I never thought of myself as a hero. Heroes sacrificed themselves for others. And for most of my life I didn’t think I had anything to give. But I had saved Oz and lived to tell about it. And no one in either world—save two fairies and Nox—knew about it. That was the definition of sacrifice, right? But I wasn’t so sure. What I had gotten from Oz seemed to somehow outweigh what I had given on the balance sheet. That time on the other side of the Rainbow had shaped me. Changed me. And the girl staring back at me in the mirror in Kansas wasn’t the same one who had been picked up by the tornado all those months ago.
When I’d shown up at my mom’s door a few days ago, I hadn’t offered much of an explanation of where I’d been. After all that time in Oz, it turned out I’d only been gone from Kansas for two days. Time really did pass differently in the two places, but I never could figure out exactly how.
Mom hadn’t pressed me for answers—yet. But I could tell she was watching me carefully and wondering. Maybe she was afraid to ask.
I stepped out of the bathroom and did a dramatic hair flip. “What do you think, Mom?” I asked.
“Wow, Amy, it’s . . . different.” She looked down at her hands. “You’re different. No more pink?”
“I think I was meant to be a blonde.”
I couldn’t really give a damn what color my hair was anymore, but the truth was that I couldn’t let go of Oz. Glamora had magically changed my hair to blond and I liked keeping a reminder with me. This morning I had chopped three inches and it now grazed my shoulders in an edgy bob instead of hanging down my back.
Mom had offered to take me to the mall for the cut and color. But I couldn’t see spending the money.
“You’ll be okay getting to school? Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?”
“I’ll be fine, Mom. It’s a two-minute walk. Besides, Madison is picking me up.”
Mom frowned. For Mom, Madison would always be the girl who had disinvited the entire first grade class from my birthday party.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had to go back to school, to add insult to irony, Mom had told me last night that my high school had temporarily moved to empty trailers in the Dusty Acres Trailer Park while the school was being rebuilt. Glamora and the Nome King-as-Assistant-Principal Strachan had caused just a little bit of damage when they had opened a portal between Kansas and Oz. You can take the girl out of the trailer park . . . but then her high school ends up holding classes there.
I slipped my feet into my boots. I wore them every day. They were silver and sparkly and Mom had never asked where I’d gotten them. What would I say if she’d asked?
My mother’s words stopped me before I reached the door.
“Amy? Wherever it was that you went—I know you came back for me. To take care of me. I want you to know that I am okay. That you don’t have to worry about me, darling . . .”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” I said lightly.
“The first time you went I put up posters and I searched for you . . . this time I knew better. You weren’t somewhere I could find you—I’m right, aren’t I?”
I couldn’t answer with words. I nodded.
“Were you happy there?”
“Mom, it was—” How did I sum up Oz? It was scary and amazing and harder and more wonderful than anything I had ever imagined. “It was . . . magical,” I said finally.
“If anyone is overdue some magic . . . it’s you.”
“Well, I’m here now, Mom,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m back.” Some part of me would always be in Oz, but I was determined to find my footing here. My mother kissed me on the forehead and went off to join Jake in the kitchen, where they were making breakfast. I watched her for a few minutes as they huddled over an egg casserole. Every day she was more herself—not the woman I remembered from my youth before the pills, but something new. She seemed to have made it through the storm that we’d lived in for all those years, and she was rebuilding herself from the ground up.
I still had some work to do.
Madison was waiting outside for me with a Starbucks cup and a smile. She knew how hard it had been for me to leave Nox behind, and even though she didn’t bring him up, she was helpful in her way—offering advice I was sure was ripped from one of the pages of a magazine. The articles she read were breakup ones. But I was pretty sure Cosmo didn’t cover “How to Lose a Guy After You Saved His World and Left Him on the Other Side of the Rainbow.”
Dustin was at her side, standing a little closer to her than the last time I’d seen them together. I could see them inching back together, and every touch and laugh and little joke reminded me of what I had had on the other side and lost. But I was happy for them and happy for their companionship. They were the only friends I had.
But my other classmates had not forgotten Salvation Amy, the nickname that Madison had given me before we were BFFs. People whispered and pointed as I walked past. But I shook them off. I was a different Amy.
So when I slipped into my desk in the trailer and someone tapped me on the shoulder, I didn’t even bother to turn around.
The person tapped again.
This time I whipped around, prepared to return fire. But instead, I found I was staring into the only eyes I wanted to see, sitting in the desk right behind mine.
“Nox!”
Without hesitation, I climbed over my desk and into his lap. I pressed my lips to his, and the whole of Dusty Acres melted away.
Nox was laughing and kissing me and trying to talk at the same time.
“You cut your hair!” He ran his fingers through my short strands. I broke away and swatted him.
“That’s the first thing you say to me? What are you doing here? I don’t understand. Aren’t you supposed to be watching over Oz? It’s your home!” I was laughing and almost crying.
Nox just smiled, tucked my hair behind my ear, and filled me in: “Ozma’s in charge now, and she can handle it. She’s the one true ruler. And I’m the only one besides her who remembers everything that happened. Everything that Dorothy did to our home.” He paused, and a tentative smile spread across his face. “But it didn’t feel like home without you, Amy. Oz is safe now, and my place is with you. Wherever you are.”
“Ahem.” The teacher, Mrs. Labine, cleared her throat beside us. But Nox, oblivious to classroom customs—and, well, just being Nox—ignored her. “This is not the time and place for public displays of affection. In my class we sit in our own seats, Ms. Gumm and Mr. . . .”
“I’m Nox. I’m new here.”
And just like that Nox became a student at Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High. There were logistics of course. Nox had to become an emancipated minor and we had to falsify some documents. The administration didn’t really look that closely—no one would want to go to Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High unless they really had to. And, frankly, after our assistant principal brought the school down, enrollment was kind of at an all-time low.
Nox, of course, being Nox, had come prepared for life in the Other Place. He had a stash of jewels from Ozma to pawn for cash and use to pay for an apartment. Madison and I took him to the mall and dressed him up like a real Kansas boy. Even in dark jeans and dark T-shirts, he still looked otherworldly in the best possible way.
If you thought people were whispering about me before, you should have seen the looks on Tiffany’s and the others’ faces when they saw me walking around with Nox by my side.
In an unlikely twist, Nox and Dustin had an instant bromance. I think Nox was just happy to have his first guy friend after years of living with all those witches and assorted creatures. Dustin—ever the jock—recruited Nox to the football team. Nox’s reflexes were just as fast even without purple magic flashing from his hands. To Dustin’s surprise, mine were, too, when I joined in their pickup games. My very physical training with the Order had turned me into something of an athlete. It was actually a nice way to get out my aggression. I hadn’t gotten into a single fight since I’d been back.
It was books that were the challenge for Nox. I tutored him in the earthly subjects he knew nothing about. And I admit, it felt good to be the one schooling him, for a change.
The next few weeks and months progressed, but not without some hiccups. It wasn’t easy for either of us to get used to a world without magic. More than once I caught Nox flicking his wrist or reaching for some shortcut spell that wasn’t there for the most mundane things. Magic was like breathing for Nox, and it had become a part of me, too.
Mom was doing better every day. She’d gotten a job at the elementary school assisting kindergarteners. And Jake was hanging in there, somehow more in love with Mom every day, unlike any other boyfriend she’d ever had, including Dad. I still hadn’t talked to my father, even though he had actually called during my second disappearance. Maybe one day I would return the call, but not anytime soon. Although I had learned forgiveness, and I had balled up all my hurt and pain and sent it away in a burst of fire, I had seen more of my life without him than with him. And I wasn’t ready to change that yet.
I began to make plans. Not the battle plans I had gotten so used to. The kind that involve college brochures and transcripts and tests. I had never really decided what I wanted to do, except, “be anywhere but here.” But now I thought about it. A lot. It was like all these new doors were open to me. I couldn’t exactly put “Savior of Oz” on a résumé, but I started to wonder if there was a way to apply what I was good at and what I had learned in Oz to the real world.
But as I tried to write college-application essays, I found myself stumped because the thing I wanted most to write about was the one thing I couldn’t. I saw Glamora in purple eyeshadow palettes at the mall. I saw Gert in the pond I passed on the way to school. I saw Mombi in every spider web. I saw Indigo in every bubble, and the Lion lurking behind every tree.
Sometimes I felt like I understood Dorothy more and more. It wasn’t just killing the witch that changed her—it was also coming home, back to Kansas, and leaving Oz behind. She had experienced magic and power and had been surrounded by friends. She had left Technicolor for sepia-tinged black and white. And I had done the same. Even with Nox at my side, I felt myself yearning for Oz.
I saw my own restlessness reflected back at me when I looked at him sometimes. He fidgeted constantly and had trouble sitting still in the tiny desks we had at school. He was accustomed to battles, and so was I now.
But other times he seemed to just be at peace, happy to be someplace where there was no war. Prom was on the horizon, and I’m not even kidding, the theme was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Madison had suggested that we wear gingham for irony. But I did not want to tempt fate. And prom wasn’t exactly a thing I had ever aspired to. I wasn’t a prom person. Madison disagreed. She said everyone was a prom person—it was a seminal event like being born or going to the mall for the first time or One Direction breaking up.
Madison was always trying to remind me that there was magic in this world, too. We just had to work a lot harder to see it. I wasn’t convinced about prom but I did see the magic. Holding Dustin Jr. (when he wasn’t screaming his lungs out) and feeling him wrap his little fingers around my thumb, my mom’s clean and sober laugh, getting an A-plus on my math test. And Nox was magic. On my good days, I was magic, too.
One day after school Nox led me to a corner of the trailer park—the corner where I used to live, where the tornado that had first taken me to Oz had left behind a twisted graveyard of metal.
“What are we doing here, Nox?” I asked. I didn’t need a reminder of this part of my past.
Nox ran over to the nearest intact trailer and plugged in what looked like an extension cord. The corner of the park lit up and I could see that there was a landscape painted on one of the trailers: the moving mountain range in Oz where we had shared out first kiss. Over it Nox had written in surprisingly perfect script, “Will you go to prom with me?”
Inexplicably, I started to cry. Nox took a step toward his handiwork as if contemplating turning out the lights. He didn’t know what to do.
“Why are you crying? Did I do something wrong?” he asked, clearly confused. It just made me cry harder.
“Did you know the prom theme is ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’?” I managed between sobs.
“That makes you cry?”
“Nox, do you ever wonder—what if we wake up one day and wish we had been there all along?”
“Then we go back. But I for one don’t want to miss my first prom.”
I leaned in to kiss him, but just as my lips met his a silver glow lit up our faces. I gasped and looked down. My boots. The boots were glowing.
“Amy,” Nox breathed. “Has this ever happened before?”
I shook my head. “I thought I didn’t have power here.”
Nox frowned. “Maybe you don’t. Maybe this is coming from somewhere else.”
“But who? The only people in Oz who still remember me—besides you—are Lurline and Ozma. And they are also the only ones who would know how to use the magic in these shoes. Do you think . . .? But it couldn’t possibly mean—”
“That they’re calling you back?”
“They need me to return to Oz.”
“What about your mom? What about your—our—life here?”
I wasn’t a hero but I was no coward either—going back to Oz had something in it for me, something more than the fight itself.
“Kansas is a part of me—but so is Oz. And Ozma wouldn’t contact me unless she absolutely needed to.”
Nox had said home was where we were together. Dorothy had chosen Kansas and then Oz. But perhaps home wasn’t so black and white. Just like Good and Wicked had turned out to be much more complicated than I ever imagined. There was magic on both sides of the rainbow. And there was no law that said that I had to choose one place over another forever.
I looked down at the shoes again.
What was it she had done? It was worth a try.
I took Nox’s hand. He looked at me and nodded.
And I knocked my sparkly heels together three times.