Book 2 - Gillikin

Wittica, Settica, Wiccas and Turning, Red Sand, Dixxi House, change at Dixxi House for Shin; stay aboard this coach for all points East; Tenniken, Brox Hall, and all destinations to Traum”-the conductor paused to catch his breath-“next stop Wittica, Wittica next!”

Galinda clutched her parcel of clothes to her breast. The old goat who sprawled on the seat across from her was missing the Wittica stop. She was glad that trains made passengers sleepy. She didn’t want to keep avoiding his eye. At the last minute before she was to board the train, her minder, Ama Clutch, had stepped on a rusty nail and, terrified of the frozen-face syndrome, had begged permission to go to the nearest surgery for medicines and calming spells. “I can surely get myself to Shiz alone,” Galinda had said coldly, “don’t bother with me, Ama Clutch.” And Ama Clutch hadn’t. Galinda hoped that Ama Clutch would suffer a little frozenness of jaw before being well enough to show up in Shin and chaperone Galinda through whatever was to come.

Her own chin was set, she believed, to imply a worldly boredom with train travel. In fact she had never been more than a day’s carriage ride away from her family home in the little market town of Frottica. The railway line, laid down a decade ago, had meant that old dairy farms were being cut up for country estates for the merchants and manufacturers of Shiz. But Galinda’s family continued to prefer rural Gilhikin, with its fox haunts, its dripping dells, its secluded ancient pagan temples to Lurline. To them, Shin was a distant urban threat, and even the convenience of rail transportation hadn’t tempted them to risk all its complications, curiosities, and evil ways.

Galinda didn’t see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of

youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet. The sway of her head made her creamy ringlets swing, catching the light, like so many jostling stacks of coins. Her lips were perfect, as pouted as an opening maya flower, and colored as brilliantly red. Her green traveling gown with its inset panels of ochre musset suggested wealth, while the black shawl draping just so about the shoulders was a nod to her academic inclinations. She was, after all, on her way to Shin because she was smart.

But there was more than one way to be smart.

She was seventeen. The whole town of Frottica had seen her off. The first girl from the Pertha Hills to be accepted at Shin! She had written well in the entrance exams, a meditation on Learning Ethics from the Natural World. (”Do Flowers Regret Being Plucked for a Bouquet? Do the Rains Practice Abstinence? Can Animals Really Choose to Be Good? Or: A Moral Philosophy of Springtime.”) She had quoted excessively from the Oziad, and her rapturous prose had captivated the board of examiners. A three-year fellowship to Crage Hall. It wasn’t one of the better colleges- those were still closed to female students. But it was Shiz University.

Her companion in the compartment, waking up when the conductor came back through, stretched his heels as he yawned. “Would you be so kind as to reach my ticket, it’s in the overhead,” he said. Galinda stood and found the ticket, aware that the bearded old thing was eyeing her comely figure. “Here you are,” she said, and he answered, “Not to me, dearie, to the conductor. Without opposable thumbs, I have no hope of managing such a tiny piece of cardboard.”

The conductor punched the ticket, and said, “You’re the rare beast that can afford to travel first class.”

“Oh,” said the goat, “I object to the term beast. But the laws still allow my traveling in first class, I presume?”

“Money’s money,” said the conductor, without ill will, punching Galinda’s ticket and returning it to her.

“No, money’s not money,” said the goat, “not when my ticket cost double what the young lady’s did. In this case, money is a visa. I happen to have it.”

“Going up to Shin, are you?” said the conductor to Galinda, ignoring the goat’s remark. “I can tell by that academic shawl.”

“Oh well, it’s something to do,” said Galinda. She didn’t care to talk to conductors. But when he continued along down the carriage, Galinda found that she liked even less the baleful look that the goat was giving her.

“Do you expect to learn anything at Shin?” he asked.

“I have already learned not to speak to strangers.”

“Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.”

“I am disinclined to know you.”

“I am a Fellow of Shin University, on the Faculty of Biological Arts.”

You are a shabby dresser, even for a goat, Galinda thought. Money isn’t everything. “Then I must overcome my natural shyness. My name is Galinda. I am of the Arduenna Clan on my mother’s side.”

“Let me be the first to welcome you to Shin, Glinda. This is your first year?”

“Please, it is Galinda. The proper old Gillikinese pronunciation, if you don’t mind.” She could not bring herself to call him sir. Not with that horrid goatee and the tatty waistcoat that looked cut from some public house carpet.

“I wonder what you think of the Wizard’s proposed Banns on travel?” The goat’s eyes were buttery and warm, and frightening. Galinda had never heard of any Banns. She said as much. Dillamond-was it Doctor Dillamond?-explained in a conversational tone that the Wizard had thoughts of restricting Animal travel on public conveyances except in designated transports. Galinda replied that animals had always enjoyed separate services. “No, I am speaking of Animals,” said Dillamond. “Those with a spirit.”

“Oh, those,” said Galinda crudely. “Well, I don’t see the problem.”

“My, my,” said Dillamond. “Don’t you indeed?” The goatee quivered; he was irritated. He began to hector her about Animal Rights. As things now stood, his own ancient mother couldn’t afford to travel first class, and would have to ride in a pen when she wanted to visit him in Shin. If the Wizard’s Banns went through the Hall of Approval, as they were likely to do, the goat himself would be required by law to give up the privileges he had earned through years of study, training, and saving. “Is that right for a creature with a spirit?” he said. “From here to there, there to here, in a pen?”

“I quite agree, travel is so broadening,” said Galinda. They endured the rest of the trip, including the change across the platform at Dixxi House, in a frosty silence.

Seeing her fright at the size and bustle of the terminus at Shin, Dillamond took pity and offered to engage a carriage to take her to Crage Hall. She followed him, looking as unmortified as she could manage. Her luggage came behind, on the backs of a couple of porters.

Shin! She tried not to gawp. Everyone hustling on business, laughing and hurrying and kissing, dodging carriages, while the buildings of Railway Square, brownstone and bluestone and covered with vine and moss, steamed softly in the sunlight. The animals-and the Animals! She had scarcely ever come across even the odd chicken squawking philosophically in Frottica-but here was a quartet of tsebras at an outdoor cafe, dressed flashily in black-and-white satin stripes on the bias to their inborn design; and an elephant on its hind legs directing traffic; and a tiger dressed up in some sort of exotic religious garb, a kind of monk or maunt or nun or something. Yes, yes, it was Tsebras, and Elephant, and Tiger, and she supposed Goat. She would have to get used to enunciating the capital letters or else she would show off her country origins.

Mercifully, Dillamond found her a carriage with a human driver, and directed him to Crage Hall and paid him in advance, for which Galinda had to come up with a weak smile of appreciation. “Our paths will cross again,” said Dillamond, gallantly if curtly, as if putting forth a prophecy, and he disappeared as the carriage jolted forward. Galinda sank back into the cushions. She began to be sorry that Ama Clutch had punctured her foot with a nail.

Crage Hall was only twenty minutes from Railway Square. Behind its own bluestone walls, the complex was set with large watery-glass windows in lancet formation. A tessellation of quatrefoils and blind multifoils ran riot at the roofline. The appreciation of architecture was Galinda’s private passion, and she pored over the features she could identify, although the vines and flatmoss fudged many of the finer details of the buildings. Too soon she was whisked inside.

The Headmistress of Crage Hall, a fish-faced upper-class Gillikinese woman wearing a lot of cloisonne bangles, was greeting new arrivals in

the atrium. The Head eschewed the drabness of professional women’s dress that Galinda had expected. Instead the imposing woman was bedecked in a currant-colored gown with patterns of black jet swirling over the bodice like dynamic markings on sheet music. “I am Madame Morrible,” she said to Galinda. Her voice was basso profundo, her grip crippling, her posture military, her earrings like holiday tree ornaments. “Flourishes all around, and a quick cup of tea in the parlor. Then we’ll assemble in the Main Hall and sort you out as to roomies.”

The parlor was filled with pretty young women, all wearing green or blue and trailing black shawls like exhausted shadows behind them. Galinda was glad for the natural advantages of her flaxen hair, and stood by a window so the light could dazzle itself off her curls. She hardly sipped the tea. In a side room, the attendant Amas were serving themselves from a metal urn, and laughing and yakking already as if they were old friends from the same village. It was somewhat grotesque, all those dumpy women smiling at each other, making marketplace noise.

Galinda hadn’t read the fine print very closely. She hadn’t realized there would be a need for “roomies.” Or perhaps had her parents paid extra so she could have a private room? And where would Ama Clutch stay? Looking about her, she could tell that some of these dollies came from families much better off than hers. The pearls and diamonds on them! Galinda was glad she had chosen a simple silver collar with mettanite struts. There was something vulgar about traveling in jewels. As she realized this truth, she codified it into a saying. At the earliest perfect opportunity she would bring it out as proof of her having opinions-and of having traveled. “The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing,” she murmured, trying it out, “while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.” Good, very good.

Madame Morrible counted heads, gripped a cup of tea, and shooed everyone into the Main Hall. There Galinda learned that allowing Ama Clutch to go looking for a surgery had been a colossal mistake. Apparently all that chatter among Amas hadn’t been frivolous and social. They had been instructed to sort out among them whose young lady would room with whose. The Amas had been relied upon to get to the nub of the matter more quickly than the students themselves. No one had spoken for Galinda-she had gone unrepresented!

After the forgettable welcome remarks, as couple by couple the students and Amas left to locate their lodgings and settle in, Galinda found herself growing pale with embarrassment. Ama Clutch, the old fool, would have fixed her up nicely with someone just a notch or two above on the social ladder! Near enough that Galinda would suffer no shame, and above enough to make it worth the while of socializing. But now, all the better young misses were linked together. Diamond to diamond, emerald to emerald, for all she could tell! As the room began to empty, Galinda wondered if she shouldn’t go up and interrupt Madame Morrible and explain the problem. Galinda was, after all, an Arduenna of the Uplands, at least on one side. It was a hideous accident. Her eyes teared up.

But she hadn’t the nerve. She stayed perched on the edge of the fragile, stupid chair. Except for her, all the center of the room had cleared out now, and the shyer, more useless girls were left, around the edges, in the shadows. Surrounded by an obstacle course of empty gilded chairs, Galinda alone sat like an unclaimed valise.

“Now the rest of you are here without Amas, I understand,” said Madame Momble, a bit sniffily. “Since we require chaperonage, I will assign each of you to one of the three dormitories for freshers, which sleep fifteen girls each. There is no social stigma to the dormitory, I might add. None at all.” But she was lying, and not even convincingly.

Galinda finally stood up. “Please, Madame Morrible, there is a mistake. I am Galinda of the Arduennas. My Ama took a nail in her foot on the voyage and was detained for a day or two. I am not in the dormitory class, you see.”

“How sad for you,” said Madame Morrible, smiling. “I’m sure your Ama will be pleased to be a chaperone in, shall we say, the Pink Dormitory? Fourth floor on the right-“

“No, no, she would not,” interrupted Galinda, quite bravely. “I am not here to sleep in a dormitory, Pink or otherwise. You have misunderstood.”

“I have not misunderstood, Miss Galinda,” said Madame Morrible, growing even more fishlike as her eyes began to bulge. “There is accident, there is tardiness, there are decisions to be made. As you were not equipped, through your Ama, to make your own decision, I am empowered to make it for you. Please, we are busy and I must name the other girls who will join you in the Pink Dormitory-“

“I would have a private word with you, Madame,” said Galinda in desperation. “For myself, dormitory partners or a single roomie, it is no matter. But I cannot recommend that you ask my Ama to oversee other girls, for reasons I may not say in public.” She was lying as fast as she could, and better than Madame Morrible, who seemed at least intrigued.

“You strike me as impertinent, Miss Galinda,” she said mildly.

“I have not yet struck you, Madame Morrible.” Galinda delivered the daring line with her sweetest smile.

Madame Morrible chose to laugh, thank Lurline! “A spark of spunk! You may come to my chambers this evening and tell me the story of your Ama’s shortcomings, as I should know them. But I will compromise with you, Miss Galinda. Unless you object, I will have to ask your Ama to chaperone both you and another girl, one who comes without an Ama. For you see, all the other students with Amas are already paired off, and you are the odd one out.”

“I am certain my Ama could manage that, at least.”

Madame Morrible scanned the page of names, and said, “Very well. To join Miss Galinda of the Arduennas in a double room-shall I invite the Thropp Third Descending, of Nest Hardings, Elphaba?”

No one stirred. “Elphaba?” said Madame Morrible again, adjusting her bangles and pressing two fingers at the bottom of her throat.

The girl was in the back of the room, a pauper in a red dress with gaudy fretwork, and in clumpy, old-people’s boots. At first Galinda thought what she saw was some trick of the light, a reflection off the adjacent buildings covered in vines and flatmoss. But as Elphaba moved forward, lugging her own carpetbags, it became obvious that she was green. A hatchet-faced girl with putrescent green skin and long, foreign-looking black hair. “A Munchkinlander by birth, though with many childhood years spent in Quadling Country,” read Madame Morrible from her notes. “How fascinating for us all, Miss Elphaba. We shall look forward to hearing tales of exotic climes and times. Miss Galinda and Miss Elphaba, here are your keys. You may take room twenty-two on the second floor.”

She smiled broadly at Galinda as the girls came forward. “Travel is so broadening,” she intoned. Galinda started, the curse of her own words lobbed hack at her. She curtseyed and fled. Elphaba, eyes on the floor, followed behind.

By the time Ama Clutch arrived the next day, her foot bandaged to three times its natural sine, Elphaba had already unpacked her few belongings. They hung raglike on hooks in the cupboard: thin, shapeless shifts, shamed into a corner by the fulsome hoops and starched bustles and padded shoulders and cushioned elbows of Galinda’s wardrobe. “I am happy as cheese to be your Ama too, don’t matter to me,” said Ama Clutch, smiling broadly in Elphaba’s direction, before Galinda had a chance to get Ama Clutch alone and demand that her minder refuse. “Of course my Papa is paying you to be my Ama,” said Galinda meaningfully, but Ama Clutch answered, “Not as much as all that, duckie, not as much as all that. I can be making up my own mind.”

“Ama,” said Galinda when Elphaba had left to use the mildewy facilities, “Ama, are you blind? That Munchkinlander girl is green.”

“Odd, isn’t it? I thought all Munchkinlanders were tiny. She’s a proper height, though. I guess they come in a variety of sizes. Oh, are you bothered by the green? Well, it might do you some good, if you let it. If you let it. You affect worldly airs, Galinda, but you don’t know the world yet. I think it’s a lark. Why not? Why ever not?”

“It’s not yours to organize my education, worldly or otherwise, Ama Clutch!”

“No, my dear,” said Ama Clutch, “you’ve made this mess all by your lonesome. I’m merely being of service.”

So Galinda was stuck. Last night’s brief interview with Madame Morrible had not provided any escape route, either. Galinda had arrived promptly, in a dotted morpheline skirt with lace bodice, a vision, as she’d said to herself, in nocturnal purples and midnight blues. Madame Morrible bade her enter the reception room, in which a small cluster of leather chairs and a settee were drawn up before an unnecessary fire. The Head poured mint tea and offered crystallized ginger wrapped in pearlfruit leaves. She indicated a chair for Galinda, but herself stood by the mantelpiece like a big game hunter.

In the best tradition of the upper-class savoring its luxuries, they sipped and nibbled in silence at first. This gave Galinda the chance to observe that Madame Morrible was fishlike not merely in countenance but in dress: Her loose-fitting cream foxille flowed like a huge airy bladder from the high frilled neckline to the knees, where it was tightly gathered and dropped straight to the floor, hugging the calves and ankles in neat, anticlimactic pleats. She looked for all the world like a giant carp in a men’s club. And a dull, bored carp at that, not even a sentient Carp.

“Now your Ama, my dear. The reason she is incapable of supervising a dormitory. I’m all ears.”

Galinda had taken all afternoon to prepare. “You see, Madame Head, I didn’t like to say it publicly. But Ama Clutch suffered a terrible fall last summer when we were picnicking in the Pertha Hills. She reached for a handful of wild mountain thyme and went pitching over a cliff. She lay for weeks in a coma, and when she emerged she had no memory of the accident at all. If you asked her about it, she wouldn’t even know what you meant. Amnesia by trauma.”

“I see. How very tiresome for you. But why does this make her unequal to the job I proposed?”

“She has become addled. Ama Clutch, on occasion, gets confused as to what has Life and what doesn’t. She will sit and talk to, oh, say, a chair, and then relate its history back to us. Its aspirations, its reservations-“

“Its joys, its sorrows,” said Madame Morrible. “How truly novel. The emotional life of furniture. I never.”

“But, silly as this is, and a cause for hours of merriment, the corollary ailment is more alarming. Madame Morrible, I must tell you that Ama Clutch sometimes forgets that people are alive. Or animals.” Galinda paused, then added, “Or Animals, even.”

“Go on, my dear.”

“It is all right for me, because Ama has been my Ama all my life, and I know her. I know her ways. But she can sometimes forget a person is there, or needs her, or is a person. Once she cleaned a wardrobe and tipped it over onto the houseboy, breaking his back. She didn’t register his screaming right there, right at her feet. She folded the nightclothes and had a conversation with my mother’s evening gown, asking it all sorts of impertinent questions.”

“What a fascinating condition,” said Madame Morrible. “And how vexing for you, really.”

“I couldn’t have allowed her to accept responsibility for fourteen other girls,” Galinda confided. “For me, alone, there is no problem. I love the foolish old woman, in a way.”

Madame Morrible had said, “But what of your roomie? Can you jeopardize her well-being?”

“I didn’t ask for her.” Galinda looked the Head in her glazed, unblinking eye. “The poor Munchkinlander appears to be used to a life of distress. Either she will adjust or, I assume, she will petition you to be removed from my room. Unless, of course, you feel it your duty to move her for her own safety.”

Madame Morrible said, “I suppose if Miss Elphaba cannot live with what we give her, she will leave Crage Hall on her own accord. Don’t you think?”

It was the we in what we give her: Madame Morrible was binding Galinda into a campaign. They both knew it. Galinda struggled to maintain her autonomy. But she was only seventeen, and she had suffered that same indignity of exclusion in the Main Hall just hours ago. She didn’t know what Madame Morrible could have against Elphaba except the looks of her. But there was something, there was clearly something. What was it? She sensed it to be wrong somehow. “Don’t you think, dear?” said Madame Morrible, bowing a bit forward like a fish arching in a slow-motion leap.

“Well, of course, we must do what we can,” said Galinda, as vaguely as possible. But she seemed the fish, and caught on a most clever hook.

Out of the shadows of the reception room came a small tiktok thing, about three feet high, made of burnished bronze, with an identifying plate screwed into its front. The plate said Smith and Tinker’s Mechanical Man, in ornate script. The clockwork servant collected the empty teacups and whirred itself away. Galinda didn’t know how long it had been there, or what it had heard, but she had never liked tiktok creatures.

Elphaba had a bad case of what Galinnda called the reading sulks. Elphaba didn’t curl up-she was too bony to curl-but she jackknifed herself nearer to herself, her funny pointed green nose poking in the moldy leaves of a book. She played with her hair while she read, coiling it up and down around fingers so thin and twiglike as to seem almost exoskeletal. Her hair never curled no matter how often Elphaba twined it around her

hands. It was beautiful hair, in an odd, awful way, with a shine like the pelt of a healthy giltebeast. Black silk. Coffee spun into threads. Night rain. Galinda, not given to metaphor on the whole, found Elphaba’s hair entrancing, the more so because the girl was otherwise so ugly.

They didn’t talk much. Galinda was too busy forging alliances with the better girls who had been her rightful roomie prospects. No doubt she could switch rooms at half-term, or at any rate next fall. So Galinda left Elphaba alone, and she flew down the hall to gossip with her new friends. Milla, Pfannee, Shenshen. Just as in children’s books about boarding school, each new friend was wealthier than the one before.

At first Galinda didn’t mention who her roomie was. And Elphaba showed no sign of expecting Galinda’s company, which was a relief. But the gossip had to start sooner or later. The first wave of discussion about Elphaba concerned her wardrobe and her evident poverty, as if her classmates were above noticing her sickly and sickening color. “Someone told me that Madame Head had said Miss Elphaba was the Thropp Third Descending from Nest Hardings,” said Pfannee, who was also a Munchkinlander, but one of diminutive stock, not full-size like the Thropp family. “The Thropp are highly regarded in Nest Hardings and even beyond. The Eminent Thropp put together the area’s militia and tore up the Yellow Brick Road that the Omar Regent had been laying in when we all were small-before the Glorious Revolution. There was no callousness in the Eminent Thropp or his wife or family, including his granddaughter Elena, you can be assured.” By callousness, of course, Pfannee meant greenness.

“But how the mighty have fallen! She’s as ragged as a gypsy,” observed Milla. “Have you ever seen such tawdry dresses? Her Ama should be sacked.”

“She has no Ama, I think,” said Shenshen. Galinda, who knew for sure, said nothing.

“They said she had spent time in Quadling Country,” Milla went on. “Perhaps her family had been exiled as criminals?”

“Or they were speculators in rubies,” said Shenshen.

“Then where’s the wealth?” snapped Milla. “Speculators in rubies did very well, Miss Shenshen. Our Miss Elphaba doesn’t have two barter tokens to rub together and call her own.”

“Perhaps it’s a kind of religious calling? A chosen poverty?” suggested Pfannee, and at this nonsense they all threw back their heads and chortled.

Elphaba, coming into the buttery for a cup of coffee, caused them to escalate into louder roars of laughter. Elphaba did not look over at them, but every other student did glance their way, each girl longing to be included in the jollity, which made the four new friends feel just fine.

Galinda was slow coming to terms with actual learning. She had considered her admission into Shin University as a sort of testimony to her brilliance, and believed that she would adorn the halls of learning with her beauty and occasional clever sayings. She supposed, glumly, that she had meant to be a sort of living marble bust: This is Youthful Intelligence; admire Her. Isn’t She lovely?

It hadn’t actually dawned on Galinda that there was more to learn, and furthermore that she was expected to do it. The education all the new girls chiefly wanted, of course, had nothing to do with Madame Momble or the prattling Animals at lecterns and on daises. What the girls wanted wasn’t equations, or quotations, or orations-they wanted Shin itself. City life. The broad, offensive panoply of life and Life, seamlessly intertwined.

Galinda was relieved that Elphaba never took part in the outings the Amas organized. Since they often stopped at a lunchroom for a modest meal, the weekly brigade became known informally as the Chowder and Marching Society. The university district was aflame with autumn color, not just of dying leaves, but also of fraternity pennants, fluttering from rooftop and spire.

Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shin. Here and there, mostly in protected College yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then, in dizzying succession, unparalleled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those festering ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or, as the critics in the liberal press put it, High

Hostile Crudstyle, the form propagated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.

Besides architecture, the excitement was tame, to be sure. On one notable occasion, which no Crage Hall girl present ever forgot, the senior boys from Three Queens College across the canal, for a lark and a dare, had tanked themselves up with beer in the middle of the afternoon, had hired a White Bear violinist, and had gone down to dance together under the willow trees, wearing nothing but their clinging cotton drawers and their school scarves, It was deliciously pagan, as they had set an old chipped statue of Lurline the Fairy Queen on a three-legged stool, and she seemed to smile at their loose-limbed gaiety. The girls and the Amas pretended shock, but poorly; they lingered, watching, until horrified proctors from Three Queens came rushing out to round the revelers up. Near nudity was one thing, but public Lurlinism-even as a joke-bordered on being intolerably retrograde, even royalist. And that did not do in the Wizard’s reign.

One Saturday evening, when the Amas had a rare night off and had taken themselves in to a pleasure faith meeting in Ticknor Circus, Galinda had a brief and silly squabble with Pfanriee and Shenshen, after which she retired early to her bedchamber, complaining of a headache. Elphaba was sitting up in her bed with the commissary brown blanket tucked around her. She was hunched forward over a book, as usual, and her hair hung down like brackets on either side of her face. She looked to Galinda like one of those etchings-the natural history books were full of them-of odd Winkie mountain women who hide their strangeness with a shawl over the head. Elphaba was munching on the pips of an apple, having eaten all the rest of it. “Well, you look cozy enough, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, challengingly. In three months it was the first social remark she had managed to make to her roomie.

“Looks are only looks,” said Elphaba, not looking up.

“Will it break your concentration if I sit in front of the fire?”

“You cast a shadow if you sit just there.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Galinda, and moved. “Mustn’t cast shadows, must we, when urgent words are waiting to be read?”

Elphaba was back in her book already, and didn’t answer.

“What the dickens are you reading, night and day?”

It seemed as if Elphaba were coming up for air from a still, isolated pool. “While I don’t read the same thing every day, you know, tonight I am reading some of the speeches of the early unionist fathers.”

“Why ever would anyone want to do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to read them. I’m just reading them.”

“But why? Miss Elphaba the Delirious, why, why?”

Elphaba looked up at Galinda and smiled. “Elphaba the Delirious. I like it.”

Before she had a chance to bite it back, Gallinda returned the smile, and at the same time a sweeping wind sent a handful of hail against the glass, and the latch broke. Galinda leaped to swing the casement shut, but Elphaba scuttled to the far corner of the room, away from the wet. “Give me the leather luggage grip, Miss Elphaba, from inside my satchel-there on the shelf, behind the hatboxes-yes-and I’ll secure this until we can get the porter to fix it tomorrow.” Elphaba found the strap, but in doing so the hat boxes tumbled down, and three colorful hats rolled out onto the cold floor. While Galinda scrabbled up on a chair to organize the window shut again, Elphaba returned the hats to their boxes. “Oh, try it on, try that one on,” said Galinda. She meant to have something to laugh at, to tell Misses Pfannee and Shenshen about and so to work her way back into their good graces.

“Oh, I daren’t, Miss Galinda,” Elphaba said, and went to set the hat away.

“No, do, I insist,” Galinda said, “for a lark. I’ve never seen you in something pretty.”

“I don’t wear pretty things.”

“What’s the harm?” said Galinda. “Just here. No one else need see you.”

Elphaba stood facing the fire, but turned her head on her shoulders to look long and unblinkingly at Galinda, who had not yet hopped down from the chair. The Munchkinlander was in her nightgown, a drab sack without benefit of lace edging or piping. The green face above the wheatgray fabric seemed almost to glow, and the glorious long straight black hair fell right over where breasts should be if she would ever reveal any evidence that she possessed them. Elphaba looked like something between an

animal and an animal like something more than life but not quite Life.

There was an expectancy but no intuition, was that it?-like a child who has never remembered having a dream being told to have sweet dreams. You’d almost call it unrefined, but not in a social sense-more in a sense of nature not having done its full job with Elphaba, not quite having managed to make her enough like herself.

“Oh, put the damn hat on, really,” said Galinda, for whom, where introspection was concerned, enough was enough.

Elphaba obliged. The thing was the lovely roundel bought from the best milliner in the Pertha Hills. It had orangey swags and a yellow lace net that could be draped to achieve varying degrees of disguise. On the wrong head it would look ghastly, and Galinda expected to have to bite the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. It was the kind of super-feminine thing boys in a pantomime wore when they pretended to be girls.

But Elphaba dropped the whole sugary plate onto her strange pointed head, and looked at Gallinda again from underneath the broad brim. She seemed like a rare flower, her skin stemlike in its soft pearlescent sheen, the hat a botanical riot. “Oh Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “you terrible mean thing, you’re pretty.”

“Oh, and now you have lied, so go confess to the unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “Is there a looking glass?”

“Of course there is, down the hall in the lavatory.”

“Not there. I’m not going to be seen by those ninnies in this.”

“Well then,” decided Galinda, “can you find an angle without hiding the firelight, and look at your reflection in the dark window?”

They both gazed at the green and flowery spectre reflected in the watery old glass, surrounded by the blackness, driven through with the wild rain beyond. A maplefruit leaf, shaped like a star with blunted points, or like a heart grown lopsided, suddenly whirled out of the night and plastered itself on the reflection in the glass, gleaming red and reflecting the firelight, just where the heart would be-or so it seemed from the angle at which Galinda stood.

“Entrancing,” she said. “There’s some strange exotic quality of beauty about you. I never thought.”

“Surprise,” said Elphaba, and then nearly blushed, if darker green

constituted a blush-“I mean, surprise, not beauty. It’s just surprise. ‘Well, what do you know.’ It’s not beauty.”

“Who am I to argue,” said Galinda, tossing her curls and striking a pose, and Elphaba actually laughed at that, and Galinda laughed back, partly horrified as she did so. Elphaba tore the hat off then, and returned it to its box, and when she picked up her book again Galinda said, “So what is Beauty reading anyway? I mean really, tell me, why the old sermons?”

“My father is a unionist minister,” said Elphaba. “I’m just curious what it’s all about, that’s all.”

“Why don’t you just ask him?”

Elphaba didn’t answer. Her face took on a solid, waiting look, like that of an owl just about to go for a mouse.

“So what’re they on about? Anything interesting?” said Galinda. No sense giving up now, there was nothing else to do and she was too wrought up by the storm to sleep.

“This one is thinking about good and evil,” said Elphaba. “Whether they really exist at all.”

“Oh, yawn,” said Galinda. “Evil exists, I know that, and its name is Boredom, and ministers are the guiltiest crew of all.”

“You don’t really think that?”

Galinda didn’t often stop to consider whether she believed in what she said or not; the whole point of conversation was flow. “Well, I didn’t mean to insult your father, for all I know he is an entertaining and lively preacher.”

“No, I mean do you think evil really exists?”

“Well, how do I know what I think?”

“Well, ask yourself Miss Galinda. Does evil exist?”

“I don’t know. You say. Does evil exist?”

“I don’t expect to know.” The look went slanty and inwards somehow, or was it the hair swinging forward like a veil again?

“Why don’t you just ask your father? I don’t understand. He should know, that’s his job.”

“My father taught me a lot,” Elphaba said slowly. “He was very well educated indeed. He taught me to read and write and think, and more. But not enough. I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they’re good at asking questions to get you to think. I don’t think they’re supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily.”

“Oh, well, tell that to our boring minister at home. He has all the answers, and charges for them, too.”

“But maybe there’s something to what you say,” said Elphaba. “I mean, evil and boredom. Evil and ennui. Evil and the lack of stimulation. Evil and sluggish blood.”

“You’re writing a poem, it sounds like. Why ever would a girl be interested in evil?”

“I’m not interested in it. It’s just what the early sermons are all on about. So I’m thinking about what they’re thinking about, that’s all. Sometimes they talk about diet and not eating Animals, and then I think of that. I just like to think about what I’m reading. Don’t you?”

“I don’t read very well. So I don’t think I think very well either.” Galinda smiled. “I dress to kill, though.”

There was no response from Elphaba. Galinda, usually pleased that she knew the correct way to steer every conversation into a paean to herself, was flummoxed. She lamely ventured on, annoyed at having to expend the effort. “Well, whatever did those old brutes think about evil, then?”

“It’s hard to say exactly. They seemed to be obsessed with locating it somewhere. I mean, an evil spring in the mountains, an evil smoke, evil blood in the veins going from parent to child. They were sort of like the early explorers of Oz, except the maps they made were of invisible stuff, pretty inconsistent one with the other.”

“And where is evil located?” Galinda asked, flopping onto her bed and closing her eyes.

“Well, they didn’t agree, did they? Or else what would they have to write sermons arguing about? Some said the original evil was the vacuum caused by the Fairy Queen Lurline leaving us alone here. When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies. So every evil thing is a sign of the absence of deity.”

“Well I wouldn’t know an evil thing if it fell on me,” said Galinda.

“The early unionists, who were a lot more Lurlinist than unionists are today, argued that some invisible pocket of corruption was floating around the neighborhood, a direct descendent of the pain the world felt when Lurline left. Like a patch of cold air on a warm still night. A perfectly agreeable soul might march through it and become infected, and then go and kill a neighbor. But

then was it your fault if you walked through a patch of badness? If you couldn’t see it? There wasn’t ever any council of unionists that decided it one way or the other, and nowadays so many people don’t even believe in Lurline.”

“But they believe in evil still,” said Galinda with a yawn. “Isn’t that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger-“

“You are thinking!” Elphaba cried. Galinda raised herself to her elbows at the enthusiasm in her roomie’s voice.

“I am about to sleep, because this is profoundly boring to me,” Galinda said, but Elphaba was grinning from ear to ear.

In the morning Ama Clutch regaled them both with tales of the night out. There was a talented young witch in nothing but shocking pink undergarments, adorned with feathers and beads. She sang songs to the audience and collected food tokens in her cleavage from the blushing undergraduate men in the nearer tables. She did a little domestic magic, turning water into orange juice, changing cabbages into carrots, and running knives through a terrified piglet, which spouted champagne instead of blood. They all had a sip. A terrible fat man with a beard came on and chased the witch around as if he would kiss her-oh, it was too funny, too funny! In the end the whole cast and audience together stood and sang “What We Don’t Allow in the Public Halls (In Fact Is for Sale in the Cheaper Stalls).” The Amas had a riotous good time, every one of them.

“Really,” said Galinda sniffily. “The pleasure faith is so-so common.”

“But I see the window broke,” said Ama Clutch. “I hope it wasn’t boys trying to climb in.”

“Are you mad?” said Galinda. “In that storm?”

“What storm?” said Ama Clutch. “That don’t make sense. Last night was as calm as moonlight.”

“Hah, that was some show,” said Galinda. “You were so caught up in pleasure faith you lost your bearings, Ama Clutch.” They went down to breakfast together, leaving Elphaba still asleep, or pretending to be asleep maybe. Though as they walked along the corridors, sun through the broad windows making racks of light on the cold slate floors, Galinda did wonder about the capriciousness of weather. Was it even possible for

a storm to pitch itself against one part of town and overlook another? There was so much about the world she didn’t know.

“She did nothing but chatter about evil,” said Galinda to her friends, over buttered brisks with ploughfoot jelly. “Some inside tap was turned on, and prattle just poured out of her. And, girls, when she tried on my hat, I could’ve died. She looked like somebody’s maiden aunt come up out of the grave, I mean as frumpy as a Cow. I endured it only for you, so I could tell you all; otherwise I’d have expired with glee on the spot. It was so very much!”

“You poor thing, to have to be our spy and stand the shame of that grasshopper roomie!” said Pfannee devoutly, clasping Galinda’s hand. “You’re too good!”

One evening-the first evening of snow-Madame Morrible held a poetry soiree. Boys from Three Queens and Ozma Towers were invited. Galinda brought out her cerise satin gown with the matching shawl and slippers and an heirloom Gillikinese fan, painted with a pattern of ferns and phoenix. She arrived early to lay claim to the upholstered chair that would best set off her own attire, and she dragged the chair over to the bookshelves so that the light from library tapers would gently fall on her. The rest of the girls-not only the freshers, but the sophisters and seniors-entered in a whispering clot and arranged themselves on sofas and lounges in Crage Hall’s nicest parlor. The boys who came were somewhat disappointing; there weren’t that many, and they looked terrified, or giggled with one another. Then the professors and doctors arrived, not just the Animals from Crage Hall, but the boys’ professors too, who were mostly men. The girls began to be glad they had dressed well, for while the boys were a spotty bunch, the male professors had grave and charming smiles.

Even some of the Amas came, though they sat behind a screen at the back of the room. The sound of their knitting needles going at a rapid rate was soothing to Galinda, somehow. She knew Ama Clutch would be there.

The double doors at the end of the parlor were swept open by that little bronze industrial crab Galinda had met on her first evening at Crage Hall. It had been especially serviced for the occasion; you could still detect the cutting scent of metal polish. Madame Morrible then made an entrance, severe and striking in a coal black cape, which she let drop to the floor (the thingy picked it up and slung it over a sofa back); her gown was a fiery orange, with abalone lake shells stitched all over it. Despite herself Galinda had to admire the effect. In tones even more unctuous than usual, Madame Morrible welcomed the visitors and led polite applause at the notion of Poetry and Its Civilizing Effects.

Then she spoke on the new verse form sweeping the social parlors and poetry dens of Shin. “It is known as the Quell,” said Madame Morrible, in her Headmistress’s smile displaying an impressive assembly of teeth. “The Quell is a brief poem, uplifting in nature. It pairs a sequence of thirteen short lines with a concluding, unrhyming apothegm. The reward of the poem is in the revealing contrast between rhyming argument and concluding remark. Sometimes they may contradict each other, but always they illuminate and, like all poetry, sanctify life.” She beamed like a beacon in a fog. “Tonight especially, a Quell might serve as an anodyne to the unpleasant disruptions we have been hearing about in our nation’s capital.” The boy students looked at least alert, and all the professors nodded, though Galinda could tell none of the girl students had a clue as to what “unpleasant disruptions” Madame Morrible was prattling on about.

A third-year girl at the hammer-strung keyboard clattered out a couple of chords, and the guests cleared their throats and looked at their shoes. Galinda saw Elphaba arrive in the back of the room, dressed in her usual casual red shift, two books under her arm and a scarf wound around her head. She sank into the last empty chair, and bit into an apple just as Madame Morrible was drawing in a dramatic breath to begin.

Sing a hymn to rectitude,

Ye forward-thinking multitude.

Advance in humble gratitude

For strictest rules of attitude.

To elevate the Common Good

In Brotherhood and Sisterhood

We celebrate authority.

Fraternity, Sorority,

United, pressing onward, we

Restrict the ills of liberty.

There is no numinosity

Like Power’s generosity

In helping curb atrocity.

Bear down on the rod and foil the child.

Madame Morrible lowered her head to signify that she was done. There was a rumbling of indistinct comments. Galinda, who didn’t know much about Poetry, thought perhaps this was the accepted way of appreciating it. She grumbled a little bit to Shenshen, who sat in a straightback chair to one side, looking dropsical. Wax from the taper was about to drip onto Shenshen’s silk-shouldered white gown with the lemon-chiffon swags, and ruin it, most likely, but Galinda decided Shenshen’s family could afford to replace a gown. She kept still.

“Another,” said Madame Momble. “Another Quell.”

The room grew silent, but a little uneasily so?

Alas! For impropriety,

The guillotine of piety.

To remedy society

Indulge not to satiety

In mirth and shameless gaiety.

Choose sobering sobriety.

Behave as if the deity

Approaches in its mystery,

And greet it with sonority.

Let your especial history

Be built upon sorority

Whose Virtues do exemplify,

And Social Good thus multiply.

Animals should be seen and not heard.

Again, there was mumbling, but it was of a different nature now, a meaner key. Doctor Dillamond harrumphed and beat a cloven hoof against the floor, and was heard to say, “Well that’s not poetry, that’s propaganda, and it’s not even good propaganda at that.”

Elphaba sidled over to Galinda’s side with her chair under her arm, and plunked it down between Galinda and Shenshen. She put her bony behind on its slatted seat and leaned to Galinda and asked, ‘What do you make of this?”

It was the first time Galinda had ever been addressed by Elphaba in public. Mortification bloomed. “I don’t know,” she said faintly, looking in the other direction.

“It’s a cleverness, isn’t it?” said Elphaba. “I mean that last line, you couldn’t tell by that fancy accent whether it was meant to be Animals or animals. No wonder Dillamond’s furious.”

And he was. Doctor Dillamond looked around the room as if trying to marshal the opposition. “I’m shocked, shocked,” he said. “Deeply shocked,” he amended, and he marched out of the room. Professor Lenx, the Boar who taught math, left too, accidentally crushing an antique gilded sideboard through trying to avoid stepping on Miss Milla’s yellowlace train. Mister Mikko, the Ape who taught history, sat dolefully in the shadows, too confused and ill at ease to make a move. “Well,” said Madame Momble in a carrying tone, “one expects poetry, if it is Poetry, to offend. It is the Right of Art.”

“I think she’s bonkers,” said Elphaba. Galinda found it too horrible. What if even one of the pimply boys saw Elphaba whispering to her! She’d never hold her head up in society again. Her life was ruined. “Shhh, I’m listening, I love poetry,” Galinda told her sternly. “Don’t talk to me, you’re ruining my evening.”

Elphaba sat back, and finished her apple, and they both kept listening. The grumbling and murmuring grew louder after each poem, and the boys and girls began to relax and look around at one another.

When the last Quell of the evening had knelled (to the cryptic aphorism “A witch in time saves nine”), Madame Morrible retired to uneven applause. She allowed her bronze servant to administer tea to the guests, and then the girls, and finally the Amas. In a heap of rustling silk and clicking abalone lake shells, she received compliments from the male professors and some of the braver boys, and begged them to sit near her so she could enjoy their criticisms. “Do tell the truth. I was overly dramatic, wasn’t I? It is my curse. The stage called, but I chose a life of Service to Girls.” She lowered her eyelashes in modesty as her captive audience mumbled a lukewarm protest.

Galinda was still trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing company of Elphaba, who kept on about the Quells and what they meant, and if they were any good. “How do I know, how should I know, we’re first-year girls, remember?” said Galinda, yearning to swish over to where Pfannee, Milla, and Shenshen were squeezing lemons into the teacups of a few edgy boys.

“Well, your opinion is as good as hers, I think,” said Elphaba. “That’s the real power of art, I think. Not to chide but to provoke challenge. Otherwise why bother?”

A boy came up to them. Galinda thought he wasn’t much to look at, but anything was better than the green leech at her side. “How do you do?” said Galinda, not even waiting for him to get up his nerve. “It’s so nice to meet you. You must be from, let’s see-“

“Well, I’m from Briscoe Hall, actually,” he said. “But I’m a Munchkinlander originally. As you can tell.” And she could, for he hardly came up to her shoulder. He wasn’t bad looking for all that. A spun-cotton mess of ill-combed golden hair, a toothy smile, a better complexion than some. The evening tunic he wore was a provincial blue, but there were flecks of silver thread running through it. He was trim, nicely so. His boots were polished and he stood a little bandy-legged, feet pointed out.

“This is what I love,” said Galinda, “meeting strangers. This is Shia at its finest. I am Gillikinese.” She just managed to keep herself frost adding, of course, for she believed it evident in her attire. Munchkinlander girls had a habit of quieter dress, so understated that they were often mistaken, in Shiz, for servants.

“Well then, hello to you,” said the boy. “My name is Master Boq.”

“Miss Galinda of the Arduennas of the Uplands.”

“And you?” said Boq, turning to Elphaba. “Who are you?”

“I’m leaving,” she said. “Fresh dreams, all.”

“No, don’t leave,” said Boq. “I think I know you.”

“You don’t know me,” said Elphaba, pausing as she turned “However could you know me?”

“You’re Miss Elphie, aren’t you?”

“Miss Elphie!” cried Galinda gaily. “How delightful!”

“How do you know who I am?” said Elphaba. “Master Boq from Munchkinland? I don’t know you.”

“You and I played together when you were tiny,” said Boq. “My father was the mayor of the village you were born in. I think. You were born in Rush Margins, in Wend Hardings, weren’t you? You’re the daughter of the unionist minister, I forget his name.”

“Frex,” said Elphaba. Her eyes looked slanted and wary.

“Frexspar the Godly!” said Boq. “That’s right. You know they still talk about him, and your mama, and the night the Clock of the Time Dragon came to Rush Margins. I was two or three years old and they took me to see it, but I don’t remember that. I do remember that you were in a play set with me when I was still in short pants. Do you remember Gawnette? She was the woman who minded us. And Bree? He is my dad. Do you remember Rush Margins?”

“This is all smoke and guesswork,” said Elphaba. “How can I contradict? Let me tell you about what happened in your life before you can remember it. You were born a frog.” (This was unkind, as Boq did have an amphibious look about him.) “You got sacrificed to the Clock of the Time Dragon and were turned into a boy. But on your marriage night when your wife opens her legs you’ll turn back into a tadpole and-“

“Miss Elphaba!” cried Galinda, flicking open her fan to wave the flush of shame from her face. “Your tongue!”

“Oh well, I have no childhood,” said Elphaba. “So you can say what you like. I grew up in Quadling Country with the marsh people. I squelch when I walk. You don’t want to talk to me. Talk to Miss Galinda, she’s much better in parlors than I am. I have to go now.” Elphaba nodded a good night salute and escaped, almost at a run.

“Why did she say all that?” said Boq, no embarrassment in his voice, just wonder. “Of course I remember her. How many green people are there?”

“It’s just possible,” considered Galinda. “that she didn’t like being recognized on account of her skin color. I don’t know for sure, but perhaps she’s sensitive about it.”

“She must know that it’s what people would remember.”

“Well, as far as I am aware, you are right about who she is,” Galinda went on. “They tell me her great-grandfather is the Eminent Thropp of Colwen Grounds in Nest Hardings.”

“That’s the one,” Boq said. “Elphie. I never thought I’d see her again.”

“Won’t you have some more tea? I’ll call the server,” Galinda said. “Let us sit here and you can tell me all about Munchkinland. I am aquiver with curiosity.” She perched herself back on the chair-in-sympathetic-colors and looked her very best. Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.

When Galinda retired that evening, Elphaba was already in bed, blankets pulled up over her head, and a patently theatrical snore issuing forth. Galinda huffed herself into bed with a lump, annoyed that she could feel rejected by the green girl.

In the week that followed much was said about the evening of Quells. Doctor Dillamond interrupted his biology lecture to call for a response from his students. The girls didn’t understand what a biological response to poetry might be and sat silent at his leading questions. He finally exploded, “Doesn’t anyone make the connection between the expression of those thoughts and what’s been going on in the Emerald City?”

Miss Pfannee, who didn’t believe she was paying tuition in order to be yelled at, snapped back at him. “We don’t have the tiniest notion what’s going on in the Emerald City! Stop playing games with us; if you have something to say, say it. Don’t bleat so.”

Doctor Dillamond stared out the windows and seemed to be trying to control his temper. The students were thrilled with the little drama. Then the Goat turned and in a milder voice than they expected he told them that the Wizard of Oz had proclaimed Banns on Animal Mobility, effective several weeks ago. This meant not only that Animals were restricted in their access to travel conveyances, lodgings, and public services. The Mobility it referred to was also professional. Any Animal coming of age was prohibited from working in the professions or the public

sector. They were, effectively, to be herded back to the farmlands and wilds if they wanted to work for wages at all.

“What do you think Madame Morrible was saying when she ended that Quell with the epigram Animals should be seen and not heard?” asked the Goat tersely.

“Well, anyone would be upset,” said Galinda. “I mean, any Animal. But it’s not as if your job is threatened, is it? Here you are, still teaching us.”

“What about my children? What about my kids?”

“Do you have kids? I didn’t know you were married.”

The Goat closed his eyes. “I’m not married, Miss Galinda. But I might be. Or I may. Or perhaps I have nieces and nephews. They have already been banned effectively from studying at Shin because they can’t hold a pencil to write an essay with. How many Animals have you ever seen in this paradise of education?” Well, it was true; there were none.

“Well, I do think it’s pretty dreadful,” said Galinda. “Why would the Wizard of Oz do such a thing?”

“Why indeed,” said the Goat.

“No, really, why. It’s a real question. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.” The Goat turned to his rostrum and shoved some papers this way and that, and was then seen pawing a handkerchief from a lower shelf, and blowing his nose. “My grandmothers were milking-Goats at a farm in Gillikin. Through their lifelong sacrifices and labors they purchased the help of a local schoolteacher to educate me and to take dictation when I went for my exams. Their efforts are about to go to waste.”

“But you can still teach!” said Pfannee petulantly.

“The thin edge of the wedge, my dear,” said the Goat, and dismissed the class early. Galinda found herself glancing over toward Elphaba, who had a strange, focused look. As Galinda fled the classroom, Elphaba approached the front of the room, where Doctor Dillamond stood shaking in uncontrolled spasms, his horned head bowed.

A few days later, Madame Morrible gave one of her occasional open lectures on Early Hymns and Pagan Paeans. She called for questions, and the entire assembly was startled to see Elphaba unfold herself from her customary fetal position in the back of the room and address the Head.

“Madame Morrible, if you please,” said Elphaba, “we never had an opportunity to discuss the Quells that you recited in the parlor last week.”

“Discuss,” said Madame Morrible with a generous though shooing wave of the bangled hands.

“Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animal Mobility.”

“Doctor Dillamond, alas,” said Madame Morrible, “is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a Goat, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn’t understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?”

“I don’t believe I can, Madame.”

“Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without.”

“So that phrase that he objected to-Animals should be seen and not heard-that was ironic?” continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumple in a sudden attack of the spleen.

“One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose,” said Madame Morrible.

“How do you choose?” said Elphaba.

“How impertinent!” said Madame Morrible.

“Well, but I don’t mean impertinence. I’m trying to learn. If you- if anyone-thought that statement was true, then it isn’t in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It’s just argument and conclusion, and I don’t see the irony.”

“You don’t see much, Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible. “You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one’s own modest acumen, well, it Is very sad in one so young and bright.” She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba’s skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking.

“But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond,” said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up.

“In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animals should not be heard,” snapped Madame Morrible.

“Do you mean that ironically?” said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face, and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

When the second semester began, and Galinda was still saddled with Elphaba as a roomie, she made a brief protest to Madame Morrible. But the Head would allow no shifting, no rearranging. “Far too upsetting for my other girls,” she said. “Unless you’d like to be removed to the Pink Dormitory. Your Ama Clutch seems, to my watchful eye, to be recovering from the ailments you described when first we met. Perhaps now she is up to overseeing fifteen girls?”

“No, no,” said Galinda quickly. “There are recurrences from time to time, but I don’t mention them. I don’t like to be a bother.”

“How thoughtful,” said Madame Momble. “Bless you, sweet thing. Now my dear, I wonder if we might take a moment, as long as you’ve come in for a chat, to discuss your academic plans for next fall? As you know, second year is when girls choose their specialties. Have you given it any thought?”

“Very little,” said Galinda. “Frankly, I thought my talents would just emerge and make it clear whether I should try natural science, or the arts, or sorcery, or perhaps even history. I don’t think I’m cut out for ministerial work.”

“I’m not surprised that one such as you should be in doubt,” said Madame Morrible, which wasn’t greatly encouraging to Galinda. “But may I suggest sorcery? You could be very good at it. I pride myself on knowing this sort of thing.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Galinda, though her early appetite for sorcery had waned once she’d heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them.

“In the event you choose sorcery, it might-just might-be possible to find for you a new roomie,” said Madame Morrible, “given that

Miss Elphaba has already told me her interests lie in the natural sciences.”

“Oh well then, I certainly will give it a great deal of thought,” said Galinda. She struggled with unnamed conflicts within her. Madame Morrible, for all her upper-class diction and fabulous wardrobe, seemed just a tad-oh-dangerous. As if her big public smile were composed of the light glancing off knives and lances, as if her deep voice masked the rumbling of distant explosions. Galinda always felt as if she couldn’t see the whole picture. It was disconcerting, and to her credit at least Galinda felt inside herself the ripping apart of some valuable fabric-was it integrity?-when she sat in Madame Morrible’s parlor and drank the perfect tea.

“For the sister, I hear, is eventually coming up to Shin,” concluded Madame Morrible a few minutes later, as if silence had not intervened, and several tasty biscuits, “because there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And that, I understand, would be dreadful. You would not like it. The sister being as she is. Undoubtedly spending much time in Miss Elphaba’s room, being tended to.” She smiled wanly. A puff of powdery aroma came forward from the flank of her neck, almost as if Madame Morrible could somehow dispense a pleasant personal odor at will.

“The sister being as she is.” Madame Morrible tutted and wagged her head back and forth as she saw Galinda to the door. “Miserable, really, but I suppose we shall all pull together and cope. That is sorority, isn’t it?” The Head grasped her shawl and put a gentle hand on Galinda’s shoulder. Galinda shivered, and was sure Madame Morrible felt it, knew it, but the Head never registered a sign of it. “But then, my use of sorority-how ironic. Too witty. Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn’t ironic in the end.” She squeezed Galinda’s shoulder blade as if it were a bicycle handle. almost harder than was proper for a woman to do. “We can only hope- ha ha-that the sister comes with some veils of her own! But that’s year yet. Meanwhile we have time. Think about sorcery, would you? Do Now good-bye, my pet, and fresh dreams.”

Galinda walked back to her room slowly, wondering what Elphaba’s sister was like to provoke those catty remarks about veils. She wanted to ask Elphaba. But she couldn’t think of how to do it. She didn’t have the nerve.

Come on out,” said the boys. “Come out.” They were leaning in the archway to Boq’s room, a pell-mell clot of them, backlit by the oil lamp in the study beyond. “We’re sick of books. Come with us.”

“Can’t,” said Boq. “I’m behind in irrigation theory.”

“Fuck your irrigation theory when the pubs are open,” said the strapping Gillikinese bucko named Avaric. “You’re not going to improve your grades at this late date, with the exams almost over and the examiners half-crocked themselves.”

“It’s not the grades,” said Boq. “I just don’t understand it yet.”

“We’re off to the pub, we’re off to the pub,” chanted some boys who, it seemed, had gotten a head start. “Fuck Boq, the ale is waiting, and it’s already aged enough!”

“Which pub, then, maybe I’ll join you in an hour,” Boq said, sitting firmly back in his chair and not lifting his feet to the footstool, as he knew that this might incite his classmates to hoist him to their shoulders and carry him off with them for an evening of debauchery. His smallness seemed to inspire such banditry. Feet square on the floor made him look more planted, he figured.

“The Boar and Fennel,” said Avaric. “They’ve got a new witch performing. They say she’s hot. She’s a Kumbric Witch.”

“Hah,” said Boq, unconvinced. “Well, go on and get a good view. I’ll come along when I can.”

The boys rambled away, rattling doors of other friends, knocking aslant the portraits of old boys now grown into august patrons. Avaric stood in the archway and waited a minute longer. “We might ditch some

of the boors and take a select few of us off to the Philosophy Club,” he said enticingly. “Later on, I mean. It’s the weekend, after all.”

“Oh, Avaric, go take a cold shower,” said Boq.

“You admitted you were curious. You did. So why not an end-of-semester treat?”

“I’m sorry I ever said I was curious. I’m curious about death, too, but I can wait to find out, thank you. Get lost, Avaric. Better go catch up with your friends. Enjoy the Kumbric antics, which by the way I expect is false advertising. Kumbric Witch talents went out hundreds of years ago. If indeed they ever existed.”

Avaric turned up the second collar of his tunic-jacket. The inside was lined with a deep red velvet plush. Against his elegant shaven neck the lining seemed like a single ribbon of privilege. Boq found himself, once again, making mental comparisons between himself and handsome Avaric, and coming up-well, coming up short. “What, Avaric,” he said, as impatient with himself as he was with his friend.

“Something has happened to you,” said Avaric. “I’m not that dull. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” said Boq.

“Tell me to mind my own business, tell me to go flick myself, to piss off, go on, say it, but don’t tell me nothing’s wrong. For you’re not that good a liar, and I’m not that stupid. Even for a dissipated Gillikinese of decaying nobility.” His expression was soft, and Boq, momentarily, was tempted. His mouth opened as he thought of what to say, but at the sound of bells in Ozma Towers, chiming the hour, Avaric’s head turned just a fraction. For all his concern, Avaric wasn’t entirely here. Boq closed his mouth, thought some more, and said, “Call it Munchkinlander stolidity. I won’t lie, Avaric, you’re too good a friend to lie to. But there’s nothing to say now. Now go on and enjoy yourself. But be careful.” He was about to add a word of warning against the Philosophy Club, but checked it. If Avaric was annoyed enough, then Boq’s nannyish worrying might backfire and goad Avaric into going there.

Avaric came forward and kissed him on both cheeks and on the forehead, an upper-class northern custom that always made Boq profoundly ill at ease. Then with a wink and a dirty gesture, he disappeared.

Boq’s room looked out over a cobblestoned alley, down which Avaric

and his cronies were swooping and weaving. Boq stood back, in the shadows, but needn’t have worried; his friends weren’t thinking of him now. They had made it through the halfway point in their exams and had a breather for a couple of days. After the exams, the campus would lie vacant except for the more befuddled of the professors and the poorer of the boys. Boq had lived through this before. He preferred study, however, to scrubbing old manuscripts with a five-haired reck-fur brush, which was what he would be employed to do in the Three Queens library all summer long.

Across the alley ran the bluestone wall of a private stable, attached to some mansion house a few streets away on a fashionable square. Beyond the stable roof you could see the rounded tops of a few fruit trees, in the kitchen garden of Crage Hall, and above them glowed the lancet windows of the dormitories and classrooms. When the girls forgot to draw their drapes- which was astoundingly often-you could see them in various stages of undress. Never the whole body naked, of course; in that case he would have looked away, or told himself sternly that he had better. But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the filminess of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust. It was an education in lingerie if nothing else. Boq, who had no sisters, merely looked.

The Crage Hall dormitory was just far enough away that he couldn’t make out the individual girls. And Boq was flushed with desire to see his heartthrob again. Damn! Double damn! He couldn’t concentrate. He’d be sent down if he queered his exams! He’d let down his father, old Bree, and his village, and the other villages.

Hell and hell. Life was hard and barley just wasn’t enough. Boq found himself suddenly leaping over the footstool, grabbing his student cape, charging down the corridors, and plummeting around the stone spiral stairs in the corner tower. He couldn’t wait any more. He had to do something, and an idea had come to him.

He nodded to the porter on duty, turned left out of the gate, and hurried along the road, in the dusk avoiding as best he could the generous heaps of horse manure. At least with his classmates off gallivanting, he would make no fool of himself in their line of vision. There wasn’t a soul left in Briscoe. So he turned left, then left again, and soon was pacing the alley by the stable. A rick of cordwood, the protruding edge of a swollen shutter, the iron bracket of a hoist. Boq was small but he was nimble too,

and with hardly a scrape of his knuckles he had swung himself to the tin gutter of the stable, and then was scrabbling like a lake crab up the steeply pitched roof.

Aha! He might have thought of this weeks ago, months ago! But the night that all the boys would be out celebrating, the night he could be sure he himself wouldn’t be seen from Briscoe Hall: that was tonight, and maybe only tonight. Some fate had insisted he resist Avaric’s invitation out. For now he was mounted on the stable roof, and the wind coursing through the wet leaves of the cranberry and pear trees made a soft fanfare. And there proceeded the girls into their hall-as if they’d been waiting in the corridor until he was properly positioned-as if they’d known he was coming!

Closer up they were not, on the whole, as pretty.

But where was the one?

And pretty or not, they were clear. The fingers they dove into clumps of satin bow, to untie them, the fingers they peeled gloves off with, and worked cunning rows of forty miniature pearl buttons with, the fingers they loaned to each other, at the inside laces and the private places that college boys knew only by mythology! The unexpected tufts of hair-how tender! How marvelously animal like! His hands clenched and unclenched themselves, of their own accord, but hungry for what he hardly knew-and where was she?

“What the hell are you doing up there?”

So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child’s toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was loudly knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices.

“Oh, brilliant,” said the voice. “The trees are dropping their fruits early this year.”

He had a last, lost hope that the person speaking would be his love. He tried to look urbane, though his spectacles had bounced somewhere.

“How do you do,” he said uncertainly, sitting up. “This isn’t how I intended to arrive.”

Barefoot and aproned, she came out from behind an arbor of pink Pertha grapes. It wasn’t she, it wasn’t the one. It was the other one. He could tell even without his glasses. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, trying not to sound devastated.

She had a colander with baby grapes in it, the sour ones used in spring salads. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, coming closer. “I know you.”

“Master Boq, at your service.”

“You mean Master Boq, in my lettuces.” She picked up his spectacles from the runner beans, and handed them back.

“How are you, Miss Elphie?”

“I am not as tart as a grape and not as squished as a lettuce,” she said. “How are you, Master Boq?”

“I am,” he said, “considerably embarrassed. Am I going to get in trouble here?”

“I can arrange it if you like.”

“Don’t go to the effort. I’ll let myself out the way I came in.” He looked up at the pear tree. “Poor thing, I’ve splintered some good-size limbs.”

“Pity the poor tree. Why would you do that to it?”

“Well, I was startled,” he said, “and I had a choice: either flip myself like a wood nymph through the leaves. Or else just climb quietly down on the other side of the stable, into the street, and go back to my life. Which would you choose?”

“Ah, that’s the question,” she said, “but I’ve always learned that the first thing to do is deny the question’s validity. Myself, being startled, I would neither climb quietly streetward, nor would I trip noisily treeward and lettuce bound. I would turn myself inside out to make myself lighter, I would hover until the air pressure outside me had stabilized. Then I would let the underside of my skin settle, one toe at a time, back on the roof.”

“And would you then reverse your skin?” he said, entertained.

“Depends on who was standing there and what they wanted, and whether I minded. Also depends on what color the underside of my skin turns out to be. Never having reversed myself, you know, I can’t be sure. I always thought it might be horrid to be pink and white like a piglet.”

“It often is,” said Boq. “Especially in the shower. You feel like an

underdone-” But he stopped. The nonsense was becoming too personal. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I startled you and I didn’t mean to.”

“You were looking at the tops of the fruit trees, examining the new growth, I assume?” she said, amused.

“Indeed,” he answered coldly.

“Did you see the tree of your dreams?”

“The tree of my dreams is of my dreams, and I don’t speak of that to my friends nor to you, whom I hardly know.”

“Oh, but you know me. We were in a child play set together, you reminded me when we met last year. Why, we’re nearly brother and sister. You can certainly describe your favorite tree to me, and I’ll tell you if I know where she grows.”

“You mock me, Miss Elphie.”

“Well, that I don’t mean to do, Boq.” She used his name without the honorific in a gentle way, as if to underscore her comment about their being like siblings. “I suspect you want to know about Miss Galinda, the Gillikinese girl you met at Madame Morrible’s poetry slaughter last autumn.”

“Perhaps you do know me better than I thought.” He sighed. “Could I hope she thinks of me?”

“Well, you could hope,” said Elphaba. “It would be more efficient to ask her and have done with it. At least you’d know.”

“But you’re a friend of hers, aren’t you? Don’t you know?”

“You don’t want to rely on what I know or not,” said Elphaba, “or what I say I know. I could be lying. I could be in love with you, and betray my roomie by lying about her-“

“She’s your roomie?”

“You’re very surprised at that?”

“Well-no-just-just pleased.”

“The cooks will be wondering what dialogues with the asparagus I’m having now,” Elphaba said. “I could arrange to bring Miss Galinda here some evening if you like. Sooner rather than later, so as to kill your joy the more neatly and entirely. If that is what’s to happen,” she said, “but as I say, how do I know? If I can’t predict what we’ll have for pudding, how can I predict someone’s affections?”

They set a date for three nights hence, and Boq thanked Elphaba fervently, shaking her hand so hard his spectacles jounced on his nose. “You’re a dear old friend, Elphie, even if I haven’t seen you in fifteen years,” he said, giving her back her name without its honorific. She withdrew beneath the boughs of the pear trees and disappeared down the walkway. Boq found his way out of the kitchen garden and back to his room, and reviewed his books again, but the problem wasn’t solved, no, not solved. It was exacerbated. He couldn’t concentrate. He was still awake to hear the noisy clatterings, the hushings, the crashings, and the muttered ballatherings, when the drunken boys returned to Briscoe Hall.

Avaric had left for the summer, once the exams were done, and Boq either had flimflammed his way through or disgraced himself, in which case there was little to lose now. This first rendezvous with Galinda might be the last. Boq bothered with his clothes more than usual, and got an opinion on how to fix his hair from the new look in the cafes (a thin white ribbon around the crown of his head, pulling his hair straight from the nub, so that it burst into curls beneath, like froth exploding from an overturned basin of milk). He cleaned his boots several times over. It was too warm for boots but he had no evening slippers. Make do, make do.

On the appointed evening he retraced his way and, on the stable roof, found that a fruit picker’s ladder had been left leaning up against the wall, so he need not descend through the leaves like a vertiginous chimpanzee. He picked his way carefully down the first few rungs, then jumped manfully the rest of the way, avoiding the lettuces this time. On a bench under the wormnut trees sat Elphaba, her knees drawn casually up to her chest and her bare feet flat on the seat of the bench, and Galinda, whose ankles were crossed daintily and who hid behind a satin fan, and who was looking in the other direction anyway.

“Well, my stars and garters, a visitor,” said Elphaba. “Such a surprise.”

“Good evening, ladies,” he said.

“Your head looks like a hedgehog in shock, what did you do to yourself?” said Elphaba. At least Galinda turned to see, but then she disappeared behind the fan again. Could she be so nervous? Could her heart be faint?

“Well I am part Hedgehog, didn’t I tell you?” said Boq. “On my grandfather’s side. He ended up as cutlets for Ozma’s retinue one hunting season, and a tasty memory for all. The recipe is handed down in the family, pasted into the picture album. Served with cheese and walnut sauce. Mmmm.”

“Are you really?” said Elphaba. She put her chin on her knees. “Really Hedgehog?”

“No, it was a fancy. Good evening, Miss Galinda. It was good of you to agree to meet me again.”

“This is highly improper,” said Gallinda. “For a number of reasons, as you well know, Master Boq. But my roomie would give me no rest until I said yes. I can’t say that I am pleased to see you again.”

“Oh, say it, say it, maybe it’ll make it true,” said Elphaba. “Try it out. He’s not so bad. For a poor boy.”

“I am pleased that you are so taken with me, Master Boq,” said Miss Galinda, working at courtesy. “I am flattered.” She clearly was not flattered, she was humiliated. “But you must see that there can be no special friendship between us. Apart from the matter of my feelings, there are too many social impediments for us to proceed. I only agreed to come so that I could tell you this in person. It seemed only fair.”

“It seemed only fair and it might be fun, too,” said Elphaba. “That’s why I’m hanging around.”

“There’s the issue of different cultures, to start,” said Galinda. “I know you are a Munchkinlander. I am a Gillikinese. I will need to marry one of my own. It is the only way, I’m sorry”-she lowered her fan and lifted her hand, palm out, to stop his protest-“and furthermore you are a farmer, from the agricultural school, and I require a statesman or a banker from Ozma Towers. This is just how things are. Besides,” said Galinda, “you’re too short.”

“What about his subversion of custom by coming here this way, what about his silliness?” said Elphaba.

“Enough,” said Galinda. “That’ll do, Miss Elphaba.”

“Please, you’re too certain of yourself,” said Boq. “If I may behold.”

“You’re not so bold at all,” said Elphaba, “you’re about as bold as tea made from used leaves. You’re embarrassing me with hanging back so. Come on, say something interesting. I’m starting to wish I’d gone to chapel.”

“You’re interrupting,” said Boq. “Miss Elphie, you’ve done a wonderful thing to encourage Miss Galinda to meet me, but I must ask you to leave us alone to sort things out.”

“Neither of you will understand what the other is saying,” said Elphaba calmly. “I’m a Munchkinlander by birth anyway, if not by upbringing, and I’m a girl by accident if not by choice. I’m the natural arbiter between you two. I don’t believe you can get along without me. In fact if I leave the garden you’ll cease to decipher each other’s language entirely. She speaks the tongue of Rich, you speak Clotted Poor. Besides, I paid for this show by wheedling Miss Galinda for three days running. I get to watch.”

“It would be so good of you to stay, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, “I require a chaperone when with a boy.”

“See what I mean?” Elphaba said to Boq.

“Then if you must stay, at least let me talk,” Boq said. “Please let me speak, just for a few minutes, Miss Galinda. What you say is true. You are highborn and I am common. You are Gillikinese and I, Munchkinlander. You have a social pattern to conform to, and so do I. And mine doesn’t include marrying a girl too wealthy, too foreign, too expectant. Marriage isn’t what I came here to propose.”

“See, I’m glad I didn’t leave, this is just getting good,” said Elphaba, but clamped her lips shut when they both glared at her.

“I came here to propose that we meet from time to time, that’s all,” said Boq. “That we meet as friends. That, free of expectations, we come to know each other as dear friends. I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadowlight; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight-“

“This sounds rehearsed,” said Elphaba.

“You are the mythical sea,” he concluded, all his eggs in one basket.

“I’m not much for poetry,” said Galinda. “But you’re very kind.” She had seemed to perk up a little at the compliments. Anyway the fan was moving faster. “I don’t really understand the point of friendship, as

you call it, Master Boq, between unmarried people of our age. It seems- distracting. I can see it might lead to complications, especially as you confess to an infatuation I cannot hope to return. Not in a million years.”

“It’s the age of daring,” said Boq. “It’s the only time we have. We must live in the present. We are young and alive.”

“I don’t know if alive quite covers it,” said Elphaba. “This sounds scripted to me.”

Galinda rapped Elphaba on the head with her fan, which folded smartly up and opened just as neatly again, an elegant practiced gesture that impressed all of them. “You’re being tiresome, Miss Elphie. I appreciate your company but I didn’t request a running commentary. I’m perfectly capable of deciding the merits of Master Boq’s recital myself. Let me consider his stupid idea. Lurline above, I can hardly hear myself think!”

Losing her temper, Galinda was prettier than ever. So that old saw was true, too. Boq was learning so much about girls! Her fan was dropping. Was that a good sign? If she hadn’t had some affection for him, would she have worn a dress with a neckline that dipped just a tad lower than he had dared hope? And there was the essence of rose water on her. He felt a surge of possibility, an inclination to rub his lips on the place where her shoulder became her neck.

“Your merits,” she was saying. “Well, you’re brave, I suppose, and clever, to have figured this out. If Madame Morrible ever found you here we’d be in severe trouble. Of course you might not know that, so scratch the bravery part. Just clever. You’re clever and you’re sort of, oh, well, I mean to look at-“

“Handsome?” suggested Elphaba. “Dashing?”

“You’re fun to look at,” decided Galinda.

Boq’s face fell. “Fun?” he said.

“I’d give a lot to achieve fun,” Elphaba said. “The best I usually hope for is stirring, and when people say that they’re usually referring to digestion-“

“Well, I might be all or none of the things you say,” said Boq staunchly, “but you will learn that I am persistent. I will not let you say no to our friendship, Galinda. It means too much to me.”

“Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate,” said Elphaba. “See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she

organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?”

“Elphaba!” they both cried at her.

“My word, duckie!” said a voice behind them, and all three turned. It was some middle-aged minder in a striped apron, her thinning gray hair twisted in a knot on her head. “What are you getting yourself up to?”

“Ama Clutch!” Galinda said. “How did you think to look for me here?”

“That Tsebra cook told me some yacky-yacky was going on out here. You think they’re blind in there? Now who is this? This don’t look good at all, not to me.”

Boq stood. “I am Master Boq of Rush Margins, Munchkinland. I am nearly a third-year fellow at Briscoe Hall.”

Elphaba yawned. “Is this show over?”

“Well, I am shocked! A guest don’t get shown into the vegetable garden, so I guess you arrived uninvited! Sir, get yourself gone from here before I be calling the porters to remove you!”

“Oh, Ama Clutch, don’t make a scene,” said Galinda, sighing.

“He’s hardly developed enough to worry about,” pointed out Elphaba. “Look, he’s still beardless. And from that we can deduce-“

Boq said in a rush, “Perhaps this is all wrong. I did not come here to be abused. Forgive me, Miss Galinda, if I have failed even to amuse you. As for you, Miss Elphaba”-his voice was as cold as he could make it, and that was colder than he’d ever heard it himself-“I was wrong to have trusted in your compassion.”

“Wait and see,” said Elphaba. “Wrong takes an awful long time to be proven, in my experience. Meanwhile, why don’t you come back sometime?”

“There is no second time to this,” said Ama Clutch, tugging at Galinda, who was proving as sedentary as set cement. “Miss Elphaba, shame on you for encouraging this scandal.”

“Nothing here has been perpetrated but badinage, and bad badinage at that,” said Elphaba. “Miss Galinda, you’re mighty stubborn there. You’re planting yourself in the vegetable garden for good in the hopes that this Boy Visitation might occur again? Have we misread your interest?”

Galinda stood at last with some dignity. “My dear Master Boq,” she said, as if dictating, “it was ever my intention to dissuade you from pursuing me, in romantic attachment or even in friendship, as you put it. I had

not meant to bruise you. It is not in my nature.” At this Elphaba rolled her eyes, but for once kept her mouth shut, perhaps because Ama Clutch had dug her fingernails into Elphaba’s elbow. “I will not deign to arrange another meeting like this. As Ama Clutch reminds me, it is beneath me.” Ama Clutch hadn’t exactly said that, but even so, she nodded grimly. “But if our paths cross in a legitimate way, Master Boq, I will do you the courtesy at least of not ignoring you. I trust you will be satisfied with that.”

“Never,” said Boq with a smile, “but it’s a start.”

“And now good evening,” said Ama Clutch on behalf of them all, and steered the girls away. “Fresh dreams, Master Boq, and don’t come back!”

“Miss Elphie, you were horrible,” he heard Galinda say, while Elphaba twisted around and waved good-bye with a grin he could not clearly read.

So the summer began. Since he passed the exams, Boq was free to plan one last year at Briscoe Hall. Daily he hid himself over to the library at Three Queens, where under the watchful eye of a titanic Rhinoceros, the head archival librarian, he sat cleaning old manuscripts that clearly weren’t looked at more than once a century. When the Rhino was out of the room, he had flighty conversations with the two boys on either side of him, classic Queens boys, full of gibbering gossip and arcane references, teasing and loyal. He enjoyed them when they were in good spirits, and he detested their sulks. Crope and Tibbett. Tibbett and Crope. Boq pretended confusion when they got too arch or suggestive, which seemed to happen about once a week, but they backed off quickly. In the afternoons they would all take their cheese sandwiches by the banks of the Suicide Canal and watch the swans. The strong boys at crew, coursing up and down the canal for summer practice, made Crope and Tibbett swoon and fall on their faces in the grass. Boq laughed at them, not unkindly, and waited for fate to deliver Galinda back into his path.

It wasn’t too long a wait. About three weeks after their vegetable garden liaison, on a windy summer morning, a small earthquake caused some minor damage in the Three Queens library, and the building had to be closed for some patching. Tibbett, Crope, and Boq took their sandwiches, with some beakers of tea from the buttery, and they flopped down

at their favorite place on the grassy banks of the canal. Fifteen minutes later, along came Ama Clutch with Galinda and two other girls.

“I do believe we know you,” said Ama Clutch as Galinda stood demurely a step behind. In cases such as these it was the servant’s duty to elicit names from the strangers in the group, so that they might greet each other personally. Ama Clutch registered out loud that they were Masters Boq, Crope, and Tibbett, meeting Misses Galinda, Shenshen, and Pfannee. Then Ama Clutch moved a few feet away to allow the young people to address one another.

Boq leaped up and gave a small bow, and Galinda said, “As in line with my promise, Master Boq, may I enquire how you’re keeping?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Boq.

“He’s ripe as a peach,” said Tibbett.

“He’s downright luscious, from this angle,” said Crope, sitting a few steps behind, but Boq turned and glared so fiercely that Crope and Tibbett were chastened, and fell into a mock sulk.

“And you, Miss Galinda?” continued Boq, searching her well-composed face. “You are well? How thrilling to see you in Shin for the summer.” But that wasn’t the right thing to say. The better girls went home for the summer, and Galinda as a Gillikinese must feel it deeply that she was stuck here, like a Munchkinlander or a commoner! The fan came up. The eyes went down. The Misses Shenshen and Pfannee touched her shoulders in mute sympathy. But Galinda sallied on.

“My dear friends the Misses Pfannee and Shenshen are taking a house for the month of Highsummer on the shores of Lake Chorge. A little fantasy house near the village of Neverdale. I’ve decided to make my holiday there instead of taking that tiresome trek back to the Pertha Hills.”

“How refreshing.” He saw the beveled edges of her lacquered fingernails, the moth-colored eyelashes, the glazed and buffed softness of cheek, the sensitive tuck of skin just at the cleft of her upper lip. In the summer morning light, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.

“Steady,” said Crope, and he and Tibbett jumped up and they each caught Boq by an elbow. He then remembered to breathe. He couldn’t think of anything else to say though, and Ama Clutch was turning her handbag around and around in her hand.

“So we’ve got jobs,” said Tibbett, to the rescue. “The Three Queens library. We’re housekeeping the literature. We’re the cleaning maids of culture. Are you working, Miss Galinda?”

“I should think not,” said Galinda. “I need a rest from my studies. It has been a harrowing year, harrowing. My eyes are still tired from reading.”

“How about you girls?” said Crope, outrageously casual. But they only giggled and demurred and inched away. This was their friend’s encounter, not theirs. Boq, regaining his composure, could feel the group beginning to shift itself into motion again. “And Miss Elphie?” he enquired, to hold them there. “How is your roomie?”

“Headstrong and difficult,” said Galinda severely, for the first time speaking in a normal voice, not the faint social whisper. “But, thank Lurline, she’s got a job, so I get some relief. She’s working in the lab and the library under our Doctor Dillamond. Do you know of him?”

“Doctor Dillamond? Do I know of him?” said Boq. “He’s the most impressive biology tutor in Shiz.”

“By the by,” said Galinda, “he’s a Goat.”

“Yes, yes. I wish he would teach us. Even our professors acknowledge his prominence. Apparently, years ago, back in the reign of the

Regent, and before, he used to be invited annually to lecture at Briscoe

Hall. But the restrictions changed even that, so I’ve never really met him.

Just to see him at that poetry evening, last year, so briefly, was a treat-“

“Well he does go on,” said Galinda. “Brilliant he may be, but he has no sense of when he’s become tedious. Anyway, Miss Elphie’s hard at work, doing something or other. She will go on about it, too. I think it’s contagious!”

“Well, a lab, it breeds things,” said Crope.

“Yes,” said Tibbett, “and incidentally may I add that you’re every bit as lovely as Boq gushes you are. We’d put it down to an overactive imagination born of affectional and physical frustration-“

“You know,” said Boq, “between your Miss Elphie and my erstwhile friends here, we have no real hope of friendship at all. Shall we organize a duel and kill each other instead? Count off ten paces, turn and shoot? It would save so much bother.”

But Galinda didn’t approve of such joking. She nodded in a dismissive way, and the group of females moved out along the graveled path, following the curve of the canal. Miss Shenshen was heard to say in a deep, breathy voice, “Oh, my dear, he is sweet, in a toylike way.”

The voice faded out, Boq turned to rail at Crope and Tibbett, but they fell to tickling him and they all collapsed in a heap on the remains of their lunch. And since there was no hope in changing them, Boq abandoned the impulse to correct his friends. Really, what difference did their callow banter make if Miss Galinda found him so impossible?

A week or two later, on his afternoon off, Boq took himself in to Railway Square. He lingered at a kiosk, staring. Cigarettes, ersatz love charms, naughty drawings of women undressing, and scrolls painted with lurid sunsets, overladen with one-line inspirational slogans. “Lurline Lives on Within Each Heart.” “Safe Keep the Wizard’s Laws, and the Wizard’s Laws Will Keep You Safe.” “I Pray to the Unnamed God That Justice Will Walk Abroad in Oz.” Boq noted the variety: the pagan, the authoritarian, and the old-fashioned unionist impulses.

But nothing directly sympathetic to the royalists, who had gone underground in the sixteen harsh years since the Wizard had first wrested power from the Ozma Regent. The Ozma line had been Gillikinese originally, and surely there were active pockets of resistance to the Wizard? But Gillikin had, in fact, thrived under the Wizard, so the royalists kept mum. Besides, everyone had heard the rumors of strict court action against turncoats and peristrophists.

Boq bought a broadsheet published out of the Emerald City-several weeks old, but it was the first he’d seen in some time-and he settled down at a cafe. He read about the Emerald City Home Guard suppressing some Animal dissenters, who were making a nuisance of themselves in the palace gardens. He looked for news of the provinces, and found a filler about Munchkinland, which continued experiencing near-drought conditions; occasional thunderbursts would drench the ground, but the water would run off or sink uselessly into the clay. They said that hidden subterranean lakes underlay the Vinkus region, that water resources there could serve the whole of Oz. But the idea of a canal system across the entire country made everyone laugh. The expense! There was great disagreement between the Eminences and the Emerald City as to what was to be done.

Secession, thought Boq seditiously, and looked up to see Uphaba, alone, without even a nanny or Ama, standing over him.

“What a delicious expression you have on your face, Boq,” she said. “It’s much more interesting than love.”

“It is love, in a way,” said Boq, then remembered himself, and leaped to his feet. “Won’t you join me? Please, take a seat. Unless you’re worried about being unchaperoned.”

She sat down, looking a bit etiolated, and allowed him to call for a cup of mineral tea. She had a parcel in brown paper and string under her arm. “A few trinkets for my sister,” she said. “She’s like Miss Galinda, she loves the fancy outside of things. I found a Vinkus shawl in the bazaar, red roses on a black background, with black and green fringe. I’m sending it to her, and a pair of striped stockings that Ama Clutch knitted for me.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” he said. “Was she in the play group we were in together?”

“She’s three years younger,” Elphaba said. “She’ll come to Crage Hall before long.”

“Is she as difficult as you are?”

“She’s difficult in a different way. She’s crippled, pretty severely, is my Nessarose, so she’s a handful. Even Madame Morrible doesn’t quite know the extent of it. But by then I’ll be a third-year girl and will have the nerve to stand up to the Head, I guess. If anything gives me nerve, it’s people making life hard for Nessarose. Life is already hard enough for her.”

“Is your mama raising her?”

“My mother is dead. My father is in charge, nominally.”

“Nominally?”

“He’s religious,” said Elphaba, and made the circling palms gesture that indicated you could grind millstone against millstone all you liked, but there wasn’t any quern in the land that could produce flour if there was no grain to grind.

“It sounds very hard for you all. How did your mama die?”

“She died in childbirth, and this is the end of the personal interview.”

“Tell me about Doctor Dillamond. I hear you’re working for him.”

“Tell me about your amusing campaign for the heart of Galinda the Ice Queen.”

Boq really wanted to hear about Doctor Dillamond, but was derailed by Elphaba’s remark. “I will keep on, Elphie, I will! When I see her I’m so smitten with longing, it’s like fire in my veins. I can’t speak, and the things I think about are like visions. It’s like dreaming. It’s like floating in your dreams.”

“I don’t dream.”

“Tell me, is there any hope? What does she say? Does she ever even imagine that her feelings for me might change?”

Elphaba sat with her two elbows on the table, her hands clasped in front of her face, her two forefingers leaning against each other and against her thin, grayish lips. “You know, Boq,” she said, “the thing is I have become fond of Galinda myself. Behind her starry-eyed love of herself there is a mind struggling to work. She does think about things. When her mind is really working, she could, if led, think on you-even, I suspect, somewhat fondly. I suspect. I don’t know. But when she slides back into herself, I mean into the girl who spends two hours a day curling that beautiful hair, it’s as if the thinking Galinda goes into some internal closet and shuts the door. Or as if she’s in hysterical retreat from things that are too big for her. I love her both ways, but I find it odd. I wouldn’t mind leaving myself behind if I could, but I don’t know the way out.”

“I propose you’re being hard on her, and you’re certainly too forward,” said Boq sternly. “Were she sitting here I think she’d be astounded to hear you speak so freely.”

“I’m just trying to behave as I think a friend should behave. Granted, I haven’t had much practice.”

“Well, I question your friendship with me, If you consider Miss Galinda your friend too, and if that’s how you tear a friend apart in her absence.”

Though Boq was irritated, he found that this was a more lively discussion than the conventional patter he and Galinda had so far exchanged. He didn’t want to burn Elphaba off with criticism. “I’m ordering you another mineral tea,” he said, in an authoritative voice, his father’s voice in fact, “and then you can tell me about Doctor Dillamond.”

“Skip the tea, I’m still nursing this one and you have no more money than I do, I bet,” said Elphaba, “but I’ll tell you about Doctor Dillamond. Unless you are too affronted at the slice and angle of my opinions.”

“Please, perhaps I am wrong,” said Boq. “Look, it’s a nice day, we’re both off the campus. How do you come to be out alone, by the way? Is your escape sanctioned by Madame Morrible?”

“Take a guess about that,” she said, “Once it was clear that you could come and go from Crage Hall by way of the vegetable garden and the roof of the adjacent stable, I decided I could too. I’m never missed.”

“That’s hard for me to believe,” said he, daringly, “for you’re not the kind who blends into the woodwork. Now tell me about Doctor Dillamond. He’s my Idol.”

She sighed, and set the package down on the table at last, and settled in for a long chat. She told him about Doctor Dillamond’s work in natural essences, trying to determine by scientific method what the real differences were between animal and Animal tissue, and between Animal and human tissue. The literature on the matter, she had learned from doing the legwork herself, was all couched in unionist terms, and pagan terms before that, and they didn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. “Don’t forget Shiz University was originally a unionist monastery,” said Elphaba, “so despite the anything-goes attitude among the educated elite, there are still bedrocks of unionist bias.”

“But I’m a unionist,” said Boq, “and I don’t see the conflict. The Unnamed God is accommodating to many ranges of being, not just human. Are you talking about a subtle bias against Animals, interwoven into early unionist tracts, and still in operation today?”

“That’s certainly what Doctor Dillamond thinks. And he’s a unionist himself. Explain that paradox and I’d be glad to convert. I admire the Goat intensely. But the real interest of it to me is the political slant. If he can isolate some bit of the biological architecture to prove that there isn’t any difference, deep down in the invisible pockets of human and Animal flesh-that there’s no difference between us-or even among us, if you take in animal flesh too-well, you see the implications.”

“No,” said Boq, “I don’t think I do.”

“How can the Banns on Animal Mobility be upheld if Doctor Dillamond can prove, scientifically, that there isn’t any inherent difference between humans and Animals?”

“Oh, now that’s a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future,” said Boq.

“Think about it,” said Elphaba. “Think, Boq. On what grounds could the Wizard possibly continue to publish those Banns?”

“How could he be persuaded not to? The Wizard has dissolved the Hall of Approval indefinitely. I don’t believe, Elphie, that the Wizard is open to entertaining arguments, even by as august an Animal as Doctor Dillamond.”

“But of course he must be. He’s a man in power, it’s his job to consider changes in knowledge. When Doctor Dillamond has his proof, he’ll write to the Wizard and begin to lobby for change. No doubt he’ll do his best to let Animals the land over know what he’s intending, too. He isn’t a fool.”

“Well I didn’t say he was a fool,” said Boq. “But how close do you think he is to getting firm evidence?”

“I am a student handmaid,” said Elphaba. “I don’t even understand what he means. I’m only a secretary, an amanuensis-you know he can’t write things himself, he can’t manage a pen with his hoofs. I take dictation and I file and I dash to the Crage Hall library and look things up.”

“Briscoe Hall library would be a better place to hunt for that kind of material,” said Boq. “Even Three Queens, where I work this summer, has stacks of documents from the monks’ observations of animal and vegetable life.”

“I know I am not traditionally presented,” said Elphaba, “but I believe on the grounds of being a girl I am excluded from the Briscoe Hall library. And on the grounds of being an Animal so too, now at least, is Doctor Dillamond. So those valuable resources are off limits to us.”

“Well,” said Boq carelessly, “if you knew exactly what you wanted . I have access to the stacks in both collections.”

“And when the good Doctor is finished ferreting out the difference between Animals and people, I will propose he apply the same arguments to the differences between the sexes,” said Elphaba. Then she registered what Boq had said, and stretched out her hand, almost as if to touch him. “Oh Boq. Boq. On behalf of Doctor Dillamond, I accept your generous offer of help. I’ll get the first list of sources to you within the week. Just leave my name out of it. I don’t care so much about incurring Horrible Morrible’s wrath against myself, but I don’t want her taking out her annoyance on my sister, Nessarose.”

She downed the last of her tea, gathered her parcel, and had sprung up almost before Boq could pull himself to his feet. Various customers, lingering over their elevenses with their own broadsheets or novellas, looked up at the ungainly girl pushing out the doors. As Boq settled back down, hardly yet registering what he had gotten himself into, he realized, slowly but thoroughly, that this morning there were no Animals taking their morning tea in here. No Animals at all.

In years to come-and Boq would live a long life-he would remember the rest of the summer as scented with the must of old books, when ancient script swam before his eyes. He sleuthed alone in the musty stacks, he hovered over the mahogany drawers lined with vellum manuscripts. All season long, it seemed, the lozenge-paned windows between bluestone mullions and transoms misted over again and again with flecks of small but steady rain, almost as brittle and pesky as sand. Apparently the rain never made it as far as Munchkinland-but Boq tried not to think about that.

Crope and Tibbett were coerced into researching for Doctor Dillamond, too. At first they had to be dissuaded from going about their forays in costumes of disguise-fake pince-nez, powdered wigs, cloaks with high collars, all to be found in the well-stocked locker of the Three Queens Student Theatrical and Terpsichorean Society. But when convinced of the seriousness of the mission, they fell to with gusto. Once a week they met Boq and Elphaba in the cafe in Railway Square. Elphaba showed up, during these misty weeks, entirely swathed in a brown cloak with a hood and veil that hid all but her eyes. She wore long, frayed gray gloves that she boasted buying secondhand from a local undertaker, cheap for having been used in funeral services. She sheathed her bamboo-pole legs in a double thickness of cotton stocking. The first time Boq saw Elphaba like this, he said, “I just barely manage to convince Crope and Tibbett to lose the espionage drag, and you come in looking like the original Kumbric Witch.”

“I don’t dress for your approval, boys,” she said, shucking her cloak and folding it inside out so that the wet wool never touched her. On the

occasion when another care patron would come through, shaking water off an umbrella, Elphaba always recoiled, flinching if she was caught by even a scattering of drops.

“Is that religious conviction, Elphie, that you keep yourself so dry?” said Boq.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I’m beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.”

“Hence,” observed Crope, “your aversion to all water. Without your knowing it, it might be a baptismal splash, and then your liberty as a free-range agnostic would be curtailed.”

“I thought you were too self-absorbed to notice my spiritual pathology,” said Elphaba. “Now, boys, what’ve we got today?”

Every time, Boq thought: Would that Galinda were here. For the casual camaraderie that grew up among them during these weeks was so refreshing-a model of ease and even wit. Against convention they had dropped the honorifics. They interrupted one another and laughed and felt bold and important because of the secrecy of their mission. Crope and Tibbett cared little about Animals or the Banns-they were both Emerald City boys, sons, respectively, of a tax collector and of a palace security advisor-but Elphaba’s passionate belief in the work enlivened them. Boq himself grew more involved, too. He imagined Galinda drawing her chair up with them, losing her upper-crust reserve, allowing her eyes to glow with a shared and secret purpose.

“I thought I knew all the shapes of passion,” Elphaba said one bright afternoon. “I mean, growing up with a unionist minister for a father. You come to expect that theology is the fundament on which all other thought and belief is based. But boys!-this week, Doctor Dillamond made some sort of a scientific breakthrough. I’m not sure what it was, but it involved manipulating lenses, a pair of them, so he could peer at bits of tissue that he had laid on a transparent glass and backlit by candlelight. He began to dictate, and he was so excited that he sang his findings; he composed arias out of what he was seeing! Recitatives about structure, about color, about the basic shapes of organic life. He has a horrible sandpapery voice, as you might imagine for a Goat;

but how he warbled! Tremolo on the annotations, vibrato on the interpretations, and sostenuto on the implications: long, triumphant open vowels of discovery! I was sure someone would hear. I sang with him, I read his notes back to him like a student of musical composition.”

The good Doctor was emboldened by his findings, and he required that their digging become more and more focused. He did not want to announce any breakthroughs until he had figured out the most politically advantageous way to present them. Toward the end of the summer the push was on to find Lurlinist and early unionist disquisitions on how the Animals and the animals had been created and differentiated. “It’s not a matter of uncovering a scientific theory by a prescientific company of unionist monks or pagan priests and priestesses,” explained Elphaba. “But Doctor Dillamond wants to authenticate the way our ancestors thought about this. The Wizard’s right to impose unjust laws may be better challenged if we know how the old codgers explained it to themselves.”

It was an interesting exercise.

“In one form or another, we all know some of the origin myths that predate the Oziad,” said Tibbett, throwing his blond bangs back with a theatrical flourish. “The most coherent one has our dear putative Fairy Queen Lurline on a voyage. She was tired of travel in the air. She stopped and called from the desert sands a font of water hidden deep beneath the earth’s dry dunes. The water obeyed, in such abundance that the land of Oz in all its febrile variety sprang up almost instantly. Lurline drank herself into a stupor and went for a long rest on the top of Mount Runcible. When she awoke, she relieved herself copiously, and this became the Gillikin River, running around the vast tracts of the Great Gillikin Forest and skirting through the eastern edges of the Vinkus, and coming to a stop at Restwater. The animals were terricolous and thus of a lower order than Lurline and her retinue. Don’t look at me like that, I know what that word means-I looked it up. It means living on or near the ground.

“The animals had come into their being as rolled clots of earth dislodged from the exuberant plant growth. When Lurline let loose, the animals thought the raging stream was a flood, sent to drown their fresh new world, and they despaired of their existence. In a panic they flung themselves into the torrent and attempted to swim through Lurline’s urine. Those who became intimidated and turned back remained animals,

beasts of burden, slaughtered for flesh, hunted for fun, counted as profit, admired as innocent. Those who swam on and made it to the farther shore were given the gifts of consciousness and language.”

“What a gift, to be able to imagine your own death,” muttered Crope.

“Thus, Animals. Convention, as long ago as history can remember, divides the animals and Animals.”

“Baptism by piss,” said Elphaba. “Is that a subtle way both to explain the talents of Animals and to denigrate them at the same time?”

“And what of the animals who drowned?” asked Boq. “They must have been the real losers.”

“Or the martyrs.”

“Or the ghosts who live underground now and stop up the water supply so the fields of Munchkinland dry up today.”

They all laughed and had more tea brought to the table.

“I’ve found some later scriptures with a more unionist slant,” Boq said. “They tell a story that I guess would be derived from the pagan narrative, but it has been cleaned up some. The flood, occurring sometime after creation and before the advent of humankind, wasn’t a massive piss by Lurline, but the sea of tears wept by the Unnamed God on the god’s only visit to Oz. The Unnamed God perceived the sorrow that would overwhelm the land throughout time, and bawled in pain. The whole of Oz was a mile deep in saltwater tides. The animals kept afloat by means of the odd log, the uprooted tree. Those who swallowed enough of the tears of the Unnamed God were imbued with a fulsome sympathy for their kin, and they began to construct rafts from the flotsam. They saved their kind out of mercy, and from their kindness they became a new, sentient lot: the Animals.”

“Another kind of baptism, from within,” said Tibbett. “Ingestion. I like it.”

“But what of the pleasure faith?” said Crope. “Can a witch or a sorcerer take an animal and, through a spell, create an Animal?”

“Well, that’s the thing I’ve been looking into,” said Elphaba. “The pleasure fathers-the fathers-say that if anything-Lurline or the Unnamed God-could have done it once, magic could do it again. They even hint that the original distinction between Animals and animals was a Kumbric Witch spell, so strong and enduring it has never worn off. This

a thing as a Kumbric Witch, let alone if there ever was. Myself, I think it’s

a part of the Lurlinist cycle that’s gotten detached and developed independently. Arrant nonsense. We have no proof that magic is so strong-“

“We have no proof that god is so strong,” interrupted Tibbett.

“Which strikes me as being as good an argument against god as it is against magic,” said Elphaba, “but never mind that. The point is, if it is an enduring Kumbric spell, centuries old, it may be reversible. Or it may be perceived to be reversible, which is just as bad. In the interim, while sorcerers are at work experimenting with charms and spells, the Animals lose their rights, one by one. Just slowly enough so that it’s hard to see as a coherent political campaign. It’s a dicey scenario, and one that Doctor Dillamond hasn’t figured out-“

At this point Elphaba hitched the loose part of her cloak up over her head, and disappeared into the shadows of Its folds. “What?” said Boq, but she put a finger to her lips. Crope and Tibbett, as if on cue, launched into some silly banter about their professional goals of being abducted by pirates of the desert and made to dance the fandango dressed only in slave shackles. Boq saw nothing amiss: A couple of clerks reading the racing forms, some genteel ladies with their lemonades and novellas, a tiktok creature buying coffee beans by the pound, a parody of an old professor figuring out some theorem by arranging and rearranging some sugar cubes along the edge of his butter knife.

A few minutes later, Elphaba relaxed. “That tiktok thing works at Crage Hall. I think it’s called Grommetik. Usually it shadows Madame Morrible like a lovesick puppy. I don’t think it saw me.”

But she was too jittery to continue the conversation, and after she made sure their next assignments were clear, the crew disbanded into the misty streets.

Two weeks before Briscoe Hall reconvened for the new semester, Avaric returned from his home, the seat of the Margreave of Tenmeadows. He was bronzed with summer leisure and eager for fun. He mocked Boq for having struck up friendships with boys from Three

Queens, and under other circumstances Boq would probably have let his new alliance with Crope and Tibbett lapse. But they were all engaged in Doctor Dillamond’s research now, and Boq just put up with Avaric’s taunting.

Elphaba remarked one day that she had had a letter from Galinda, away with her friends on Lake Chorge. “Can you believe it, she proposed I take a coach and come visit for a weekend,” said Elphaba. “She must really be bored out of her mind with those society girls.”

“But she’s society herself, how could she be bored?” asked Boq.

“Don’t ask me to explain the nuances of that circle,” said Elphaba, “but I suspect that our Miss Galinda isn’t quite as society as she makes out.”

“Well, Elphie, when are you going?” asked Boq.

“Never,” said Elphaba. “This work is too important.”

“Let me see the letter.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Bring it to me.”

“What are you on about?”

“Maybe she needs you. She always seems to need you.”

“She needs me?” Elphaba laughed, coarsely, loudly. “Well I know you’re besotted and I feel somewhat responsible. I’ll show you the letter next week. But I’m not going to go just to give you a vicarious thrill, Boq. Friend or no friend.”

The next week she unfolded the letter.

My dear Miss Elphaba,

I am bade to write to you by my hostesses the Misses Pfannee of Pfann Hall and Shenshen of the Minkos Clan. We are having a lovely summer at Lake Chorge. The air is calm and sweet and all is as pleasant as anything. If you would like to visit us for three or four days before school begins, we know you have been hard at work all summer and so. A little change. If you would like to come no need to write if you would like to visit. Just arrive by coach at Neverdale and come by foot or hire a hansom cab, it’s just a mile or two by the bridge. The house is dear, covered in roses and ivy, it s called the Caprice-in-the-Pines. Who wouldn’t love it here! I do hope you can come! I do very

specially hope so for reasons I dare not write. I cannot advise you as to chaperones as .Alina Clutch is already here and so is Ama and Ama Vimp. You can decide. We hope for long hours of amusing conversation. Ever your loving friend,

Miss Galinda

of the Arduennas of the Upland

33 Highsummer, midday

at “Caprice-in-the-Pines”

“But you must go!” Boq cried. “Look how she writes to you!”

“She writes like someone who doesn’t write very often,” Elphaba observed.

“I do hope you can come!’ she says. She needs you, Elphie. I insist that you go!”

“Oh you do? Why don’t you go then?” said Elphaba.

“I hardly can go without having been invited.”

“Well that’s easy enough. I’ll write and tell her to invite you.” Elphaba reached for a pencil in her pocket.

“Don’t patronize me, Miss Elphaba,” said Boq sternly. “This must be taken seriously.”

“You are lovesick and deluded,” said Elphaba. “And I don’t like your retreating back to ‘Miss Elphaba’ to punish me for disagreeing with you. Besides, I can’t go. I have no chaperone.”

“I’ll be your chaperone.”

“Hah! As if Madame Morrible would allow that!”

“Well-how about”-Boq tossed it around-“how about my friend Avaric? He’s the son of a margreave. He’s spotless by virtue of his station. Even Madame Momble would quail before a margreave’s son.”

“Madame Morrible wouldn’t quail before a hurricane. Besides, have you no concern for me? I don’t feel like traveling with this Avaric.”

“Elphie,” said Boq, “you owe me. I’ve been helping you out all summer, and I’ve had Crope and Tibbett helping too. Now you have to pay me back. You ask Doctor Dillamond for a few days off, and I’ll ask Avaric, who is bursting to do something. The three of us will go to Lake Chorge. Avaric and I will rent a room in an inn, and we’ll stay a very short time. Just long enough to make sure that Miss Galinda is all right.”

“It’s you I’m worried about, not her,” said Elphaba, and Boq could see that he had won.

Madame Momble would not release Elphaba in the care of Avaric. “Your dear father would never forgive me,” she said. “But I am not the Horrible Morrible you think of me. Oh yes, I know your little pet names for me, Miss Elphaba. Amusing and juvenile! I am concerned for your welfare. And with all your hard work all summer, I see that you have grown, oh, shall we say, verdigrisian? So I shall make a compromise proposal. Provided that you can convince Master Avaric and Master Boq to travel with you and my own little Grommetik, whom I will loan in your care and to care for you, I shall permit your little summer fun.”

Elphaba, Boq, and Avaric rode in the coach, and Grommetik was made to ride on top with the luggage. Elphaba met Boq’s eyes from time to time, grimacing, but she ignored Avaric, to whom she had taken an instant dislike.

When he had finished with the pages of his racing form, Avaric teased Boq about this trip. “I should have known when I left for the summer that you were mooning about in the throes of love! You developed this serious set of chin, it misled me. I thought it was consumption at least. You should have come out with me that night before I left! A visit to the Philosophy Club would have been just what the doctor ordered.”