Andromeda Klein Read Free

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