#oz project

Nick went home to the Winkies, and Scarecrow went with him. I’m not sure what happened to the Wogglebug; I really don’t care. My first and so far only act as Queen was to have the Gump disassembled. I don’t have the guts or the power to un-bring him to life like I think he wants, even if the horror of it all is really relatable. I separated him from the unfamiliar body he woke up in, at least. Mombi’s probably in some prison, but Glinda won’t tell me where. I’ve asked, but she just gets all sad and starts talking about how I’m traumatized and confused.

So there’s only Jack and the Sawhorse left. The Sawhorse is fine. He’s being pampered down in the stables. But Jack—pumpkins spoil. I know that, I’m not stupid. I’m still a farm boy, even if it was all a spell, and I’m supposed to be this awful girl, really. Pumpkins spoil. He wouldn’t shut up about it from the moment he figured it out—this isn't a surprise.

It’s only been a couple weeks.

It isn't fair. He’s all I have left from home—really from home—we picked up the Sawhorse on the way. I don’t even have my body anymore, or my hat, or the pants Mombi said I’d grow into but now I guess I never will—I lost everything. Everything. And pumpkins spoil.

He’s still alive, technically. But his head is all mushy, so bad you can see bits of it dripping off if you hang out for a few minutes. And he can’t really talk anymore, not so it makes any sense, and I don’t think he recognizes me.

Which is fair, because I sure don’t recognize me either.

Glinda comes by every couple days to check on me. I ignore her as much as I can. She’s talking about a party, after I’ve adjusted. Only she seems to think that “after I’ve adjusted” should have been about a week ago now.

It’s only been, what, two weeks? Three? Less than the lifespan of a pumpkin.

Jellia walks in on me saying some very unprincessy words. She doesn’t say anything about it.

-

“The people want to know their leader,” Glinda says. Which is hilarious, because it’s pretty damn clear I’m not in charge of anything here. “Don’t tell anyone where you came from,” she said. “You’re Ozma now; I don’t want to hear the name Tip again.” “Pants are inappropriate for queens.” “That language is inappropriate for girls.”

I don’t know why she doesn’t just crown herself and let me go home.

“I don’t care what the people want,” I tell her, because I’ve just put on a dress and dragged my stupid girly body down the hall to see Jack, and it’s worse than ever, and ignoring Glinda is just not good enough today. I feel like a fight.

Glinda sighs, because she is a Sorceress and won’t stoop to my level. “I know you’ve been through a traumatic experience, Ozma, but lingering is not the answer. It’s over, and your life will only improve from now. I understand it’s an adjustment, but this is all for the better. You’ll see, with time.”

It’s impossible to pick a fight with someone like Glinda. I turn away, because my stupid girl eyes are constantly trying to cry, and I hate when she sees.

“I just don’t know what you want from me, Ozma.”

“Fix Jack.”

“Excuse me?”

I turn to look at her again. “Fix Jack, and I’ll do whatever you want. The party, the queen thing, the girl thing, whatever. Just make him okay.”

“Is that all? Jellia, come here please.”

Jellia walks right in, and I wonder how long she’s been standing in the doorway, how much she’s heard. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

“Make Ozma presentable, then have her taken to the pumpkin fields. Her friend needs a new head.”

“It’s that easy?” I ask.

“It’s that easy,” Glinda says. She softens a little, looks almost as kind and maternal and sympathetic as I think she wants to seem. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you didn’t know.”

-

Even my hands are different. Even carving a pumpkin is harder. I pick the biggest, orange-est, freshest one, but my hand keeps slipping. His mouth is wider than it should be, and lopsided, and his eyes are crooked. The soldier with green whiskers—the one who was guarding the gate when Jinjur’s army first came—is the one who took me to the pumpkin field. He offers to help, once, but I don’t let him. Jack is mine. If someone else made his face, maybe he wouldn’t be, and I can’t risk that.

He’s all I have left.

I let the soldier carry the pumpkin back to Jack, though, because I’m constantly tripping over this awful skirt, and I don’t want to drop his new head.

I wonder if Glinda would have told me I could fix Jack if I had just asked. If I hadn’t made a deal for it.

Too late now. Gillikins always keep their promises. If I even count as a Gillikin anymore. And it’s not like I really had a choice about all that stuff, anyway. Glinda would have made me, somehow. She’s the most powerful person in Oz. Maybe the most powerful person in Oz ever, now that we know the Wizard was a humbug all along.

Jack reminds me of the old man who used to live across the river. How gone he is, how bad he smells, how his face droops. I take his head off, and it turns into goop and slips through my fingers, landing on the floor with an awful squelching sound.

I take the new head from the soldier and put it on Jack’s neck. I can tell as soon as it connects, even though the carved face doesn’t change, exactly when it stops being a random squash and starts being Jack.

“Tip!” he says.

“Ozma,” I remind him, because the soldier is listening, and I don’t want Jack getting in trouble with Glinda. Not so soon after I almost lost him.

“My head feels funny,” he says, and I start laughing, hysterical, for probably the first time since everything happened.

Nothing is really funny, but Jack starts laughing too, his whole stick body shaking with it, and I catch his head just as it comes flying off.

The soldier helps me really stick it on this time, and I make Jack practice nodding and shaking his head until I’m sure it isn’t going anywhere.

-

Nick and the Scarecrow come back to Emerald City for the party, and they bring the Cowardly Lion with them.

He’s the coolest character from The Witch Who Fell From the Sky. After Dorothy. I never thought I’d actually get to meet him. I never thought I’d get to meet any of them, and it isn’t worth it.

He thinks I’m some stupid girl. Nick and the Scarecrow call me Ozma like it’s normal, like I was never Tip to them, and I hate it. I hate everything here so much.

Glinda helps me get dressed for the party. White dress, gold sandals, long, shiny black hair, clean and untangled. She magics away the circles under my eyes, and the way my cheeks are red and chapped from endless days of crying. She calls me “darling,” and “beautiful girl,” and “my sweet princess,” and I hate her. I hate her.

She makes my finger and toe nails shiny. She makes my lashes longer and darker, my lips redder. But I’m not beautiful, not really, and she can’t make me be. I’m viciously grateful for my sallow skin, my boxy figure, my knobby knees. I was delicate as a boy; as a girl I’m square-jawed and awkward. She can’t make me prettier, she can’t make me more graceful, and she can’t make me look happy.

Well, she could, maybe. Probably. But that would be transformation magic, and transformation is Wicked. That’s what she told me on the second day, when I begged her to change me back. That, and that someday I would understand, and be grateful to her for returning me to my true form.

“You’ll need a crown,” she says, running her fingers through my hair. I think she might be braiding it—the girl down the road always used to wear her hair in braids. “Your mother’s and grandmother’s were lost when the Wizard came.”

“What about my father’s crown?”

“Also lost,” she says, tone sharper. “And too heavy. It wouldn’t have suited you. I have a tiara that will do for the coronation tomorrow; it’s only symbolic.” She takes a step back. “There, dear. See how you look.”

She’s braided my hair into a circle around my head, making a nest for the crown to sit in. I see her in the mirror behind me, smiling. I don’t see myself.

-

I haven’t bothered exploring the palace, or the city, so I have to stick close to Glinda—I don’t know where the party is happening. Maybe I could get lost and miss the whole thing.

Glinda would probably cast a spell to find me. And if this is my life now, running and hiding isn't a great way to start it.

Nick is there as soon as we walk in, and I hug him even though he’s made of metal and really not designed for hugging. The room is huge and gauzy and gaudy, too crowded and too colorful. The Scarecrow comes, and I hug him too—that feels much better.

“Where’s Lion?”

“He’ll be here soon,” Scarecrow says.

“Spend time with your friends,” Glinda says. “I’ll bring along some people to meet you later.”

I don’t want to meet people. But what I want clearly doesn’t matter here. Not really what I expected royalty to be like.

“You look lovely today,” Nick says. Which is not what I want to hear, but I don’t know how to explain that to him. Apparently we’re just pretending that I was never Tip.

“Is Jack here? Have you seen him?”

“A few minutes before you got here,” Scarecrow says. “He was talking to Jellia. Did you make him a new face?”

“Yeah. It’s a little messy. Can we go see him?”

“Of course, Ozma.”

Jack calls me Ozma now too. But at least I had to remind him. At least he still hesitates for a second, remembering. He’s not made for hugging, either—I have to be really gentle. I’m feeling clingy tonight, I guess. These are the only people left who really know who I am. Even if they’re acting like they don’t.

-

Mombi told me that Santa wasn’t real. It turns out she lied. (It turns out she lied about a lot of things. But she was still my mom. At least when she changed me, I was young enough it didn’t hurt me.)

Apparently, the Wizard kept Santa out of Oz. Santa doesn’t say how. He doesn’t say why. He does say that to make up for it, he’s giving me all the Christmas presents I should have had today.

Then he turns around, opens up his sack, and starts pulling out dolls and dresses and jewelry, all things I would never have put on a Christmas list, when I was little and didn’t understand how poor we were, when I still wasted time with things like Christmas lists.

Either Glinda got to him or he’s lying about still seeing my lists, even locked out of Oz like he was. I know I never wanted a porcelain doll in silk skirts. I did have a doll for a while. We had to burn it after a really bad sickness swept through, and I was too old by then to care enough for a new one. But he was burlap, with button eyes, and he got tossed around in the dirt every day. Sometimes he even came swimming. What good would a doll be that was too fancy to play with?

I say thank you, instead of all the things I’m thinking, and move on to the next person Glinda wants me to meet.

There’s kings and queens and princes and princesses from other lands, places I’ve only heard about in ballads. Ev and Mo and Ix and Noland. Gayalette and Quelala live in Gillikin country, not far from home, but I would never have met people like them, before.

I would never have wanted to. Mombi disapproves of Gayalette. She took in Quelala as a child younger than me, and brought him up to be her husband. And she enslaved the Flying Monkeys. But she’s an old friend of Glinda, and Mombi is the one they call a Wicked Witch.

Quelala is nice, in a quiet, distracted way. He’s much older than me now, and much older still than he looks—magic. I don’t know if I ought to feel bad for him or not. I’m too busy feeling bad for myself to bother working it out.

The Rainbow King has sent a few of his daughters, which is apparently an honor. The Nome King didn’t send anybody, which is apparently an expected slight. Glinda whispers all this to me as she makes the introductions.

The Munchkin King is here with his wife, and the Witch of the North—my witch, the Gillikin one—comes for just long enough to meet me. She’s known for not venturing often from her part of Oz.

The most important person of all, Glinda says, is Lulea of Burzee Forest. She’s a fairy, closely related to Lurline—my many-great grandmother, now. No one knows if Lulea is a daughter or a cousin or what, but they say she actually knew Lurline, personally.

She’s very old.

I don’t care. I just don’t care. About any of it. I thought it would be fun, at least, meeting all these famous people I’ve grown up with the songs of, but it’s not me meeting them, at all. I feel trapped inside this body, and so far away from everything, and I barely feel alive at all. I don’t know if it will go away. I don’t know if I want it to—if I can do this, can be a girl, and not want to be dead first, does that mean Glinda was right? Does that mean she wins?

“Psst. Ozma.”

 I turn around—a second too late, because I’m still not used to this being my name. The Cowardly Lion is hiding behind a curtain.

“You look bored. Want to get out of here?”

“Lurline, yes. Please.”

“Get on my back. I’ll take you riding in the woods.”

I met everyone. Santa and Gayalette and half the country. I’ve given Glinda enough for tonight.

We end up deep in the woods. I sit in the moss, leaning against a sappy tree, and stare up at the stars. You can’t see any good stars from my room in the palace.

“You’re staining your dress,” Lion says.

“I don’t give a shit,” I say, and he laughs a rumbly, roary laugh.

“You must be making life interesting for Glinda.”

“I try.”

We sit outside for a while, until a friend of his comes to meet us. The Hungry Tiger, Lion introduces him as.

“Well, why don’t you eat something?” I turn out my pockets—they’re full of bread. I was too nervous to eat, at the party, but Emerald City has such good food, I didn’t want to miss out.

He sighs mournfully. “My appetite can only be sated by fat babies. But no one will ever let me eat any.”

“Babies? You wouldn’t, really, would you?”

“If someone gave him a baby,” Lion says, “the first thing he would do is find it a new set of parents who wouldn’t give it away to hungry tigers.”

“I like you,” I decide. “You should come see us at the palace.”

“I will,” he says, looking pleased, and eats a piece of the bread I dropped.

I fall asleep, and they must carry me back, because I wake up in my new green bed, still dressed in my moss-stained dress, hair falling out of my braids. I only have a few minutes to myself before Glinda and Jellia come to dress me again—today is my coronation.

-

“You disappeared last night,” Scarecrow says.

“I made new friends.”

“Well,” Nick says, “if you’re looking for friends, you must meet Prince Marvel.”

“Why?”

They both lean in closer, and Nick says, very quietly, “He used to be a girl.”

The other way around, but still—I’m not the only one?

Prince Marvel is a very cheerful boy, older than me—maybe Jellia’s age. He has another, grumpier boy with him, who Scarecrow says is his friend Nerle.

“Ozma!” he says. “My little cousin!”

“Cousin?”

He smiles at me. I glance back at Nick and Scarecrow, or try to—I’ve been abandoned. “You’re a fairy princess, Ozma. We’re all your cousins.”

“I’m a fairy?” They didn’t tell me that. I wonder if I was a fairy when I was Tip, too, or if that’s another thing Glinda did to me.

“Of course!” Prince Marvel says.

“And you’re a fairy?” I mostly pictured fairies as pretty young girls.

“Well. Not at the moment. I asked to be turned into a mortal, see, because life was so boring as a fairy.”

“You were a girl fairy.”

“I was.”

“And you don’t mind? Not being a girl anymore?”

“Mind? Why would I mind? Being a boy is so much more fun!”

“Yes,” I agree, looking down at my stupid dress, “it is.”

He laughs. “Oh, I like you! I’m going to ask Lulea to make you a present.”

He wanders away before I can ask him anything else, and then I’m alone until the princess of Noland finds me. She’s even more cheerful than Prince Marvel, her name is Fluff—Fluff!—and she wants to talk about dresses. It’s ages before I can get away, and then Glinda is introducing me to the princess of China Country, which is only cool because she met Dorothy Gale, too.

The coronation isn't so bad. All I have to do is sit there while people—mostly Glinda—talk and talk and talk. I thought the witch of the North went home already, but she’s here again—she, Glinda, Nick, and the Munchkin king, as the rulers of the four realms of Oz, all have lines in my coronation. I only have one—yes. I have to say it a lot.

Lulea is there in Lurline’s name; Glinda said usually it’s my oldest female relative on the royal side, but everyone is dead now.

As soon as the ceremony is over, I dump my shoes and tiara in a flowerpot and go to hide in the gardens, which are huge and poorly kept and exactly like an ancient forest. From there, I watch all the guests leaving the palace.

-

Glinda finds me eventually. She tries to scold me, but I don’t pay enough attention for it to really take. I interrupt her in the middle of a sentence about my new responsibilities.

“That room you put me in. That’s my room now, right? Forever?”

“I suppose so,” she says slowly, because she knows me well enough by now to be cautious.

“If I have to stay there, I want to not feel sick all the time. It’s too green, and it makes me dizzy.”

She looks surprised. “Are you asking for permission to redecorate? Ozma, this is your home. Your kingdom. You can do whatever you want.”

She doesn’t mean it, clearly, because ten minutes later we’re having a fight about my crown.

Glinda says I should have a proper crown. I agree, and I tell her I’m going to design it myself. Get a metalworker on hold for me, and tell him to stock some gold. I’ll get back to you in a couple days.

Just once, couldn’t things be easy? I do get my way in the end. We argue endlessly, but I end up on a garden bench with a pen and paper, sketching my ideas. Sometimes I win.

-

Scarecrow and Lion and Tiger stick around.  And Jack and the Sawhorse, but they don’t have anywhere else to go. I try to spend time with them, doing responsible, royal, girly-type things. But now that my room is open and clear and less green, now that all the mirrors are gone, being there doesn’t make me feel even more terrible anymore. So I spend a lot of time locked up alone, staring out the windows.

Glinda doesn’t like that. She comes in, talks a lot, this big long speech that doesn’t really say anything except that I need a hobby. I stare out the window at the tangled jungle of garden.

“I’ll renovate the gardens,” I tell her. That’s girly enough, and I know there must be secrets there, under a hundred years of neglect.

If I can find them first, they can’t be used to hurt me.

-

I’ve been in the gardens all day now, alone—Glinda’s finally come around to agreeing that I don’t need supervision here, not in my very own gardens, not when I’ve spent all my childhood running across the countryside alone in pants.

I think she tries to pretend it never happened. Sometimes I wish I could do that, too, but I’m Tip, I’ve always been Tip, and I don’t know how to do this Ozma thing.

Couldn’t I have at least kept my name?

She’s given me books of flowers. It’s odd—everything I have and use is sent for specifically by Glinda, but this is a palace, isn’t it? Oughtn’t there to be a library, a whole big room full of books that I can choose from for myself?

There are a lot of odd things here. And Mombi always hated Glinda—she must have had a reason for it. Probably a good one.

The books, anyway, they tell me that this one flower running all over everywhere is called a poppy. It’s red, with a black center, and I like it. There’s probably some fancy metaphorical reason for that—the Scarecrow thinks, at least, that everything has a fancy metaphorical reason, and he’d probably come up with something to explain to me about the poppies if I asked. But I just like them.

Most of what I see, though, isn’t in the books at all. Jellia says that means they’re weeds, and I should pull them all out and put something prettier there instead. Jellia knows that I’m just a dumb little boy, really, or she should, and I don’t know why she thinks I’d care at all what’s pretty. I like the weeds.

Well, some of them. But I guess most of them will have to go, because that’s what you do with weeds, and it’ll look awfully strange if I’m renovating the gardens and leave them all cool and jungley.

Girls are so boring.

I’ll make it work, though. The gardens go on just forever and ever and then some, and I could get lost in here, live in the jungle like I always wanted to when I was little. I don’t think they’d find me.

But I shouldn’t, I guess. Glinda could probably find me anywhere. She probably has something magic stuck to all my clothes so she always knows exactly where I am.

I notice the first building when I’ve been doing it for about a week. Everything’s overgrown all around it, so much you can hardly see, and it’s half falling down. I go to it because it’s really hot out, and I figure old stone buildings are probably sort of cold, but I think it’ll only have old spades and flowerpots and crap in it.

I’m really wrong.

There’s a basement, a dark narrow staircase leading down, half hidden by a large shovel, dank and musty smelling. I make my way down feeling carefully along the damp, rough stone walls, feeling like the bravest of adventurers, imagining the way I’ll present whatever priceless object I’m recovering to the beautiful princess who is its rightful owner, and in return her father will give me her hand and half the kingdom.

And then my dress gets caught on a loose stone in the steps, and I trip over myself and remember what I am now.

The stupid, girly eyes are trying to cry again. I blink it away and keep on down the steps. The dress is torn now, probably. Glinda will ask about it, and I will point out, again, how completely stupid it is to go out and completely rebuild miles of gardens singlehandedly while wearing a thin, pure white dress, when things like worn pants and shirts of sturdy material are so readily available. And tomorrow I’ll go out in another delicate white dress, and ruin that one too.

How does someone so damn impractical get to ruling an entire huge kingdom like Oz?

The actual basement isn’t nearly as dark as the staircase is, so I guess there must be a window or something down here, but I don’t see it anywhere. What I do see is a giant fancy trunk, full of books and papers, lots and lots all stacked up inside, and I start to pull them out, try to make things out in the dim light.

It’s a good thing Mombi taught me to read. I wonder if it was because of this, because she knew—she had to have known it wouldn’t go on forever, what we had. We were always going to be found out. I was always going to have to be the stupid queen of stupid Oz.

Stupid, stupid Oz. I used to love this country.

In the end I have to lug it all back up the stairs and outside to see it well enough, ancient pages spilling out of the books as I go. I think I get them all back, feeling around on the staircase, but it’s too dark to be sure. And of course there’s no way to get them all back to where they belong inside the books, not until I’ve read through everything here, and even then it’s going to be like putting a puzzle together, harder than any puzzle I’ve done before.

It only takes a page, though, to see that these—some of these, at least—are old royal records. Records like Glinda said she wanted me to write but I didn’t, and she let that go awfully fast for her, when I asked to see some of the other ones for inspiration. She said they were lost, or something, in the great war between the Wizard and the Wicked Witches who he drove from the central length of our land.

Well, it looks like I’ve just found them.

I make three more trips up and down the narrow stairs, this time putting it all back into the trunk. I’ll come back tomorrow with a light, and hope Glinda doesn’t take an interest in what I’m doing.

She always knows things. I don’t know how she does it. The first few days I was here, I was with the soldier—the one with green whiskers—crying about how much I missed Mombi and pants and my boy parts and all. She had a long talk with me a couple days later about how I’d been kidnapped and mistreated, abused, been manipulated into thinking and feeling things that weren’t right, and now I needed to let myself accept the changes in my life and keep moving forward, so that someday soon I could understand everything and then I would be so much healthier and happier. It was even more detailed than her last speech on the subject.

I almost spit in her face. But that’s not ladylike, or whatever. And I guess she kind of scares me. Just a little. She wasn’t even in Emerald City that day; she went home to check on her Quadlings. And I know the soldier didn’t tell on me.

-

If I’m going to make any sense of these papers at all, I’m going to need to know the line of succession. My father’s name was Pastoria, I know, but beyond that I’ve never heard anything. Pastoria, the Wizard, me. I have to find out who came before us, and in what order. But Glinda’s been pretty shifty about that kind of stuff before.

I have to play the sad, lonely little girl card in the end—she always goes for that, even if it is humiliating for me.

“I never even got to meet my family, Glinda. Any of them. And I know you’re here for me, and the Scarecrow and the Lion and Nick and everyone, but I just feel so alone, still. I don’t even know my own mother’s name, and if I could just see a family tree or something, I think I would feel a lot more at home here. Tangible proof that I really belong, you know? This is so good—so much better than—it just feels like a dream, Glinda, and I’m afraid one day I’ll wake up and it’ll all be gone, I’ll just be trapped for the rest of my life like a—like—”

“It’s all right, dear,” Glinda says, soothingly. She pulls me into a hug, and I know, long before the neatly bound genealogy appears on my desk the next morning, that I’ve won this round.

-

I am a girl. Really, truly. There are reports of my birth in here, Tippetarius, daughter of Oz Pastoria, heir to the throne. It’s not just some lie or wicked trick of Glinda’s. I’m a girl. I’m really a girl.

That’s the worst thing since I started this project. The best thing is the bits of our old language, the original language of Oz, that I’m learning through the old records.

Ozma isn’t my name. Glinda never told me that. It’s only a title. All the queens are called Ozma, just like all the kings are called Oz. Oz Pastoria, my father, and Ozma Tippetarius, me. Tip is my real name. Tip was always my real name.

So why do I have to always go by Ozma?

I really think I’m starting to hate Glinda. Mombi would be proud.

I wonder if that’s a title, too. Glinda. It must be—it shows up too often in the records to be all one person. Not consistently, though. Through my father’s and the Wizard’s reigns, and I suppose that could all be her. I know she’s much older than she looks. Not during my grandmother’s, and just one brief mention of her at the very beginning of my great grandmother’s. But the name Glinda shows up, periodically, throughout the entire histories. There was a Glinda here when Lurline was, and still throughout the reign of the first Ozma. But then she disappears. She always disappears from the records, and a generation or so later she’ll come back, no explanation ever given. And it doesn’t offer real names, the way it does for the Ozzes and the Ozmas.

I wish I could ask her about it, but then she’d know I’ve found something she doesn’t want me to see.

It can’t have been all one person, all this time. Can it?

-

The genealogies are better than nothing, I suppose, but they are kind of useless in some ways. Only the name of the Oz or Ozma is given. The spouse will be referred to as the husband or wife, the king or queen, but they only bother listing the names of people actually born into the royal family. A major oversight on someone’s part, obviously.

I wonder if it was always like that. I wonder if the fact that half the names are missing means something else that Glinda is hiding.

-

Glinda summons me to the throne room, where a package is waiting for me—square, as tall as I am, wrapped in silk. Glinda isn't actually there when I come down; she’s probably busy running my country. There’s a woman standing by the package, tall and beautiful and kind of familiar, probably one of the fairies from the coronation. She’s wearing the same kind of soft, gauzy dress they were—the same kind Glinda usually makes me wear.

“Ozma,” she says, sort of tilting her head down at me. “This is your coronation gift from Lulea, Queen of the Burzee Forest.”

She pulls the silk aside, revealing a giant picture frame. It’s the most detailed painting I’ve ever seen, but it’s just some grass. “It works like Glinda’s Book of Records,” she tells me.

“Glinda’s what?”

“The book that records everything that happens in Oz,” she explains, slowly, like this is something I should already know. It probably is—no one ever tells me anything. It’s fine; I’m only the queen of Oz. “The Magic Picture will only show you the present, but it isn't limited to Oz; it will show you anything in the world. Would you like to try it?”

Yes. Yes, I would definitely like to try it. A princess gift that’s actually useful, not just a reminder I’m a girl now? This is amazing! “How does it work?”

She turns to the picture. “Show me the Burzee Forest.”

The super-detailed grass melts away into gigantic, moss-covered trees.

I try it six or seven different times—asking to see normal, boring things, nothing that tells the fairy lady anything about me—until she starts to look sort of bored, so I thank her and let her go home. The soldier helps me carry the picture up to my rooms.

I’m so excited to have my own magic, it’s a few hours before I remember about the other thing she said. Glinda’s Book of Records. I guess it’s public knowledge, because Jellia tells me all about as soon as I ask.

It’s terrifying. She can read anything that’s ever happened in all of Oz. I lived my whole stupid life with her able to see right over my shoulder anything that I was doing, and I wasn’t even anyone who mattered then. She can just see anything anyone is doing whenever. She can watch us pee. Shower. Anything. Terrifying.

So how didn’t she see me go to Mombi? How didn’t she see what Mombi did to me?

Mombi’s last gift. For the boy I made you, she said. To keep your secrets safe.

She probably knew about Glinda’s Book. She probably gave me a spell to hide from it. I keep the tin beneath a floorboard under my bed—it’s full of a thin, purple powder. It’s worth a chance, sprinkling it over myself, doing something outlandish, and seeing if Glinda comments on it.

-

I’m not supposed to leave the royal grounds on my own. Even—and Glinda was very specific about this—with Lion and Tiger. So the next time she goes home to the Quadlings, I sprinkle some of Mombi’s powder on my head. I sit on Tiger’s back, Jack sits on Lion’s, and we ride and ride and ride, well out of Emerald City and into Munchkin land, then just barely into Winkie land, then home again.

Glinda doesn’t say anything about it when she gets back. She doesn’t even look at me disapprovingly, which is how she usually looks at me.

The powder works. I can hide. And the tin is huge—I can hide for a long time. Not forever, but a long time.

-

I wake up in a pool of blood. Jellia comes running when I scream.

“What’s wrong?” she asks me. I gesture down at my red sheets, which used to be white. “Oh!” she says brightly. “Your first time, is it?”

“My first time what? Bleeding out?”

“It means you’re a woman now,” she tells me, still sounding cheerful.

“A woman? I’m covered in blood and it means I’m a woman? I can’t—I’m too young.” Barely three months ago I was a little boy.

Jellia sits on the edge of the bed. “It comes early for girls, growing up. They didn’t tell you about this, where you were?”

“Why would they tell me? Boys don’t bleed.”

“Of course not. What does that have to do with anything?”

“What does—you met me, Jellia! I was—when Jack and the Scarecrow were—I told you Jinjur was coming!”

“That was you?”

She didn’t—she really didn’t know?

There’s a sudden, sharp pain in my stomach before I can ask her more about it, and more blood comes pouring out. It’s—there’s so much. There’s—it’s not that much, probably, but any amount of blood is—and it just keeps coming—it’s—I’m not—I can’t—I can’t breathe—I’m not—this isn't right. I’m not supposed to be like this.

Glinda bursts into the room. “Ozma.”

“That’s not my name.” I’m covered in blood, and I’m crying, and I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. “That’s not my name!”

“Jellia. Get the Pumpkinhead. The Lion if you can’t find him—she likes him.”

Jellia runs out of the room.

“Ozma, sweetheart.” Glinda sits down where Jellia was, sighing. “Tip. Jack—your son is coming. You don’t want him to see you like this, do you? You want to set a good example for your son.”

I don’t want Jack to see me this upset—she’s right. It’ll just make him upset, too. But I can’t stop crying, and I can’t catch my breath, and the blood is still coming.

“All right, come on, let’s get you cleaned up.” She has to half carry me to the bathroom—the palace has running water, which is one of my favorite things about it. “Do you want privacy?”

I shake my head—this isn't my body, I don’t care who sees it. And I’m not sure I can stand alone. I don’t—it’s not just that it’s not my body—I don’t even feel like I’m inside it.

“All right, Tip. All right.” She sets me in the bathtub and starts to strip off my bloody night dress. I can barely see through my tears.

Jellia comes back in. “I can’t find them. Either of them. The Tiger is downstairs.”

“Not the Tiger,” Glinda says. “I don’t know him—I’m not giving him royal secrets on a platter. Help me undress her.”

The blood keeps coming, tingeing the water red. They drain it and start again. I still can’t breathe; I’m dizzy with it, and the edges of my vision are black. It feels like I’ve always been crying. My throat is raw like I’ve been screaming, but I haven’t. I think I haven’t. The lights have been flickering since I started crying, and my Magic Picture, what I can see of it through the bathroom door, is an angry mess of black and red.

Glinda stands and takes a step back. “You can’t handle this. Damn that backwaters witch, she should never have—” She cuts herself off. “I’m going to fix this, Tip.”

She puts her hands right over my crotch—I’m too tired to even feel violated—and says words I can’t understand. For a minute I think—for a minute—but when I look down I’m still a girl.

The bleeding has stopped, though.

“You won’t bleed again,” Glinda says. “Not until the time is right.”

I don’t know what that means. I don’t ask. I feel limp and wrung out, and I let them wash and dress me without saying anything else. Then I leave—the room reeks of blood, the smell sticking in my nose like bad smells do, and I don’t want to be here while Jellia cleans it.

I end up on one of the sofas that used to be the Gump’s body. His head is hanging on the wall nearby.

“Would you really rather be dead?” I ask him.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t kill you. I’m sorry I can’t kill you.”

“I’m sorry I can’t kill you,” he says, because we understand each other. “Tip.”

“Thank you.”

I fall asleep on the couch. When I wake up the Lion is taking up the rest of it, half on top of me. The Tiger is on the floor, and Jack and the Scarecrow are on the Gump’s other couch.

-

It’s a few days before I feel like myself again. Or as much like myself as I ever do feel, now. I go back to the gardens. Set all the old records aside, ignore all my friends. The deeper my hands are in the dirt, the closer to normal I feel.

I won’t bleed again. We don’t talk about it—Glinda and Jellia both pretend the day didn’t happen, not even the part where Jellia found out I was Tip.

I plant poppies and roses and big, colorful things I don’t know the names of. I collect all the weeds I like and move them into little clusters so they look deliberate. It’s starting to look less like a jungle. More like a proper garden. I don’t hate the change as much as I thought I would—this is mine. I created it. Like I created Jack. The garden won’t love me like Jack does, but it’s still mine.

I find a lot of benches and fountains and arches. I plant big bushes to section off the gardens, make places that are available for everyone and places that are just for me. I don’t finish everything—there’s still plenty of jungle, and I’ll work through it slowly, so I have an excuse to be out here in the dirt for a long time.

One of the fountains is called the Fountain of Forgetfulness. It has a golden placard that says anyone who drinks from it will lose all of their memories.

I leave the vines and trees grown up around it. I talk with Glinda and meet the people she wants me to meet. I attend committees about money and roadwork and permits. I wear white dresses and close my eyes when Jellia sets me in front of a mirror to brush my hair. I go back to the fountain. I think about long summer days making mud pies on the shore of the river. Shucking corn, stacking hay. The year every chick we had was a rooster, and there were going to be no more eggs. How Mombi turned half of them to girls with magic. I think about drinking from the fountain, about forgetting all of that, and being the queen Glinda wants.

I turn around and go back inside. I’ve already given up my body—I won’t lose my mind as well.

-

I’ve never thought much about fairies before—they’re just something from old songs. But they were all over Emerald City for my coronation, and Prince Marvel says that I’m one, too.

I stare out at the rain, and think about how all the lights in the palace blew out when I bled. I wonder what, exactly, a fairy can do.

Mombi is a witch. Glinda is a sorceress. Could I be as powerful as them, with the right training? The right tools?

Jack comes up to see me later. As soon as he walks into the room, the rain stops.

-

We had a vegetable garden and an herb garden at home. Mombi wouldn’t let me touch the herbs—called them “finicky, magical things, not for children.” But I always had to weed the vegetable patch, and I never thought of myself as particularly good with plants.

A week after I plant my new poppy seeds they bloom, and the flowers are as big as my head. Some might be as big as Jack’s head.

-

I sit out in the gardens with my weird little family—me, the boy fairy queen, and my two wooden sons.

Someone plated the Sawhorse’s hooves with gold while I was busy with one identity crisis or another. He seems pretty pleased, but it’s not exactly practical.

Jack’s head is just barely starting to get soggy again—I’ll replace it much sooner this time, now that I know it can be replaced.

Sawhorse likes being petted and praised and plated with gold. He’s good here. But Jack doesn’t sit well on velvet couches. He’s awkward and out of place here. I don’t really fit in either, but I don’t have a choice.

Maybe Jack does. Maybe it’s time to be a good father, and let my son go.

It was Scarecrow’s idea—he found the place. But I think he’s right.

“There’s a pumpkin farm for sale a few miles east of the city,” I tell him. “We could buy it. I—I have to stay here, of course. But you could come back to visit, and I would come to see you all the time—any time you needed a new head, for sure.”

“I’d like that,” Jack says.

I nod, stroking Sawhorse’s splintery neck. Parenthood is hard.

-

I think I’m beginning to see why I had to be a girl.

It’s still not okay. It’s never going to be okay. But our last two rulers have been men—my father, and the Wizard who killed him. And my grandmother, before them, she had a long and prosperous reign. It was good, back then. Oz flagged in my father’s time, and the Wizard was a cruel tyrant who lied and stole and manipulated children into doing his dirty work. And it’s been like this, or similar, generation after generation. Oz flourishes under women. And there have been plenty of men who were good kings. But I can see how, coming after the Wizard, and then the Scarecrow (I love the Scarecrow, but Lurline help him he was not cut out to rule a kingdom), and then Jinjur’s rebellion on top of all that—I can see how Oz would follow another queen more easily.

Even if she is just a puppet and a figurehead.

And then there’s Lurline, of course. Mombi would get to talking about Lurline sometimes, and I liked it, and we all swear by her, but I never got the whole history of it or anything. I can’t find that history, anywhere. I’m not sure it exists anymore. And I don’t dare to ask Glinda.

I understand why Oz needed an Ozma. I just wish it didn’t have to be me.

I still have the wishing pills. The others think we dropped them in the Jackdaw nest, but they’re in the tin under the floorboard with Mombi’s magic powder. For the boy she made me.

Why would she do that? Didn’t she know it would catch up with me someday?

I could wish to be a boy, but Glinda would only change me back. I could wish Glinda straight out of Oz. I could wish no one but me could ever change my form. I could wish I’d never run away.

If I hadn’t run away, I wouldn’t have met the Sawhorse, or the Scarecrow, or Nick or Lion or Tiger.

I’ve been crowned. As a queen. I don’t know what would happen to me if the sovereign ruler of Oz vanished, and I was the boy left in her place.

Lurline’s bloodline ruled without interruption from the day she created Oz until the Wizard came.

Oz needs a queen. A king could never have the same power, could never bring the same stability. Not so soon after the Wizard.

I can’t just think about what will happen to me anymore. I have to think about what will happen to all of Oz.

-

My crown arrives. Three crowns arrive, really. Glinda stuck her nose in it, like she does in everything I do without Mombi’s powder, and said I should have different designs for different occasions. I guess she’s probably right—I still have no idea what I’m doing, ruling Oz. I still sort of wish she would just take over officially and send me home.

My favorite is the least interesting—just a ring of gold. One of the others is a ring, too, but it spells Oz across the front. The last has a ring with a tiny pointed crown in the center, which was Glinda’s idea, probably so she can do fancy things to my hair around it. She really likes messing with my hair. I’d like to chop it all off, but she’ll never go for that.

I put on my favorite, because I’d better start getting used to something heavy on my head all the time, and go out to the gardens. Jack is gone now, living at his pumpkin farm. The Sawhorse is running an errand for Glinda, halfway across Oz, and the Scarecrow went to visit Nick in Winkie land. I don’t know where Lion and Tiger are—not here. I’m all alone. At this point, I wouldn’t even mind spending some time with Glinda, but I think she’s at home with the Quadlings for a few days.

I wander through the sunflowers, then the morning glories, before I end up in the poppies. I seem to always end up in the poppies. I lie down for a while, and I think maybe I’ve started to fall asleep by the time Jellia comes running to find me.

“Ozma! We’ve just had word from Ev—the king is dead and his entire family has been kidnapped by the Nome King.”

I sit up. There’s grass in my hair; Glinda would be horrified. No one’s ever come straight to me for a problem before, and it’s kind of cool, even if it’s only because Glinda’s not here.

“Should we do something?” Jellia asks, like I’m actually in charge here.

“Yes. They came to my coronation. We have to rescue them.”

I’m lonely, and bored. An adventure is what started this whole mess in the first place, but I think I’m due for another one—it’s not as if things can get worse. If I set things in motion to go rescue them myself, publicly, I don’t think Glinda will actually be able to stop me without making it clear how much of a figurehead I am. I stand up, brushing leaves and dirt from my dress. “Let’s go make a plan.”

Jellia frowns at me. “You’ll need to change your dress first. And your hair is a mess—is that your new crown in there?”

I nod. “They delivered it today.”

“Hm.” She tilts her head. “It needs something. Take it off.”

I hand it to her. She bends down to pick two poppies, and twists them around the circle, then sets it back on my head, so one poppy sits above each ear.

“There. Now you look like a queen.”