

  “Well, I do not accept her apology,” said Bike Rack, but she sullenly got off the rack and began to fumble around in her backpack, mumbling something else that Andromeda couldn’t catch. All other girls seemed to hate Andromeda. All of them except Empress, who seemed to love everybody. She had a glittery heart on her shirt to prove it too.

  “I’ll see you later at your spot, KK,” said Empress, meaning the area where Andromeda and Rosalie and company ate lunch. Rosalie was one of Empress’s favorite customers because she bought large quantities and even tipped sometimes.

  “And you might want to find somewhere else to park your bike. Lacey’s having a bad day. You still riding that thing? You need to get horizons, or a boyfriend to drive you around….” She meant “your license.” Everyone was always saying that. “You should get a tattoo of that,” said Altiverse AK, “on your nonexistent ass.”

  Lacey. The most inapt name in history, second only, perhaps, to that of Andromeda Krystal Klein herself.

  The bell rang and Empress and Lacey and the others began a lugubrious, slouching march to the school steps.

  Maybe she should have taken Empress’s advice and parked her bike somewhere else, but the slot was there, now unguarded, so she pushed her front wheel into the groove and snapped and locked the lock.

  She went to the girls’ vacuum to wash her face and was horrified by what she saw, as usual. Lacey’s fingers had left scratches and a bruise on her cheek. Attempting to cover the marks with makeup was so pathetic that she couldn’t even bring herself to try. She pulled her hood and hair around her face and hoped for the best.

  “A.E.,” she said, louder than she intended. “Trismegistus.” Then: “Jesus Christ.”

  A voice from a stall shushed her. One of those godbotherers, as the dad called them. They were everywhere. “That’s how you know Clearview is hell,” Altiverse AK said to her reflection, not sure whether it was one of the dad’s jokes or if she had made it up. “Because there are so many damned Christians in it.”

  Andromeda managed to make it through the whole day up to lunch without crying at all, which was something of a marvel. She was a year behind most of the girls in Rosalie’s crowd, and no one in her own classes paid her much heed, thank goodness. But after fourth period she found she just couldn’t face Rosalie and Empress, and, gods forbid, Lacey, so she spent lunch period by herself in the coffee place by the Safeway. It was a Right Ring Day, so she was a carnivore. She stared at the sandwiches in the display counter—turkey, chicken salad, tuna, roast beef—but as usual couldn’t bring herself to get one. She’d already been through quite a lot, and decided not to make it worse by subjecting herself to the ordeal of choking down a hunk of slimy meat.

  Outside food and beverages were not allowed, but she sank into the puffy blue armchair and hunched over her Tupperware container and ate her hummus-filled pita bread and a radish and no one complained.

  After eating, she used the Two of Swords as a significator for a tarot spread on the shiny blond wood coffee table in front of her. Once again, the High Priestess, the King of Pentacles, and several other Swords cards were present, and the Magician was in the tenth position, “the outcome;” the Tower was “crossing” her, and Ace of Cups “covered” her, which was about as schizophrenic a juxtaposition as there could be. Her perspective was getting warped by all the synchs: she had to make a real effort not to see the High Priestess as Daisy, the King of Pentacles as St. Steve, and the Magician as the King of Sacramento. The little white booklet wasn’t much help. She needed access to the resources in the International House of Bookcakes to interpret it, or anything, properly.

  She slunk in late to Language Arts. Baby Talk Barnes said nothing but raised an eyebrow. Most teachers made her sit in front because of her hearing issues, but not Baby Talk, which was a great mercy. Amy the Wicker Girl was standing in front of the class reading one of her acrostic poems; Andromeda was unable to make out most of it, but the B in Bellinger was “bangin’,” which earned a big laugh and some “yow’s” from the class, and a look of mock reproach from Mr. Barnes. Andromeda had the sense that she would be called on and was sweating in dread of it, but there were short periods that day, so she was spared the ordeal of having to say “ectomorph” and “no ass” while facing twenty-five pairs of hostile, uncomprehending eyes. Mr. Barnes, she had believed, would accept the self-deprecation and the ironic, resentful spirit in which she intended it, but for the students it would just be giving them more ideas. She had had no idea that recitation was to be part of the assignment; next time, she decided, she would choose random, totally unrelated and neutral words: Anniversary, New Jersey, Door, etc. Some people loved being the center of attention, but it was hard to see why. Just being stared at seemed to raise Andromeda’s body temperature several degrees, causing her brain to short-circuit and flattening her already quite flat hair. Thank goodness that threat at least was over.

  vi.

  Her bike lock cable had been cut and lay on the ground, a dead blue snake with a lock head. The bicycle itself was nowhere to be seen.

  “My bike,” she said, and that was when she started crying, finally. Empress had warned her and she should have listened.

  Andromeda had never felt so action-populated in her life. There was potentially a great deal of power in such a mental state, and she knew that if she were disciplined enough to spark it and control it and direct it, it could be used to manifest powerful magical effects. What would happen if she were to attempt a magical operation in this state? a small part of her mind, distant from the rest of it, wondered.

  And something happened.

  According to Bonewits, subtle results cannot be expected from the hate spells of a beginner; if
you wish to harm someone, say, a girl named Lacey, by magic, you might as well make up your mind to kill her. Lacey. She wouldn’t know how to begin, and she had no tools, no ritual materials. By the time she got to a suitable temple location, at home, or at the library, or in the water tower or the bell tower of the closed-down high school, the feeling would have passed. You can’t preserve mental states for later use, or at least, Andromeda could not, though theoretically a sigil or talisman might help to achieve such an effect, storing the magical energy like a battery. A skilled magician could deftly slip into an inner plane and construct a temple and tools out of astral matter and take care of it right away. How was she going to get home?

  The sun was behind thick clouds, and even what light there was had to travel through the redwood and eucalyptus and oak branches hanging over the footpath. They seemed to grow taller and thicker and denser, and the sky assumed a darker shade. She felt a swirling sensation. She felt a throbbing in her head and legs. She felt a twisting, a rising, with a rushing sound.

  The last thing she remembered thinking consciously before she dissolved into it was: So this is it, this is magic.

  The spell was happening all on its own. Once again, as she had in the transition from state to state in the sigil trance that morning, Andromeda heard the great clatter of voices jabbering nonsense, shrieks that sounded like metal scraping and nails being ripped from boards, an incredible, ugly, overwhelming cacophony echoing through her head and through the Universe, sounds she could almost feel. They swarmed over her like insects, and did not fade into music as before. She saw a pinpoint of shimmering darkness that widened into a kind of tunnel, dark green and flashing, with a transparent lightning-colored cube at its mouth.