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?
SEVEN
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.
EIGHT
The next morning, dressed in my new jeans and one of the shirts my mom had picked out for me, I was once again a senior at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High. The halls were the same dull linoleum, smelling of mop bucket and ancient cafeteria tater tots. The lockers were the same dull gray metal that even a fresh coat of paint couldn’t make look new. The lights overhead flickered like mood lighting in a prison camp. But this time, everything was different. Before, I’d been nobody. Salvation Amy, trailer-trash nobody. If people bothered to look at me, it was only with scorn in their eyes. This time around, I was a celebrity. And I definitely didn’t like it.
Everywhere I walked, whispers followed me, and people turned to stare as I passed. More than a few of them said hi in sickly sweet tones that made me want to roll my eyes. They’d never talked to me before in their lives; they just wanted to be close to the drama. My disappearance and miraculous return was the most interesting thing that had happened at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High since Dustin knocked up Madison Pendleton. I wasn’t dumb enough to fall for the fake warmth. I knew who my real friends were in Flat Hill: nobody.
Go ahead and look, I thought. They should look. Because whatever they thought happened to me while I had been gone, the truth was so much crazier. And anyway, I wasn’t here to run for prom queen. I was here to save the Whole. Damn. World. The only annoying thing was that these people would never even know it.
It took me a minute to find my own locker—because I didn’t recognize it. It had practically been turned into a shrine. Ribbons looped around the bare metal. Dried flowers were stuck through the vents. Cards and notes were taped to every inch of its surface—“Missing You,” “Come Home Soon,” a heart cut out of construction paper with MISS U AMIE written on it in loopy cursive that looked like a kindergartener’s. Someone had even taped a picture of me with sequins glued in the shape of a heart around my face. Where the photo had come from, I had no idea. Pre-Oz Amy glared balefully out at me in her dirty thrift-store jeans, ready for a fight.
The whole thing made me sick. I wanted to pull the cards and flowers off my locker and throw them to the ground, trample them into scraps. None of these people had given a shit about me until they thought I was dead. Until I’d given them an excuse to feel sad, important, useful. Until I’d finally done something interesting by getting myself killed. My stomach turned over and I flipped my lock through its old combination, the numbers coming to me effortlessly. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I thought bitterly.
“Do you like it? I’m the one who organized the decorating committee.”
No matter how much time I spent in Oz, I’d never forget that voice. I turned slowly. “Hi, Madison,” I said. I mean, what else was I supposed to say?
My mouth dropped open when I saw her. Pregnant Madison was now new-mom Madison, and she beamed with pride at me over the wrinkly faced infant strapped to her chest in one of those weird baby slings that always look like they’re designed to suffocate the kid. Baby or no baby, she was still Madison. She was wearing a hot-pink sequin-covered crop top that bared a surprisingly toned postbaby belly, pink velour track pants with a huge, glittery pink heart over her ass, and pink platform sneakers. She also smelled intensely of strawberry body spray and her lips were slicked with a thick coat of pink gloss.
“If it isn’t Amy Gumm, back from the dead,” she said. “We all thought you were a goner, you know.” She giggled. “Of course, once you weren’t around for a while—you know, I almost missed you. Almost. This is Dustin Jr., by the way.” She patted the baby, who made a burbling noise. Madison’s baby was downright ugly. Then again, I guess most new babies are. He looked like a little old man who couldn’t find his dentures. His cheeks were too fat and his face was squashed-looking, as if someone had stepped on his head. Plus, he was bald as an egg. But I felt bad for him. It wasn’t his fault that his mom was the biggest bitch in Kansas—well, second biggest, now that I was back.
Anyway, I’d long since learned I could tackle bitches way bigger than Madison Pendleton of Flat Hill. Although come to think of it, Madison was as fond of sparkly pink crap as Glinda. Maybe when you signed up for Super Evil Archenemy status somebody sent you a gallon of glitter body spray. Or maybe everybody evil just had the same tacky taste. Either way, I was apparently going to be cursed with a glittery pink nemesis everywhere I went.
“He’s, uh, really cute,” I said. This lying thing was getting easier and easier, wasn’t it? I’d slayed monsters in Oz—she’d just given birth to one.
She smiled, and weirdly, it wasn’t her usual cat-about-to-chomp-down-on-the-canary grin. It was a real smile—almost tender. She looked down at Dustin Jr. and stroked the top of his bald head gently with one finger. “I know,” she said blissfully. “It’s kind of crazy how much stuff can change in a month.”
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. I looked back at my locker. “Thanks for, uh, all this,” I said. For some reason, Madison was not moving.
She shrugged. “I mean, it was the least I could do, you know? I know we didn’t always get along, but I didn’t want for you to, like, die. Honestly . . .” She trailed off, chewing at one pink-manicured nail. I raised an eyebrow. “Honestly, I guess I was kind of a bitch to you sometimes,” she said in a rush. “I mean, you made it easy, you know? You were pretty shitty to me, too. And you kept going after my boyfriend.”
“I did not!” I protested.
She rolled her eyes. “Please,” she said. Her voice took on a high-pitched note. “‘Oh, Dustin, of course I’ll do your algeb
ra. Oh, Dustin, let me tutor you.’ You weren’t even trying to be subtle.”
“He kept asking,” I said.
“Dustin’s not very smart,” Madison said. “But he knows a sucker when he sees one.”
I stared at her, not sure whether to laugh or hit her. Was Madison—in her own weird, mean, Madison way—trying to be friends with me? By making fun of her jock boyfriend? I’d always had a soft spot for Dustin—she was right about that. But she was also right that he wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier.
“Look,” she said, shrugging again. “When you disappeared like that I realized that you’re, like, one of the only interesting people around here. It was boring without you, Sal—Amy.” She popped her finger back in her mouth again, chewing away at her nail and grinning at me. “Gonna be late for homeroom. See you around,” she said, and sauntered away as Dustin Jr. trailed spit down her shoulder.
So that was pretty weird. But it was nowhere close to the weirdest thing that would happen to me that day.
NINE
Mr. Strachan had given my mom my old schedule, and in each classroom, the story was the same. A loud buzz of chatter would die down immediately as soon as I walked in the door. Everyone—and I mean everyone—would turn to look at me as I slunk toward my seat, doing my best to pretend I was invisible. A few seconds later, the talk would start again—this time, low whispers I wasn’t meant to hear, although I couldn’t help catching some of it. “Went crazy and . . .” “Totally ran away with some guy, just like her mom . . .” “Was blackout drunk for, like, the entire month and then lied about being in a hospital . . .” Okay, so nobody bought the hospital story. Too damn bad. I sat with my back straight and my eyes fixed on the front of the room, I wrote down my homework assignments, and I spoke when I was spoken to—which was never, conveniently leaving me plenty of time to think about how I was going to start my search for the shoes. Even my teachers wouldn’t meet my eyes. Whatever, I thought. It’s not like I had friends before either. At least this time no one was throwing food at me, or yelling “Get those shoes at Kmart, Salvation Amy?” as I tried to slink by. Being a total pariah had its definite advantages.