Only a month? The idea was crazy. So much had happened to me, so much time had passed. I didn’t even feel like the same person anymore. The Amy Gumm who’d lived here was a total stranger. I didn’t belong here anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had.
“You’ll have to find them fast,” Mombi added. “There’s no telling what damage Dorothy will be able to do in Oz. We have to get back as soon as we can.”
“I haven’t even said I’ll help!” I said angrily, but I knew Mombi was right. Yet again it was up to me. “Fine. I’ll find the stupid shoes. So where am I supposed to live while I’m repeating senior year?”
“Oh,” Glamora said cheerfully, “that part at least is easy. We found your mom.”
My mom. Just the word brought back a flood of memories, most of them bad. I’d just been dumped back in Kansas, watched Nox take a place among the witches that they hadn’t even considered me for despite how hard I’d worked, and I had no idea if it was possible to return to Oz—or if I even wanted to. And now I was going to have to stay with the woman who’d abandoned me to party with her friends while a tornado descended on our house? It was too much.
“I need a minute,” I mumbled, and ducked out of the tent. The air was still and cool; overhead, clouds moved quickly across the stars as if a storm was on its way. Like we needed any more of those. One tornado per lifetime had been way more than enough.
I couldn’t help but wonder: What if, that afternoon in the trailer, my mom had decided just that once to take care of me? To drive me to safety—somewhere both of us could ride out the storm together? What if she had finally done the right thing? Was what I’d gained in Oz—strength, power, respect, self-reliance—worth what I’d lost? Without Nox, what did I even have to go back for? Being with him was the closest I’d come to happiness in Oz, but if his duties to the witches meant we could never even try to have a relationship, I didn’t relish the idea of returning to Oz just to be the Quadrant’s servant.
I wondered what would have happened if my mom had kept me safe and I’d never been airlifted into Oz at all. I knew that somewhere inside the mom who’d abandoned me that day was the mom who’d once loved me as though I was the greatest treasure in her life. But Kansas had a way of stripping the good out of anything, like the harsh prairie winds that peeled pretty paint from siding until all the houses were the same peeling, hopeless gray. And who was I kidding—my life here, in Kansas, had basically been hell.
After my dad bailed, I’d watched my mom’s downward spiral: slow at first, circling the drain faster and faster as pills and booze took away anything that resembled the happy, cheerful, loving mom I’d once known. By the time the tornado picked me up out of Dusty Acres, my mom was a couch-hugging wreck who only got up long enough to stagger down to the nearest bar with her best friend, Tawny. And the day the tornado had hit she’d cussed me out for getting suspended—as if über-pregnant tyrant Madison Pendleton’s picking a fight with me had been my fault—before abandoning me to the mercy of the storm in order to hit up a tornado party. I remembered what she’d looked like the last time I’d seen her: caked in drugstore makeup, her cheap skirt not much longer than a belt, her boobs racked up to her chin with a push-up bra. Trashy, bitchy, angry, and mean: like a trailer-park version of the Seven Dwarfs. I could’ve died, easily, because she’d left me that day. And now I was supposed to go back to her? To pretend everything was fine? The witches had asked a lot from me during my time in Oz, but this was something else.
“Amy?” It was Nox. I could barely make out his silhouette where he perched on a crumbling cement foundation. Somehow, he was the person I most and least wanted to see at the same time. What comfort was he going to be to me now? He’d made his choice. We could never be together. “Amy, I’m really sorry,” he said. I hesitated, and then sat down next to him. He put an arm around me, and I flinched. Hastily, he pulled away.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. “Why did you even let me hope we could—” I broke off, grateful he couldn’t see my cheeks flush in the dark. I was sixteen and I’d only known him for—well, for a month, apparently. It’s not like we were engaged, I thought bitterly. Except it had felt like so much more than that. I guess Oz did that. Made everything feel larger than life.