NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Arnie wondered about Dorothy. She seemed way too big to be wandering around the barnyard in a party dress and pigtails, singing to her little dog about rainbows. Shouldn’t she have been helping out? She was bigger than Auntie Em.

There was a pink-faced, Dorothy-sized girl in the neighborhood named Gloria who also wore pigtails and party dresses, plus a lot of messy lipstick, and when the older boys shouted, “Hey, Gloria, show us your panties,” she would stop her bike and lift up her dress with a horrible smile.

Dorothy didn’t seem that far gone, but like Gloria, she didn’t seem to have any friends—except of course for Toto, and when Miss Gulch took him away in her picnic basket Dorothy didn’t just cry, she threw herself across her bed and sobbed.

Arnie saw Gloria crying like that once, pedaling hard down the sidewalk, bawling away at the blue sky. Somebody must have done something to her, something bad. He felt sorry.

He felt a little sorry for Dorothy when she got locked out of the storm cellar, the cyclone closing in. Auntie Em had called out her name a few times but gave up pretty easily, it seemed. And when Dorothy stomped on the cellar door with her heel, they had to have heard. Maybe Auntie Em and Uncle Henry figured this was a good way of getting rid of her. After all, they weren’t her real parents, and she didn’t contribute anything to the farm, and probably ate as much as three little girls.

Gloria was always gobbling Hostess cream-filled cupcakes. She carried them around in the wire basket on the front of her bike. Sometimes she would pull up by the backstop in the park and eat cupcakes while she watched Arnie and his friends playing ball. He tried not to look, the way she always got cream and crumbs all over her face. After an inning or two she would finally wave and yell, “Byyye,” no one replying, and pedal off.

But Dorothy changes. She grows up a little. In fact a lot. It begins with the ruby slippers. Looking down at them on her feet, she goes up on her toes and does a graceful little turn, like a young lady. Then she actually starts being useful. She helps the Scarecrow down from his pole and keeps him on his feet, squirts oil on the Tin Man to get him going, and scolds the Cowardly Lion for scaring little Toto. “Shame on you,” she tells him.

Gloria scolded Arnie once.

The way it happened, he was walking home from the park one afternoon, just walking along with his bat and glove, then all of a sudden Gloria came bicycling around the corner. “Hi, Arnie!” she shouted, and as she pedaled by and continued on down the sidewalk she cried out, “Bye, Arnie! Byyye!” He walked home horrified: Gloria never used anyone’s name, she didn’t know anyone’s name, but somehow she knew his, which meant he was in her mind, which made him feel sick deep inside. After that, he started crossing the street whenever he saw her coming, pretending not to see her.

“Hi, Arnie!”

Pretending not to hear.

“Bye, Arnie!”

He had a dream one night in which Gloria was also Dorothy, also the Wicked Witch, wearing ruby slippers as she pedaled her bike across the sky, able to spell, looping out Hi Arnie in white smoke for all to see, smiling her lipsticky smile up there.

Then one Saturday morning she was waiting for him. He was coming out of Dorbern’s Bakery with a loaf of raisin bread his mom had sent him after, and there she was, straddling her bike and smiling. “Hi, Arnie! Wanna see my panties?”

“No!”

She stopped smiling as if he had slapped her.

Then he told her, slowly so she would understand: “Leave. Me. Alone.”

Gloria started breathing hard. She stretched out a fat red arm and pointed at his face. “You’re not nice, Arnie.” Then she pedaled off, bawling out, “You’re not nice!”

He gave a shrug to show how little he cared what Gloria thought. Walking home he ate a slice of raisin bread to further show himself, though he had some trouble swallowing.

Dorothy ends up scolding even the Wizard, telling him, “If you were really great and powerful you’d keep your promises!” And he finally does, sort of. But then she wakes up in her bed back in Kansas and seems really simple again. “I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again,” she promises Auntie Em, who glances at Uncle Henry.

But maybe Dorothy had the right idea, staying close to home. Gloria’s body was discovered one morning under some bushes in a park two towns away, her bicycle lying nearby.