“Wow, you are quite remarkably drunken,” said Altiverse AK.
It was true. The floor was rising and pitching just a bit, producing a very slight antigravity roller-coaster effect, and Andromeda’s face felt lopsided. The power of Christmas trees. She felt great. She could be wound all around with wire, underneath the silk ribbon, before being put in her box, and she could drink martinis through a tube and she could practice training her mind to expand and encompass the Universe while she remained compact and stationary and secure, protected by animated swords lying crossed on top of her…. She must have fallen asleep for a minute there, because she jolted awake and realized she had missed the end of the movie. The basketball boy and Rosalie’s brother, Theo, had left. Someone had put on some annoying, grating music that was making her inner ears buzz unpleasantly.
The laptop was back on the table now, facing them, and Charles Iskiw was still up there, grinning. Rosalie had lit a couple of strong vanilla candles to mask the weed smell. The candles were on either side of the computer, giving the table the look of an altar erected to Charles’s glory.
Rosalie was poking Andromeda and shaking her.
“Okay, back to work, kiddo,” she said. “Come on back. Come back, come back. Don’t go into the light.”
“Rise and shine,” Charles said.
Andromeda blinked.
“So, now, what happened with Byron?” said Amy the Wicker Girl.
“What she means is,” Rosalie said, “what did you do to make Byron run from the room screaming?”
“I thought,” said Amy the Wicker Girl, “that the two of you would have a lot in common. He likes evil. All-star Growlie. And books.”
“Oh God,” said Rosalie. “Don’t say ‘Crally.’ She’ll bite your head off. It’s Crow-ley. Crow-ley. Like Stoli.”
Byron was in Amy’s boyfriend’s band, it turned out. And you wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he was good at quite a lot of sports.
“You’ve got it all wrong. We made passionate love all over the kitchen table. I was a voracious animal and he barely got out of there alive. You might not want to go up there for a while. It’s pretty messy.” That was Altiverse AK, of course. What could Andromeda say in the plain Universe? That she wanted someone smarter than her and taller than her, someone she chose herself from amongst her thousands of ardent suitors? Picky, picky, they would say. St. Steve had ruined her for anyone else, maybe, or at least for anyone else with a scraggly goatee.
“How about,” she finally said, “he was even worse than Jesus Truck?”
“Seriously,” said Bethany from across the room, in a tone that seemed to suggest that Rosalie might have tried him out on her as well.
How about, no more pathetic matchmaking designed only to demonstrate how much more datable everyone other than me is—but she didn’t say that because she couldn’t figure out how to phrase it.
“Now, what is he?” she asked instead. “Is he emo? He’s emo, isn’t he?”
Laughter all around. Charles said “Oh, man” and Rosalie said “Gah” and Amy the Wicker Girl choked on her drink all at the same time. She knew it. Had to be emo. But they were shaking their heads, so it was hard to tell.
“I don’t see how you know what people are.” All the nonstandard types of guys, the music ones, anyway, looked pretty similar. “What is emo, again?”
“Nobody knows!” said Charles. “Nobody!”
“Seriously,” said Rosalie. “He’s more like skate rat? Maybe skate rat crossed with art fag?”
“He’s mostly into that Cthulhu rock, you know,” said Charles.
“No,” Rosalie said. “She doesn’t know. Andromeda hates rock-and-roll music. It all sounds the same and it hurts her dear little ears.”
Cthulhu rock. Was there really such a thing? About half the things these people said were true. The trick was to spot which half. Rosalie and Amy were nodding, though. Choronzon, the Goat with a Thousand Young—that made sense. The idea that there might be a whole genre of music dedicated to Cthulhu with an official name known even to Charles and Rosalie and Amy the Wicker Girl was faintly disturbing. On the other hand, Crowley’s work had survived the dabbling of dozens of dumb rock musicians, so there was no reason the Deep Old Ones couldn’t as well. Andromeda imagined herself and Dave and Mr. Crowley and A.E. and a Necronomicon with eyes, sitting in a row on a ledge, waiting patiently till Cthulhu rock, whatever it was, ran its course and they were once again free to do their work unobstructed.
“Now, what’s that weird, creepy music you always listen to in your headphones, again, what’s it called?” asked Rosalie. “You know. It sounds like nails on a chalkboard strangling a cat?”
“It’s ars nova,” said Andromeda. “Or ars subtilior.” She added that it meant “a subtler art” and it was from the fourteenth century.
“Yeah,” said Charles’s voice from the laptop speakers in a mock British accent, one of his most annoying affectations. “And arses don’t come much subtler than our Androms’s.”
Rosalie scowled at him but conceded, “Well, you do have a very subtle ass, it’s true. Did you at least show Bri-bri your tantoons?” Rosalie was asking. “Tattoos,” she meant.
“Yes, I did,” said Andromeda, with the tone of voice and facial expression that instructs the listener to understand the opposite of the literal meaning of the words. “Of course. He was blown away.”
“I wanna see,” said Charles, but Rosalie gave him a look and hit Pause on the laptop so he couldn’t see or hear. “Don’t even think about it, Man-dromeda. Flaunting yourself like a harlot.” Then, brightly, to the others in the room: “She does them herself, just like they do in prison.
“You know,” she continued, turning to Andromeda again, “Brian’s the only living example of a male with a tramp stamp. Maybe he’ll show you his if you show him yours.”
Now, she had to be kidding on that one, surely.
“I’ll ask him,” Andromeda said. “He’s coming to the library to check out some books for me.”
“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” said Rosalie as she unpaused the laptop and blew Charles a kiss, then said to the screen, “You missed it, Andromeda got naked and her tattoos put a curse on everybody but you. You can thank me later.”
Andromeda spotted her bag, halfway hidden by the open closet door next to the computer table, and she crawled over to inspect it. It was all intact, though it was a bit jumbled, like someone had kicked it or dragged it. Inconsiderate of them, but there was no damage that she could see, and she set it down gently.
When she got back to the couch, the conversation had moved from her “tantoons” to a discussion of Byron the Emogeekian’s scraggly wisp of chin beard, and, to Andromeda’s surprise, there seemed to be general approval of it. Maybe they were kidding about that, too. It was grotesque.
Amy the Wicker Girl said that the whole band was thinking of dyeing their facial hair blue. “You should do that with your goatee,” she added, turning to Charles, who made a sour face.
“People,” said Charles’s laptop face. “I’m getting really sick and tired of nobody ever knowing the difference between a goatee and a Vandyke. This,” he said, drawing a circle in the air around his mouth, “is a Vandyke….”
Rosalie rolled her eyes and abruptly closed the laptop.
“Don’t die,” she said.
“Oh my God, you hung up on him!” said Amy.
“I can’t take the Vandyke speech again, I just can’t.”
“Seriously,” said Bethany.
“Won’t he be mad?” said Amy.
“No, no, he’s whipped. Not allowed to be mad. I’m just kidding.”
But the real reason she closed the laptop on Charles’s Vandyky face was that the garage door was opening, which meant Rosalie’s mother was finally home from Debtors Anonymous. Rosalie wasn’t, technically, allowed to talk to Charles Iskiw, even over the Internet. Everyone scrambled to hide the stuff that needed to be hidden.
Ther
e was a polite knock on the door, a respectful pause, and then the door opened partway and Mrs. van Genuchten’s face appeared.
“Everything all right down here?” it asked, sounding almost as wasted as everyone else.
“Rough session?” said Rosalie. Debtors Anonymous could get pretty ugly sometimes.
Andromeda Klein was in the vacuum, shivering a little, not feeling too good, though not quite all the way sick. It was always the last drink that did it. Up till then it was great. She remembered overhearing one of the rock-and-roll boys from the Old Folks Home—it was either Frederick or Sam, she didn’t know which was which—sardonically describe the process after Amanda had, once again, snarled at him incoherently before losing consciousness with her head on the booth table: “It’s like, I go to a licensed professional,” he had said, pointing to Ned Ned the bartender, “and hand him forty bucks, and in return for this payment he solemnly promises to guarantee that my girlfriend will, by the end of the night, be belligerent and hostile and violently ill all night and for most of the next day.” Why do people do it? Because it’s fun, all the way up till when it’s not, plus some people can’t help it. She was pretty sure that Frederick and Sam and Amanda were too old to be emo, though she had no idea what they were.
How wonderful, though, to be in a vacuum on the other side of a door that locks and has no spy holes. What luxury. The mom would be getting home from the DA meeting any time now, and would soon be calling to harass her, but at least she couldn’t barge in physically.
As if on cue, Andromeda’s phone vibrated. It was not, of course, the red mom-phone, which was still in her makeup bag in the playroom, but rather her regular blue phone, which she had retrieved from her book bag before heading to the vacuum. The display was flashing “R&E,” which was how Rosalie’s number was labeled in her address book. It stood for “Rosalie and Elisabeth.”
“You having some trouble in there?” said Rosalie after Andromeda had pressed Accept.
“Just enjoying the view,” Andromeda replied, and that got a laugh, because the downstairs guest bathroom in the van Genuchten house was known for the garish, vibrantly clashing colors of the tiles and wallpaper, expensive and in great, vintage, restored condition but obviously conceived in the fifties by a schizophrenic designer. There was a picture of a sailboat on the wall in front of the toilet, and if you stared at it, the colors around it would start to vibrate and swim in your peripheral vision and eventually make the pastel background of the painting flash with blotches of random colors. Or maybe it was just that she rarely visited that particular vacuum stone cold sober. This was because Rosalie van Genuchten was such a determined and efficient hostess. “Come on, everybody, drink”—that was the tantoon Rosalie should get, really.
Rosalie was calling to suggest that Andromeda stay the night. Rosalie was in no condition to drive Andromeda home, and Andromeda would certainly have a bit of trouble biking all the way, especially in this weather. Rosalie had already had her mother call the mom to clear it.
“She told her we had to work on our altruism projects tonight,” she said. This was a Social Studies assignment that Rosalie and the Thing had been complaining about for some time. The students were supposed to do something kind or helpful for someone and submit documentation and analysis. Andromeda wasn’t in Rosalie’s class and didn’t really understand what it was supposed to involve, but there was no way the mom would know that.
“Just say the word,” continued Rosalie, “and I’ll call Byron and have him come over. You guys can have the downstairs all to yourself if you want.”
“Now, that would be an altruism project,” said Andromeda, which clearly meant “No thanks,” but just to be sure she added: “No thanks.”
It was then that something rather amazing happened, and then, following that, that a rather unfortunate thing happened; and then, following that, that an extremely unfortunate thing resulted. Calls to Andromeda’s cell phone displayed the phone number through caller ID when it was available, unless they were labeled in her phone’s address book, in which case the name, rather than the number, would flash on the screen. If caller ID was blocked, the phone would indicate it by flashing “UNKNOWN,” or “WITHHELD,” or sometimes “NO NUMBER.” When she could be bothered, she labeled the numbers of her few associates and friends with whimsical names in her address book, like “R&E,” for Rosalie and her stomach, Elisabeth, or “THE MOM” for the mom, or “TEH GHEY” for Bryce, or “BIG-BOOBS” for Marlyne. How to identify St. Steve in her address book had been a difficult question. He was a secret. She was worried not only that her phone might fall into the wrong hands, but also that someone might see the name flash on her phone when he texted or called. The way she handled it was, she thought, rather clever, though it had also had a cost. St. Steve’s “name,” in her address book, was UNAVAILABLE. The idea was that anyone who saw it pop up on her phone would think it was a display like “WITHHELD” or “UNKNOWN.” Her heart would leap when she saw it flashing when he called or texted her, though the fact that the label was so literally, painfully true was not lost on her.
So when she was folding up her phone after talking to Rosalie and her stomach, Elisabeth, she noticed the little picture of an envelope in the phone’s viewing screen indicating that she had a message. And when she opened the phone back up to check it, the screen said “new text message.” And when she pressed the key for “read message” the screen said “new message from UNAVAILABLE.”
That was the amazing thing.
The unfortunate thing was that just as she was pressing, with trembling fingers, “read message,” she fumbled and the phone slipped from her hand, bounced once on the toilet seat, and landed in the water. She shrieked and fished it out, and dried it as best she could with one of the big pink fluffy towels that said GUESTS. Then she had a better idea and snapped it apart and dried each piece separately before putting it back together. “Thoth Hermes, Three Times Great, Thoth Hermes, Three Times Great, I beseech thee,” she was saying over and over again quickly in a whisper. But—and this was the extremely unfortunate thing that resulted—after she had reassembled all the pieces, she couldn’t even get it to switch on.
xi.
The question Andromeda was turning over in her mind was whether one of her series of “It is my will that St. Steve return to me” sigils had finally worked or the message from UNAVAILABLE had happened on its own. Often, it is said, a sigil that has been successfully embedded in the deep mind will briefly flash and fade in the mind when it has worked. Andromeda had seen a flash of something before the message arrived. But it was very possible that this flash had been Christmas-tree-generated.
Sigil-spawned or not, if it really had been a message from UNAVAILABLE, it would still be there, still marked unread, on the SIM card, Altiverse AK was saying as Andromeda Klein headed down the stairs back to the playroom, still pressing the On button over and over, telling herself that AAK was right, that the SIM card was still okay, that it wouldn’t be too water-damaged to function. If, that is, the phone had been set to save texts on the card rather than in the phone, AAK added. Andromeda said “Motherfucker” under her breath, because she had no idea, to which AAK did the Alternative Universe equivalent of what used to be written out as “tut-tut.” Andromeda had never meant the exploding head sound quite this much.
No one was in the playroom when she got there. The mom phone in her makeup bag was vibrating, though, and she had to endure an intolerable interrogation and the usual list of complaints and helpful hints before she could get her bearings. She just wasn’t in the mood at the moment. She barely heard them, in fact: she was still woozy, and what was left of her mind was otherwise engaged, thinking about UNAVAILABLE and his lost text.
“I love you,” the mom was saying in a badgering tone. “Hey, did you hear me? I love you. I love you….”
“Love you, too, Mom,” Andromeda finally said, with a great deal of resignation, hanging up just as the door swung open and Rosalie, Bethany, Amy
the Wicker Girl, Stacey, and the Thing’s female half came in.
All five girls were staring at her with five strange, hard-to-classify expressions. “When you are too wasted,” said AAK, “to manage even the basic minimal level of sarcasm required by the situation, it is time to say when.”
“Wait,” said Rosalie. “What phone is that? Your phone is blue.”
“Blue,” said Amy the Wicker Girl, “yes it was,” and the other girls nodded, as though the color of Andromeda’s phone were the most fascinating, and intellectually taxing, subject in the world.
Andromeda did her best to explain the color-coded mom-phone system, not the easiest thing to do in her current state. Eventually they got it.
“Your mom tracks your calls?” said Amy the Wicker Girl incredulously, as though doing such a thing weren’t utterly typical mom behavior. “That is …” She searched for the word: “fucked.”
“No, that’s genius,” said Bethany. “I can’t believe I never thought of two phones.”
Andromeda smiled in spite of herself, feeling weirdly proud, though St. Steve was the genius, not her. It looked like they were all going to be getting mom-phones now, anyway.
Amy the Wicker Girl asked how she kept them straight in her head, and how she kept the mom from seeing the red phone. “I don’t think I could manage it,” she added.
“I keep them separate,” said Andromeda. “The red phone is always hidden in my makeup bag and I only take it out when I have to. The blue phone is usually in my book bag or in my pocket.” She didn’t explain about dropping the blue phone—the explanation was confusing enough as it was.
Andromeda stared at the red phone in her hand, then turned so they couldn’t see and discreetly lifted her shirt. St. Steve’s upside-down number was on her stomach, where she had written it in pen the first day she met him at the library and re-inked it as a nightly ritual till she had finally decided to save time by tattooing it. She was marked as his, or as whoever else’s who got the number if it was ever reassigned. Texting that number from the red phone would really be a bad idea, though. Avoiding that was the whole purpose of the two-phone system in the first place.
Andromeda Klein Page 16
