“Why am I even doing this?” she said to the Andromeda in the mirror, and the mirror Andromeda rolled her eyes.
The mom was still on the computer, communing with Wildman_B in the persona of Tigress_67. It would be the “real” Wildman_B rather than Rosalie impersonating him now, since Rosalie was not at the computer but in the car; though, who knew, there could have been other Wildman_B impersonators out there. Andromeda left a note on the kitchen table saying she was going to Rosalie’s and wouldn’t be home late. Tigress_67 had her earbuds in and couldn’t hear Andromeda as she crept out the door. The dad’s van was gone—so he had escaped into the night too. Good for him. Or maybe he was recording Choronzon, inadvertently summoning Cthulhu and dooming the world.
“Like I said, good for him,” she said, more for Huggy’s benefit than anything, though there was no answer. The world was annoying and if not already doomed, in desperate need of dooming.
“Twenty twelve,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”
The usual pickup spot (for St. Steve as well as Rosalie) was the corner of Cedar and Hacienda Terrace, half a block away from Casa Klein. Rosalie wasn’t there yet. The rain had cleared up, but it was windy, making Andromeda wish she’d thought to bring Daisy’s vinyl coat. She hugged herself inside her sweatshirt, her hood pulled tight and drawstrung around her face and wig, counting the minutes as they ticked by, each one making it ever more clear how unlikely it was that St. Steve would actually send a photo in response to hers.
“This is your idea of cute?” said Rosalie, cranking down her window. “Grim Reaper couture? Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”
“You’re fifty-three minutes late,” said Andromeda, sliding in, checking her phone again. “No, fifty-four.”
“Yeah, sorry, I had to make another pickup first.” Bethany Stone was in the back, leaning over. Her smile was a wonder of nature, like the aurora borealis or Yosemite. Despite the complaints about Andromeda’s outfit, Rosalie was wearing her usual getup of sneakers, pegged jeans, and leather jacket; it was the costume of the rock bands she and the rest of them were into, the boys and the girls alike. Somehow it looked feminine and pretty on Rosalie, though also rather theatrical, as though she were playing a juvenile delinquent in a high school play. Bethany looked dazzling in a retro dress with little ties on the sleeves. Andromeda was distinctly unsurprised to note that she had perfect upper arms.
Andromeda hadn’t recognized the car at first as it had backed slowly down the hill toward her. It wasn’t the Volvo. It was the old Impala that had been in the van Genuchten garage for years.
“I thought this car didn’t work,” said Andromeda.
“Oh, it works,” said Rosalie, rolling back down the hill. “To a certain extent.” Andromeda expected Rosalie to go into a three-point turn, but when she reached the corner she rolled to a stop, then continued backing through the intersection.
“Slight transmission problem,” said Rosalie in answer to Andromeda’s stare. “I managed to move the Volvo out of the way and back the Impala out of the garage, but it doesn’t seem to want to get out of reverse. The Gimpala! Poor little thing. It takes some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. Tell me if I’m going to hit anything,” she added to Bethany as she accelerated in reverse down Redwood Grove Boulevard, her neck craned and her arm across the seat back.
“You’re going to back up all the way there,” said Andromeda.
“The girl catches on fast. Great at math,” Rosalie said, to Bethany.
“On the freeway.”
“Yes, it’s not too far,” Rosalie responded, as though driving in reverse on the freeway were something people did all the time when their transmissions acted up. “We’ll be fine.”
Bethany was nodding. Funny, she had seemed so sane. Maybe people did do it all the time. Andromeda tried once more:
“You’re not worried about dying in a horrifying, bloody car crash? At all?”
“Dying in a horrifying, bloody car crash can suck my dick,” said Rosalie brightly. “I’m skidding. That’s it, Drama-rama. Fetal position, just like at home. It’ll be over in no time.”
Andromeda had lowered herself to the seat and curled up, trying to clear her mind of everything but St. Steve’s arms and Bethany’s fiery eyes so she would at least have something pleasant and worthwhile in her head when it was sliced off and incinerated in a storm of glass, steel, and fire. At least the explosion would be beautiful, and there was always a chance that her future self would be born with better hair and bones and skin and parents.
Rosalie only ran off the road a couple of times on the frontage road leading to the freeway on-ramp, and when she did she got right back on, hardly slowing down.
“Merging could be tricky,” she conceded as the car accelerated. Bethany’s method of warning Rosalie of impending collisions was to shriek loudly, which Rosalie acknowledged with an “Oh my God,” or an “Aye, aye, Captain,” depending, apparently, on the urgency of the situation.
Andromeda’s eyes were closed tightly, her fists mashed into them, her knees against her chest. But after a few jerky lurches and stops and starts, the ride became, unbelievably, rather smooth. Mortal terror and panic gave way to an odd sense of detachment, a numbness. So this is how it ends, she said to herself dispassionately. How very interesting. The numbness enveloped her. She could no longer feel the wheels on the road. It was like she was floating away. She saw flashing shapes against the dark purple of her closed lids, crying faces, coils of twisting light like tubes or tunnels, hollow tentacles with dark veins branching all through their interior. They were tunnels to somewhere, or they were structures of her brain that she was floating through, and she felt the sensation of the legs of dozens of tiny spiders swarming along them through the tunnels, through tubes in her eyes and brain.
She was close to wherever it was, as she had been during the Lacey cone-of-hate incident, which had looked rather similar; she felt that with the least effort she could slip right past the here and now, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to. These gates presented themselves at such inconvenient times. Gods, we had better hope, she said to herself and whoever or whatever else was there, that riding backwards on the freeway in a car driven by a maniac is not what is required to open that gate. That would be some ceremony, very difficult to replicate, let alone survive.
What was the formula, the escape incantation? Hekas hekas este bebeloi!
The car lurched to a stop, the flashing tubes and spiders evaporated, and she opened her eyes to Rosalie and Bethany staring down at her with alarm and something else that was perhaps on the border between slight disgust and amusement.
“You are one weird chick,” said Rosalie. “Come on, sit up. We’re there.” Both Bethany and Rosalie were rubbing her shoulders encouragingly, and she felt the life coming back into her numbed body.
“What did you just say?” asked Bethany, in a confused but not unkind voice. “Some kind of ‘Otchie-kotchie Liberace’ rhyme thing?” So Andromeda had said the banishing formula out loud.
“Nothing,” said Andromeda, still feeling like she was waking up. “No, nothing, really. Just the Cry of the Watcher Within …”
“Yes, Beth,” Rosalie said. “Get with it. It was merely the Cry of the Washing Machine. Don’t you know anything?”
Smooth, said the Altiverse AK voice that might or might not have been Huggy. It’s getting confusing in there, Andromeda thought, referring to her head. No kidding, said whatever it was.
Rosalie had parked down the road from the station so they could get themselves together. For Rosalie, this meant a fairly elaborate routine of reapplying her makeup. Bethany was one of those girls who always looked wonderful with very little effort. That was like some superpower. Andromeda, for her part, didn’t see the point of any heroic efforts of beauty, especially for the sake of impressing these gas-station guys, who were not her project. This was Rosalie’s deal. They would not be interested in Andromeda, obviously, and, just as obviously, sh
e did not want them to be. It was clear that Rosalie’s objective in bringing her and Bethany along was to give the other guys something to occupy themselves with while she focused on this Darren. Andromeda had played the role of nonthreatening distraction many times, for Rosalie and for Daisy as well, and it was too uninteresting even to waste much effort being irritated by it. Bethany Stone, on the other hand: now, there was some competition, whether or not Rosalie realized it.
As if sensing Andromeda’s train of thought, Rosalie said:
“They really want to meet you, I swear. I’ve told them all about you.” Then she added, “Oh, and you, too, Andromeda: you and your witchy ways.” Bethany’s attitude seemed to be benign, amused, self-confident indulgence. How great it must have been to be her.
They saw the wig when Andromeda took her hood off to look at herself in the sun-visor mirror, and after gasping and making a big deal out of confirming that it was Daisy’s old wig and shaking her head in a “what am I going to do with you?” way, Rosalie pronounced her verdict that it actually looked pretty good on Andromeda. “Way better than your own flat, mousy hair” was what she undoubtedly meant, but Bethany too was nodding.
“Wig circle,” she said, meaning “Wigs are cool.” “I don’t know if I’d want a used one, though.” She said it with a smile, though with perhaps a hint, Andromeda suspected, of being weirded out by the fact that it had belonged to a dead person.
Like the person who owned that vintage dress with the sleeve ties isn’t long dead, said Huggy’s faint voice, bubbling up from under the sound of the traffic. I promise you, she’s dead. The question of how, precisely, Huggy could make that kind of promise was intriguing, but would have to wait for another time.
“Let me try something,” said Rosalie. What she wanted to try was to adjust Andromeda’s makeup. Andromeda felt like an idiot but let her do it, mainly because Bethany was egging her on and even put encouraging fingers on Andromeda’s palm, so it was almost like they were holding hands, almost, and she felt an ever-so-slight electric tingle from it. She even let Rosalie apply the thick, dark lipstick that never, ever worked on her.
“There,” said Rosalie to Bethany, turning Andromeda’s face toward her. “Now, that’s what Daisy looked like. Except less frightened and emaciated. Or is that emancipated? What is it, mance or mace?”
“I think it’s mace,” said Andromeda dryly.
It was true: she was wearing Daisy’s wig, and now she was also wearing a kind of Daisy mask. She didn’t really look like Daisy, but Rosalie had captured something of Daisy’s style, and it did look pretty good with the blond wig. Andromeda felt like a piece of art.
“I think I lost one of my cards at your house the other night,” said Andromeda abruptly, remembering the missing World. “Did you maybe see it?”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Rosalie, waving away the question. She was repacking her purse and shifting around preparing to open the door and get out of the car. She reached behind the seat and handed Andromeda a book. It was a big, heavy hardcover book, but it was too dark to read the title. Andromeda didn’t realize she was sniffing it till Rosalie said: “How’s it smell?” It actually smelled very nice, with a slightly different type of mustiness than the older IHOB books. Dave’s head, said Huggy. It smells like the back of Dave’s head, and It was right. Andromeda had always loved Dave’s head’s dusty smell, but this was the first time she had realized that Dave smelled like a book. Suddenly, and somehow, in a tiny, tiny way, just a sliver, her world made a little more sense. Perhaps that was all this night was meant to teach her. If so, she was ready to go home right now.
Rosalie was already out of the car and on her way down the sidewalk to the station with Bethany close behind and didn’t even hear Andromeda’s “What is it?” There was enough light when Andromeda opened her door to see the title: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Another classic Rosalie joke: off-the-wall, vaguely insulting in some indefinable way. Perhaps the joke was, Andromeda needed a reference book to know about that topic? She would open the book and it would be inscribed something like: So you’ll know what to do if the time ever comes.
That seemed to be the thrust of it, because Rosalie called out to her without looking back, using Andromeda’s least favorite of all her names: “Come on, Man-dromeda, step it up!” But then she added, “I mean, Androma-Daisy!”
“Josh,” said Rosalie to the boy in the booth as she set down her shopping bag of supplies. “Where’s Darren?”
“Who are you?” said the boy apparently named Josh, looking puzzled and a little sleepy. “And who’s Darren?”
Rosalie pulled her hair back and put her face right up to his: “Remember me, from last night? I had my hair up?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “The crazy Derek groupie from the high school who claims she goes to the College Behind Mervyn’s. Fifi, right? I didn’t recognize you with all those clothes on and being able to stand up without falling down and stuff.” So he was just teasing her after all. Andromeda really had to marvel at people like Bethany and now this Josh, who could handle Rosalie so easily. Nuit knew, Andromeda couldn’t do it, but those who could manage the right dismissive, faintly amused manner could render Rosalie eager to please, almost deferential.
“It’s Felicity,” said Rosalie. “And these are the girls I was telling you about, Stella and Georgie. So where’s Darr—uh, ek? Really? It was ren, I thought. No, I’m sure it’s ren. But never mind. We have brought refreshments. We made cupcakes.” The last bit was said in a kind of pleading manner. She was craning her neck, as though the elusive Darren-ek might be hiding coyly behind the Coke machine. “He said how much he liked cupcakes.”
You’ve got to be kidding, said the distant Huggy voice, and Andromeda shared Its skepticism about the proposition that Darren-ek had said anything at all about liking “cupcakes” while the two of them had been doing whatever it was they had been doing while “Felicity” had been, apparently, not overly dressed and falling off her shoes last night. But there were the cupcakes in a Tupperware tub in Rosalie’s hands. Andromeda was trying to work out whether she was supposed to be Stella or Georgie in this scenario. If you’re going to do alternate identities, as Rosalie often liked to do, it’s a good idea to tell your accomplices beforehand, isn’t it? Stella meant “star,” so it would have been more apt for Bethany; Georgie was boyish, the one who kissed the girls and made them cry, so that was about right; it just figured. Not that it made much of a difference. Andromeda was planning to remain completely silent, whatever her name was supposed to be, and to wait it out. The prospects for a surprise beer-and-baked-goods party seemed fairly grim, and as the actual target of the scheme was nowhere to be found, it didn’t seem like it would last too long. She looked at her phone (no messages) and imagined getting home early enough to take another picture for St. Steve or even attempt another tantoon ritual. In the meantime, perhaps she could find a quiet corner where she could read Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Possibly there was a chapter on cupcakes that would explain everything.
Andromeda liked how this Josh referred to the target as Darren-ek dryly and without missing a beat or making a big deal of it, exactly as Andromeda herself had been doing in her head since Rosalie had said it. Other than that, he was not particularly impressive, a generic, uninteresting guy. Darren-ek wasn’t working tonight, he said. There was a chance he might stop by later, but probably not. When Rosalie suggested that Josh call him to let him know they were there, Josh said: “Why don’t you call him yourself? Oh, that’s right, he didn’t give you his number!” The secret was in the easygoing, confident, joking tone. Andromeda couldn’t have pulled that off if her life depended on it. He was probably a Sagittarius, like Rosalie herself, born with a quiver of arrows and a license to be an asshole.
He said he would text Darren-ek, and he made a big deal out of poking his fingers at his phone, but it looked like pretend-texting to Andromeda. Everybody was smiling good-naturedly, though. Bethany looked nowhere ne
ar miserable or annoyed at being dragged there, as Andromeda felt she had a right to be, and even Rosalie’s crestfallen look was comparably mild. Darren-ek doesn’t want to be reached, said a vague, buzzy Huggy vibration from somewhere behind Andromeda’s upper jaw. He’s protecting him. That’s what friends are for. Protection from unwanted Rosalie action—everybody could use a Josh, really.
It was decided that they might as well drink the beers and eat the cupcakes while waiting for Darren-ek to arrive.
“Stella can tell our fortunes,” said Rosalie, sitting back against the tiny office’s partition wall. “She has a gift. Stained flowers.” “Strange powers,” she probably meant to say. “She did readings the other night and they all came true. She predicted that my fuck-head ex-boyfriend would cheat on me and even could tell the names of the whores he did it with.” She continued with a rather inflated list of other aspects of Andromeda’s readings that had proven to be accurate, including Rosalie’s own activities with Darren-ek (“I’m sure he told you about it, the full play-by-play—and that one she did over the phone. That’s what I’m talking about.”) and her mother’s being “called away” on “important business” for the weekend and taking the car keys with her, and being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There were other ones Andromeda hadn’t even known about, such as Bethany’s father getting a new job, and Bethany coming into money of her own (she apparently had gotten news of having won a scholarship of some kind) and Empress falling ill and maybe having to go to the hospital.
These interpretations were all iffy, exaggerated reports of Andromeda’s own charlatanism, and some were flat-out wrong: the Empress card in a spread suggesting illness or infirmity did not really indicate that someone who happened to be named Empress would get sick. Some of the readings, like the fact that Amy the Wicker Girl had lost four pounds, she didn’t even remember having done all that clearly. But the way Rosalie told it, and with Bethany nodding confirmation, it did sound impressive. That’s not the way it works, was what she had said at the time, and she also said it now, looking sheepishly at her shoes and wishing herself far away. The Book of Thoth pointed to deep secrets of the Universe, of the complex interplay of forces on the inner planes, not trivial details about what base you get to with a guy whose name you don’t quite know, or who has the keys to the family Volvo. Yet on the other hand, it did seem to work that way. Rosalie seemed convinced at least. Perhaps the Universe speaking through the Book of Thoth revealed trivial details to trivial people? There was, maybe, something in that.
Andromeda Klein Page 24
