Andromeda Klein (18 page)

The lexicon now included
mageek
and
emogeekian
as well as
bacon
, that was certain.

x.

Rosalie van Genuchten pressed Pause on the remote when Andromeda walked in, ignoring a couple of overlapping groans from the basketball boy and one of the Thing’s heads.

The door had been unlocked for her as they’d heard her coming down the stairs. The zombie-killing video-game tournament had come to an end. The lights were all out, and it was nearly dark in the room. They had moved the coffee table out of the way of the television. The Thing with Two Heads, Amy the Wicker Girl, and the basketball boy were squeezed onto the couch, and everyone else was sitting on the floor, watching a movie on the TV, passing around Rosalie’s bong. Rosalie herself was seated on the floor with her back against the Thing’s legs, her open laptop on her lap facing outward toward the TV screen.

Rosalie swiveled to face her. Charles Iskiw’s face was still in the video chat window of the laptop; his voice, coming from the laptop’s tinny speakers, said “Yo,” and he winked. It was the first time Andromeda had ever seen anyone watch a movie from a computer. It was like two machines watching each other. This
was
the future.

“Where’s Brian?” said Rosalie.

“It’s Byron,” said Andromeda.

“Yeah, Rosalie, it’s Byron!” said Amy the Wicker Girl. Charles Iskiw snickered from the screen.

“Brian, Byron,” said Rosalie. “Okay, Byron, then. Cute-she’s defending his honor.”

“You be good to my boy Byron,” said Charles’s voice, crackling through the laptop speakers. “He’s good people.”

“Mkay …,” said Andromeda tentatively. Man, it was weird talking to a flat-screen head in someone else’s lap facing out; far weirder, for some reason, than talking to someone’s flat-screen head in your own lap facing inward. “He had to go.”

Charles, Rosalie, and Amy the Wicker Girl were the ones who groaned, indicating, possibly, that they, and only they, had been the coconspirators.

“Scared another one away,” said Rosalie, shaking her head and making a sad, lower-lip pout face, but motioning Andromeda over to sit next to her in front of the couch. “I’m just kidding.” She pushed Play and turned back to the movie. “It’s
Chisel Two
,” she whispered to Andromeda. “Are you excited?”

Andromeda was, perhaps, just a bit excited.
Chisel II had
just come out on DVD.

Charles’s whispered voice buzzed from the laptop, and Rosalie pulled Andromeda’s head down near the speakers so she could hear what he was saying, and she caught quite a bit of it because it was all treble tones.

“Tommy just closed the store,” whispered Charles’s buzzy voice, explaining the plot of the film so far, “and he’s following this kid’s family to the zoo….”

Chisel II
was one of a series of horror movies Rosalie’s crowd had been following for years, about a slow-witted psycho killer named Tommy Frederic who works in a hardware store and kills the customers with their own tools when they buy them from the store. Before
Chisel II
there had been
Hammer
and
Screwdriver
, and
Wrench I, Wrench II, and Wrench III
, though the entire Wrench trilogy had all gone straight to DVD and wasn’t up to the standard of the others.
Chisel
, the first in the series, was generally regarded as the best one.

Andromeda waved the bong away each time it reached her. Weed gave her headaches.

“Pussy,” whispered Rosalie, the consummate hostess, through the bubbles. “You’re breathing my exhaust anyway.” And it was true. Andromeda was starting to feel some pain in the approximate location of her pineal gland. The Thing’s two heads were loudly making out with each other. Thank Horus Andromeda still had her ice-watered mug of Christmas trees resting between her feet, there if she needed it.

Chisel
had been Daisy’s favorite movie, which made it a little sad that she wasn’t around to see
Chisel II
. Or maybe, she was? Andromeda could smell Daisy, all right, despite the weed and the gin and all the other people in the room, but that could be explained, possibly, by all of Daisy’s old things she had brought in with her. She could smell the damp wig all the way from the corner, and the vinyl coat was also hanging where she’d left it. Andromeda thought about Daisy’s old Gnome School Little One in her book bag, imagined it being inhabited by the gathering Daisy spirit and scrambling up over all the books and other things in the bag, pulling open the zipper from the inside just enough to pop its head through, and watching the movie that way. Why not, if Charles could watch the movie through the computer’s camera eye?

Andromeda looked over and saw that her book bag wasn’t against the wall where she had left it. The others must have moved it when they’d rearranged the furniture for the home theater setup, she thought. She couldn’t very well paw around for it in the dark, and she felt stupid asking about it, but there were important things in there, not even counting Daisy’s Little One. She worried about her bag all through the movie, to the degree that she wasn’t able to enjoy it all that much, even though there was a clever twist near the end where one of Tommy Frederic’s victims used copper wire from the hardware store to fashion a crude chisel-deflecting suit of armor under her clothes. You could tell, though, that it wasn’t going to work. The girl had too many curves and too much surface area, and Tommy Frederic was very handy with a chisel. If she had been slight and aerodynamic like Andromeda, complete copper wire coverage would have been much less of a problem.

“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.