The silver shoes took three wild, lurching steps through the void, then stopped so suddenly that I tumbled onto the grass and rolled over several times before I even figured out where I was.

  Grass? There was no grass at the mall.

  I opened my eyes to see a great, windswept plain under a vast, cloudless gray sky. There was a wooden farmhouse plopped down right in the middle of it that looked brand new and even a bit unfinished—which would make sense if the last one had recently been swept up in a tornado.

  I was in fucking Kansas.

  An old man was milking cows out in the barn, and Toto took off toward him, running. I didn’t even remember what Dorothy’s uncle’s name was, but maybe Toto was technically his dog? A stout, silver-haired woman came out of the house with a watering pot, then dropped it when she saw me.

  “My darling child!” she cried, tackling me in a running hug and covering my face with kisses. “Where in the world did you come from?”

  It was kind of nice. “Uh, the Land of Oz, pretty much,” I said. The moment stretched on. “But this is it, right? We’re done? Roll credits?”

  The credits did not roll. Something about all of it felt very wrong. “Well, don’t just stand there,” Auntie Em said. “Come inside and we’ll draw you a nice, warm bath.”

  Oh, no. Oh, fuck no. If anything, the Depression-era Kansas dustbowl felt even more real than Oz had, and it was several times more depressing. I looked down at my feet—the silver shoes had gone transparent. They were fading away before my eyes. I clicked them together quickly times. “Take me to the mall in Calabasas! To my home!”

  Nothing happened. Like the Flying Monkeys, the shoes could only transport me to places inside the Oz Matrix. There was no way I was going to let myself get trapped, and grow old and paranoid and bitter, like that fucking Wizard.

  That fucking Wizard. Was he the key? Had he managed to escape, somehow, in his balloon? I clicked my heels again.

  “Take me to the fucking Wizard!”

  With another whoosh I was gone—I hoped this gust of wind wouldn’t wreck Auntie Em’s new house, but to be honest, I had my own shit to worry about. When I regained my senses this time, though, I didn’t find myself safe on some patch of grass. I was high up in the sky, and somehow managed to just grab the edge of the balloon’s passenger basket to avoid falling toward my death on the inhospitable landscape far below.

  “Dorothy! You found me!” Oz looked like hell. His hair was blowing wildly in the rough winds, his fine clothes were in tatters, and he stared at me like he was fucking nuts. The Wizard was far around the bend. It had been days since we’d left the Emerald City—had he been up in the balloon the entire time?

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  “I’m almost there!” he shouted. “See the hatch? That’s where they send the weather from! But I’m going through it!”

  I didn’t see any hatch, but I did see the dark, inverted cone of a tornado—no, make that three tornadoes, whirling violently around us. The Wizard was somehow managing to pilot his craft between them.

  My legs were still dangling off the edge of the basket. I tried to click my heels, but my socks just bumped together soundlessly. The silver shoes had either disappeared or fallen.

  ‘They sent the weather to stop me!” Oz howled. “But not this time! We won’t be stopped!”

  One of the cyclones blew dangerously close, and the wind almost whipped me right off of my perch. Somewhere inside the maelstrom, I saw a flash of neon light. EDUTAINMENT.

  “The tornadoes are the way out!” I cried, trying to be heard above the wind. “I’m sure of it! I saw the booth! From the mall!”

  “I’m not going back to the mall!” he shouted. “They took me to Oz and just left me there, for twenty-five years, with nothing to do! And I want to know why!” He shook his fist at the sky. “You hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME? I want some goddamned answers!”

  For the first time, I genuinely felt bad for him. The poor son of a bitch wasn’t even the main character in his own voyage through literature. He pressed himself against the inside of the basket and reached toward me with one arm.

  “Come with me, Dorothy! We’ll figure out what this whole thing was, after all this time! We’ll find out together.”

  I did want to know what the hell was going on. And maybe there was a secret escape hatch somewhere up there in the sky. But I had stuff waiting for me at home. And given the choice between figuring out what the hell any of this was, and my life, I’d pick cell phones and Netflix and Tumblr, and Madeline, and my Mom.

  Every time.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” I muttered under the wind. The tornado was almost upon me, and I flung myself away from the basket, falling backwards into the chaos of the cyclone’s embrace, and immediately passing out.

  * * *

  At the end of the day, being shanghaied by a mall librarian and left for dead in a children’s book was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And, yeah, when I get the chance to look back at it with some perspective, I might decide it was the best thing that ever happened to me, too—meeting wonderful friends, growing as a person, all that bullshit. But whatever else it was, it was definitely the worst.

  When I woke up, I was lying on a vast expanse of red sand. A green-skinned monster with tusks and a brass loincloth towered over me—he must have been fifteen feet tall, at least—and tapped my side with a long spear that he carried in two of his four arms.

  So far, I amended. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me so far.