The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  The Crage Hall dormitory was just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the individual girls. And Boq was flushed with desire to see his heartthrob again. Damn! Double damn! He couldn’t concentrate. He’d be sent down if he queered his exams! He’d let down his father, old Bfee, and his village, and the other villages.

  Hell and hell. Life was hard and barley just wasn’t enough. Boq found himself suddenly leaping over the footstool, grabbing his student cape, charging down the corridors, and plummeting around the stone spiral stairs in the corner tower. He couldn’t wait any more. He had to do something, and an idea had come to him.

  He nodded to the porter on duty, turned left out of the gate, and hurried along the road, in the dusk avoiding as best he could the generous heaps of horse manure. At least with his classmates off gallivanting, he would make no fool of himself in their line of vision. There wasn’t a soul left in Briscoe. So he turned left, then left again, and soon was pacing the alley by the stable. A rick of cordwood, the protruding edge of a swollen shutter, the iron bracket of a hoist. Boq was small but he was nimble too, and with hardly a scrape of his knuckles he had swung himself to the tin gutter of the stable, and then was scrabbling like a lake crab up the steeply pitched roof.

  Aha! He might have thought of this weeks ago, months ago! But the night that all the boys would be out celebrating, the night he could be sure he himself wouldn’t be seen from Briscoe Hall: that was tonight, and maybe only tonight. Some fate had insisted he resist Avaric’s invitation out. For now he was mounted on the stable roof, and the wind coursing through the wet leaves of the crawberry and pear trees made a soft fanfare. And there proceeded the girls into their hall—as if they’d been waiting in the corridor until he was properly positioned—as if they’d known he was coming!

  Closer up they were not, on the whole, as pretty. . .

  But where was the one?

  And pretty or not, they were clear. The fingers they dove into clumps of satin bow, to untie them, the fingers they peeled gloves off with, and worked cunning rows of forty miniature pearl buttons with, the fingers they loaned to each other, at the inside laces and the private places that college boys knew only by mythology! The unexpected tufts of hair—how tender! How marvelously animallike! His hands clenched and unclenched themselves, of their own accord, but hungry for what he hardly knew—and where was she?

  “What the hell are you doing up there?”

  So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child’s toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was loudly knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.

  “Oh, brilliant,” said the voice. “The trees are dropping their fruits early this year.”

  He had a last, lost hope that the person speaking would be his love. He tried to look urbane, though his spectacles had bounced somewhere.

  “How do you do,” he said uncertainly, sitting up. “This isn’t how I intended to arrive.”

  Barefoot and aproned, she came out from behind an arbor of pink Pertha grapes. It wasn’t she, it wasn’t the one. It was the other one. He could tell even without his glasses. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, trying not to sound devastated.

  She had a colander with baby grapes in it, the sour ones used in spring salads. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, coming closer. “I know you.”

  “Master Boq, at your service.”

  “You mean Master Boq, in my lettuces.” She picked up his spectacles from the runner beans, and handed them back.

  “How are you, Miss Elphie?”

  “I am not as tart as a grape and not as squished as a lettuce,” she said. “How are you, Master Boq?”

  “I am,” he said, “considerably embarrassed. Am I going to get in trouble here?”

  “I can arrange it if you like.”

  “Don’t go to the effort. I’ll let myself out the way I came in.” He looked up at the pear tree. “Poor thing, I’ve splintered some good-size limbs.”

  “Pity the poor tree. Why would you do that to it?”

  “Well, I was startled,” he said, “and I had a choice: either flip myself like a wood nymph through the leaves. Or else just climb quietly down on the other side of the stable, into the street, and go back to my life. Which would you choose?”

  “Ah, that’s the question,” she said, “but I’ve always learned that the first thing to do is deny the question’s validity. Myself, being startled, I would neither climb quietly streetward, nor would I trip noisily treeward and lettucebound. I would turn myself inside out to make myself lighter, I would hover until the air pressure outside me had stabilized. Then I would let the underside of my skin settle, one toe at a time, back on the roof.”

  “And would you then reverse your skin?” he said, entertained.

  “Depends on who was standing there and what they wanted, and whether I minded. Also depends on what color the underside of my skin turns out to be. Never having reversed myself, you know, I can’t be sure. I always thought it might be horrid to be pink and white like a piglet.”

  “It often is,” said Boq. “Especially in the shower. You feel like an underdone—” But he stopped. The nonsense was becoming too personal. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I startled you and I didn’t mean to.”

  “You were looking at the tops of the fruit trees, examining the new growth, I assume?” she said, amused.

  “Indeed,” he answered coldly.

  “Did you see the tree of your dreams?”

  “The tree of my dreams is of my dreams, and I don’t speak of that to my friends nor to you, whom I hardly know.”

  “Oh, but you know me. We were in a child play set together, you reminded me when we met last year. Why, we’re nearly brother and sister. You can certainly describe your favorite tree to me, and I’ll tell you if I know where she grows.”

  “You mock me, Miss Elphie.”

  “Well, that I don’t mean to do, Boq.” She used his name without the honorific in a gentle way, as if to underscore her comment about their being like siblings. “I suspect you want to know about Miss Galinda, the Gillikinese girl you met at Madame Morrible’s poetry slaughter last autumn.”

  “Perhaps you do know me better than I thought.” He sighed. “Could I hope she thinks of me?”

  “Well, you could hope,” said Elphaba. “It would be more efficient to ask her and have done with it. At least you’d know.”

  “But you’re a friend of hers, aren’t you? Don’t you know?”

  “You don’t want to rely on what I know or not,” said Elphaba, “or what I say I know. I could be lying. I could be in love with you, and betray my roomie by lying about her—”

  “She’s your roomie?”

  “You’re very surprised at that?”

  “Well—no—just—just pleased.”

  “The cooks will be wondering what dialogues with the asparagus I’m having now,” Elphaba said. “I could arrange to bring Miss Galinda here some evening if you like. Sooner rather than later, so as to kill your joy the more neatly and entirely. If that is what’s to happen,” she said, “but as I say, how do I know? If I can’t predict what we’ll have for pudding, how can I predict someone’s affections?”

  They set a date for three nights hence, and Boq thanked Elphaba fervently, shaking her hand so hard his spectacles jounced on his nose. “You’re a dear old friend, Elphie, even if I haven’t seen you in fifteen years,” he said, giving her back her name without its honorific. She withdrew beneath the boughs of the pear trees and disappeared down the walkway. Boq found his way out of the kitchen garden and back to his room, and reviewed his books again, but the problem wasn’t solved, no, not solved. It was exacerbated. He couldn’t con
centrate. He was still awake to hear the noisy clatterings, the hushings, the crashings, and the muttered balladeerings, when the drunken boys returned to Briscoe Hall.

  2

  Avaric had left for the summer, once the exams were done, and Boq either had flimflammed his way through or disgraced himself, in which case there was little to lose now. This first rendezvous with Galinda might be the last. Boq bothered with his clothes more than usual, and got an opinion on how to fix his hair from the new look in the cafés (a thin white ribbon around the crown of his head, pulling his hair straight from the nub, so that it burst into curls beneath, like froth exploding from an overturned basin of milk). He cleaned his boots several times over. It was too warm for boots but he had no evening slippers. Make do, make do.

  On the appointed evening he retraced his way and, on the stable roof, found that a fruit picker’s ladder had been left leaning up against the wall, so he need not descend through the leaves like a vertiginous chimpanzee. He picked his way carefully down the first few rungs, then jumped manfully the rest of the way, avoiding the lettuces this time. On a bench under the wormnut trees sat Elphaba, her knees drawn casually up to her chest and her bare feet flat on the seat of the bench, and Galinda, whose ankles were crossed daintily and who hid behind a satin fan, and who was looking in the other direction anyway.

  “Well, my stars and garters, a visitor,” said Elphaba. “Such a surprise.”

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said.

  “Your head looks like a hedgehog in shock, what did you do to yourself?” said Elphaba. At least Galinda turned to see, but then she disappeared behind the fan again. Could she be so nervous? Could her heart be faint?

  “Well I am part Hedgehog, didn’t I tell you?” said Boq. “On my grandfather’s side. He ended up as cutlets for Ozma’s retinue one hunting season, and a tasty memory for all. The recipe is handed down in the family, pasted into the picture album. Served with cheese and walnut sauce. Mmmm.”

  “Are you really?” said Elphaba. She put her chin on her knees. “Really Hedgehog?”

  “No, it was a fancy. Good evening, Miss Galinda. It was good of you to agree to meet me again.”

  “This is highly improper,” said Galinda. “For a number of reasons, as you well know, Master Boq. But my roomie would give me no rest until I said yes. I can’t say that I am pleased to see you again.”

  “Oh, say it, say it, maybe it’ll make it true,” said Elphaba. “Try it out. He’s not so bad. For a poor boy.”

  “I am pleased that you are so taken with me, Master Boq,” said Miss Galinda, working at courtesy. “I am flattered.” She clearly was not flattered, she was humiliated. “But you must see that there can be no special friendship between us. Apart from the matter of my feelings, there are too many social impediments for us to proceed. I only agreed to come so that I could tell you this in person. It seemed only fair.”

  “It seemed only fair and it might be fun, too,” said Elphaba. “That’s why I’m hanging around.”

  “There’s the issue of different cultures, to start,” said Galinda. “I know you are a Munchkinlander. I am a Gillikinese. I will need to marry one of my own. It is the only way, I’m sorry”—she lowered her fan and lifted her hand, palm out, to stop his protest—“and furthermore you are a farmer, from the agricultural school, and I require a statesman or a banker from Ozma Towers. This is just how things are. Besides,” said Galinda, “you’re too short.”

  “What about his subversion of custom by coming here this way, what about his silliness?” said Elphaba.

  “Enough,” said Galinda. “That’ll do, Miss Elphaba.”

  “Please, you’re too certain of yourself,” said Boq. “If I may be so bold.”

  “You’re not so bold at all,” said Elphaba, “you’re about as bold as tea made from used leaves. You’re embarrassing me with hanging back so. Come on, say something interesting. I’m starting to wish I’d gone to chapel.”

  “You’re interrupting,” said Boq. “Miss Elphie, you’ve done a wonderful thing to encourage Miss Galinda to meet me, but I must ask you to leave us alone to sort things out.”

  “Neither of you will understand what the other is saying,” said Elphaba calmly. “I’m a Munchkinlander by birth anyway, if not by upbringing, and I’m a girl by accident if not by choice. I’m the natural arbiter between you two. I don’t believe you can get along without me. In fact if I leave the garden you’ll cease to decipher each other’s language entirely. She speaks the tongue of Rich, you speak Clotted Poor. Besides, I paid for this show by wheedling Miss Galinda for three days running. I get to watch.”

  “It would be so good of you to stay, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “I require a chaperone when with a boy.”

  “See what I mean?” Elphaba said to Boq.

  “Then if you must stay, at least let me talk,” Boq said. “Please let me speak, just for a few minutes. Miss Galinda. What you say is true. You are highborn and I am common. You are Gillikinese and I, Munchkinlander. You have a social pattern to conform to, and so do I. And mine doesn’t include marrying a girl too wealthy, too foreign, too expectant. Marriage isn’t what I came here to propose.”

  “See, I’m glad I didn’t leave, this is just getting good,” said Elphaba, but clamped her lips shut when they both glared at her.

  “I came here to propose that we meet from time to time, that’s all,” said Boq. “That we meet as friends. That, free of expectations, we come to know each other as dear friends. I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadowlight; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the pfenix in circles of flight—”

  “This sounds rehearsed,” said Elphaba.

  “You are the mythical sea,” he concluded, all his eggs in one basket.

  “I’m not much for poetry,” said Galinda. “But you’re very kind.” She had seemed to perk up a little at the compliments. Anyway the fan was moving faster. “I don’t really understand the point of friendship, as you call it, Master Boq, between unmarried people of our age. It seems—distracting. I can see it might lead to complications, especially as you confess to an infatuation I cannot hope to return. Not in a million years.”

  “It’s the age of daring,” said Boq. “It’s the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.”

  “I don’t know if alive quite covers it,” said Elphaba. “This sounds scripted to me.”

  Galinda rapped Elphaba on the head with her fan, which folded smartly up and opened just as neatly again, an elegant practiced gesture that impressed all of them. “You’re being tiresome, Miss Elphie. I appreciate your company but I didn’t request a running commentary. I’m perfectly capable of deciding the merits of Master Boq’s recital myself. Let me consider his stupid idea. Lurline above, I can hardly hear myself think!”

  Losing her temper, Galinda was prettier than ever. So that old saw was true, too. Boq was learning so much about girls! Her fan was dropping. Was that a good sign? If she hadn’t had some affection for him, would she have worn a dress with a neckline that dipped just a tad lower than he had dared hope? And there was the essence of rose water on her. He felt a surge of possibility, an inclination to rub his lips on the place where her shoulder became her neck.

  “Your merits,” she was saying. “Well, you’re brave, I suppose, and clever, to have figured this out. If Madame Morrible ever found you here we’d be in severe trouble. Of course you might not know that, so scratch the bravery part. Just clever. You’re clever and you’re sort of, oh, well, I mean to look at—”

  “Handsome?” suggested Elphaba. “Dashing?”

  “You’re fun to look at,” decided Galinda.

  Boq’s face fell. “Fun?” he said.

  “I’d give a lot to achieve fun,” Elphaba said. “The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they’re usually referring to digestion—”

  “Well, I might be all or none of the things
you say,” said Boq staunchly, “but you will learn that I am persistent. I will not let you say no to our friendship, Galinda. It means too much to me.”

  “Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate,” said Elphaba. “See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?”

  “Elphaba!” they both cried at her.

  “My word, duckie!” said a voice behind them, and all three turned. It was some middle-aged minder in a striped apron, her thinning gray hair twisted in a knot on her head. “What are you getting yourself up to?”

  “Ama Clutch!” Galinda said. “How did you think to look for me here?”

  “That Tsebra cook told me some yacky-yacky was going on out here. You think they’re blind in there? Now who is this? This don’t look good at all, not to me.”

  Boq stood. “I am Master Boq of Rush Margins, Munchkinland. I am nearly a third-year fellow at Briscoe Hall.”

  Elphaba yawned. “Is this show over?”

  “Well, I am shocked! A guest don’t get shown into the vegetable garden, so I guess you arrived uninvited! Sir, get yourself gone from here before I be calling the porters to remove you!”

  “Oh, Ama Clutch, don’t make a scene,” said Galinda, sighing.

  “He’s hardly developed enough to worry about,” pointed out Elphaba. “Look, he’s still beardless. And from that we can deduce—”

  Boq said in a rush, “Perhaps this is all wrong. I did not come here to be abused. Forgive me, Miss Galinda, if I have failed even to amuse you. As for you, Miss Elphaba”—his voice was as cold as he could make it, and that was colder than he’d ever heard it himself—“I was wrong to have trusted in your compassion.”

  “Wait and see,” said Elphaba. “Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. Meanwhile, why don’t you come back sometime?”