The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

“There is no second time to this,” said Ama Clutch, tugging at Galinda, who was proving as sedentary as set cement. “Miss Elphaba, shame on you for encouraging this scandal.”

  “Nothing here has been perpetrated but badinage, and bad badinage at that,” said Elphaba. “Miss Galinda, you’re mighty stubborn there. You’re planting yourself in the vegetable garden for good in the hopes that this Boy Visitation might occur again? Have we misread your interest?”

  Galinda stood at last with some dignity. “My dear Master Boq,” she said, as if dictating, “it was ever my intention to dissuade you from pursuing me, in romantic attachment or even in friendship, as you put it. I had not meant to bruise you. It is not in my nature.” At this Elphaba rolled her eyes, but for once kept her mouth shut, perhaps because Ama Clutch had dug her fingernails into Elphaba’s elbow. “I will not deign to arrange another meeting like this. As Ama Clutch reminds me, it is beneath me.” Ama Clutch hadn’t exactly said that, but even so, she nodded grimly. “But if our paths cross in a legitimate way, Master Boq, I will do you the courtesy at least of not ignoring you. I trust you will be satisfied with that.”

  “Never,” said Boq with a smile, “but it’s a start.”

  “And now good evening,” said Ama Clutch on behalf of them all, and steered the girls away. “Fresh dreams, Master Boq, and don’t come back!”

  “Miss Elphie, you were horrible,” he heard Galinda say, while Elphaba twisted around and waved good-bye with a grin he could not clearly read.

  3

  So the summer began. Since he passed the exams, Boq was free to plan one last year at Briscoe Hall. Daily he hied himself over to the library at Three Queens, where under the watchful eye of a titanic Rhinoceros, the head archival librarian, he sat cleaning old manuscripts that clearly weren’t looked at more than once a century. When the Rhino was out of the room, he had flighty conversations with the two boys on either side of him, classic Queens boys, full of gibbering gossip and arcane references, teasing and loyal. He enjoyed them when they were in good spirits, and he detested their sulks. Crope and Tibbett. Tibbett and Crope. Boq pretended confusion when they got too arch or suggestive, which seemed to happen about once a week, but they backed off quickly. In the afternoons they would all take their cheese sandwiches by the banks of the Suicide Canal and watch the swans. The strong boys at crew, coursing up and down the canal for summer practice, made Crope and Tibbett swoon and fall on their faces in the grass. Boq laughed at them, not unkindly, and waited for fate to deliver Galinda back into his path.

  It wasn’t too long a wait. About three weeks after their vegetable garden liaison, on a windy summer morning, a small earthquake caused some minor damage in the Three Queens library, and the building had to be closed for some patching. Tibbett, Crope, and Boq took their sandwiches, with some beakers of tea from the buttery, and they flopped down at their favorite place on the grassy banks of the canal. Fifteen minutes later, along came Ama Clutch with Galinda and two other girls.

  “I do believe we know you,” said Ama Clutch as Galinda stood demurely a step behind. In cases such as these it was the servant’s duty to elicit names from the strangers in the group, so that they might greet each other personally. Ama Clutch registered out loud that they were Masters Boq, Crope, and Tibbett, meeting Misses Galinda, Shenshen, and Pfannee. Then Ama Clutch moved a few feet away to allow the young people to address one another.

  Boq leaped up and gave a small bow, and Galinda said, “As in line with my promise, Master Boq, may I enquire how you’re keeping?”

  “Very well, thank you,” said Boq.

  “He’s ripe as a peach,” said Tibbett.

  “He’s downright luscious, from this angle,” said Crope, sitting a few steps behind, but Boq turned and glared so fiercely that Crope and Tibbett were chastened, and fell into a mock sulk.

  “And you, Miss Galinda?” continued Boq, searching her well-

  composed face. “You are well? How thrilling to see you in Shiz for the summer.” But that wasn’t the right thing to say. The better girls went home for the summer, and Galinda as a Gillikinese must feel it deeply that she was stuck here, like a Munchkinlander or a commoner! The fan came up. The eyes went down. The Misses Shenshen and Pfannee touched her shoulders in mute sympathy. But Galinda sallied on.

  “My dear friends the Misses Pfannee and Shenshen are taking a house for the month of Highsummer on the shores of Lake Chorge. A little fantasy house near the village of Neverdale. I’ve decided to make my holiday there instead of taking that tiresome trek back to the Pertha Hills.”

  “How refreshing.” He saw the beveled edges of her lacquered fingernails, the moth-colored eyelashes, the glazed and buffed softness of cheek, the sensitive tuck of skin just at the cleft of her upper lip. In the summer morning light, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

  “Steady,” said Crope, and he and Tibbett jumped up and they each caught Boq by an elbow. He then remembered to breathe. He couldn’t think of anything else to say though, and Ama Clutch was turning her handbag around and around in her hands.

  “So we’ve got jobs,” said Tibbett, to the rescue. “The Three Queens library. We’re housekeeping the literature. We’re the cleaning maids of culture. Are you working, Miss Galinda?”

  “I should think not,” said Galinda. “I need a rest from my studies. It has been a harrowing year, harrowing. My eyes are still tired from reading.”

  “How about you girls?” said Crope, outrageously casual. But they only giggled and demurred and inched away. This was their friend’s encounter, not theirs. Boq, regaining his composure, could feel the group beginning to shift itself into motion again. “And Miss Elphie?” he enquired, to hold them there. “How is your roomie?”

  “Headstrong and difficult,” said Galinda severely, for the first time speaking in a normal voice, not the faint social whisper. “But, thank Lurline, she’s got a job, so I get some relief. She’s working in the lab and the library under our Doctor Dillamond. Do you know of him?”

  “Doctor Dillamond? Do I know of him?” said Boq. “He’s the most impressive biology tutor in Shiz.”

  “By the by,” said Galinda, “he’s a Goat.”

  “Yes, yes. I wish he would teach us. Even our professors acknowledge his prominence. Apparently, years ago, back in the reign of the Regent, and before, he used to be invited annually to lecture at Briscoe Hall. But the restrictions changed even that, so I’ve never really met him. Just to see him at that poetry evening, last year, so briefly, was a treat—”

  “Well he does go on,” said Galinda. “Brilliant he may be, but he has no sense of when he’s become tedious. Anyway, Miss Elphie’s hard at work, doing something or other. She will go on about it, too. I think it’s contagious!”

  “Well, a lab, it breeds things,” said Crope.

  “Yes,” said Tibbett, “and incidentally may I add that you’re every bit as lovely as Boq gushes you are. We’d put it down to an overactive imagination born of affectional and physical frustration—”

  “You know,” said Boq, “between your Miss Elphie and my erstwhile friends here, we have no real hope of friendship at all. Shall we organize a duel and kill each other instead? Count off ten paces, turn and shoot? It would save so much bother.”

  But Galinda didn’t approve of such joking. She nodded in a dismissive way, and the group of females moved out along the graveled path, following the curve of the canal. Miss Shenshen was heard to say in a deep, breathy voice, “Oh, my dear, he is sweet, in a toylike way.”

  The voice faded out, Boq turned to rail at Crope and Tibbett, but they fell to tickling him and they all collapsed in a heap on the remains of their lunch. And since there was no hope in changing them, Boq abandoned the impulse to correct his friends. Really, what difference did their callow banter make if Miss Galinda found him so impossible?

  A week or two later, on his afternoon off, Boq took himself in to Railway Square. He lingered at a kiosk, staring. Cigarettes, ersatz love char
ms, naughty drawings of women undressing, and scrolls painted with lurid sunsets, overladen with one-line inspirational slogans. “Lurline Lives on Within Each Heart.” “Safe Keep the Wizard’s Laws, and the Wizard’s Laws Will Keep You Safe.” “I Pray to the Unnamed God That Justice Will Walk Abroad in Oz.” Boq noted the variety: the pagan, the authoritarian, and the old-fashioned unionist impulses.

  But nothing directly sympathetic to the royalists, who had gone underground in the sixteen harsh years since the Wizard had first wrested power from the Ozma Regent. The Ozma line had been Gillikinese originally, and surely there were active pockets of resistance to the Wizard? But Gillikin had, in fact, thrived under the Wizard, so the royalists kept mum. Besides, everyone had heard the rumors of strict court action against turncoats and peristrophists.

  Boq bought a broadsheet published out of the Emerald City—several weeks old, but it was the first he’d seen in some time—and he settled down at a café. He read about the Emerald City Home Guard suppressing some Animal dissenters, who were making a nuisance of themselves in the palace gardens. He looked for news of the provinces, and found a filler about Munchkinland, which continued experiencing near-drought conditions; occasional thunderbursts would drench the ground, but the water would run off or sink uselessly into the clay. They said that hidden subterranean lakes underlay the Vinkus region, that water resources there could serve the whole of Oz. But the idea of a canal system across the entire country made everyone laugh. The expense! There was great disagreement between the Eminences and the Emerald City as to what was to be done.

  Secession, thought Boq seditiously, and looked up to see Elphaba, alone, without even a nanny or Ama, standing over him.

  “What a delicious expression you have on your face, Boq,” she said. “It’s much more interesting than love.”

  “It is love, in a way,” said Boq, then remembered himself, and leaped to his feet. “Won’t you join me? Please, take a seat. Unless you’re worried about being unchaperoned.”

  She sat down, looking a bit etiolated, and allowed him to call for a cup of mineral tea. She had a parcel in brown paper and string under her arm. “A few trinkets for my sister,” she said. “She’s like Miss Galinda, she loves the fancy outside of things. I found a Vinkus shawl in the bazaar, red roses on a black background, with black and green fringe. I’m sending it to her, and a pair of striped stockings that Ama Clutch knitted for me.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said. “Was she in the play group we were in together?”

  “She’s three years younger,” Elphaba said. “She’ll come to Crage Hall before long.”

  “Is she as difficult as you are?”

  “She’s difficult in a different way. She’s crippled, pretty severely, is my Nessarose, so she’s a handful. Even Madame Morrible doesn’t quite know the extent of it. But by then I’ll be a third-year girl and will have the nerve to stand up to the Head, I guess. If anything gives me nerve, it’s people making life hard for Nessarose. Life is already hard enough for her.”

  “Is your mama raising her?”

  “My mother is dead. My father is in charge, nominally.”

  “Nominally?”

  “He’s religious,” said Elphaba, and made the circling palms gesture that indicated you could grind millstone against millstone all you liked, but there wasn’t any quern in the land that could produce flour if there was no grain to grind.

  “It sounds very hard for you all. How did your mama die?”

  “She died in childbirth, and this is the end of the personal interview.”

  “Tell me about Doctor Dillamond. I hear you’re working for him.”

  “Tell me about your amusing campaign for the heart of Galinda the Ice Queen.”

  Boq really wanted to hear about Doctor Dillamond, but was derailed by Elphaba’s remark. “I will keep on, Elphie, I will! When I see her I’m so smitten with longing, it’s like fire in my veins. I can’t speak, and the things I think about are like visions. It’s like dreaming. It’s like floating in your dreams.”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “Tell me, is there any hope? What does she say? Does she ever even imagine that her feelings for me might change?”

  Elphaba sat with her two elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her face, her two forefingers leaning against each other and against her thin, grayish lips. “You know, Boq,” she said, “the thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things. When her mind is really working, she could, if led, think on you—even, I suspect, somewhat fondly. I suspect. I don’t know. But when she slides back into herself, I mean into the girl who spends two hours a day curling that beautiful hair, it’s as if the thinking Galinda goes into some internal closet and shuts the door. Or as if she’s in hysterical retreat from things that are too big for her. I love her both ways, but I find it odd. I wouldn’t mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don’t know the way out.”

  “I propose you’re being hard on her, and you’re certainly too forward,” said Boq sternly. “Were she sitting here I think she’d be astounded to hear you speak so freely.”

  “I’m just trying to behave as I think a friend should behave. Granted, I haven’t had much practice.”

  “Well, I question your friendship with me, if you consider Miss Galinda your friend too, and if that’s how you tear a friend apart in her absence.”

  Though Boq was irritated, he found that this was a more lively discussion than the conventional patter he and Galinda had so far exchanged. He didn’t want to burn Elphaba off with criticism. “I’m ordering you another mineral tea,” he said, in an authoritative voice, his father’s voice in fact, “and then you can tell me about Doctor Dillamond.”

  “Skip the tea, I’m still nursing this one and you have no more money than I do, I bet,” said Elphaba, “but I’ll tell you about Doctor Dillamond. Unless you are too affronted at the slice and angle of my opinions.”

  “Please, perhaps I am wrong,” said Boq. “Look, it’s a nice day, we’re both off the campus. How do you come to be out alone, by the way? Is your escape sanctioned by Madame Morrible?”

  “Take a guess about that,” she said, grinning. “Once it was clear that you could come and go from Crage Hall by way of the vegetable garden and the roof of the adjacent stable, I decided I could too. I’m never missed.”

  “That’s hard for me to believe,” said he, daringly, “for you’re not the kind who blends into the woodwork. Now tell me about Doctor Dillamond. He’s my idol.”

  She sighed, and set the package down on the table at last, and settled in for a long chat. She told him about Doctor Dillamond’s work in natural essences, trying to determine by scientific method what the real differences were between animal and Animal tissue, and between Animal and human tissue. The literature on the matter, she had learned from doing the legwork herself, was all couched in unionist terms, and pagan terms before that, and they didn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. “Don’t forget Shiz University was originally a unionist monastery,” said Elphaba, “so despite the anything-goes attitude among the educated elite, there are still bedrocks of unionist bias.”

  “But I’m a unionist,” said Boq, “and I don’t see the conflict. The Unnamed God is accommodating to many ranges of being, not just human. Are you talking about a subtle bias against Animals, interwoven into early unionist tracts, and still in operation today?”

  “That’s certainly what Doctor Dillamond thinks. And he’s a unionist himself. Explain that paradox and I’d be glad to convert. I admire the Goat intensely. But the real interest of it to me is the political slant. If he can isolate some bit of the biological architecture to prove that there isn’t any difference, deep down in the invisible pockets of human and Animal flesh—that there’s no difference between us—or even among us, if you take in animal flesh too—well, you see the implications.”

  “No
,” said Boq, “I don’t think I do.”

  “How can the Banns on Animal Mobility be upheld if Doctor Dillamond can prove, scientifically, that there isn’t any inherent difference between humans and Animals?”

  “Oh, now that’s a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future,” said Boq.

  “Think about it,” said Elphaba. “Think, Boq. On what grounds could the Wizard possibly continue to publish those Banns?”

  “How could he be persuaded not to? The Wizard has dissolved the Hall of Approval indefinitely. I don’t believe, Elphie, that the Wizard is open to entertaining arguments, even by as august an Animal as Doctor Dillamond.”

  “But of course he must be. He’s a man in power, it’s his job to consider changes in knowledge. When Doctor Dillamond has his proof, he’ll write to the Wizard and begin to lobby for change. No doubt he’ll do his best to let Animals the land over know what he’s intending, too. He isn’t a fool.”

  “Well I didn’t say he was a fool,” said Boq. “But how close do you think he is to getting firm evidence?”

  “I am a student handmaid,” said Elphaba. “I don’t even understand what he means. I’m only a secretary, an amanuensis—you know he can’t write things himself, he can’t manage a pen with his hoofs. I take dictation and I file and I dash to the Crage Hall library and look things up.”

  “Briscoe Hall library would be a better place to hunt for that kind of material,” said Boq. “Even Three Queens, where I work this summer, has stacks of documents from the monks’ observations of animal and vegetable life.”

  “I know I am not traditionally presented,” said Elphaba, “but I believe on the grounds of being a girl I am excluded from the Briscoe Hall library. And on the grounds of being an Animal so too, now at least, is Doctor Dillamond. So those valuable resources are off limits to us.”

  “Well,” said Boq carelessly, “if you knew exactly what you wanted . . .

  I have access to the stacks in both collections.”

  “And when the good Doctor is finished ferreting out the difference between Animals and people, I will propose he apply the same arguments to the differences between the sexes,” said Elphaba. Then she registered what Boq had said, and stretched out her hand, almost as if to touch him. “Oh Boq. Boq. On behalf of Doctor Dillamond, I accept your generous offer of help. I’ll get the first list of sources to you within the week. Just leave my name out of it. I don’t care so much about incurring Horrible Morrible’s wrath against myself, but I don’t want her taking out her annoyance on my sister, Nessarose.”