Dorothy Must Die

Chapter Three

When I came to, the first thing I saw was the spongy gray floor of the trailer above me. Star was scampering around my achy body like it was a racetrack, trying frantically to wake me. It took me a second to realize that I was lying on the ceiling.

Light streaked through the dirty windows—normal, bright, white light again, not the blushy pink I’d seen during the tornado or the watercolor brown just before it.

I was alive. And someone was talking to me.

“Grab my hand,” he was saying. “Step lightly.” I turned my head and looked up to see a torso leaning in through the open door, half-in, half-out, and an arm reaching for me. It was a he, silhouetted by light pouring in from behind. I couldn’t make out his face.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Just take my hand. Try not to make any sudden movements.”

From my side, Star squeaked and scrambled into the pocket of my hoodie.

I rose slowly to my feet and dusted myself off. Nothing seemed to be broken. But everything hurt like I was a rag doll that’d been thrown around in a giant tin can. When I took a step, the double-wide lurched beneath me. I rolled back on my heels, trying to get my balance, and it rocked with even more menace. I stopped.

“Just two steps and you’re home. Hurry,” he said. The distance between his hand and me seemed farther than two steps. I wanted to move again. But I didn’t.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t panic. Just move.”

I took another step, careful not to upset the equilibrium, and then another. I put my hand in his.

As my skin touched his, I saw his face, and I felt electricity shooting through my body. His eyes were the first thing I noticed: They were emerald green with flecks of something I couldn’t even describe to myself, and they seemed to be glowing, almost floating in front of his face. There was something about them that seemed almost alien.

Was he a rescue worker? And if so, how far from home was I, exactly?

“Am I dead?” I asked. It certainly seemed possible. Likely, even. It was hard to believe that I had survived any crash.

“Of course not. If you were dead, would we be having this conversation?”

With that, he gave my arm a sharp, strong yank and pulled me through the tipped doorway. We fell backward, tumbling onto the ground outside.

I scrambled quickly to my feet and turned around to see that I was standing on the edge of a deep ravine. My poor little trailer was barely holding on, teetering on the precipice.

The chasm was more like a canyon: it was as wide as a river and stretched on for as far as I could see in either direction. The bottom was all blackness.

“What the . . . ?” I whispered.

My trailer heaved, and then, with a final, aching creak, it lurched backward, letting go.

“No!” I screamed, but it was too late. The home that had once been mine was spinning down and down and down into the hole.

I kept expecting to see it crash and shatter into a million pieces, but it just kept on falling as I stood there watching it disappear into the abyss.

It was gone without even a sound. I had almost gone with it.

Everything I owned was in there. Every piece of ugly clothing. Every bad memory.

I was free of all of it.

“I’m sorry about your house,” my rescuer said. His voice was soft, but it startled me anyway. I jumped and looked up to find that he was standing at my side. “It’s a miracle you made it out. A few inches to the left and you’d have gone straight into the pit. Lucky, I guess.” The way he said it made it sound like he thought it had been something more than luck.

“Did the tornado do that?” I asked. I stared back into the pit, wondering how far down it went. Wondering what was down there. “I didn’t know tornadoes made giant holes in the ground.”

“Ha. No.” He laughed, but he didn’t seem to think it was all that funny. “The pit’s been here for a long time now.” He didn’t elaborate.

I turned to face him, and when I saw him standing there in the pale, blue-gray sunlight, my breath caught somewhere beneath my ribs. The boy was probably my age, and about my height, too. He was slim and sinewy and compact, with a face framed by dark, shaggy hair that managed to be both strong and delicate at the same time.

His skin was paler than pale, like he’d never left home without sunscreen or like he’d never left home period. He was part rock star, part something else. I couldn’t put my finger on what the something else was, but I knew that it was somehow important.

And those eyes. They were glittering even brighter than before, and there was something about them that made me uneasy. It was like he had whole worlds behind his eyes.

He was beautiful. He was too beautiful. It was the kind of beautiful that can almost seem ugly; the kind of beautiful you don’t want to touch, because you know it might burn. I wasn’t used to talking to people who looked like him. I wasn’t used to being near people who looked like him.

But he had saved my life.

“I won’t miss it,” I said, not sure if I meant it or not. “The house, I mean.”

I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t argue. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Your tin farm. It must be very precious. A house made out of metal.”

I guess they didn’t have trailers where he was from. Lucky him.

I realized, looking around for the first time, that we weren’t in Dusty Acres anymore. But where were we?

On the side of the pit on which I stood, a vast field of decaying grass stretched into the distance. It was gray and patchy and sickly, with the faintest tinge of blue. On the far side of the pit was a dark, sinister-looking forest, black and deep. Everything around here seemed to have that tint to it, actually. The air, the clouds, even the sun, which was shining bright, all had a faded, washed-out quality to them. There was something dead about all of it. When I looked closely, I saw that tiny blue dust particles were floating everywhere, like the wispy floating petals of a dandelion—except that they were glittering, giving everything a glowing, unreal feeling.

But not everything was blue. Underneath the boy’s feet, yellow bricks, as vivid as a box of new crayons, were almost glowing in stark contrast to the blown-out, postapocalyptic monochrome of the landscape.

The golden path led all the way up to the ravine and then dropped off into nothingness. In the other direction, it wound its way through the field and spiraled off into the horizon.

It was a road.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was so astonished that I wasn’t even sure if I had said it out loud or not.

I had been dropped here by a tornado, and now I was standing on something that looked remarkably like a road of yellow bricks.

This had to be some big mix-up. Maybe Kansas had finally cashed in on the whole Dorothy thing with a theme park and the tornado had just happened to drop me there. In which case, this guy was just a really hot park guide. I stared at him, waiting for him to explain.

“Welcome to Oz,” the boy said, nodding, like he expected I’d figured that out already. It came out sounding almost apologetic, like, Hate to break the bad news.

Oz.

I touched my head, looking for a bump or something. I must have gotten knocked out and was having a particularly crazy hallucination.

At that, I let out a hoot of laughter. Good! With the way things had been lately, I figured I could use a fantastical hallucination right about now. It seemed like it had done Dorothy some good in the movie—and in Dorothy’s fantasy, she’d been greeted by a bunch of Munchkins. A beautiful boy beat that any day.

“Aren’t you supposed to bow down for me or something?” I asked, still laughing.

Instead of laughing along with me, concern washed over the boy’s face, like he was worried I was going a little bit crazy.

Was I crazy? My head was swimming. If this was a fantasy, it was a strange one: this wasn’t the Oz that I had read about or seen in the movie. It was as if someone had drained out some of the Technicolor and introduced some serious darkness.

Where were the good witches, the fields of enormous poppies? Where were the jolly Munchkins? I guess even in my concussion-induced fantasies, I’m not creative—or cheerful—enough to come up with all that. Instead, I’d conjured up something that looked suspiciously like Dusty Acres right after a nuclear explosion.

I spun around to take it all in—a little too quickly in my excitement—and began to wobble at the edge of the cliff. My rescuer was there with a hand on my wrist, pulling me onto the brick road just in time to save me, yet again, from plunging to my death.

It took me a second, but I recovered my balance and stepped forward, getting my bearings. As I set one foot and then another onto the road, the bricks themselves seemed to almost pulse under me. Like there was a current running through them. “It feels like there’s something under there,” I said, looking down at my sneakers.

“The road wants you to go to the city.”

“The road? Wants . . . me?” I rubbed my head in confusion.

“It wants everyone. That’s what it’s for. The road’s been here longer than any of us. There’s deep magic in there—magic even she doesn’t understand. Some people think it has a mind of its own. It wants you to go to the city, but it doesn’t like to make the trip easy.”

It figured. Nothing was ever easy, in my experience.

“Who’s ‘she’?” I asked.

The boy reached out and tugged at a lock of my hair. The way he did it wasn’t romantic, but more curious really. It was tender, too, but it was a sad kind of tenderness. No one ever touched me, anyway, and I flinched automatically. “There is so much you don’t know. So much you have to learn. I wish you didn’t.”

Learn what? I wanted to ask. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.

Then I felt a wriggling at my hip and looked down to see that Star was poking her head out of the pocket of my hoodie and was sniffing the air, looking just as confused as I felt. I pulled her out and placed her on the bricks, and she jolted. I guess the road had given her the same feeling it had given me.

“Easy, girl,” I said. “You’ll get used to it in a second.” I looked back up at the boy. “If this is Oz . . . ,” I trailed off, searching for the question that was on the tip of my tongue. Then I found it. “What happened here?” I asked.

I was waiting for him to answer when, out of nowhere, a look of panic crossed his face. For a moment, he looked disoriented, like he’d forgotten who he was. Something around the edges of his body seemed to flicker.

“Are you okay?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He hadn’t moved; now he seemed to be looking right through me.

I reached out and touched him on the shoulder.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Go?” I didn’t understand. He just got here. I just got here. What the hell was happening? “Where are you going?”

He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s getting late. I’ve never left for this long. I have to get back before . . .”

“Don’t,” I said, maybe a little too desperately. Maybe this was a dream and maybe it wasn’t, but either way, I didn’t want to be left here, in the middle of nowhere, all alone. “Before what? What are you talking about? Who are you?”

“I’m no one,” he said, turning away and walking toward the pit.

“Please,” I begged.

He turned back to me one more time.

“This is where it all began for her, you know. I don’t know why you’re here or who brought you, Pink Hair, but if you’re here, it means it’s all beginning for you, too. You’re like her in so many ways, but I can tell you’re different. I can’t help you. I’m not powerful enough. But you can help yourself. Prove me right. Don’t make the same mistakes she made.”

“But . . .”

“Be brave,” he said. “Be angry. Don’t trust anyone. I’ll see you soon.”

He stepped to the edge of the road, to right where the bricks crumbled away into the black. Then he jumped.

“No!” I screamed, lunging forward, catching myself just in time before I followed him. Below me, the darkness looked relentless and unforgiving. The road wanted something, he had told me, and now I knew the pit did, too. It was hungry. It was already infinite and still it wanted more.

There was no sign of him. The boy was gone.

I looked down at Star, who was perched on her haunches at my feet. “So what do we do now?” I asked, half expecting her to say something back.

She didn’t need to. I knew the answer already: what I was going to do next was the same thing I’d been doing my whole life.

I turned back. Just put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had changed except the color of the road.