No Place Like Oz

by Danielle Paige

  She staggered backward as I rushed at her. Her face contorted in fear. “No, Dorothy! Please! Don’t let it control you! Don’t give in to it!”

  “Too late for that, Princess,” I screamed. As I said it, I felt all of Oz screaming along with me.

  “Please, calm down. You’ve no idea what you’re doing. You can still save yourself. Think about this.”

  With a roar louder than the Lion’s I unleashed every last bit of magic that had been building unstoppably inside me since I got to Oz.

  It was wondrous.

  It surged through my body, flowing like a thousand rivers cascading violently and crashing on the shore.

  It drained from the land and the sky, up through me and right at her.

  She screamed as I hit her with pure energy, streams of purple and green and red lightning shocking and sparking as it struck the ground around us over and over and over again.

  She didn’t fight back. Maybe she couldn’t—maybe she’d used up everything she had summoning my house. Or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she was too scared. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just wanted her dead. I wanted it to hurt.

  But she didn’t die. When I’d used up everything I thought I had, I was sure that I’d see her lying on the ground in a mangled, bloody heap. But Ozma rose to her feet. Easily, steadily, as if it was nothing.

  She was more powerful than I’d realized. She had changed. I hadn’t hurt her a bit. I might have even made her stronger.

  Ozma’s entire body turned the color of midnight and shadows. It looked alive—like there was black smoke churning just beneath her skin. Her eyes were hollow, golden caverns; her scepter was a lightning bolt that stretched into the thick clouds overhead.

  “You have no idea what I am,” she screamed with a hundred voices. “I am the blood of Lurline and the daughter of the Ancient Flower. I am the first and the last and the in-between. I am Oz.”

  She slammed her scepter into the earth, and a swarm of black moths came bursting forth out of it. They flew for me, knocking me backward, clinging to my skin, trying to suck the life out of me.

  But the shoes protected me. Without me even trying, they wrapped me with red light, and the moths burned away as if I was a candle whose flame they’d been drawn to in the dark.

  I regained my composure. Ozma had taken everything away from me. Everything I cared about or would ever care about. She had taken away Glinda, and my aunt and uncle, and my magic. She had tried to take away my kingdom.

  “I am Dorothy,” I screamed back at her.

  I closed my eyes and knocked my heels three times, begging the Land of Oz to fill me with darkness and power and all the enchantments it possessed.

  It did.

  It all came bursting out of me. This time, it was more than magic. It wasn’t just the shoes at work. It was me. It was the reason I had been brought here in the first place. It was the reason I had been brought back again.

  It was that wanting I’d known my whole life. All that hope that there was something better out there, something that could be mine and mine alone.

  Ozma was no match for it. She’d never felt anything like it, I don’t think. She had all this, and she didn’t even care about it.

  But I cared. I wanted. I wanted more. My desire was a tornado that twisted out of my body and danced toward the princess, catching her up in its funnel, lifting her into the air as easily as if she was a feather. She screamed and struggled against it, but there was nothing she could do.

  It was no use. She was powerless against me. She may have been the One True Princess, the delicate peach blossom and the blood of whatever-her-name-was, but I was the girl who rode the cyclone, the girl who had slayed the witches. I had been brought here against all odds—not once, but twice. I wouldn’t be denied.

  Within the cone of the maelstrom, I watched calmly as Ozma’s dark form began to tear itself apart in a gruesome explosion of black and gold. It was like she was unraveling. Like she was melting.

  And then she was gone.

  For the third time, Oz had chosen me.

  The sky had returned to normal. Everything was quiet. The storm I had summoned faded away into the distance. It was like none of it happened, except that my head was throbbing and all of my limbs were aching in exhaustion.

  And the old farmhouse was still standing there, invincible and mostly undisturbed, with my poor aunt’s feet still sticking out from underneath it. I looked away. I couldn’t bear the sight of it.

  Then my eyes caught sight of her.

  Ozma was lying on the ground, her crown knocked from her head and her scepter ten feet away. Her dress was streaked with blood and dirt and her face was bruised and swollen. But she was breathing.

  She sat up and looked around. I took a step forward, ready to keep fighting. Ready to do whatever it took. Then I saw that she was smiling. It wasn’t a normal smile either. It was dazed and vacant and her eyes were empty, like old, tarnished marbles. She looked at me and cocked her head.

  “Who are you?” she asked stupidly.

  I lowered my arms. “Ozma?”

  She giggled an idiotic giggle.

  I pointed at her and tried to call up more magic. Just a little bit more, enough to snuff her out once and for all. But all that shot forth from my fingers were a few useless red sparks from my fingertips that faded away as quickly as they had come. I had used it all up, for now, I figured. It would take some time to recharge.

  Ozma didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t exactly her friend. She clapped her hands. “Oh that’s lovely!” she cried. “Do it again.”

  Before I could try anything, a high-pitched yipping noise filled my ears.

  “Toto?” I spun around.

  In all the commotion, I had forgotten about my dog, and when I searched for him, I saw Glinda standing there, right next to the farmhouse.

  Her pink dress looked like it was made from the sunset itself; her eyes were kind and gentle. She bent down to pet my Toto, who was bouncing up and down happily at her feet, and when she stood up, she caught sight of me and beamed, picking up the skirt of her dress and racing forward through the grass to greet me.

  “Dorothy!” she called, her voice strong and sweet and joyful. “My beautiful, powerful, angry Dorothy. I knew I could count on you, and I was right. Just look how right I was!”

  She gestured toward Ozma, who had her arms outstretched and was whirling around, making herself dizzy as she laughed and tripped over herself, oblivious to everything that was going on.

  “What did I do to her?” I asked.

  “Oh, you did what you had to,” Glinda said with a shrug. “You couldn’t kill her. I don’t think it’s possible to kill her, at least not without destroying Oz. But still, ding dong, as they say!”

  Glinda threw her head back and let out a long, melodious chortle.

  I was a little confused. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Think of it this way,” Glinda said, when she’d stopped laughing. “You’ve taken Ozma’s power and you’ve given it back to the land. Back to Oz, where it belongs. She was trying to hoard it all for herself, you know—that’s been her goal all along. That’s why she hated me, and why she wanted your shoes so badly. She just wanted to hoard the magic, like fairies always do.”

  “I thought the fairies gave Oz its magic.”

  “Oh, she told you that old taradiddle, now did she? I’m sure you didn’t believe her. These fairies are greedy little creatures. She just couldn’t stand to see anyone else with even a drop of magic to speak of. You did what you had to. You did what was right. And Oz will thank you for it, someday. For now, you’ll have to settle for my thanks. You saved me, Dorothy. You can’t think of how horrible it was for me to be locked away like that.”

  “How did I . . .”

  “Once you took care of Ozma, the prison she’s been holding me in ceased to exist. Poof! Just like that. Of course I came to find you right away. I’ve been so worried about you all this time. It
’s a miracle I was able to get you those shoes at all. But you know—even all chained up, even in the darkest of dungeons—this old girl had a few tricks up her sleeve.” She wiggled an eyebrow at me and laughed again, but this time she stretched out her arms as she did it and gestured for me.

  “Oh, come here, you foolish, dear thing.” As soon as she said it, I fell effortlessly into her embrace and suddenly found myself sobbing as she pulled me tight against her bosom.

  “My aunt,” I managed to say through my tears. “My uncle . . .”

  Glinda held me close. She kissed my head and squeezed me even tighter. Aunt Em had hugged me before, and of course I knew that she had loved me, but there had always been a certain distance between us. She had never wanted children, and even though she had tried her best with me, I always knew I wasn’t quite part of her plan.

  Now, as Glinda kissed me and hugged me and stroked my hair, I wondered if I finally knew what it was like to have a mother.

  “Darling,” she said kindly. “I’m so sorry about what’s happened to them. But it just couldn’t be helped. And, you know what?”

  “What?” I asked, as she let me go and I stepped back. She took my arms, held them at my sides, and looked lovingly into my eyes.

  “You’ll have a new family now. A family who loves you more than you can imagine.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Why, me of course, you silly goose! And the Scarecrow, and the Lion, and the Tin Woodman, and, oh, just about everyone in Oz, I imagine. You’re to be their new princess, you know, and you’re sure to be the most beloved girl in the land, before long. If you’re not already!”

  “I’m to be princess?” I asked.

  “Who else would be?” Glinda asked. “Her?” She pointed to Ozma, who was kneeling in the grass sniffing curiously at a patch of buttercups. “Well, they’ll still call her princess, I guess. All that fairy magic makes it unavoidable. La-di-dah! But as you can see, she won’t be good for much from now on. When we get back to the palace, I’ll see to it that she issues a decree making you Deputy Princess and Protector of the Crown. Won’t be too difficult. We’ll set her up with some dolls and toys and let her run wild in her own quarters while you sit on the throne and do all the important princessing work. With my help and guidance, of course. They’ll forget all about her soon enough; the people of Oz have short memories, bless their hearts. And they absolutely adore a new monarch. Oh, the coronation we’ll throw for you!”

  I looked over at Ozma, and Glinda, and then over at the farmhouse. I wasn’t sure about any of this. Aunt Em’s feet were pointing away from each other in odd angles. She was wearing the same ordinary leather boots she’d worn on the farm—for all the fancy new shoes she’d been offered here, she’d refused to give them up.

  Glinda saw the doubt in my eyes. She frowned sympathetically. “You poor thing. You always were such a sentimental sparrow.”

  She waved her hand at the house. “Poof!” she said, and as soon as the word escaped her lips, my old home—along with my aunt and uncle—disappeared in a shower of pink bubbles, like there had never been anything there at all.

  I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders. I felt my sobs easing.

  “There, doesn’t that feel better?”

  “It does,” I said. As soon as the reminders were gone, everything that had happened in the past couple of weeks felt very far away.

  “It doesn’t matter where you came from,” Glinda said. “I came from someplace, too, you know. Someplace not that different from Kansas. I’ll tell you the story someday, if you can possibly stand the boredom!”

  “I’d like that,” I said softly.

  Glinda smiled back at me. “Good. Very good. Now, why don’t we leave all this useless sadness behind and go back to the palace? We need to pick you out a nice crown.” She put her arm around me. “Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?”

  It did. It really did.

  Glinda turned to Ozma. “You too, darling,” she said, and the princess scampered toward us, almost tripping over her own feet. “You two can be like wonderful sisters!”

  Ozma nodded eagerly and took my hand.

  Glinda winked knowingly. “Well, maybe more like distant cousins,” she said to me in a stage whisper. She put her arm around my shoulder, and we began the walk back to the Emerald City.

  “Now,” Glinda said, “you must tell me all about your adventures. I was able to watch some of them while you were having them, but I have to say it all came in a bit garbled. Like listening to a radio with a broken antenna.”

  I looked back over my shoulder. The house was gone. My aunt and uncle were gone. Ozma was flapping her arms as she skipped aimlessly through the fields.

  She wouldn’t be much company. But Toto was racing behind us. And I had Glinda and all my friends in the palace. I had my kingdom.

  My shoes sent a happy wave of magic shooting up through my body, and, on impulse, I grabbed a fistful of it and tossed it into the blue sky, where it burst into a pink and gold firework.

  “That’s my girl!” Glinda exclaimed proudly. “Oh, I can’t wait to show you what you can really do with it. You were born to be a sorceress, you know.”

  It was too good to be true. It was almost like Kansas was just a dream and I was waking up to a wonderful new morning where everything was bright and sunny and full of life.

  They say you can’t go home again. Well, I’m proof that’s not true. Home isn’t just where you’re born—it’s where you belong. I found my home and I let it go. But I came back. Now I was home for good, and I would never, ever make the mistake of leaving again. The past was gone forever. There was no place like here.

  Excerpt from Dorothy Must Die

  I first discovered I was trash three days before my ninth birthday—one year after my father lost his job and moved to Secaucus to live with a woman named Crystal and four years before my mother had the car accident, started taking pills, and began exclusively wearing bedroom slippers instead of normal shoes.

  I was informed of my trashiness on the playground by Madison Pendleton, a girl in a pink Target sweat suit who thought she was all that because her house had one and a half bathrooms.

  “Salvation Amy’s trailer trash,” she told the other girls on the monkey bars while I was dangling upside down by my knees and minding my own business, my pigtails scraping the sand. “That means she doesn’t have any money and all her clothes are dirty. You shouldn’t go to her birthday party or you’ll be dirty, too.”

  When my birthday party rolled around that weekend, it turned out everyone had listened to Madison. My mom and I were sitting at the picnic table in the Dusty Acres Mobile Community Recreation Area wearing our sad little party hats, our sheet cake gathering dust. It was just the two of us, same as always. After an hour of hoping someone would finally show up, Mom sighed, poured me another big cup of Sprite, and gave me a hug.

  She told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.

  Even as a little kid, I was smart enough to point out that our house was on blocks, not wheels. Its mobility was severely oversold. Mom didn’t have much of a comeback for that.

  It took her until around Christmas of that year when we were watching The Wizard of Oz on the big flat-screen television—the only physical thing that was a leftover from our old life with Dad—to come up with a better answer for me. “See?” she said, pointing at the screen. “You don’t need wheels on your house to get to somewhere better. All you need is something to give you that extra push.”

  I don’t think she believed it even then, but at least in those days she still cared enough to lie. And even though I never believed in a place like Oz, I did believe in her.

  That was a long time ago. A lot had changed since then. My mom was hardly the same person at all anymore. Then again, neither was I.

  I didn’t bother trying to make Madison like me
now, and I wasn’t going to cry over cake. I wasn’t going to cry, period. These days, my mom was too lost in her own little world to bother cheering me up. I was on my own, and crying wasn’t worth the effort.

  Tears or no tears, though, Madison Pendleton still found ways of making my life miserable. The day of the tornado—although I didn’t know the tornado was coming yet—she was slouching against her locker after fifth period, rubbing her enormous pregnant belly and whispering with her best friend, Amber Boudreaux.

  I’d figured out a long time ago that it was best to just ignore her when I could, but Madison was the type of person it was pretty impossible to ignore even under normal circumstances. Now that she was eight and a half months pregnant, it was really impossible.

  Today, Madison was wearing a tiny T-shirt that barely covered her midriff. It read Who’s Your Mommy? across her boobs in pink cursive glitter. I did my best not to stare as I slunk by her on my way to Spanish, but somehow I felt my eyes gliding upward, past her belly to her chest and then to her face. Sometimes you just can’t help it.

  She was already staring at me. Our gazes met for a tiny instant. I froze.

  Madison glared. “What are you looking at, Trailer Trash?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Was I staring? I was just wondering if you were the teen mom I saw on the cover of Star this week?”

  It wasn’t like I tried to go after Madison, but sometimes my sarcasm took on a life of its own. The words just came out.

  Madison gave me a blank look. She snorted.

  “I didn’t know you could afford a copy of Star.” She turned to Amber Boudreaux and stopped rubbing her stomach just long enough to give it a tender pat. “Salvation Amy’s jealous. She’s had a crush on Dustin forever. She wishes this was her baby.”

  I didn’t have a crush on Dustin, I definitely didn’t want a baby, and I absolutely did not want Dustin’s baby. But that didn’t stop my cheeks from going red.

  Amber popped her gum and smirked an evil smirk. “You know, I saw her talking to Dustin in third period,” she said. “She was being all flirty.” Amber puckered her lips and pushed her chest forward. “Oh, Dustin, I’ll help you with your algebra.”