Andromeda Klein (10 page)

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 the 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.

Then her mouth, beyond her control, formed the words she heard in her head:

“Hekas hekas este bebeloi …”

The swirling stopped, and the throbbing ebbed and died and the cube and tunnel collapsed and her mind spiraled back to the size of a human girl’s brain and with it the expanded world.

She realized she’d had her eyes closed tightly, because they hurt when she suddenly opened them and because the light was so bright; there were people staring at her, so she must have been doing something to attract their attention; and her throat hurt, so she must have been shrieking the incantation amidst all the other shrieking.

There were six or seven people staring, puzzled, seemingly frozen in time, until she spoke.

“Someone took my bike,” she said. The frozen people began to move again, as though they were paused on video and someone had pushed Play. No one was the least bit interested in her or her missing bike, now that the spectacle was over. They were whispering, laughing, cackling amongst themselves.

“A.E.,” she said dejectedly. “Resh.” She was worn out.

When she looked toward the spot where the sun ought to have been, around twenty degrees from the western horizon, she noticed something hanging a bit higher, so she looked up and saw the bike. How had they gotten it up there? It was dangling precariously from its front wheel, which had been lodged in a fork of an oak branch. The rest of it was swaying in the wind. If it fell, it would be wrecked.

A couple of boys from the basketball courts helped her. You could never tell whether people were going to be nice or not, whether they were going to ridicule you or sympathize or just walk by. And boys could be incredibly mean and harsh, especially to people who didn’t look like models. But these ones were all smiles, and seemed to enjoy showing off their tree-climbing and bike-rescue talents.

“Someone must really hate you,” said the one who had scrambled up the tree. He detached the wheel from the branch and carefully lowered the bike down to the other one, who held it by the back wheel and caught the rest of it when it swiveled down. He presented it to her and bowed, which was cute. It seemed in decent shape, though the front wheel looked slightly out of true. At least they hadn’t vandalized it.

The other boy hung from the lower branch and dropped down heavily.

“Like ’em hunky,” he said.

“What?” she said. “Oh right, yes, like a monkey.”

They were being so nice, she didn’t know how to react. These boys were not her sort, to the degree that she had a sort. They were like aliens.

“Thanks,” she finally said, and did her best to smile back at them. The smile wouldn’t, it just couldn’t, come. Back at home, and with Daisy, appreciation or greeting was sometimes expressed with a Dave salute, the hand held up as a claw and then closed. She instinctively did this in lieu of a smile and realized how stupid it looked only after she had already done it. They were confused but still smiling at her. How could any non-insane people smile that much?

One of them seemed to be staring at her nonexistent chest.

“Teenage Head,” said one, “what’s that?” Andromeda’s sweatshirt zipper was undone and she was wearing one of the dad’s old T-shirts that she had rescued when the mom had packed them up to give to Goodwill. Most of them were very old and far too small for him to wear, but he had seemed really sad when he’d noticed them missing. Not least of the reasons she liked wearing them was that it irritated the mom so much. This one said TEENAGE HEAD, which would have to be a band, or a software company, or a restaurant.

“It’s my dad’s,” she said. One of the boys raised an eyebrow at that.

This was perhaps why it was so often said that practical magic of any kind can be dangerous for the neophyte. Not so much because of what you can do or manifest, but because whatever it is, is hard to control when you lack understanding, and because true understanding is so hard to achieve. What had happened by the bike rack under the trees was a kind of magic, if anything was. Now that Andromeda had recovered from her shock and had her bike back, she was certain that, though she would very much enjoy it if Lacey were to feel her wrath in some manner, she did not actually want Lacey dead. And that if she were to discover that her spell actually had killed Lacey somehow, she would be dismayed. Not overwhelmingly dismayed, perhaps; but it would add greatly to her worries, which were already too heavy. All she needed was two angry dead people on her back instead of only one. And she disliked the idea of tainting her magic by association with Lacey. She should attempt, at least, to preserve such magic for higher things. How to do it, though, when everything is so utterly beyond your control? The answer must lie in training and discipline, of course, as all experts said, though till now she had not perhaps fully realized why they said that.

Lacey had left a note wedged in her bicycle basket, which was why the monkey boy had said that someone must really hate her:
fucken bitch constantration camp
, it read. Not good, as the dad might say. “Learn to spell, at least,” said Altiverse AK, fortunate at that moment that there was not an Altiverse Lacey around to clobber it or sit on it or something.

The magic appeared to have been set off inadvertently by her agitated mood. Had she been in control, and with the proper protection and weapons, she might have entered the cube and passed through the tunnel, learned what she was meant to learn, and conducted a ceremony or operation astrally while in the alternate plane. Skilled magicians did this all the time, but in the event, she had only caught a brief glimpse of it and moreover had had no idea what sort of world or plane it might have led to.

The
hekas hekas
incantation was not one she usually used, but it was Golden Dawn, she was pretty sure. Why had she intoned it? Or shrieked it, rather. It seemed like she had shrieked it. Her throat still hurt.

Andromeda Klein stopped by the bike shop to get a new lock, one they told her would be very difficult to cut or crack. Ness was a good guy who often fixed her bike for free. If Andromeda had been the kind of girl who could pick and choose which guys to attract, and if she had been in the market for another impossible, unattainable boyfriend, he was one she might have chosen. He was tall and not bad-looking, and dressed reasonably well, and often wore decent rather nice clunky leather shoes even in the shop, in sharp contrast to the slovenly ragamuffin guys who worked for him. There was nothing fiery or deep about him, but he was kind and well groomed, two incredibly rare qualities.

“Your front whale’s spit out,” said Ness, meaning the wheel in front was a bit out of true, and he offered to fix it when she had more time. He also gave her a great deal on the heavy-duty U-shaped lock.

Despite the day’s trouble and the extra stop, Andromeda Klein arrived at the International House of Bookcakes with twenty minutes to spare before her shift began. She locked her bike to one of the breezeway poles and rushed straight past Marlyne to the 133s without pausing to hear today’s review of her appearance.

“Her” section was looking a little ragged. It had been several days since she had tidied it up. There were quite a few empty spaces, familiar colors and shapes missing from the shelves. Of course, the Sylvester Mouse list, that was it. Someone must have pulled more while she was off.
True and Faithful
was still up there on the top shelf with the oversizeds, but a quick inspection revealed that the library’s edition of Dee’s
Five Books of Mystical Experience
was now missing. It must have been added to the list—it was certainly unlikely that anyone had checked it out.

She pulled a few books and retreated to a semiprivate table behind Reference to study them. There were several things she wanted to check.

Dr. Regardie confirmed that
hekas hekas este bebeloi
was Golden Dawn, a banishing formula known as the Cry of the Watcher Within, adapted from the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries; it means “away, away, profane spirits,” the equivalent of the more familiar
apo pantos kakodaimonos
or the
procol, O procul este profani of the
Star Ruby, for example.

As best she could analyze it, then: the magic by the bike rack had begun, sparked spontaneously by her action-populated state of mind, and a wave of hate had somehow formed itself into a directed force; a gateway to somewhere had opened; she had heard the voices of the entities or agents or spirits from within and beyond the gate. And then, for some reason and by some means, she had uttered the Greek banishing formula, which had in fact banished the voices, the gateway, and the directed magical wave of ill will, leaving everything deflated and inert. So had the magical state itself been caused by profane spirits? If so, what a successful use of banishing, and far simpler than that of an entire formal ritual. Or had it been something inside her, some buried part of her will, that had called the magic into being, had opened the gateway, had constructed a kind of magical bomb, only to deactivate it at the last moment, as though two parts of herself were at war with one another, canceling each other out in the end?

It was confusing. She had never opened a gateway before. It was hard to know what to think.

Crowley, Regardie, Dion Fortune, and Agrippa had nothing to say regarding any King of Sacramento.

She had put away the books and scanned herself in before it struck her that the unintentional magic under the oak tree might well have arisen from, or been instigated by, her sigil magic of that morning. If so, it had been one hell of a powerful sigil, to manifest a dreamworld in the waking world; and if so, the King of Sacramento might well have been involved, though she had not seen him.