The feeling of relief that overwhelmed me took me by surprise. I wasn’t totally alone—at least, not for the moment. If you’d told the old Amy Gumm that she’d be hanging out after school with Madison, Dustin, and their drooling newborn, I’d have said you were completely nuts. But then again, a lot had happened to that Amy Gumm. I could take this in stride, too.
“It’s kind of a long story,” I said, thinking fast. I had to come up with something to convince them Dorothy was real, but I couldn’t tell them anything close to the whole truth.
“So let’s go get ice cream downtown and talk it over,” Madison said. She laughed at the expression on my face. Madison? Eating food with calories? It really was a whole new world. “What? So maybe I never got over my pregnancy cravings. That thing about pickles is totally true, too.”
“She eats, like, a pint of rocky road a day,” Dustin said.
“Shut up,” Madison said, hitting him.
“Lead the way,” I said.
Flat Hill’s downtown drugstore was like something straight out of the 1950s. It probably was straight out of the 1950s—and no one had bothered to clean since then either. The long old-fashioned lunch counter was always sticky, the bar-stool upholstery was cracked and peeling, revealing the gross yellow foam padding underneath, and they only served three flavors of ice cream—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. But there was nowhere else to go. Kids from school were already piling into the booths by the window, giving me and Madison dirty looks, but Madison held her head high and ignored them, settling regally onto a bar stool with Dustin Jr. in his baby wrap and Dustin Sr. on her other side.
“Okay, so,” I began, once Madison had ordered a triple-decker chocolate sundae—“With extra syrup!” she barked—and was busy spooning ice cream into her mouth. “You know how in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Dorothy is from Kansas?”
“Yes, Amy, we know that,” Madison said drily.
“I found part of this newspaper article from 1897,” I explained. “It was by L. Frank Baum, the guy who wrote the original books, and it was an interview with a girl named Dorothy who survived a tornado that struck Flat Hill that year. She talked about having crazy visions of a wonderful place.”
Madison and Dustin looked at me expectantly. “And?” Dustin asked.
“Well, that proves Dorothy was real, right? So her shoes must be real,” I said. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t quite worked out the most convincing argument.
Dustin’s forehead creased and Madison smiled. “That’s his thinking face,” she said affectionately. He gave her a dirty look.
“Amy,” he said slowly, “even if this thing you found proves that Dorothy was real, Oz isn’t real. She was just a girl who hit her head during a tornado and hallucinated. So her shoes can’t be real, because in the story she got the shoes in Oz, and Oz doesn’t exist.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s, uh, I want to like—metaphorically look for her shoes. I mean . . .” I thought fast. “I mean, we can prove she was real if we find the rest of that article. And then we’ll, uh, be famous!” I added brightly. “Totally famous. We’ll go viral. It’s our ticket out of Flat Hill.”
Madison stared at me, her eyes narrowed. “So what’s the part you’re not telling us?”
“Which part?”
“Amy, this story is insane. Your house gets wiped out by a tornado. You disappear for a month. You come back and tell everyone you were in the hospital, which is clearly not true, and now you’re obsessed with proving that a character in a cheesy old movie was a real person?”
“I . . . Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean, I’ll do it by myself. I understand if you don’t want to help me.”
“Help you do what, exactly?” Madison asked patiently, like I had the brain development of Dustin Jr.
“Find Dorothy’s sho—find, uh, more evidence that Dorothy existed,” I said lamely. “You know, like . . . I couldn’t even find the rest of the article. But I know there has to be some kind of . . . I don’t know, newspaper collection or something. Her farm was where the high school is now. I mean, there has to be more about her.”
“How do you know Dorothy’s supposedly real farm was in the same place as the high school?” Madison asked.
“I, uh . . . ,” I faltered. “I just, um, guessed.” They were both looking at me like I had grown an extra head. “Come on, you guys, if we can prove Dorothy existed, we’ll be completely famous. On TV. Interviews and stuff. You name it.” Madison was starting to look intrigued instead of suspicious. “Anyway, I thought maybe I could start by trying to find the whole Baum article and, uh, starting from there.”
“Why don’t you just go to the library?” Dustin asked.
“The library?”
“Flat Hill’s historical archive is in the library at the high school,” he pointed out. “I had detention one time and they made me dust back there.”
“Oh my god, Dustin, you’re a genius,” I breathed. Of course. It was so obvious. Here I was, worrying about magic, when all I needed was to find an old newspaper.
“He’s okay,” Madison said, patting him on the shoulder.
“The only thing is, they keep the really old stuff locked up, and you have to have special permission to get back there,” Dustin added. “I think you have to be writing a paper about it or something.” My heart sank. Great, just what I needed. Everything I needed was locked up in some dusty old room no one really cared about, and I couldn’t even break in using magic.
“Maybe I could sneak into school at night,” I said.
“Wow, you are really serious about this,” Madison said. “Why don’t you just get detention?”
“What?”
“If that’s how Dustin got back there, it’ll probably work for you, too,” Madison said reasonably. “We can get detention, too, if you want company,” she added, holding Dustin Jr. aloft with a wicked gleam in her eye. “Pissing off Strachan is like my new full-time job. Dustin can pee on his desk or something.”
“No way,” Dustin said.
“I meant the baby.”
“I know you meant the baby. I mean no way can you piss off Strachan, Mad. He’s itching for an excuse to throw you out of school. But if you want help looking, Amy, I can go with you. I just have to show up late for class a couple of times.”
Madison stuck out her glossy lower lip in a fake pout. “You’re so boring,” she sighed.
“Strachan would love to throw me out, too,” I mused. “I have to figure out a way to get in trouble without actually getting in trouble.”
“Don’t you have detention already? Like, technically?” Madison asked, batting her eyelashes. “I seem to remember a certain hallway fight with a defenseless pregnant chick.”
“Of course,” I said, practically slapping my forehead with the heel of my hand. “I’ll just tell him I feel bad getting out of my suspension. You’re totally brilliant, Madison.”
“I know,” she said airily, polishing off her sundae and eyeballing the dish like she was ready to order another. How was she so fit? “Breastfeeding,” she said, answering my unasked question. “Plus, carrying this little sucker around all day is a total workout. I’m in the best shape of my life.”
“If I watch you eat any more ice cream, I’m going to puke,” Dustin said firmly, pushing the plate away. Dustin Jr. woke up and wailed aloud as if in protest. Heads turned as Madison tried unsuccessfully to shush him. “We better get home,” Dustin said to me. “But I’ll see you tomorrow in the clink.” He grinned, and I wanted to hug them both. For the first time since I’d gotten back to Kansas, I had a plan.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.