“My sister, Glinda, sent her home with a pair of enchanted silver shoes—the predecessors to the pair that brought her back here a second time. Dorothy always assumed they’d been lost when she crossed the Deadly Desert, and though she tried to find them again, she was never able to.” I wasn’t sure how to explain to Glamora that all this Ozian history was a series of classic books—not to mention a hit movie—in Kansas, so I didn’t bother trying. “But what if the shoes are still here?”
“Here, like Kansas?”
“She means here here,” Mombi said. “Where Dorothy’s farm used to be.”
“Dorothy’s farm used to be in Dusty Acres?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Glamora said. “Dorothy’s farm used to be in the exact spot where your school is sitting right now.”
“High school,” Gert prompted. She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “Barbaric system, really. Oz’s method of apprenticeship is vastly superior.”
Were they serious? Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High had somehow been sheltering the long-lost magic silver shoes of Oz this whole time? It was almost too much. If only Madison Pendleton had known that when she’d done her book report on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Not that she’d have needed anything extra to get her A+. Everybody loved Madison already. Everyone, that is, except for me. “How do you even know the shoes are still magic?” I asked. “What if they don’t work anymore? What if they only go one way, from Oz back to the Other—um, back to Kansas?”
Mombi sighed. “You’re right. It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot we have. We have to take the chance.”
“Okay,” I said, “so you guys find the shoes. Then what?”
“Amy,” Glamora said, “we’re not going to find the shoes. If you agree to help us, you are.”
“But I don’t understand how,” I argued. “I mean, my magic doesn’t work here any better than yours does. Why can’t you find them without me?”
“Because they’re in your high school,” Gert said. “It would look a little funny if three old ladies and a teenage boy showed up for class in the middle of the school year, don’t you think? Consider it an undercover mission.” She beamed. “To tell you the truth, you’re our only hope at this point. If you want to help us get back to Oz, you have to go back to high school.”
THREE
“No,” I said. “No way. Absolutely, positively, no way in hell am I going back to high school. I didn’t even want to come back to Kansas.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Mombi said.
“Well, I do. I am not a member of the Quadrant.”
“Amy,” Gert said gently. “We still need you.”
“Why don’t you just glamour yourselves?” I said, exasperated. I wanted to help them—at the very least, it would distract me from the decision I had to make. But I sure didn’t want to help them like this.
“Amy, you’ve already realized how difficult it is for us to use magic here,” Glamora said. “We’re close to where the Wizard opened the portal, so we still have some connection to Oz. But the farther we get away from Dusty Acres, the weaker we’ll probably be. We simply don’t know what effect Kansas will have on our power, and we can’t risk a long-term glamour spell.”
“You don’t need me. You can send Nox,” I said. “He can be—he can be a foreign exchange student. From, uh, France.”
Glamora cocked her head at me quizzically. “From what?”
“It’s like a—uh, it’s like Quadling Country,” I said. “But with baguettes.” The witches stared at me blankly, and the stupidity of my own idea hit me. Right. A foreign exchange student with no papers, no parents, and no passport. A foreign exchange student who had never even heard of the country he was supposedly from. Nox would last about five minutes at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High, dreamboat hair or no dreamboat hair.
I didn’t want to admit it any more than Mombi did, but the witches were right. Whether or not I wanted to go back to Oz myself, they didn’t have a chance of finding the shoes without me. And unless I could come up with a better plan—not that theirs was much of one—the shoes were the only chance they had.
“I can’t even get extra credit for learning magic,” I muttered. “How long have I been in Oz anyway? Everyone in Kansas probably thinks I’m dead.”
“You know time works differently here than it does in Oz,” Gert said. “As far as we can figure out, about a month of your time has passed while you were in Oz.”
Only a month? The idea was crazy. So much had happened to me, so much time had passed. I didn’t even feel like the same person anymore. The Amy Gumm who’d lived here was a total stranger. I didn’t belong here anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.
“You’ll have to find them fast,” Mombi added. “There’s no telling what damage Dorothy will be able to do in Oz. We have to get back as soon as we can.”
“I haven’t even said I’ll help!” I said angrily, but I knew Mombi was right. Yet again it was up to me. “Fine. I’ll find the stupid shoes. So where am I supposed to live while I’m repeating senior year?”
“Oh,” Glamora said cheerfully, “that part at least is easy. We found your mom.”
My mom. Just the word brought back a flood of memories, most of them bad. I’d just been dumped back in Kansas, watched Nox take a place among the witches that they hadn’t even considered me for despite how hard I’d worked, and I had no idea if it was possible to return to Oz—or if I even wanted to. And now I was going to have to stay with the woman who’d abandoned me to party with her friends while a tornado descended on our house? It was too much.
“I need a minute,” I mumbled, and ducked out of the tent. The air was still and cool; overhead, clouds moved quickly across the stars as if a storm was on its way. Like we needed any more of those. One tornado per lifetime had been way more than enough.
I couldn’t help but wonder: What if, that afternoon in the trailer, my mom had decided just that once to take care of me? To drive me to safety—somewhere both of us could ride out the storm together? What if she had finally done the right thing? Was what I’d gained in Oz—strength, power, respect, self-reliance—worth what I’d lost? Without Nox, what did I even have to go back for? Being with him was the closest I’d come to happiness in Oz, but if his duties to the witches meant we could never even try to have a relationship, I didn’t relish the idea of returning to Oz just to be the Quadrant’s servant.
I wondered what would have happened if my mom had kept me safe and I’d never been airlifted into Oz at all. I knew that somewhere inside the mom who’d abandoned me that day was the mom who’d once loved me as though I was the greatest treasure in her life. But Kansas had a way of stripping the good out of anything, like the harsh prairie winds that peeled pretty paint from siding until all the houses were the same peeling, hopeless gray. And who was I kidding—my life here, in Kansas, had basically been hell.
After my dad bailed, I’d watched my mom’s downward spiraclass="underline" slow at first, circling the drain faster and faster as pills and booze took away anything that resembled the happy, cheerful, loving mom I’d once known. By the time the tornado picked me up out of Dusty Acres, my mom was a couch-hugging wreck who only got up long enough to stagger down to the nearest bar with her best friend, Tawny. And the day the tornado had hit she’d cussed me out for getting suspended—as if über-pregnant tyrant Madison Pendleton’s picking a fight with me had been my fault—before abandoning me to the mercy of the storm in order to hit up a tornado party. I remembered what she’d looked like the last time I’d seen her: caked in drugstore makeup, her cheap skirt not much longer than a belt, her boobs racked up to her chin with a push-up bra. Trashy, bitchy, angry, and mean: like a trailer-park version of the Seven Dwarfs. I could’ve died, easily, because she’d left me that day. And now I was supposed to go back to her? To pretend everything was fine? The witches had asked a lot from me during my time in Oz, but this was something else.