“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 hands.
“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 café. 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 Elphaba, 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?”
