Part 5 (1/2)

”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.