Andromeda Klein (2 page)

Thousands of wet eucalyptus leaves rattled against each other in the wind; no matter how many times she heard the sound, she was always taken aback by how loud it was, even through her defective ears. As little girls, she and Twice Holy Daisy Wasserstrom had imagined they could detect patterns in this sound, that it was the chatter of tree spirits or witches, aliens or Lemurians. At the strange little school where Daisy and Andromeda had attended kindergarten, they had been encouraged to ask the gnomes for permission to enter these woods on their daily nature walks, which might have been where the idea originated. (Also, incidentally, it was why Andromeda and Daisy used to say that they had been gnomeschooled.) Lemurians, the ancient, lost race of hermaphroditic, egg-laying giant humanoids described in Madame Blavatsky’s
Stanzas of Dzyan
, were far more interesting than imaginary hippie-school gnomes.

Imagining that she was herself blindfolded and frozen in time with a sword in each hand, she ran through the moment’s uncertainties in her mind, under the heading
not sure
. Not sure if counting off cards quickly and secretively in a girls’ bathroom stall and noting the tenth was the most respectful or effective way to invoke a god and attempt to examine a map of the Universe. Not sure to which of the several anxieties vibrating through her head and beneath her skin the Two of Swords reversed might refer. The previous night’s disturbingly lucid dream; St. Steve’s inexplicable, and now continuing, silence; Twice Holy Soror Daisy Wasserstrom’s sudden refusal to remain silent, as the dead are supposed to. Her own clumsiness. Her social discomfort. Her twice-failed driving test. Her skin (oily), her hair (flat), her body (aerodynamic and featureless). Her unreliable, unfathomable emotional weather system, continually bounding between extremes. Her accursed bones.

A distant voice barely perceptible amidst the clattering of the eucalpytus leaves reminded her: St. Steve’s silence was not all that inexplicable. His absence made far more sense than his presence ever had. It is not in the nature of life for human beings to get what they want the most. Almost nobody gets that.

She had to dismount to walk her bike through the Safe-way parking lot, feeling overheated and
action-populated
. The term had entered her vocabulary years ago when she had misheard something that might have been “discombobulated.” It meant “bubbling over with concerns.”

Mishearing was Andromeda’s life; if she had grown up hearing properly, the resulting girl would have been very different. Her body’s collagen, she had been told back in the days when her family still went to doctors, was “disorganized,” so her bones had formed improperly and tended to be fragile. According to the books, a violent sneeze or simply rolling over in bed could be enough to break a bone, though that had never happened to her. Her case was “mild,” and she was “very lucky,” though her mother still spoke and acted as though Andromeda were liable to shatter spontaneously at any time. “Brittle bones!” the mom would cry out when she suspected her daughter of harboring the intention to do something dangerous, like stand up or sit down or simply do anything the mom wished she wouldn’t, or fail to do something the mom wished she would. Sometimes Andromeda did imagine herself shattering, her jagged pieces then to be vacuumed or swept up by an angry mother or other type of demon or unearthly creature. The more common image, though, was that of cooked chicken bones inside her body: dry, brittle, pulverized, apt to splinter and dangerous to any cat or other predator that might try to eat her. It was the most pathetic of defense mechanisms. An Andromeda Klein would prove to be, if eaten, a thoroughly unsatisfactory meal.

Other times, as she wrote in the essay she turned in with slight modifications for most school writing assignments, she felt as though her bony inner core had been mysteriously cursed.
Osteogenesis imperfecta
, the condition was called, and so Imperfecta, meaning “incomplete” and implying a universe of deficiencies, was her chosen, exceedingly apt magical name. Hence her formal name in the Ninety-threes, otherwise known as the New New Temple of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus: Soror Cancellaria Imperfecta Stella Matutina Adepta (“Sister Female Chancellor Incomplete Morning Star, Adept”).

It had been years since her core had broken or fractured. But, as most people fail to realize, you hear with your bones. A bone malleus, which is a hammer, hits a bone anvil, which jostles a bone stirrup and transmits sound vibrations to the ear’s inner sanctum. The tiny ossified cartilage instruments in her ears didn’t seem to vibrate quite as well as the instruments in the ears of the well-organized-collagen people. There was, she had read, an extremely painful operation you could have to replace the bad cartilage with steel parts, which might be something to consider in the future, assuming she was to win the lottery or somehow acquire the steel parts and a manual explaining how one might conduct the surgery upon oneself, which was not too likely.

There had been a good illustration of the Soror Imperfecta Disorganized-Collagen Effect in its classic form earlier that day, at the end of sixth-period Language Arts, when a girl she didn’t really know but who was also in her Key-boarding class had asked Andromeda Klein if she was into wicker. Her name was Amy something.

Wicker? Andromeda’s first thought was of the rattan patio set the Kleins used to have back in the days when they lived in a much larger, much nicer detached home in the Hillmont hills and actually had a reason to own patio furniture—that is, a patio. Now all they had was a narrow deck and a driveway, and a semi-enclosed carport.

So Andromeda’s response to Amy Something was: “Yes, I celebrate all furniture of the world.” Or rather, Alternative Universe Andromeda Klein said that. Actual Plain Old Universe Andromeda just muttered the word
furniture
and looked confused, then reflexively pulled her hair back from her good ear and murmured “What?” Amy Something rolled her eyes, said “Freak” or “Weak,” or possibly “Geek.” As usual, even as her mouth was forming the “What?” Andromeda had worked it out: “wicca,” witchcraft, she meant.

There was more to Andromeda than her
ouijanesse
(the Daisy-Andromeda term describing their own spooky, occult experiments—pronounced “weedgie-ness”). She hated being looked at and analyzed, and she did her best to keep what was secret hidden. People with mildly disorganized collagen, the books said, could be “visually difficult to distinguish in the general population,” and the same went for the weedgie, if they didn’t advertise their
ouijanesse
. Most in the General Population saw Andromeda Klein as quiet, shy, too small, too skinny, nondescript, in her own world, even “stuck-up” because of her frequent insecure silences—a weak freak or geek, maybe, but not necessarily a weedgie one.

Nevertheless, the Amy girl must have noticed something: Daisy’s ankh ring on her first finger or her tarot deck in her backpack when she was putting away her Language Arts journal, which Mr. Barnes had just returned with a
See me
note. Perhaps this girl was herself “into wicker” and had wanted to make friends, compare wicker notes? To gather information for some future program of harassment? Either way, the moment had passed. Making enemies was astonishingly easy. All you had to do was stand there.

No, not “wicca,” certainly not. Andromeda and Daisy had had their witch phase, which they had called “doing spells.” This was their own Hellfire Club, one of many two-girl organizations they had dreamt up and dropped over the years till Daisy’s death put a stop to the process. The Stealers, the Dirties, Girls in the Mist, the Ninety-threes, the Ladies Spiritual, and many more—all harmless, except perhaps for the Murderers, which had overlapped with the witchcraft club in its herbalist phase, and also with Daisy’s murder-mystery kick and her idea to found a kind of Reverse Detective Agency, dedicated to plotting the Perfect Murder. That one hadn’t turned out so well. Poor old Mrs. Finn. Her illness, in fact, had had nothing to do with the belladonna, still less with any spell, Andromeda was sure of that. But they had shredded and burned their workbooks, of course, and never mentioned the project again. It would have been hard to explain.

The Stealers, a two-girl shoplifting ring, had also ceased to be when Daisy had been caught and issued a warning and had been banned from entering any Mervyn’s for life, a ban that had now expired.

All that wicker now embarrassed Andromeda faintly. Her views had changed a bit since those days, when she had always instinctively deferred to Daisy’s confident, yet uninformed, will. Real magick, Andromeda had come to believe, was a complex science that required far more training and study than most people could manage in a single lifetime. It was presumptuous to fake it, maybe even dangerous if you annoyed the wrong Intelligences with your yammering and blundering, or manifested and let slip Things you couldn’t control. Daisy had had no such qualms. She just charged in as though she knew everything, and the spells she “did” were a mishmash of poorly researched nonsense, culled from a variety of suspect sources. It was no wonder nothing had ever quite “worked.” Yet Daisy had had gifts, or at least luck; quite often her uninformed impulses had turned out to reflect real insight upon further study.

It had always been maddening that Daisy put in such little effort yet did so well, while Andromeda slaved away tirelessly with little result. But reality had to be faced: it had been Daisy’s role to act and Andromeda’s to study and interpret, in magic as in much else.

Daisy had used the words
witchcraft
and
magick
interchangeably, a common enough habit.
Wicker
isn’t a bad term, Andromeda concluded: a naïve, cuddly-wuddly, immature, reckless, faintly embarrassing, rather low form of shallow, new age, mock-religious garden furniture, constructed by techniques supposedly stretching back to remote prehistory but actually fabricated and plagiarized in the 1940s e.v. by a sad old English guy named Gerald and of no use whatsoever in the real world of narrow decks and driveways. Real magick wouldn’t be wicker: it would be a golden throne radiating astral light. Or perhaps merely a tree stump.

“You are a good student, Andi,” Baby Talk Barnes had said after Amy the Wicker Girl had left them alone in room C-12. “But if you don’t put more effort into your journal, you will fail this class.” As though anyone with perfect attendance ever got less than a B in any subject at Clearview High School. Andromeda Klein’s Language Arts journal had had only two entries for the week. Five would have been an A, twenty points each. You could write almost anything in there and get a nineteen or twenty. Her entry about how giraffes have long necks had earned a twenty-five, because it had been almost a whole page. “Here are some other things that are long: roads, time, spoons, knives, poles, string, rope, swimming pools, sighs …”
(Sighs
had earned a red exclamation point.) Wide margins and large handwriting were the key. But Andromeda tended to have other things on her mind, and coming up with entries that were numerous enough to satisfy Mr. Barnes yet bland enough that he wouldn’t be inspired to turn her in for psychological re-programming was more than she could manage sometimes.

“There’s no wool against shaking things up, if you don’t like kisses,” said Mr. Barnes.

By “kisses,” he meant “essays.” “Wool” was how he said
rule
. Disorganized collagen was not to blame for that one: he had trouble with his
Rs
, as well as a slight lisp, which was why everyone called him Baby Talk.

“How about a poem? Or dwaw a pick-thaw? Multimedia it up!” The expression on his face was evidently meant to be sly, or devil-may-care, or something.

Despite the speech impediment, Mr. Barnes thought of himself as the Cool Teacher type, which was quite an impressive demonstration of the power of self-esteem. He had a leather jacket and wore cowboy boots, and tended to do things like trying to turn
multimedia
into a verb. “You owe me thwee,” he said with what might have been intended as a wink, “pwuff two fwom waft week and …” She didn’t catch the last part. She would have to come up with at least ten entries for next time, just to stay even.

Andromeda Klein, now pedaling past the Community Bible Center Church on Broadway, envisioned a journal entry that went
Thingv I am bad at: dwawing, witing poemv, multimedia-ing … making eye contact …
Her thoughts strayed to less amusing avenues.

Her red mom-phone vibrated in her backpack and she had to stop in front of the post office to dig it out.

“Dromeda, honey, have you left school yet?” asked the mom.

“Yes,” said Andromeda, hanging up, hating her name.

“Bone to pick with you,” said the mom after vibrating in again, meaning she was ready to recite today’s list of instructions, schedules, and complaints. Andromeda hung up and pressed Reject when the phone vibrated again. Seven messages had been left since the morning switch-off. The mom had advice on everything: how to pour coffee, how not to drink water, how to pet the cat, how to read the newspaper, how not to shut the front door, the right way to stand or sit, the way you should and should not breathe, on and on. Complaints were generally texted in truncated form during the day and later elaborated into a full lecture. The day a person’s mother discovers text messaging is a dark day indeed. Delete All.

“I am at work,” she texted back, and switched the red phone off and returned it to its usual place in her makeup bag.

She panicked slightly when she couldn’t feel her blue phone—her “real” one—in her bag, but there it was in the outside pocket. No new messages, one saved, which was St. Steve’s deeply disappointing final text, now rather ancient:

“Hi there just checking in hope ur well, miss me?”

Hi there. There were no words for how much that “hi there” had hurt, and he’d had to have known it, too. It was still hard to look at. Before, it might have been “hey gooey” or “hi authe.” (“Authe” was a predictive text typo for “cutie;” “gooey” was “honey” though it could also be “goofy.”) She had texted back “toy away,” which meant “thinking of you and wild about you.” Wild was right. She had been wild, panic-stricken, as action-populated as she had ever been. There had been no response. That was when everything had finally begun to go wrong, as it had been intending to from the beginning. Then Daisy had died and the final spark had gone out of Andromeda’s life.