“I need to use your laptop,” she said to Rosalie, who said, “Okay, as long as you drink this, and hurry up.” She handed Andromeda the Winnie-the-Pooh cup. “Hot chocolate!” she said loudly, then whisper-sang, “Hot damn! Peppermint schnapps! Everybody everybody call call the cops….” This was the chorus of a song by one of the sneakers-and-baseball-cap “whoa oh” bands they always listened to. It actually wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Rosalie was pretty good at making drinks.
Andromeda sat down with the laptop and entered St. Steve’s phone number from her stomach tattoo in the phone company’s text message Web page for her blue phone account, and checking her dead phone’s keypad for likely text typos, quickly typed the following and pressed Send before she could second-guess herself:
“Gooey! Sax wot texted cut can mot seaf bc me phone problems. Nipp you po muah. Docil of?”
(Gooey = honey; sax = saw; wot = you; cut = but; mot = not; seaf = read; me = of; nipp = miss; po = so; muah = much; docil = e-mail; of = me.)
It was hard to know what to write without having seen what his message was, so she was trying to keep it noncommittal yet positive; this required suppressing some bitterness and avoiding the text version of whining, which was something she knew would put him off. She had always said that if she could do it over she would be, or would at least act, more easygoing and indifferent, and now was a chance to prove she could do it. St. Steve had stopped e-mailing her long before he broke off the texting, and the address she had for him had bounced back an error message for some time, but the phone must still work because she had just received the message from it.
Andromeda closed the laptop, picked up her book bag, and said she wasn’t feeling so good and had to go to the bathroom again. Rosalie rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t fall in.” Then she said Andromeda should hurry back because it was time for “phase two.” From the looks of things, the plan for “phase two” seemed to be Irish coffees and more zombie video games. Andromeda trotted up the stairs as quietly as she could, one phone in each of her sweatshirt pockets.
There was a blow-dryer under the sink in the guest vacuum. Andromeda disassembled the blue phone and spread its pieces on a towel and dried them as thoroughly as she could. The blow-dried, reassembled phone would not start up. Plugging the red phone’s battery into the blue phone resulted in a lit screen, but it was blank blue and the keys didn’t do anything at all when pressed. “Trismegistus motherfucker,” she whispered, then said, “Sorry sorry,” because blasphemy in such situations was probably ill-advised. But when she replaced the red phone’s SIM chip with the chip from the blue phone and turned the red phone on, it chimed and started up.
“Trismegistus!” she whispered. “Oh thank you thank you, Thoth Hermes Mercurius Nebo Odin, twice greatest, thrice great, ibis-headed god, scribe of heaven.”
She was reading St. Steve’s text message when there was a pounding on the vacuum door, and Amy the Wicker Girl’s voice was saying “You okay in there?”
“I’m okay,” she called out. “Just a minute.” And it was true. She felt like throwing up, but she was very, very okay.
“What was the name of your mom’s first pet?” said Rosalie van Genuchten when Andromeda came in.
“What?” said Andromeda. “I have no idea.” She was holding, or rather caressing, the red phone with the blue phone chip in her sweatshirt pocket in a silent, gloating kind of way. The last thing she wanted to think about was the mom.
Rosalie was sitting against the wall with her laptop on her knees while Amy the Wicker Girl and Bethany played Zombie Nation II. The boys always hogged the games whenever they were around.
“Okay. What was the name of her first-grade teacher? Or wait, what city was she born in?”
“That’s complicated,” Andromeda replied. “You’re hacking into my mom’s e-mail?” These were clearly “secret questions” you have to answer to get your password if you forget it.
“Nope, I already got the e-mail. Favorite color: blue. That’s some intense security system, right there. Got it on the second guess. No, she changed her account on Virtual-verse.”
Virtualverse was one of the mom’s role-playing-network alternate-world games. Manipulating Andromeda’s mother on the network was one of Rosalie’s hobbies. She had set up several fake profiles for flirting purposes and had managed to seduce Andromeda’s mother’s character a couple of times after luring her to Sex Island, and had even gotten her to agree to a virtual marriage with Super_Doug at one stage. Rosalie’s own mother played as well, if not as often or as diligently, and when the Doug character had started showing interest in Mrs. van Genuchten’s character and invited both virtual moms to the Sex Island Halloween Fetish Party the past year, the jealousy and confusion and broken-engagement fireworks between the two moms had really been something to behold. Neither of the moms appeared to have figured out the other’s identity, which added greatly to the enjoyment of the spectacle. The grand prize of this game, as originally conceived, would be to get one of the moms to agree to a personal meeting in real life, or the both of them at the same time if possible, but Rosalie hadn’t been able to manage that yet. Her latest twist was to log on as Tigress_67, the mom’s user name, and make mischief that way.
“Come on, hurry up, Dromedary, I want to make Tigress trash Wildman’s Harley before she tries to log back on.” The mom—that is, Tigress_67—was currently flirting with a guy calling himself Wildman_B.
“You could try airplane for the city question,” said Andromeda.
“What, like Airplane, Massachusetts?”
The story Andromeda had heard from the mom ever since she could remember was that she had been born in an airplane over international waters between the United States and Australia. Her father had worked for the Austrian FBI and her mother was an Amerian stewardess he had met in his undercover travels, which was why the mom was an American citizen. They made her choose her nationality when she was five, before they allowed her into her foster home after her parents’ deaths. She really missed Austria, and the surf, and wallabies, and especially the delicious schnitzel, but she could never go back now.
“Just try it.”
Rosalie tried it, and said, “Dude, no way, that’s totally it. Unreal. Was she really born on an airplane?”
“No,” said Andromeda. “Not really. She just isn’t smart enough to realize that that isn’t a very convincing lie.”
“Why would she have to lie about that?” asked Rosalie. It was a good question, and Andromeda had no answer. Perhaps the mom just wanted to make her life sound more exotic. But Rosalie was not interested in that topic and waved it away.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Back to the e-mail,” she uptalk-narrated to herself while stabbing the keyboard. “Ha. Place of birth: airplane. Password: airplane airplane. You couldn’t make this up, you really couldn’t.”
“The top-secret security methods of the Australian or Austrian FBI,” said Altiverse AK. But the primary Andromeda was not really paying attention to the master hacking, or to the swift and efficient motorcycle vandalism Rosalie was track-padding out. She was thinking of St. Steve and his message: “hey hey hot thing you ok? still love me a little? <3.”
He had never ever texted her a heart before, and “hot thing” was a new one, too. It was amazing how quickly a message could take you back in time. She was vibrating and anxious just like she had been before, the more sensible, detached, jaded Andromeda Klein suddenly a thing of the past. She had texted back a “toy away” and asked “where are you?” but he hadn’t responded. Which was normal: sometimes it took him a while to get away long enough to respond, and often the response wouldn’t be till the next day, which was agonizing. But she couldn’t help checking her phone approximately every thirty seconds, turning it in her hand inside her pocket, pressing Unlock and discreetly glancing at it when it felt like no one was looking.
“I did it with an ax,” said Rosalie, when she had finished with the virtual motorcycle, adding t
hat she left a note that said: “Dear Wildman. Fuck you. I chopped up your chopper!/hugs/Tigress.”
“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 coul
dn’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.
Andromeda Klein Page 17