Yellow Brick War (5 page)

“My room?”

“I had to fight for a two bedroom. They wanted to give me a studio. But I knew you'd be back.” She got up and opened one of the doors off the living room. I looked over her shoulder and my eyes widened in surprise. Like the rest of the apartment, the room had barely any furniture—just a narrow twin bed and a little bedside table and lamp. But my mom had painted the walls a pretty, pale pink, and hung bright white curtains over the window. She'd bought a bottle of my favorite perfume, too, and left it next to the lamp.

“This is nice,” I said cautiously. “Thanks.”

“It's nothing,” she said. “I'm going to get us something better really soon. Even though I just started at the hardware store, I'm already saving. You must be tired—do you want to rest?”

“No,” I said. “I'm okay.” I realized with surprise that I was telling the truth for once. Sleeping in had done me good, and I
was feeling weirdly energized to be home. My mom clapped her hands together.

“Then today calls for a special treat. Why don't you get cleaned up, and I'll take you out to buy some new clothes. Tonight we can order pizza and watch old movies.”

Back in the pre-accident days, my mom and I had loved watching corny old black-and-white movies together. Our favorites were always the funny ones, where Audrey Hepburn or some other super-glamorous actress goofed around while rich, handsome guys fell all over her. Sometimes it seemed like things might not work out for her for a minute, but the handsome guy always came to the rescue at the end.

Part of me felt way too old for that now. No, not even too old. Too
tired
.
Too experienced. I'd fought in a war. I'd seen too much of the world to believe in any of that crap, even for an hour.

But at the same time, being back home, and seeing my mom like this, was doing something funny to me. It was like everything that had happened in Oz was drifting away. It was like I was waking up and looking around and realizing, slowly, that it all had just been a weird, terrible dream.

It hadn't been a dream. But I
did
need new clothes. If I was going to try being a high school student again, I needed something to wear. And it had been so long since I'd seen a movie.

“I don't need anything new,” I said. “We can just go to the thrift store.”
Salvation Amy strikes again
, I thought bitterly. My mom might have changed, but nothing else in Kansas had. I tried not to think about the clothes I'd worn in Oz. My fighting gear,
the way I'd been able to magic myself into a glittering, unrecognizable version of that sad, poor, trailer-trash girl I used to be.

“No,” my mom said firmly. “I want things to be different, Amy. I mean it.”

“Sure,” I said. “That sounds good.”

I took a long, hot shower in my mom's new bathroom. She'd even bought a bottle of the strawberry body wash I liked, although now the glitter suspended in the thick pink liquid, so reminiscent of Glinda, made me want to puke. I'd had enough of glitter for the next few lifetimes. I shampooed my hair twice. Maybe the real thing was more effective than magic. I wondered how witches and princesses dealt with scalp buildup in Oz, and collapsed into near-hysterical giggles on the bathtub floor while the hot water turned slowly cold. Okay, maybe I wasn't handling this return-to-Kansas thing with as much badass attitude as I'd thought. I'd have to look for a post-travel-to-a-fictional-kingdom PTSD support group. But the fact that I might be this close to falling apart was just one of the many things I couldn't tell my mom about what I'd been up to in the month of Kansas time I'd been gone.
Mom, I really need therapy—between literally turning into a monster and killing a bunch of people in a magical world you
only think is made up, I'm not feeling too great?
Yeah, right.

Come on, Amy
, I told myself, picking myself up off the floor of the tub.
Get it together.
If I lost it in front of my mom, there was no telling what she might do or where she might send me. I couldn't talk about anything that had happened to me and I couldn't let what I'd been through show. I had to keep being a warrior. This was what I'd practiced for. This was what I'd trained for. And this was no time to forget that.

As I brushed out my long hair—no invisible magic stylists in Kansas, sadly—I saw myself as my mom must have seen me, standing on her threshold. There were dark circles under my eyes that no amount of sleep was going to erase anytime soon. I looked about ten years older than I had before that tornado had plucked me out of Dusty Acres. Mostly, I just looked sad. Without magic to hide behind, I was going to have to do my best with concealer.

I spent a long time doing my makeup. I'd never cared about it before, but my mom loved girly stuff, and I knew she'd know I was doing it for her. I remembered suddenly the way Nox had looked at me what felt like a million years ago, when Glamora had taught me how to glam out with magic, and felt a quick, sharp pang. I tugged the brush through my hair with one last savage yank, pulled on the dirty clothes I'd been wearing, and opened the bathroom door. My mom's smile was so bright and so genuine that I was glad I'd gone to the trouble of borrowing her mascara and lipstick.

Of course there was no mall in Flat Hill. There wasn't even
a place to buy clothes, unless you counted the overalls they sold at the feed store. There was a bus, though, that ran once an hour to the biggest nearby town, where you could stock up on slightly outdated ensembles at one of those giant box stores that also sold kitchenware, hunting rifles, and kids' toys.

The bus ride passed quickly enough, and soon we were walking in the front door. I let my mom pick out the clothes she wanted to buy me; I didn't care what I wore. As she flipped through a rack of pastel sweatshirts with rhinestone slogans like CUTE and FLIRT, I said casually, “I guess I should start back to school tomorrow.”

She stopped short. “School?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I mean, it's not like I can get out of going forever.”

“Honey,” my mom said, “you just got home. I think you can take a week or two to settle in.” She paused. “I don't know if you remember,” she said delicately, “but before you disappeared—I mean, before the tornado picked you up—you got suspended. We'll probably have to deal with that, too.”

Suspended? I had no idea for a moment what she was talking about, and then it all came rushing back. Madison. The fight she'd picked with me the day the tornado hit—how she'd pretended it was my fault and told the assistant principal, Mr. Strachan, that I'd assaulted her. After battling Dorothy, Madison Pendleton seemed like a pretty pathetic enemy. It was hard to believe I'd once lived in terror of her. Poor little Salvation Amy had gone to ninja camp. Now that I thought about it, I was
kind of looking forward to seeing Madison again.

“Right,” I said. “I forgot about that.”

“I can go talk to Mr. Strachan tomorrow before I go to work,” my mom offered. “I'm sure we can figure something out if you're sure you're well enough to go back. I know you missed a lot of school, but I'll ask if you can make up the work you were absent for and still graduate on time.” Graduate? Right. That, too, was something from a life that seemed so far away I could barely even think about it. In every way that really mattered, I had already graduated.

“Sure, thanks,” I said. My mom gave me a thoughtful look, but she turned back to the rack of clothes.

She ended up buying me a couple of T-shirts and sweatshirts, and one pair of jeans. She didn't say it out loud, but I knew that was all she could afford—and she couldn't really afford even that. She didn't say anything about money later that night either, when we ordered an extra-large pizza with extra pepperoni from the chain store a couple of blocks over—what constituted fine dining in Flat Hill. My mom flipped through channels on the beat-up old TV she told me she'd gotten from the Salvation Army.

So maybe it was true. Maybe I always was going to be Salvation Amy.

So what? I didn't care. I didn't care about anything here anymore, except finding those stupid shoes and going back to Oz. Somehow, without really thinking about it, I'd decided already: I didn't belong in Kansas anymore, no matter how
happy my mom was to see me. I couldn't just go back to being the same person I'd been before. Not after everything I'd seen and done. I couldn't go back to a place where no one would believe anything that had happened to me was real. I'd watched people I cared about die. I'd risked my life. I'd used magic. I'd fallen—okay, fine, I'd fallen in love. And there was no one in Kansas I could share any of that with. It was as if Oz had made the decision for me. Or maybe I just didn't have much of a choice.

“Oh, look!” my mom said happily. “
The Wizard of Oz
is on. Remember how we used to love that movie?”

I almost dropped my slice of pizza on the sad shag rug. There she was, in all her glory—Judy Garland singing her heart out as the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipped along behind her. Everyone looked so happy, and not scary at all. Dorothy was a young, innocent girl with a cute little dog. The Tin Man was an actor in silver makeup, with a silly funnel on top of his head. The Scarecrow was a dopey guy in burlap, and the Lion was just a man in a plush suit with a bow in his fake mane. I remembered the real Lion, swallowing Star in one gulp, and shuddered. “It's all wrong,” I muttered under my breath.

“You're telling me,” my mom said. “You know Judy Garland was already on pills when they were shooting this? The things they did to that poor girl. If you think I was a bad mother, you should have seen hers.”

That was a point I wasn't about to argue. “I'm kind of sick of this movie. Do you mind if we watch something else?”

“Fine by me,” my mom said. “It's not quite the same when you know the truth, is it?”

I wished I could explain myself to her. My mom was finally being honest with me, for the first time ever, and it sort of sucked that the shoe was on the other foot now. But if I told my mom the Cowardly Lion was real—and I knew because I'd killed him myself, after he ate her beloved pet rat—she'd do a lot more than go talk to Assistant Principal Strachan tomorrow. She'd go straight to a psychiatrist instead, and I'd be going to the mental hospital, not back to high school.

When it was time for bed, I hugged my mom good night. She smelled like she'd smelled when I was a kid, before the accident and the pills and the Newports: sweet and flowery, like springtime. She hugged me back. I looked over her shoulder into her room, taking it in without really thinking, and then something clicked. “Where's your bed?” I asked, releasing her.

“Oh.” She laughed, giving a little shrug. “I couldn't really afford two, so I'll just sleep on the couch. A couple more paychecks and I should be able to get myself a bed, too.”

“Mom, come on. I can sleep on the couch. You take my bed.”

“I've been selfish for way too much of your life,” she said, looking me straight in the eye. “I can handle a few weeks on the couch.” Guilt welled up in my heart like blood from a paper cut. My mom had transformed her life in the hopes I was coming back, and all I could think about was how I was going to leave her again. What would it do to her when I disappeared again?

You can't think about that and you can't get used to this
, I told
myself.
You're only here to get the shoes.
It was easier for everyone if my mom and I didn't get too close. If I closed myself off, the way I'd learned to do in Oz. Caring too much only meant you were that much easier to hurt. And if I was going to leave Kansas for good, I couldn't let my armor crack for a second.

“Suit yourself,” I said, making my voice hard and cold, and I closed my bedroom door to the look of hurt on her face. But all I could think about as I tossed and turned in the unfamiliar, narrow bed was the tears welling up in her eyes as I'd shut her out. Nox, my mom . . . who was going to be next on the list of people I had to hurt in order to survive?

My mom left the house early the next morning, and I got busy. I dragged out her battered old laptop—you could practically hear the gears turning when I logged online. Before I looked up the history of Flat Hill, I couldn't resist. I had to Google it. A video called “Tornado Girl Tragedy” popped up instantly. On one side was Nancy Grace, the CNN reporter who always covered big trials and missing person cases. And on the other, my mother's best friend, Tawny. Nancy had a habit of lambasting bad mothers who happened to be nowhere to be found while their kids were going missing.

“So where was your friend, Tornado Girl's mom, when the tornado hit?”

“She was with me—we were at a tornado party,” Tawny said dramatically, and then burst into guilty tears.

“Tornado party,” Nancy repeated, her southern drawl wrapping around the words, making it sound even more awful.

At the word
party
, I clicked on the X to close the screen. I had seen enough. I turned to my real mission.

For hours, I looked through websites about prairie history, old farmers' journals, and black-and-white pictures of the people who had come to Kansas back in Dorothy's era to make a better life for themselves. I wasn't sure what I was looking for; I just knew I'd know it when I saw it. And after reading about a million articles on devastating blizzards, crop failures, droughts, disease, and poverty, I couldn't help but feel sorry for Dorothy. Whatever she'd turned into in Oz, her life in Kansas had been harder than anything I could imagine.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
might have portrayed her life with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em as idyllic, but it didn't take much reading for me to realize that life on a Kansas farm as a dirt-poor orphan probably hadn't been a walk in the park.

And then I found it—on a historical website dedicated to printing techniques in old newspapers. I sat up straight on my mom's couch with a gasp. “Area reporter interviews Kansas tornado survivor.” It was a scan of a yellowing, torn newspaper article from the
Daily Kansan,
dated 1897. The paper was so faded I could barely make out the words, and most of the article was missing. But I saw enough to know what I was looking at. “Miss D. Gale, of Flat Hill, Kansas, population twenty-five, describes her experiences in the tornado as ‘truly wondrous,' but the most wonderful aspect of her story is that she survived the devastating tornado that destroyed her home. Miss Gale reports extraordinary visions experienced during the storm, including wonderful creatures and
an enchanted ci—” The page was torn off there, so neatly that it almost looked as though someone had done it on purpose. And then I saw the author's byline: Mr. L. F. Baum.

“Holy
shit
,” I said out loud into my mom's empty apartment. Dorothy
had
been real. She
had
lived here in the very town where I'd grown up. And L. Frank Baum had
interviewed
her. How did no one
know
about this? I didn't know much about the history of Baum's books, but I was pretty sure that I would have heard about it if people realized Dorothy was based on a real person. She'd told him the whole thing, everything that happened to her, and he'd taken her entire story and turned it into a book. She'd come back to Kansas, just like I had, dumped back into her ordinary, crappy life. No one could possibly have believed her—not even Baum himself.

But if Baum had put Dorothy's shoes in
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, that meant she'd told him about them. And the rest of the article might be a clue to where they were now. Dorothy might not have looked for the shoes the first time she returned to Kansas, but she hadn't hesitated to take up the offer of a second trip to Oz. If she hadn't looked for them then, they had to still be here. And if I could find the rest of the paper, I'd be that much closer to figuring out where they were.

Extraordinary visions, all right. How had no one else found what I'd just stumbled across? How was it possible that no one else had realized Dorothy was real? There was something else going on here. Something big. I had to find the rest of that article. But how?

I heard a key turning in the lock, and I scrambled to delete my search history. I'd barely managed to return the computer to where I'd found it—under a pile of papers and magazines on the table by the couch—when my mom walked in. She looked startled to see me there, standing in the middle of her apartment like an idiot. “Uh, hi,” I said. “I just, uh, woke up.” I shot a glance at the wall clock in the kitchen. It was four in the afternoon. Oh well, let her think I was lazy. It was better than trying to explain myself.

“Hi, honey,” she said. Her voice was cautious, and I remembered what I'd done to her the night before. I felt another flash of guilt and shoved it aside.

“Good news,” she said. “I talked to Assistant Principal Strachan. He says since the circumstances are so unusual, you can consider your suspension over.”

“Great,” I said. “So I can go to school tomorrow?”

She shot me a strange look. “Are you sure you want to, honey? You've been through a lot. I thought you might want to take a few days to rest up before you went back. We could even see if there's a way for you to finish out the quarter at home.”

“I have to get out of here,” I said without thinking. She flinched visibly. “I mean, I really just want to—to get back to normal,” I added quickly. “You know, jump back into things. I think it's the best way.”

My mom sighed. “Whatever you want, Amy. I just . . .” She trailed off and then shrugged helplessly. I knew I'd hurt her again, but there was no way around it. “Assistant Principal
Strachan wasn't happy about it,” my mom warned. “You're going to have to be on your best behavior. And Amy—Madison will still be there. I know she picks on you, but you have to get better at dealing with it.” She looked down at the ground. “I can help you, if you need me.”

I almost laughed. At this point, there wasn't much Madison Pendleton could say to me that would bother me at all. But I realized immediately I'd hurt my mom's feelings—again. Of course. She'd been offering to help, and now she thought I was laughing at her, instead of Madison. I felt awful, and then I felt awful for feeling awful. It would be better for both of us if I kept my distance. But she was trying so hard—and I was starting to believe the change was real and not just an act. I'd miss my new, improved mom. But my mom wasn't enough to keep me in Flat Hill. Right? I couldn't afford to let myself think any other way. I'd made up my mind to go back to Oz. Which meant I
had
to find those shoes—and I had an idea of how to do it.