Andromeda Klein Read Free Page A

Plain Old Universe Andromeda just muttered the word furniture and looked confused, then reflexively pulled her hair back from her good ear and murmured “What?” Amy Something rolled her eyes, said “Freak” or “Weak,” or possibly “Geek.” As usual, even as her mouth was forming the “What?” Andromeda had worked it out: “wicca,” witchcraft, she meant.
    There was more to Andromeda than her ouijanesse (the Daisy-Andromeda term describing their own spooky, occult experiments—pronounced “weedgie-ness”). She hated being looked at and analyzed, and she did her best to keep what was secret hidden. People with mildly disorganized collagen, the books said, could be “visually difficult to distinguish in the general population,” and the same went for the weedgie, if they didn’t advertise their ouijanesse . Most in the General Population saw Andromeda Klein as quiet, shy, too small, too skinny, nondescript, in her own world, even “stuck-up” because of her frequent insecure silences—a weak freak or geek, maybe, but not necessarily a weedgie one.
    Nevertheless, the Amy girl must have noticed something: Daisy’s ankh ring on her first finger or her tarot deck in her backpack when she was putting away her Language Arts journal, which Mr. Barnes had just returned with a See me note. Perhaps this girl was herself “into wicker” and had wanted to make friends, compare wicker notes? To gather information for some future program of harassment? Either way, the moment had passed. Making enemies was astonishingly easy. All you had to do was stand there.
    No, not “wicca,” certainly not. Andromeda and Daisy had had their witch phase, which they had called “doing spells.” This was their own Hellfire Club, one of many two-girl organizations they had dreamt up and dropped over the years till Daisy’s death put a stop to the process. The Stealers, the Dirties, Girls in the Mist, the Ninety-threes, the Ladies Spiritual, and many more—all harmless, except perhaps for the Murderers, which had overlapped with the witchcraft club in its herbalist phase, and also with Daisy’s murder-mystery kick and her idea to found a kind of Reverse Detective Agency, dedicated to plotting the Perfect Murder. That one hadn’t turned out so well. Poor old Mrs. Finn. Her illness, in fact, had had nothing to do with the belladonna, still less with any spell, Andromeda was sure of that. But they had shredded and burned their workbooks, of course, and never mentioned the project again. It would have been hard to explain.
    The Stealers, a two-girl shoplifting ring, had also ceased to be when Daisy had been caught and issued a warning and had been banned from entering any Mervyn’s for life, a ban that had now expired.
    All that wicker now embarrassed Andromeda faintly. Her views had changed a bit since those days, when she had always instinctively deferred to Daisy’s confident, yet uninformed, will. Real magick, Andromeda had come to believe, was a complex science that required far more training and study than most people could manage in a single lifetime. It was presumptuous to fake it, maybe even dangerous if you annoyed the wrong Intelligences with your yammering and blundering, or manifested and let slip Things you couldn’t control. Daisy had had no such qualms. She just charged in as though she knew everything, and the spells she “did” were a mishmash of poorly researched nonsense, culled from a variety of suspect sources. It was no wonder nothing had ever quite “worked.” Yet Daisy had had gifts, or at least luck; quite often her uninformed impulses had turned out to reflect real insight upon further study.
    It had always been maddening that Daisy put in such little effort yet did so well, while Andromeda slaved away tirelessly with little result. But reality had to be faced: it had been Daisy’s role to act and Andromeda’s to study and interpret, in magic as in much else.
    Daisy had used the words witchcraft