Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (21 page)

“This is Roar,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to our giant.

“This is Tin,” Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to me.

She gave her all our secret names, and she did it like it was nothing.

“How about me?” Dorothy asked and twirled around. She had one of those song voices, and you wanted her to talk more, even when you wanted her to shut up. “What’s my name?”

Crow didn’t pause. “Dorothy. You’re nothing but Dorothy.”

Then Dorothy told me how much she loved my skin art and that she was an artist too, and she showed me the girl on fire she’d markered across her forearm.

I didn’t tell her that mine wasn’t art. Because when she said it, I thought,
Maybe it is
.
And she’s just the first to notice.

Dorothy told us that she hated her parents, who’d stuck her in here because they couldn’t handle her light, and that her parents, who she called Emily and Henry instead of Mom and Dad, weren’t really her parents, that—depending on what kind of mood she was in—her real parents were fugitives, her real parents were deadbeats, her real parents were cult members, her real parents were dead.

“Henry and Emily just want to suffocate me,” she told us. “They want me to be as gray and lifeless as they are so I can fit in at their gray and lifeless country club and get good grades at the gray and lifeless school they send me to, then get into a gray and lifeless college, and lead a gray and lifeless life. It’s pathetic.”

We all nodded, even Roar.

Dorothy had a ragged stuffed goat named Bad Dog that she took with her everywhere because it was her totem animal, whatever that meant. As she talked, she made it do the can-can across her knee. “When that didn’t work, they decided I was crazy. Just for not wanting what they want me to want. So I decided if they wanted me to be crazy, I’d be crazy. Is that crazy?”

We shook our heads.

“Oh, it’s crazy, all right.” Her laugh was even more song than her voice, and when she laughed and shook, her hair flickered around her face like blue flame, and I thought that, crazy or not, she didn’t belong here. She was too bright. “But
life
is crazy, right? That’s what I figure. And if
life
is crazy, then we’re all the sane ones, aren’t we? They probably
want you to be gray and lifeless too, don’t they?” She flung her arms out at the monkeys and the Wicked Bitch and the empty paper cups in the trash, the ones that had held our morning pills. “But I think we should
celebrate
what we are. What we can see. We see life in color, so we know what they don’t, am I right? We live life like
artists
.” She pointed at me. Jabbed her finger right into my chest, then traced it across my collarbone to where the scars poked out above my collar. Concentric circles with arrows speared through their centers; I remembered every line. I remembered the cold blade warming in my hand, and I remembered carving myself into a target. You can hurt me, the arrows said to my mother and all her bullshit, to the guy in sixth period who got me up against the wall and rammed his hand up my dress and stuck his fingers inside, to the last person I was stupid enough to love and the one before that. But not as much as I can hurt myself. “Tin understands. Don’t you, Tin?”

I saw Crow’s eyes follow that finger on my skin, and I saw them narrow, because Crow was jealous for all the wrong reasons, and that made me just jealous enough to smile and say yes.

Sometimes one yes is enough to explain all the rest of them.

Yes
, we were special, and
yes
, we shouldn’t let them take that away from us.

Yes
, we were too doped up, and inside we were just like Roar, tamed and muzzled and all too willing to follow orders.

Yes
, we should do something about it.

“I have an idea,” Dorothy said. She took our hands, mine and Crow’s, and she squeezed. Roar rested his paws on our shoulders, closing the circuit. “Just for fun. Are you in?”

We said yes.

Some days we took each other’s pills. Some days we didn’t take any at all. Dorothy showed us how to cheek our meds, and after that it was simple: Drop the pill in your mouth, lodge it in a warm, soft place against your tongue, swallow hard, then open wide so the Bitch could see your insides and check you off her list. Later the pills went into our palms, damp and sticky, and they were ours, to do with what we wanted.

It got so every day was a surprise, whether you’d want to dance and fly and scream just to hear the sound of your own voice cutting the air, whether noises were too sharp and colors too bright, whether you felt like hugging or laughing or punching a fist through the webbed glass windows just to have something sharp so you could cut and cut and cut. Roar decided one of the droolers in the rec room was looking at him funny and broke the guy’s arm in two places before the monkeys got him down and sent him off for some time in the straps. Crow kissed me, or maybe let me kiss her, or maybe I imagined it, but there wasn’t much difference and anyway her lips were harder than I thought they’d be, and when we lay together side by side, with her hand in mine and her head against my cheek, her hair was stiff and rough, like sticks. She rubbed it against my face until I said stop, it hurts, and she laughed and said nothing hurts until it does, and then she took my hand and laid it on her breast and made it squeeze and squeeze.
Like milking a cow
, I thought, because those were the kinds of thoughts I had then, with Dorothy’s voice in my head and Crow’s meds in my blood and because I knew sometimes you needed that
and because I thought maybe it was a dream, I let her make me hurt her until she screamed.

Dorothy got bored.

“Screw the pill thing,” she said. “What we need is some booze. How are we supposed to have any fun around here?”

“The Wizard can get us booze,” Roar said quietly, because even after two days in the straps, he was still getting ideas, sometimes even good ones. None of us were used to that yet.

Dorothy was still new enough not to understand.

“The Wizard can get anyone anything,” Crow said. She always liked to be the one to explain things to Dorothy. “But it’ll cost us.”

The Wizard lived in green.

Jade. Chartreuse. Citrine. Kelly. Verdigris. Lime. Avocado. Hunter. Rifle. Emerald. He named the colors for us, tapping along the wall where he’d taped pages from magazines, strips of cloth, napkins and leaves and curling locks of hair—a collage covering every inch of plaster in more colors than I ever knew existed, and all of them green.

No one knew what it was the Wizard had about green, like no one knew what he was in for or how long he’d been here or how it was he managed to smuggle in everything that he did—not just booze and the good kinds of drugs but smokes and sharp objects and the kinds of movies we weren’t supposed to watch because they might give us the wrong ideas. He had a middle-aged-dad paunch and the big red nose of a drunk or a clown. We’d never been in his room before, because Crow said we had all we needed with just us, and that it wasn’t worth it. But now, I guess, because Dorothy said so, it was.

“Vodka,” Dorothy told him, one hand on her hip, the other around Bad Dog’s neck. “Also cigarettes and a lighter.”

“Not cloves,” I murmured. I didn’t look at Crow, who didn’t care about smoke but hated fire. Dorothy said we should do what we wanted, and I wanted cigarettes. Real ones.

“Not cloves,” Dorothy said. “And scissors.”

The Wizard frowned. “You slice your wrists, it’s a mess for all of us.”

“No wrist slicing.” Dorothy smiled and raised three fingers in salute. “Scout’s honor.”

Crow gave me a sharp poke in the ribs, which I knew meant when did I ask Dorothy to get me the scissors, and why didn’t she know about it. I didn’t even have to ask, but I wouldn’t tell Crow that, because who was Crow to say Dorothy and I couldn’t have secrets together, too?

“And what do I get?” the Wizard said. He was looking at Dorothy, and he was looking at me.

Dorothy gave him a smile that didn’t belong here any more than she did, a smile left over from wild late-night bonfires and 3 a.m. beer runs and cutting school to smoke weed in the parking lot and a different life. “What do you want?”

In the Wizard’s room, late at night, it’s too dark to see the green, but you can smell it, rich and moist and sweet, like a forest after the rain.

In the Wizard’s room, late at night, the monkeys down the hall watching hockey and cheering loud enough to cover the noises we make, he tells me to be quiet, even though he doesn’t have to. He says he doesn’t like the sound of my voice. “It’s like metal,” he says, and then he laughs.

His breath smells green, and his chest is hairier than I expect.

I do not throw up.

It hurts when he sticks it in, but only a little, and I do not gasp.

It hurts when he is behind me, and his rhythm is a pounding, pounding, pounding, and my head shakes and bumps the wall each time, and it’s like I’m his Bad Dog, raggy and boneless and covered in filth.

His hands are on my scars.

“Pretty,” he whispers in the dark. “So pretty.”

He finds the bare patch on my thigh, the place where skin is only skin, unbroken and waiting. “Mine,” he whispers.

I am quiet, like he wants. I breathe beneath him. When it ends, I listen to him snore, and I am still there when he wakes up, so he turns me over and starts again.