Oz Reimagined Part 10

BY ROBIN Wa.s.sERMAN.

Crow found her first. Never let us forget it either. It was always my Dorothy and before you met Dorothy and Dorothy told me, emphasis on me. c.r.a.p like that. She staked a claim on her, like it mattered, and I guess it did, because back then we all loved Dorothy, maybe even me. But no one loved her like Crow, who found her first.

Crow's s.h.i.t at remembering things now, so I have to remember for her. But I usually spare her that one, because what's the point?

I let Crow blame me. I'd let Roar blame me, too, if he could pull it together enough to blame anyone. And I blame me, because I listened to Dorothy, and I knew better, and I got the lighter, and because I can take it.

Because I still have the knife.

Crow was Crow because of her tattoos. Not the ones she did herself with unbent paper clips and ballpoint ink: jagged hearts and lightning bolts and stupid stick figures who all had missing limbsa"because when it came to Crow, nothing hurt until it did, and then you had to STOP, even if you hadn't gotten to both legs. It was the ink on her back that gave her the name, a murder of crows swooping up her shoulder blades and pecking at the nape of her neck.

A murder of crows. I got that from her. But I found the others on my own: A bellowing of bullfinches.

A pride of ostriches.

A mutation of thrushes.

A brood of hens.

A charm of finches.

A parliament of owls.

I found them for her. I thought she'd like it, how everything had its own special name, like a secret only we knew, because Crow taught me that names have power, and I figured we needed all we could get. But Crow only cared about the crows.

"A murder of me," she liked to say. She made it into a song to sing when she was bored, and sometimes, when things got dark inside her head, she screamed it, flapping her arms and jumping on tables, screaming and screaming those same four words until the monkeys with the needles came to drag her away.

Monkeys, because "they're all monkeys," Crow said once about the orderlies, watching them fling a softball around the exercise yard. "Look at those monkeys flinging poo," and because she said it, it stuck. Crow was in charge of naming. She could see the you inside of you, and she knew its true name.

But Dorothy was only ever Dorothy.

My first time in here, Crow and I were roommates. Stuck in south wing togethera"medical winga"bruised and bandaged because she'd jumped off a roof, and I'd sliced through enough skin to get gangrene or blood poisoning or who even cares what you call it, and we lay in those beds and rolled our eyes at each other when Glind came to ask us in that low, gentle voice why we wanted to die.

He didn't even need a nickname, because: Dr. Glenn Glind, can you imagine? He's got parents who do that to him, and he still manages to not shoot himself in the head. No wonder we confused him.

We don't tell him: I don't want to die.

Crow doesn't want to die.

She wants to feel something, that's what she tells me one night after he runs out of questions and leaves us to our reality TV and morphine drips. That's why she jumps.

I feel too much, I tell her. That's why the scars crawl up my legs and down my arms, intricate jags and whirls of hardened tissue; that's why I grid myself with the knife, quadrants of lines and angles, my diagram of pain. I was Tina then, but she's already calling me Tiny and Tinny and Tin-Girl, tasting the sound of one name after another until one tastes right. And even though I don't tell her, not then at least, how Tin-Girl sounds good to mea"because wouldn't that be a great deal, hard on the outside, hollow on the inside, too hard for the knife, too empty to need ita"Crow somehow knows anyway, and I'm Tin from then on.

Her brain doesn't work right, she tells me, because that's what they all told her, and she thinks she's stupid, but she's smarter than any of us, something I figure out pretty fast because I'm not stupid either.

My heart doesn't work right, but I don't tell her that either, because then I'd have to tell her that I'm not supposed to love anymore because it hurts too much, and that even so, I stay awake at night and watch the curve of her body and listen to her breathe, and then she'd laugh, and I'd have more to cut.

Here was Dorothy: electric-blue hair bobbed at her delicate chin. Ironically checkered baby-doll dress, chunky bracelets from her left wrist to her elbow, nails painted black, ruby lips, and big baby-blue "who, me?" eyes, and all that c.r.a.p that gets people to make a.s.ses of themselves and write poems about you.

Before Crow, I never much noticed girls, and I don't notice them after her, because it's not a girl thing, it's a Crow thing, like she's some separate species, some alien who got dropped on this planet by mistake and has to imitate human beings and suffer the consequences when she can't imitate them quite well enough. That was one of Crow's theories, at least. I don't know whether she believed it or not, because with Crow you could never be sure. It was better to play along, not so much that she could laugh at you after if it turned out to be a joke, but enough that she wouldn't have a freak-out and jump on the tables and then get zombified for the rest of the week. But I could believe it: Crow the alien, Crow the stranger in a strange land. Crow, who wasn't like anyone else.

So even though Dorothy was pretty enough, that wasn't the thing about her.

The thing about her was her shoes.

Silver combat boots that sparkled like magic under the fluorescent lights.

The thing was how she howled when they took them away.

We were pressed to the picture window overlooking the ward intake area, not because we were waiting for Dorothy to show, but because we were waiting to give the one-finger salute to the Wicked b.i.t.c.h of the East. Head nurse of the east warda"excuse me, soon to be ex-head nurse, fired for drug smuggling, that's what we heard. She was a yeller, the kind always looking for an excuse to get mad and, we heard, always smiled a creepy little smile when it came time to call in the monkeys to put someone down. Of course, they didn't fire her for that. Even though we were in west, where we still had a Wicked b.i.t.c.h of our own, we celebrated, because one down seemed pretty good, and at least someone was getting off easy, even if it was the pathetic east wingers. Nutcase solidarity and all that.

So we were watching when they brought Dorothy in, and when they took her shoes and the rest of it, because real clothes meant special privileges and new patients didn't get any of those, she threw a grand mal seizure of a fit, sedated before she even made it onto the ward, maybe some kind of record. It seemed like a good omen, Crow said then, the new girl coming in just as the b.i.t.c.h was going out, and for a while that's all Dorothy was, the good omen with the shoe fetish. But Crow must have noticed something, something she liked, because the next time I saw Dorothy, she had Crow's arm around her shoulder and Crow was saying to her the same thing she'd said to me, "Now you're one of us."

Here was us: Crow with her scrambled-egg brains. Me with my scars. And Roar, our bodyguard, big enough to scare off anyone who might think to mess with us, big enough to scare even the monkeys into keeping clear, skinhead bald with a bulldog face and barbed wire tattoos, big and mean-looking and too doped up to do much about it. We didn't even know his real name, but he was loyal and useful and kind of sweet when you got to know him, and frightened enough that if anyone but us got too close, he let out a mighty rooooooooar. And so, his name. And so, Us.

"Those are the monkeys," Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the poo-flinging orderlies.

"Those are the Munchkins," Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the pathetic east wingers, anorexic outpatients gnawing on their doughnut holes during group therapy, lording their precious snack over the rest of us even though they could barely choke it down.

"You ever get lost, you follow the road of yellow brick," Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to the ribbon of paint that wound through the tiled corridors, stretching from the mythical doors to the outside all the way to the bolted doors that closed down our wing. Every ward got a different color: south was sky, north was death, east was puke. Ours was sun.

"This is Roar," Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to our giant.

"This is Tin," Crow told Dorothy, and pointed to me.

She gave her all our secret names, and she did it like it was nothing.

"How about me?" Dorothy asked and twirled around. She had one of those song voices, and you wanted her to talk more, even when you wanted her to shut up. "What's my name?"

Crow didn't pause. "Dorothy. You're nothing but Dorothy."

Then Dorothy told me how much she loved my skin art and that she was an artist too, and she showed me the girl on fire she'd markered across her forearm.

I didn't tell her that mine wasn't art. Because when she said it, I thought, Maybe it is. And she's just the first to notice.

Dorothy told us that she hated her parents, who'd stuck her in here because they couldn't handle her light, and that her parents, who she called Emily and Henry instead of Mom and Dad, weren't really her parents, thata"depending on what kind of mood she was ina"her real parents were fugitives, her real parents were deadbeats, her real parents were cult members, her real parents were dead.

"Henry and Emily just want to suffocate me," she told us. "They want me to be as gray and lifeless as they are so I can fit in at their gray and lifeless country club and get good grades at the gray and lifeless school they send me to, then get into a gray and lifeless college, and lead a gray and lifeless life. It's pathetic."

We all nodded, even Roar.

Dorothy had a ragged stuffed goat named Bad Dog that she took with her everywhere because it was her totem animal, whatever that meant. As she talked, she made it do the can-can across her knee. "When that didn't work, they decided I was crazy. Just for not wanting what they want me to want. So I decided if they wanted me to be crazy, I'd be crazy. Is that crazy?"

We shook our heads.

"Oh, it's crazy, all right." Her laugh was even more song than her voice, and when she laughed and shook, her hair flickered around her face like blue flame, and I thought that, crazy or not, she didn't belong here. She was too bright. "But life is crazy, right? That's what I figure. And if life is crazy, then we're all the sane ones, aren't we? They probably want you to be gray and lifeless too, don't they?" She flung her arms out at the monkeys and the Wicked b.i.t.c.h and the empty paper cups in the trash, the ones that had held our morning pills. "But I think we should celebrate what we are. What we can see. We see life in color, so we know what they don't, am I right? We live life like artists." She pointed at me. Jabbed her finger right into my chest, then traced it across my collarbone to where the scars poked out above my collar. Concentric circles with arrows speared through their centers; I remembered every line. I remembered the cold blade warming in my hand, and I remembered carving myself into a target. You can hurt me, the arrows said to my mother and all her bulls.h.i.t, to the guy in sixth period who got me up against the wall and rammed his hand up my dress and stuck his fingers inside, to the last person I was stupid enough to love and the one before that. But not as much as I can hurt myself. "Tin understands. Don't you, Tin?"

I saw Crow's eyes follow that finger on my skin, and I saw them narrow, because Crow was jealous for all the wrong reasons, and that made me just jealous enough to smile and say yes.

Sometimes one yes is enough to explain all the rest of them.

Yes, we were special, and yes, we shouldn't let them take that away from us.

Yes, we were too doped up, and inside we were just like Roar, tamed and muzzled and all too willing to follow orders.

Yes, we should do something about it.

"I have an idea," Dorothy said. She took our hands, mine and Crow's, and she squeezed. Roar rested his paws on our shoulders, closing the circuit. "Just for fun. Are you in?"

We said yes.

Some days we took each other's pills. Some days we didn't take any at all. Dorothy showed us how to cheek our meds, and after that it was simple: Drop the pill in your mouth, lodge it in a warm, soft place against your tongue, swallow hard, then open wide so the b.i.t.c.h could see your insides and check you off her list. Later the pills went into our palms, damp and sticky, and they were ours, to do with what we wanted.

It got so every day was a surprise, whether you'd want to dance and fly and scream just to hear the sound of your own voice cutting the air, whether noises were too sharp and colors too bright, whether you felt like hugging or laughing or punching a fist through the webbed gla.s.s windows just to have something sharp so you could cut and cut and cut. Roar decided one of the droolers in the rec room was looking at him funny and broke the guy's arm in two places before the monkeys got him down and sent him off for some time in the straps. Crow kissed me, or maybe let me kiss her, or maybe I imagined it, but there wasn't much difference and anyway her lips were harder than I thought they'd be, and when we lay together side by side, with her hand in mine and her head against my cheek, her hair was stiff and rough, like sticks. She rubbed it against my face until I said stop, it hurts, and she laughed and said nothing hurts until it does, and then she took my hand and laid it on her breast and made it squeeze and squeeze. Like milking a cow, I thought, because those were the kinds of thoughts I had then, with Dorothy's voice in my head and Crow's meds in my blood and because I knew sometimes you needed that and because I thought maybe it was a dream, I let her make me hurt her until she screamed.

Dorothy got bored.

"Screw the pill thing," she said. "What we need is some booze. How are we supposed to have any fun around here?"

"The Wizard can get us booze," Roar said quietly, because even after two days in the straps, he was still getting ideas, sometimes even good ones. None of us were used to that yet.

Dorothy was still new enough not to understand.

"The Wizard can get anyone anything," Crow said. She always liked to be the one to explain things to Dorothy. "But it'll cost us."

The Wizard lived in green.

Jade. Chartreuse. Citrine. Kelly. Verdigris. Lime. Avocado. Hunter. Rifle. Emerald. He named the colors for us, tapping along the wall where he'd taped pages from magazines, strips of cloth, napkins and leaves and curling locks of haira"a collage covering every inch of plaster in more colors than I ever knew existed, and all of them green.

No one knew what it was the Wizard had about green, like no one knew what he was in for or how long he'd been here or how it was he managed to smuggle in everything that he dida"not just booze and the good kinds of drugs but smokes and sharp objects and the kinds of movies we weren't supposed to watch because they might give us the wrong ideas. He had a middle-aged-dad paunch and the big red nose of a drunk or a clown. We'd never been in his room before, because Crow said we had all we needed with just us, and that it wasn't worth it. But now, I guess, because Dorothy said so, it was.

"Vodka," Dorothy told him, one hand on her hip, the other around Bad Dog's neck. "Also cigarettes and a lighter."

"Not cloves," I murmured. I didn't look at Crow, who didn't care about smoke but hated fire. Dorothy said we should do what we wanted, and I wanted cigarettes. Real ones.

"Not cloves," Dorothy said. "And scissors."

The Wizard frowned. "You slice your wrists, it's a mess for all of us."

"No wrist slicing." Dorothy smiled and raised three fingers in salute. "Scout's honor."

Crow gave me a sharp poke in the ribs, which I knew meant when did I ask Dorothy to get me the scissors, and why didn't she know about it. I didn't even have to ask, but I wouldn't tell Crow that, because who was Crow to say Dorothy and I couldn't have secrets together, too?

"And what do I get?" the Wizard said. He was looking at Dorothy, and he was looking at me.

Dorothy gave him a smile that didn't belong here any more than she did, a smile left over from wild late-night bonfires and 3 a.m. beer runs and cutting school to smoke weed in the parking lot and a different life. "What do you want?"

In the Wizard's room, late at night, it's too dark to see the green, but you can smell it, rich and moist and sweet, like a forest after the rain.

In the Wizard's room, late at night, the monkeys down the hall watching hockey and cheering loud enough to cover the noises we make, he tells me to be quiet, even though he doesn't have to. He says he doesn't like the sound of my voice. "It's like metal," he says, and then he laughs.

His breath smells green, and his chest is hairier than I expect.

I do not throw up.

It hurts when he sticks it in, but only a little, and I do not gasp.

It hurts when he is behind me, and his rhythm is a pounding, pounding, pounding, and my head shakes and b.u.mps the wall each time, and it's like I'm his Bad Dog, raggy and boneless and covered in filth.

His hands are on my scars.

"Pretty," he whispers in the dark. "So pretty."

He finds the bare patch on my thigh, the place where skin is only skin, unbroken and waiting. "Mine," he whispers.

I am quiet, like he wants. I breathe beneath him. When it ends, I listen to him snore, and I am still there when he wakes up, so he turns me over and starts again.

"A toast to Tin!" Dorothy crowed, and raised a paper cup of vodka in my direction. "Here's to taking one for the team, and here's hoping it was a big one."

She winked, and they all did the shot.

The Wizard supplied us with a bottle of vodka, three packs of cigarettes, a yellow BIC lighter, and most miraculously of all, the key to a supply closet where we could enjoy it all to our hearts' content.

Instead of scissors, he got me a beautiful knife.

He had looked at Dorothy before he looked at me, because who wouldn't, but he wasn't picky. Anyone but the ugly one, he'd said, and we all knew the ugly one was Crow.

He looked at Dorothy, but then Dorothy looked at me, and somehow it was done.

After, we pretended like I volunteered, like I wanted it, like Dorothy was doing me a favor by stepping aside and letting me have all the fun, and maybe we weren't pretending. Maybe that's how it was. Maybe it could be that way if I decided that's how it should be.

So I tipped my vodka back, too, and it burned.

That morning I had taken my secret knife and carved triangles into the bare patch on my thigha"not bare anymore. Interlocking triangles, one corner cutting into the next, so suddenly they weren't triangles at all, just sharp lines doing their own thing. One for the Wizard, one for Crow, one for Dorothy. All of them for me.

Crow scowled when I flicked the lighter, so I flicked it again, right under her nose, yellow flame leaping toward her, and she screeched and punched me in the stomach. The lighter jumped out of my hand and skidded across the linoleum, the flame winking out. Then Roar roared, and Dorothy slapped a hand over his mouth, and Crow laughed and kissed my neck, and I squirmed away and lit up my smoke, and we all got so drunk we puked.

It's good enough that we do it again, and again. When we need more vodkaa"and more cigarettes along with it, and once some of the graphic novels Crow likes with all the blood, and more than once some pot for Roar, and always something special for Dorothy, brownies or polish or an inferior pair of silver shoesa"I do what I have to do.

It gets easier.

The Wicked b.i.t.c.h never noticed any of it. Neither did the monkeys, neither did the doctors, and if the other patients did, they weren't saying anything, because they all had their own arrangements with the Wizard, or because they couldn't care less. We could have lived like that forever, but instead we did it only until Dorothy pointed out that it wasn't living at all, not as long as we were caged up in the zoo.

"I think you're ready now," she said, proud as if she'd made us herself. "Let's do this thing, for real."