“I’m Amy,” I said, hoping this was what passed for friendly in Munchkin Country. I reached out a hand, which she ignored.
“Indigo,” she replied. She eyed my shoulder. “Cool rat, by the way. I love rats. Does it talk?”
I glanced at Star, still hoping she would decide that the answer was yes. She didn’t respond.
“Nope.” I shrugged.
“Too bad.” Her eyes traced up to my head. “But I don’t know about the hair. She’s not going to like it.”
I put a hand to my scalp and brushed a pink lock from my eyes.
“Why would my pet rat care what my hair looks like?”
Again, Indigo hooted. “Not your rat, dumbass. Her.”
“Who’s she?”
Indigo scrunched her face up and swiveled her neck like I was a complete moron. “Oh yeah, who’s she? she asks. Please.”
“No, seriously,” I said. “I’m new around here. Tell me who you’re talking about.”
“I’m new around here,” Indigo mocked me in a squeaky falsetto, slipping her backpack on. But as she did it, she looked at me. Really looked at me.
“Wait, you’re not kidding, are you? You really aren’t from around here.” She was staring at my clothes. I guessed that jeans and a hoodie were not what the kids were wearing in Oz.
“No,” I said simply. “I’m not.”
Her jaw dropped open in slow motion as it dawned on her. “Holy shit,” she said. “You’re from the Other Place, aren’t you?” She looked over one shoulder and then the other, then asked quietly: “How did you get here?” I couldn’t tell if her tone was one of excitement or fear.
“It was a tor—” I began, but before I could finish, I was cut off by a loud, metallic clanking sound from somewhere off in the distance.
Indigo took a step backward. “You know what?” she said, her eyes darting nervously from building to building. “Never mind. It’s better if I don’t know. In fact, it’s better if I don’t talk to you at all.”
“What? Why?”
She busied herself with her backpack, her tiny face scrunched up with worry.
“Like I said, I’ve already got about five thousand problems, give or take a thousand. Getting caught conspiring with an outlander would be five thousand and one. I’d love to hear your story, but it’s not worth it. Good luck. You’ll need it.” With that, she hoisted her pack on her shoulders and began to walk away.
“No way!” I yelled. “Just let me ask you some questions. I have no idea what’s going on.”
“If you’re lucky, you’ll never find out,” she said, not slowing her pace or bothering to look back.
I wasn’t going to let this happen again. She was speeding along, heading off the road, but my legs were longer. I raced after her and grabbed her by the elbow.
“Hey!” she said, whirling around to face me. “Don’t touch me!” She yanked her arm away, but I yanked right back. And I was stronger.
“Let me come with you,” I whispered urgently. I didn’t know where she was going, but she was the best hope I had. Hope of what, I wasn’t sure, but I would figure that out later. “I promise—I’ll do whatever you want. I swear I won’t get you in trouble. But I’m alone here, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
She bit her lip. The thing is, I could tell she was as curious about me as I was about her. I could tell part of her wanted to relent.
But then we heard that clanging noise again. This time it was louder.
“You seem like a nice person,” Indigo hissed. “And I love rats. But get your fucking hands off me and get the hell away from me. The best thing you can do right now is get your ass back to wherever it is you came from and hope you never wind up in this sorry place again.”
“I don’t know how to go home,” I said. But I let her elbow go. This wasn’t getting me anywhere.
“It looks like you’ve got problems, too, then.” Indigo folded her arms across her chest, planting her stocky body firmly in place. “See ya,” she said.
Honestly, I was starting to think this girl was kind of an asshole. But if she wasn’t going to help me, I couldn’t think of any good way to force her. All I could do was keep following the road and hope it led me somewhere better than this.
So I walked away, back to the famous road paved with yellow bricks. At least I had a general sense of where that would take me. When I looked back over my shoulder, the angry little Munchkin was watching me go.
As I passed the statue of Dorothy, I changed my mind one more time. “Just tell me one thing,” I asked her, spinning around. She shrugged, noncommittal. She hadn’t budged from the spot where I’d left her. “They talk about Oz where I’m from. I’ve heard about it my whole life. But this is messed up. What happened here?”
Indigo’s impassive face twisted into a snarl. “Dorothy happened,” she said.
Dorothy happened. I’d tried to ask Indigo what she’d meant, but her eyes had gone from blue to black and she’d threatened to punch me in the face if I came one step closer or asked her another goddamn question. I had already been punched in the face once today—that had been today, hadn’t it?—so I did what she wanted and kept on moving.
It was only a few minutes before I put the tiny little town behind me. Now I was back on the road. Ahead, it led up a steep hill that was completely devoid of any grass at all, the raw dirt interrupted only by a few stunted, sickly shrubs here and there.
Dorothy had been here, I reminded myself. She had walked this very same path. You’re like her in so many ways, the boy had said.
Kansas, tornado, blah, blah, blah. I mean, the similarities were pretty obvious, right? But there were plenty of differences between us, too. First off, from what I remembered it hadn’t taken her long at all to make friends. It was like everyone she’d run into—witches not included—had wanted to jump on the Dorothy Express.
As for me, I’d come across two people so far, and exactly both of them had wanted nothing to do with me. It was kind of depressing to think that I could travel all the way to Oz and still be just as unpopular as I was back in Flat Hill, Kansas.
I didn’t know where to go next, but the Emerald City seemed as good a place to start as any. That’s where Dorothy had gone for help. The road would take me there. It wanted to take me there.
So I trudged up the hill, and as I did, the banging sound I’d heard back in the village continued. It was still intermittent—there were a few minutes of welcome silence for every thirty seconds of racket. It was getting louder with every step I took, though, and soon it was so loud that I had to cover my ears every time it started.
When I finally reached the top of the incline I saw where it was coming from.
In the distance, across a periwinkle field of dust and dirt and beyond a tangled maze of gnarled, thorny trees, stood a towering seesaw contraption that was attached by a mess of pipes and wires to something that looked like a cross between an oil rig and a windmill.
When I squinted, I saw at least twenty people of less-than-average height piled on either end of the seesaw thing. Every few minutes, the Munchkins would start bouncing up and down in place, and as they did, the taller machine would begin spinning and clanging, jackhammering into the earth.
Above all of the action a statuesque figure in a glittering ball gown floated serenely in midair, just watching them at work. I tried to see what was holding her up but as far as I could tell she was just . . . floating.
Wait, a ball gown?
I couldn’t make up my mind which part I was more curious about: the fact that she was levitating or the fact that she was doing it above a field of dirt, dressed like she was on her way to the prom.
I stared at her with rapt curiosity. Even from here, I could tell that she was no Munchkin. Not just because she was too tall to be one either. There was just something different about her. Something familiar that I couldn’t place. She had to be at least a couple of hundred feet away, but it was like her image was burning right through all th
at distance and imprinting itself right onto my retinas.
She was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. Her hair was red, and her skin was glowing, and her body was radiating a shower of glittering pink sparks.
I smacked my head as it came to me.
Duh. It must be Glinda. She was supposed to be the Good Witch of the South, right?
I felt my face light up at the sheer insanity of it all. When I’d watched The Wizard of Oz with my mother, Glinda had always been my favorite character—because who wouldn’t want to travel around in a flying soap bubble wearing an awesome dress? She’d been my mom’s favorite character, too, but for a different reason.
“She’s a witch, but she’s Good,” Mom always said. “Now that’s what I call the best of both worlds.”
Finally, Oz was living up to its name. I had to see her up close.
As I stepped off the road and began to push my way through the thick mass of gnarled and twisted trees, I saw that they had sickly pale blue bark. They were thorny, too, and I had to gingerly push the branches aside, being careful not to cut myself. The whole time, I stared into the sky, mesmerized by the sight of Glinda. I couldn’t wait to meet her. I didn’t even care about the fact that my skull was vibrating from the noise the machine was making.
As I wound my way toward her, Star began to get uneasy. She clawed and fidgeted at my shoulder. There was something about all this that she didn’t like.
“Will you stop it?” I whispered to her. “It’s Glinda. Jeez.”
I could somehow hear Glinda’s voice echoing over the deafening noise, like she was speaking through a megaphone.
“There is no crying, little ones,” I heard Glinda call out, her lilting voice full of kind, gentle encouragement.
The Munchkin boy she was talking to couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. He was sitting in a little chair near the top of the seesaw, and from his red cheeks and puffy eyes, it was clear he’d just finished one major sob session and was working himself up for another. Glinda was talking him down from it. “What we do, we do for the good of Oz,” she cooed. “You do love Oz, don’t you?”
The kid nodded, sniffing up his tears and wiping the snot from his nose, and then he threw himself back into the motion of the seesaw.
The clanging began again. My skull was vibrating so hard that I thought it might explode. My hands flew to cover my ears, but that did virtually nothing.
I was close enough to really see her now. Her dress was even more extraordinary from this vantage than it had appeared in the distance. Instead of the beautiful, flowing dress that the character had worn in the book, this gown was more like armor: thin metallic petals made up the voluminous skirt while magenta jewels dipped and curved across her chest in a tight, plunging bodice. It wasn’t my style, okay, but it was still pretty amazing.
She seemed perfect. And yet, as I approached, an uneasy feeling prevented me from calling out her name.
Something wasn’t right. From far off, she looked beautiful, ethereal, otherworldly. But up close, there was something ugly about her. Something was wrong with her face.
Yes, she was delicate-featured with exquisite bone structure, her perfect strawberry-blonde curls escaping from underneath a blinged-out golden crown as she smiled benevolently down at her loyal subjects. But that smile. It was—I don’t know how else to put it—kind of super-gross.
It stretched unnaturally wide, spreading out maniacally all the way across her jaw from one cheekbone to the other, and it was twitching at the corners like her lips had been pinned into place.
Other than the twitching, it didn’t move. At all. Even when she talked.
“What’s with her mouth?” I asked Star under my breath, after the machine had halted its banging once again.
I jumped when an actual voice answered in a hoarse whisper from behind me.
“(A) it’s PermaSmile, and (B) are you out of your dumbass mind?”
I whirled around to see Indigo’s bright, aquamarine eyes staring out at me from somewhere within the shadowy web of the tree branches.
“Have you been following me?” I whispered back at my stalker, and then—my curiosity winning out over my annoyance—added, “And what’s PermaSmile?”
“I wasn’t following you,” Indigo replied with a petulant scowl. “I was just going in the same direction you were going in.” She paused. “Besides, I couldn’t let you just wander up to Glinda like she’s going to give you a kiss and a cookie. I’m a softer touch than you think. And this is PermaSmile.”
She pulled out a small tube and held it up. “I never wear it, but it comes in handy to have around,” she said, uncapping the top and smearing it across her mouth like lipstick. As she did, her scowling lips stretched like putty into a wide, maniacal grin and stayed that way.
“Ew,” I said, unable to help myself.
“I know,” she said. “I hate it.” Her huge grin barely moved as she spoke. It was like Botox in a tube. Then she drew it across her face again, in the opposite direction this time, and, just like that, her mouth returned to its customary half scowl. “Everyone wears it in the city, and since that’s where I’m going, I’ll need it.”
“The Emerald City?”
“Yes, the Emerald City,” she mimicked. “Where else? Now come on. We can’t just hang around down here. She could smell us at any second.”
“Smell us?” I asked, genuinely confused. “What is she, a hunting dog? Besides, isn’t she supposed to be a good witch?”
“Sure,” Indigo snorted. “Good. Like that means anything around here. I hate to break it to you, but just because someone has pretty hair and good skin tone and a crown instead of a pointy hat doesn’t mean she’s not the baddest bitch this side of the Emerald City. Seriously. I can’t believe I’m risking my own neck to help you out.”
“But—” I said.
“No buts,” Indigo said. “Look, I’m giving you a chance. If you want to stay here and hope she takes a liking to you, be my guest. If you’d rather not get killed, follow me.”
Then she was scampering back toward the road, effortlessly weaving through the thorns and branches like they weren’t even there.
I paused for a moment. Glinda and Dorothy the bad guys? It was all so upside down—and yet, something about what Indigo was saying seemed right. I didn’t want to believe her, but I knew all too well that you can’t always get what you want. So I followed.
By the time I made it back to the road I was a scratched-up mess, my shirt torn and my arms crisscrossed with tiny cuts. Indigo was waiting for me, looking typically sour.
“Don’t get too excited,” she grumbled, but I could tell that somewhere underneath all that, she was happy I was joining her. “You can come with me as far as the city and then you’re on your own. And you do what I say, got it? You’ve already proven you have no survival instincts.”
“Deal,” I said.
I craned my neck back up at the so-called good witch, who was still floating eerily in the sky. How could I come all the way to Oz and pass up a chance to meet the one and only sorceress herself? It was like going to Disney World and not getting your picture taken with Cinderella.
I don’t think I have to tell you that my mom never took me to Disney World.
I was still wavering when Star hissed at me angrily. I knew what she was trying to tell me. With a twinge of regret, I chased after Indigo.
Sometimes you just have to trust your pet rat’s instincts.
“Now, can you tell me what was going on back there?” I asked when we were back on our way.
“She’s magic mining,” Indigo explained, with the tone of someone explaining why the sky is blue to a toddler for the five hundredth time.
I half understood. Maybe. “Magic mining? But she’s a witch. Doesn’t she already have magic?”
Indigo gave a loud, angry snort. “It’s never enough. Never enough for her, and sure as hell never enough for Dorothy. They’re digging holes from here to the capital and
sucking it right up out of the land. Why do you think all of Munchkin Country’s such a dump? Oz needs magic to survive. Without it, it just dries up.”
“So magic is like—in the ground?”
I thought of the dark, gaping pit that had swallowed my trailer. Was that one of Glinda’s excavation sites? If so, Greenpeace would have a few bones to pick with the Witch of the South if they ever made it to Oz.
“Yup.” Indigo nodded. “Well, it’s everywhere, but it starts in the ground and seeps out from there. Dig it all up and take it for your royal self, though? No more magic. The end; unhappily ever after.”
I’d never thought of myself as someone who was slow on the uptake, but this was all very confusing.
“Okay,” I said eventually. “Back up. You keep talking about Dorothy like she’s still here. But she went back to Kansas. That’s, like, the whole point of the story. There’s no place like home and all that.”
Really, it was the one part of The Wizard of Oz that I’d never liked. Girl gets whisked away to fairyland and all she can think about is going home? Sure, she missed her auntie Em. But you’d think her aunt would be happy for her to have gotten out of Kansas. Personally, I’d always thought Dorothy should have knocked her heels together and wished for something better than a trip back to Nowheresville.
“You only heard half the story. She did go home,” Indigo said. “Turns out home wasn’t so great after all. So Glinda brought her back here. Or, at least, most people think it was Glinda who brought her back. That’s like, how the legend goes. One way or another, when Dorothy got here, that’s when the problems all started.”
“What do you mean?”
Indigo shrugged and waved her hand over the landscape. “See for yourself. She was okay at first—I guess—but then they gave her a crown and made her a princess. And somewhere along the way she got a taste for magic. Pretty soon nothing was enough for her. The more she got, the more she wanted.”
“So the magic made her go off the deep end and start digging pits? Why is Glinda even helping her?”
Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise Page 4