Andromeda Klein (19 page)

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.

There 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.

“I need to use your laptop,” she said to Rosalie, who said, “Okay, as long as you drink this, and hurry up.” She handed Andromeda the Winnie-the-Pooh cup. “Hot chocolate!” she said loudly, then whisper-sang,
“Hot damn! Peppermint schnapps! Everybody everybody call call the cops….”
This was the chorus of a song by one of the sneakers-and-baseball-cap “whoa oh” bands they always listened to. It actually wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Rosalie was pretty good at making drinks.

Andromeda sat down with the laptop and entered St. Steve’s phone number from her stomach tattoo in the phone company’s text message Web page for her blue phone account, and checking her dead phone’s keypad for likely text typos, quickly typed the following and pressed Send before she could second-guess herself:

“Gooey! Sax wot texted cut can mot seaf bc me phone problems. Nipp you po muah. Docil of?”

(Gooey = honey; sax = saw; wot = you; cut = but; mot = not; seaf = read; me = of; nipp = miss; po = so; muah = much; docil = e-mail; of = me.)

It was hard to know what to write without having seen what his message was, so she was trying to keep it noncommittal yet positive; this required suppressing some bitterness and avoiding the text version of whining, which was something she knew would put him off. She had always said that if she could do it over she would be, or would at least act, more easygoing and indifferent, and now was a chance to prove she could do it. St. Steve had stopped e-mailing her long before he broke off the texting, and the address she had for him had bounced back an error message for some time, but the phone must still work because she had just received the message from it.

Andromeda closed the laptop, picked up her book bag, and said she wasn’t feeling so good and had to go to the bathroom again. Rosalie rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t fall in.” Then she said Andromeda should hurry back because it was time for “phase two.” From the looks of things, the plan for “phase two” seemed to be Irish coffees and more zombie video games. Andromeda trotted up the stairs as quietly as she could, one phone in each of her sweatshirt pockets.

There was a blow-dryer under the sink in the guest vacuum. Andromeda disassembled the blue phone and spread its pieces on a towel and dried them as thoroughly as she could. The blow-dried, reassembled phone would not start up. Plugging the red phone’s battery into the blue phone resulted in a lit screen, but it was blank blue and the keys didn’t do anything at all when pressed. “Trismegistus motherfucker,” she whispered, then said, “Sorry sorry,” because blasphemy in such situations was probably ill-advised. But when she replaced the red phone’s SIM chip with the chip from the blue phone and turned the red phone on, it chimed and started up.

“Trismegistus!” she whispered. “Oh thank you thank you, Thoth Hermes Mercurius Nebo Odin, twice greatest, thrice great, ibis-headed god, scribe of heaven.”

She was reading St. Steve’s text message when there was a pounding on the vacuum door, and Amy the Wicker Girl’s voice was saying “You okay in there?”

“I’m okay,” she called out. “Just a minute.” And it was true. She felt like throwing up, but she was very, very okay.

“What was the name of your mom’s first pet?” said Rosalie van Genuchten when Andromeda came in.

“What?” said Andromeda. “I have no idea.” She was holding, or rather caressing, the red phone with the blue phone chip in her sweatshirt pocket in a silent, gloating kind of way. The last thing she wanted to think about was the mom.

Rosalie was sitting against the wall with her laptop on her knees while Amy the Wicker Girl and Bethany played Zombie Nation II. The boys always hogged the games whenever they were around.

“Okay. What was the name of her first-grade teacher? Or wait, what city was she born in?”

“That’s complicated,” Andromeda replied. “You’re hacking into my mom’s e-mail?” These were clearly “secret questions” you have to answer to get your password if you forget it.

“Nope, I already got the e-mail. Favorite color: blue. That’s some intense security system, right there. Got it on the second guess. No, she changed her account on Virtual-verse.”

Virtualverse was one of the mom’s role-playing-network alternate-world games. Manipulating Andromeda’s mother on the network was one of Rosalie’s hobbies. She had set up several fake profiles for flirting purposes and had managed to seduce Andromeda’s mother’s character a couple of times after luring her to Sex Island, and had even gotten her to agree to a virtual marriage with Super_Doug at one stage. Rosalie’s own mother played as well, if not as often or as diligently, and when the Doug character had started showing interest in Mrs. van Genuchten’s character and invited both virtual moms to the Sex Island Halloween Fetish Party the past year, the jealousy and confusion and broken-engagement fireworks between the two moms had really been something to behold. Neither of the moms appeared to have figured out the other’s identity, which added greatly to the enjoyment of the spectacle. The grand prize of this game, as originally conceived, would be to get one of the moms to agree to a personal meeting in real life, or the both of them at the same time if possible, but Rosalie hadn’t been able to manage that yet. Her latest twist was to log on as Tigress_67, the mom’s user name, and make mischief that way.

“Come on, hurry up, Dromedary, I want to make Tigress trash Wildman’s Harley before she tries to log back on.” The mom—that is, Tigress_67—was currently flirting with a guy calling himself Wildman_B.

“You could try
airplane
for the city question,” said Andromeda.

“What, like Airplane, Massachusetts?”

The story Andromeda had heard from the mom ever since she could remember was that she had been born in an airplane over international waters between the United States and Australia. Her father had worked for the Austrian FBI and her mother was an Amerian stewardess he had met in his undercover travels, which was why the mom was an American citizen. They made her choose her nationality when she was five, before they allowed her into her foster home after her parents’ deaths. She really missed Austria, and the surf, and wallabies, and especially the delicious schnitzel, but she could never go back now.

“Just try it.”

Rosalie tried it, and said, “Dude, no way, that’s totally it. Unreal. Was she really born on an airplane?”

“No,” said Andromeda. “Not really. She just isn’t smart enough to realize that that isn’t a very convincing lie.”

“Why would she have to lie about that?” asked Rosalie. It was a good question, and Andromeda had no answer. Perhaps the mom just wanted to make her life sound more exotic. But Rosalie was not interested in that topic and waved it away.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Back to the e-mail,” she uptalk-narrated to herself while stabbing the keyboard. “Ha. Place of birth: airplane. Password: airplane airplane. You couldn’t make this up, you really couldn’t.”

“The top-secret security methods of the Australian or Austrian FBI,” said Altiverse AK. But the primary Andromeda was not really paying attention to the master hacking, or to the swift and efficient motorcycle vandalism Rosalie was track-padding out. She was thinking of St. Steve and his message: “hey hey hot thing you ok? still love me a little? <3.”

He had never ever texted her a heart before, and “hot thing” was a new one, too. It was amazing how quickly a message could take you back in time. She was vibrating and anxious just like she had been before, the more sensible, detached, jaded Andromeda Klein suddenly a thing of the past. She had texted back a “toy away” and asked “where are you?” but he hadn’t responded. Which was normal: sometimes it took him a while to get away long enough to respond, and often the response wouldn’t be till the next day, which was agonizing. But she couldn’t help checking her phone approximately every thirty seconds, turning it in her hand inside her pocket, pressing Unlock and discreetly glancing at it when it felt like no one was looking.

“I did it with an ax,” said Rosalie, when she had finished with the virtual motorcycle, adding that she left a note that said: “Dear Wildman. Fuck you. I chopped up your chopper!/hugs/Tigress.”