No Place Like Oz: A Dorothy Must Die Prequel Novella(5)

But sometimes I still wondered. Could there have been another way? Was this really home at all?

“Oh, Toto,” I said, closing the cover of the scrapbook harder than I intended to and tossing it aside onto the couch, where it landed just next to Aunt Em’s embroidered throw pillow. Maybe the words on that pillow were more right than I knew. Maybe you couldn’t go home again.

Either way, it would have been a nice consolation if I’d gotten to keep those shoes.





Three

“Here,” Mitzi Blair said, thrusting a small gift into my arms as soon as I opened the front door and found her standing on the stoop. “Happy birthday. Is Suzanna here yet?”

I eyed Mitzi uncertainly and she gave me the same look right back, but with a hint of a question, like Well?

I don’t know what had come over me. Mitzi was my best friend and here I was treating her like a stranger at my birthday party. Luckily, I caught myself in my momentary rudeness, smiled brightly, and ushered her inside.

“Thank you!” I exclaimed, placing her present on the little table that Aunt Em had set aside for that purpose. “Suzanna and Jill are by the—”

I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence. “My mom says happy birthday, too,” Mitzi said over her shoulder, already making a beeline for the corner, where snobby Suzanna Hellman was slumped against the wall, looking straight out of a magazine ad in her brand-new dress with a fashionable wide collar and a bright pink sash while her sister, Jill, helped herself to Aunt Em’s signature potato puff balls from the snack table.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Suzanna said, her face cheering in relief when she saw Mitzi approaching. “I was beginning to wonder if Jill and I would be the only people under a hundred. Not counting Dorothy, of course.”

I giggled at the barb—probably more enthusiastically than I should have—and tried to pretend that it wasn’t at my expense.

It would have been easier to let it roll right off me if Suzanna didn’t seem so right. The sparse crowd milling around the living room was almost entirely made up of Uncle Henry’s friends from neighboring farms, and none of whom were a day under forty, if that. I had been hoping for a few of the handsome farmhands, at least, but I guess they’d all been left behind to keep an eye on the livestock.

“So, Dorothy,” Suzanna said, turning her gimlet-eyed gaze in my direction. “Been in any good parades lately?”

This time, there was no sense in pretending she wasn’t poking fun at me. Suzanna couldn’t bear to see anyone else getting more attention than her, and was always acting like the one little parade they’d thrown for me after I’d survived the tornado made me some sort of spotlight-hogging monster. It had been years ago, but she would never let me forget it.

Frankly, I hadn’t wanted snobby, mean-spirited Suzanna Hellman at my party in the first place, but Mitzi had insisted that there was no point in throwing a party if you weren’t going to invite the richest girl at school—the only rich girl at school, actually—and so I’d relented.

Now I looked over at my friend, expecting to see her indignant, but she just averted her eyes to the floor, her face flushing. If I hadn’t known better, I almost would have thought she was stifling a laugh.

Fine. I might as well admit it. When I say that Mitzi Blair is my best friend, what I mean to say is that she used to be my best friend. For most of my life, the two of us had been inseparable, but that had all changed after I’d ridden the cyclone.

Mitzi was the only one—other than my aunt and uncle—who I’d told the truth about my adventures in Oz after I’d come back. It hadn’t gone well. Instead of marveling at everything I’d been through, Mitzi had called me a liar and a show-off.

We’d made up a few weeks later, but that didn’t mean things had gone back to normal. These days she was spending more and more time hanging around with awful Suzanna Hellman, not to mention with Marian Stiles and Marjory Mumford. As for me—I was spending more and more time by myself.

Oh, I didn’t care. This was my birthday, and Aunt Em had put so much effort into it, not to mention money that we couldn’t well afford, with the farm doing the way it was. If she and Uncle Henry were kind enough to throw me a party then I was going to enjoy it whether Suzanna Hellman wanted me to or not.

If only there were a few more people to talk to.

Of course, Uncle Henry had already warned me that not everyone I’d invited would be able to make it. It was harvesting season, after all, the busiest time for anyone on a farm, and anyway, most of my classmates lived too far away to easily make the trip all the way out here. Still, I had been hoping that a few more girls my own age would be able to make it.

So, even though I’m not exactly their biggest fan, I breathed a sigh of relief when Marian Stiles and Marjory Mumford walked through the door. I was happily greeting them when Mitzi tapped my shoulder. Suzanna’s little sister was at her side, hopping impatiently from one foot to another.

“Excuse me, Dorothy?” Jill asked innocently. “When do you suppose the cake will be?”

“After the presents, I think,” I replied. “It’s one of Aunt Em’s best.”

“Well, when are presents, then? Mother said we had to stay till the cake.”

Suzanna snorted back a laugh and shhh-ed her.