Heart Of Tin Part 5

"Happy Swoot Sixtoon," the cake said, the letters spelled out in smudged icing. I beamed up at my aunt Em with my brightest smile.

"It's beautiful," I said. I'd already changed into my party dress-which wasn't that much different from the dress I'd just gotten all dirty in the field-and had cleaned myself up as best as I could, scrubbing the dirt from my hands and the blood from my knee until you could hardly tell I'd fallen.

Uncle Henry hovered off to the side, looking as proud and hopeful as if he'd baked it himself. He'd certainly helped, gathering the ingredients from around the farm: coaxing the eggs from Miss Millicent (who never seemed in the mood to lay any), milking the cow, and making sure Aunt Em had everything she needed.

"Sometimes I wonder if I didn't marry a master chef!" Henry said, putting his arm around her waist.

Even Toto was excited. He was hopping around on the floor yipping at us eagerly.

"You really like it?" Aunt Em asked, a note of doubt in her voice. "I know the writing isn't perfect, but penmans.h.i.+p has never been my strong suit."

"It's wonderful!" I exclaimed, pus.h.i.+ng down the tiny feeling of disappointment that was bubbling in my chest. A little white lie never hurt anyone, and I didn't doubt the cake would be delicious. Aunt Em's food might not usually come out looking fancy, but it always tastes better than anything else.

Oh, I know that it's how a cake tastes that matters. I know there's no point in concerning yourself with what it looks like on the outside when you'll be eating it in just a few minutes.

But as it sat lopsided on the table with its brown icing and the words "Happy Sweet Sixteen" written out so the e's looked more like blobby o's, I found myself wis.h.i.+ng for something more.

I just couldn't let Aunt Em know that. I couldn't let her have even the smallest hint that anything was wrong. So I wrapped her up in a hug to let her know that it didn't matter: that even if the cake wasn't perfect, it was good enough for me. But then something else occurred to me.

"Are you sure it's big enough?" I asked. "A lot of people are coming." I had invited everyone from school, not that that was so many people, and everyone from all the neighboring farms, plus the store owners at every shop I'd been to on my last trip into town. I'd invited my best friend, Mitzi Blair, and even awful Suzanna h.e.l.lman and her best friend, Marian Stiles, not to mention a reporter from the Carrier who had taken a special interest in my life since the tornado. Plus, Suzanna would be dragging her horrible little sister, Jill, along.

Aunt Em glanced down nervously. "There was going to be another layer, dear, but we were running low on eggs . . . ," she said, trailing off, her weathered face suddenly rosy with embarra.s.sment.

Uncle Henry came quickly to the rescue. "I just won't have a second helping," he said, rubbing his belly, which is not small. "It wouldn't hurt me to skip a first helping, come to think of it."

My aunt swatted his arm and chuckled, her worry momentarily gone. All those years of hard Kansas life had taken their toll on her, but when she was around my uncle, her eyes still lit up; when he made a joke, she still laughed a laugh that sounded like it belonged to a girl my age. "You'd eat the whole thing if I let you!" He swiped a bit of frosting with his finger and grinned.

Seeing them together like that, happy and playful and still as much in love as they'd ever been, I felt a swell of affection for them, followed immediately by sadness. I knew that, once upon a time, they had been as young as I was. Aunt Em had wanted to travel the world; Uncle Henry had wanted to set off to California and strike gold. They just hadn't had the chance to do any of those things.

Instead, they had stayed here, and when I asked them about those days now, they waved away my questions like they were ashamed to admit that they'd ever had dreams at all. To them, our farm was all there was.

Will I be like them, someday? I wondered. Happy with crooked cakes and gray skies and cleaning out the pig trough?

"I'm going to go hang the lanterns outside," Henry said, walking to the door and reaching for his toolbox. "People expect this place to look nice. After all, they helped build it."

"Only after you got it started," Aunt Em reminded him.

After the tornado had swept our house away-with me in it-everyone had figured I was dead. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had been heartbroken. They'd even started planning my memorial service.

Imagine that! My funeral! Well, sometimes I did imagine it. I imagined my teachers from school all standing up one by one to say what a wonderful student I was, that there was something truly special about me.

I imagined Aunt Em all in black, weeping silently into her handkerchief and Uncle Henry the very picture of stoic grief, only a single tear rolling down his stony face as he helped lower my coffin into an open grave. Yes, I know that without a body there could be no coffin, but this was a fantasy. And it was at that moment in my fantasy that Aunt Em would bolt up, wailing, and would race forward to fling herself in after my corpse, stopped only at the last minute by Tom Furnish and Benjamin Slocombe, two handsome farmhands from the s.h.i.+ffletts' farm. Tom and Benjamin would be crying, too, because of course, they both harbored a secret admiration for me.

Well, if one's going to daydream, one might just as well make it a good one, don't you suppose?

Of course, I know it's vain, and petty, and downright spoiled of me to do such a thing as daydream about my own funeral. I know it's downright wicked to take even the slightest pleasure in imagining the misery of others, especially my poor aunt and uncle, who have so little happiness in their lives as it is.

I try not to be vain and petty and spoiled. I certainly try not to be wicked (after my experiences with Wickedness). But we all have our bad points, don't we? I might as well admit that those happen to be mine, and I can only hope to make up for them with the good ones.

There was no funeral anyway, so no harm was done. Just the opposite, in fact! When I showed up again a few days after the cyclone-without so much as a scratch on me, sitting by the chicken coop, which had somehow remained undisturbed through everything-people had a.s.sumed that my survival was some kind of miracle.

They were wrong. Miracles are not the same as magic.

But whether you want to call it a miracle or something else, every paper from Wichita to Topeka put me on the front page. They threw a parade for me that year, and a few months later I was asked to be the head judge at the annual blueberry pie contest at the Kansas State Fair. Best of all, because I came back from my adventures minus one house, everyone in town pitched in to build us a new one.

That was how we got this new house, to replace the old one that was still back in you-know-where. It was quite a spectacle to behold: it was bigger than any other for miles around, with a second story and a separate bedroom just for me, and even an indoor commode and a jaunty coat of blue paint, though that was just as gray as everything else in Kansas soon enough.

Henry and Em didn't seem particularly happy about any of it. They were humbled, naturally, that our neighbors had done all this for us, especially seeing as how they had all suffered their losses in the cyclone, some of them bigger than ours. Of course we were grateful.

But when the neighbors had done their work and gone home, my aunt and uncle had examined all the unfamiliar extravagances and had concluded that the old house had suited them just fine.

"An indoor commode!" Aunt Em exclaimed. "It just doesn't seem decent!"

How silly they were being. Grumbling about the gift that had been so kindly given to us.

On the other hand, I had to admit that even I felt that the new house left a few things to be desired. Nothing could compare to what I had seen while I had been gone. How do you go back to a two-bedroom farmhouse in Kansas when you've been in a palace made of emeralds?

Once you've seen castles and Munchkins and roads of yellow brick, once you've faced down monsters and witches and come face-to-face with true magic, well then, no matter how much you might have missed it while you were gone, the prairie can seem somewhat dull and-truly-downright dreary.

All I wanted to do upon my return was tell my aunt and uncle everything about what I'd seen. The whole time I'd been in Oz, I'd imagined Aunt Em's amazed face when I told her about the fields of giant poppies that put you right to sleep, and I'd thought about how Uncle Henry would sputter and spit his coffee back into his cup when he heard about the town where all the people were made of china.

They hadn't given me quite the reaction I'd been hoping for. In fact, they'd hardly reacted at all. Instead, they'd just exchanged a worried glance and told me that it must have been some fanciful dream I'd had when I hit my head during the cyclone. They warned me not to repeat the story, and to get some rest. They said n.o.body liked a tale-teller.

Never mind that a b.u.mp on the head didn't explain where the house was now, or why no one had ever found it. And it didn't explain how I'd gotten home. When I told them about the magical Silver Shoes that had carried me back across the Deadly Desert, they seemed even less convinced than ever. After all, the shoes had slipped from my feet somewhere along the way.

I can see why some people might have thought I was crazy, or a liar, or had made the whole thing up. Around here, they don't believe in anything they can't see with their own two eyes.

Aunt Em and I brought the cake into the living room and set it on the table by the modest spread of food she'd already laid out. As I looked at the room, all spruced up and decorated with a careful, loving hand, I reminded myself of how much they were doing.

The birthday party had been my aunt and uncle's idea-I'd overheard them talking just a few weeks ago about how blue they thought I'd seemed lately, and how a big birthday party might be just the thing to cheer me up.

I'd asked them not to do it, of course. I knew we didn't really have the money to spare.

Even so, I must admit that I was secretly pleased when they insisted on doing it anyway. As my "wild ride"-as so many people called it-had begun to recede further into memory, I was growing eager for something to break the monotony of the farm and school and then the farm again.

"Dorothy, what is your sc.r.a.pbook doing out?" Aunt Em asked, noticing the book with all my newspaper clippings sitting on the table next to the buffet. "Your guests will be here any moment."

I quickly picked the book up and moved it aside so that it didn't fall victim to any smudges of icing or stray crumbs. "Oh," I said. "I thought someone might like to look through it at the party. A lot of people who are coming were quoted in the articles about me, after all. It might be fun for them to see their names in print."

Aunt Em didn't appear to think that was a very good idea, but she didn't try to dissuade me. She just shook her head and started humming one of her old songs again as she scurried around, busying herself with last-minute tasks.

I sat down and began to flip through the pages of my sc.r.a.pbook myself. Toto hopped up into my lap and read along with me. At least I had him. He knew it was all real. He'd been there, too. I wondered if he missed it the same way I did.

THE GIRL WHO RODE THE CYCLONE.

That headline, from the Star, was my favorite. I liked the way it made me seem powerful, as if I'd been in control rather than just some little kid swept up by forces of nature.

In Oz, I hadn't been just some little kid either. I'd been a hero. I had killed two witches and freed their subjects from tyranny; I'd exposed the humbug Wizard and restored order to the kingdom by helping my friend the Scarecrow, the smartest creature I've ever met, claim the throne.

If only those things were in my sc.r.a.pbook!

Here, I knew that I would never, ever make as much of myself as I did in my short time in Oz. It just wasn't possible. Here, it wasn't even considered proper to think about such things.

And yet I had wanted to come back here. All those brave things I'd done: I wasn't trying to be a hero. I was just trying to get home.

It would have been too cruel to leave Uncle Henry and Aunt Em all alone here, thinking that I was dead. It wasn't all to spare their grief either. I would have missed them terribly if I had stayed. All the magic in the world-all the palaces and beautiful gowns and fields full of magical flowers-all the friends I'd found-could never have replaced the people who had taken me and raised me as their own after my parents had died. I would never have been able to be happy with them here and me there.

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 sc.r.a.pbook 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.

EXCERPT FROM DOROTHY MUST DIE.

FOLLOW AMY GUMM'S MISSION TO TAKE DOWN DOROTHY:

ONE.

I first discovered I was trash three days before my ninth birthday-one year after my father lost his job and moved to Secaucus to live with a woman named Crystal and four years before my mother had the car accident, started taking pills, and began exclusively wearing bedroom slippers instead of normal shoes.

I was informed of my tras.h.i.+ness on the playground by Madison Pendleton, a girl in a pink Target sweat suit who thought she was all that because her house had one and a half bathrooms.

"Salvation Amy's trailer trash," she told the other girls on the monkey bars while I was dangling upside down by my knees and minding my own business, my pigtails sc.r.a.ping the sand. "That means she doesn't have any money and all her clothes are dirty. You shouldn't go to her birthday party or you'll be dirty, too."

When my birthday party rolled around that weekend, it turned out everyone had listened to Madison. My mom and I were sitting at the picnic table in the Dusty Acres Mobile Community Recreation Area wearing our sad little party hats, our sheet cake gathering dust. It was just the two of us, same as always. After an hour of hoping someone would finally show up, Mom sighed, poured me another big cup of Sprite, and gave me a hug.

She told me that, whatever anyone at school said, a trailer was where I lived, not who I was. She told me that it was the best home in the world because it could go anywhere.

Even as a little kid, I was smart enough to point out that our house was on blocks, not wheels. Its mobility was severely oversold. Mom didn't have much of a comeback for that.

It took her until around Christmas of that year when we were watching The Wizard of Oz on the big flat-screen television-the only physical thing that was a leftover from our old life with Dad-to come up with a better answer for me. "See?" she said, pointing at the screen. "You don't need wheels on your house to get somewhere better. All you need is something to give you that extra push."

I don't think she believed it even then, but at least in those days she still cared enough to lie. And even though I never believed in a place like Oz, I did believe in her.

That was a long time ago. A lot had changed since then. My mom was hardly the same person at all anymore. Then again, neither was I.

I didn't bother trying to make Madison like me anymore, and I wasn't going to cry over cake. I wasn't going to cry, period. These days, my mom was too lost in her own little world to bother cheering me up. I was on my own, and crying wasn't worth the effort.

Tears or no tears, though, Madison Pendleton still found ways of making my life miserable. The day of the tornado-although I didn't know the tornado was coming yet-she was slouching against her locker after fifth period, rubbing her enormous pregnant belly and whispering with her best friend, Amber Boudreaux.

I'd figured out a long time ago that it was best to just ignore her when I could, but Madison was the type of person it was pretty impossible to ignore even under normal circ.u.mstances. Now that she was eight and a half months pregnant it was really impossible.

Today, Madison was wearing a tiny T-s.h.i.+rt that barely covered her midriff. It read Who's Your Mommy across her b.o.o.bs in pink cursive glitter. I did my best not to stare as I slunk by her on my way to Spanish, but somehow I felt my eyes gliding upward, past her belly to her chest and then to her face. Sometimes you just can't help it.

She was already staring at me. Our gazes met for a tiny instant. I froze.

Madison glared. "What are you looking at, Trailer Trash?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. Was I staring? I was just wondering if you were the Teen Mom I saw on the cover of Star this week."

It wasn't like I tried to go after Madison, but sometimes my sarcasm took on a life of its own. The words just came out.

Madison gave me a blank look. She snorted.

"I didn't know you could afford a copy of Star." She turned to Amber Boudreaux and stopped rubbing her stomach just long enough to give it a tender pat. "Salvation Amy's jealous. She's had a crush on Dustin forever. She wishes this were her baby."

I didn't have a crush on Dustin, I definitely didn't want a baby, and I absolutely did not want Dustin's baby. But that didn't stop my cheeks from going red.

Amber popped her gum and smirked an evil smirk. "You know, I saw her talking to Dustin in third period," she said. "She was being all flirty." Amber puckered her lips and pushed her chest forward. "Oh, Dustin, I'll help you with your algebra."

I knew I was blus.h.i.+ng, but I wasn't sure if it was from embarra.s.sment or anger. It was true that I'd let Dustin copy my math homework earlier that day. But as cute as Dustin was, I wasn't stupid enough to think I'd ever have a shot with him. I was Salvation Amy, the flat-chested trailer-trash girl whose clothes were always a little too big and a lot too thrift store. Who hadn't had a real friend since third grade.

I wasn't the type of girl Dustin would go for, with or without the existence of Madison Pendleton. He had been "borrowing" my algebra almost every day for the entire year. But Dustin would never look at me like that. Even at forty-pounds pregnant, Madison sparkled like the words on her oversize chest. There was glitter embedded in her eye shadow, in her lip gloss, in her nail polish, hanging from her ears in shoulder-grazing hoops, dangling from her wrists in blingy bracelets. If the lights went out in the hallway, she could light it up like a human dis...o...b..ll. Like human bling. Meanwhile, the only color I had to offer was in my hair, which I'd dyed pink just a few days ago.

I was all sharp edges and angles-words that came out too fast and at the wrong times. And I slouched. If Dustin was into s.h.i.+ny things like Madison, he would never be interested in me.

I don't know if I was exactly interested in Dustin, either, but we did have one thing in common: we both wanted out of Flat Hill, Kansas.

For a while, it had almost looked like Dustin was going to make it, too. All you need is a little push sometimes. Sometimes it's a tornado; sometimes it's the kind of right arm that gets you a football scholars.h.i.+p. He had been set to go. Until eight and a half months ago, that is.

I didn't know what was worse: to have your shot and screw it up, or to never have had a shot in the first place.

"I wasn't . . . ," I protested. Before I could finish, Madison was all up in my face.

"Listen, Dumb Gumm," she said. I felt a drop of her spit hit my cheek and resisted the urge to wipe it away. I didn't want to give her the satisfaction. "Dustin's mine. We're getting married as soon as the baby comes and I can fit into my aunt Robin's wedding dress. So you'd better stay away from him-not that he'd ever be interested in someone like you anyway."

By this point, everyone in the hallway had stopped looking into their lockers, and they were looking at us instead. Madison was used to eyes on her-but this was new to me.

"Listen," I mumbled back at her, wanting this to be over. "It was just homework." I felt my temper rising. I'd just been trying to help him. Not because I had a crush on him. Just because he deserved a break.

"She thinks Dustin needs her help," Amber chimed in. "Taffy told me she heard Amy offered to tutor him after school. Just a little one-on-one academic counseling." She cackled loudly. She said "tutor" like I'd done a lap dance for Dustin in front of the whole fourth period.