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Whether it was foolish or not, only time could tell. Elphaba tended towards the former, while Boq sat on his suitcase—perhaps to create the impression of concealed height—and waited gaily for the coach to arrive. Grommetik, presumably in need of some extra grease, creakily waved its hand and gestured towards the empty road.
“He’s waiting for Avaric,” Boq claimed.
Elphaba found it strange to assign a gender to a metal being. Then again, the world had deigned it necessary to assign a gender to her, which was equally strange in its own way. “It’s concerned our coach is late, more likely. A tiktok creature is practically a clock, after all.”
Grommetik whirred at the statement, though the way its head tipped to the side indicated flattery more than offence.
Elphaba watched the air above the road shimmer in the heat.
“There he is,” said Boq as Avaric arrived. He was a tanned creature who sniffed at the air as he greeted Elphaba, as if he were a grocer and trying to determine whether a fruit was affected by rot.
Elphaba shrank back from him without extending her hand.
“You’re a shy one,” Avaric sneered. “I’d have thought you were more accustomed to attention, considering your… your…”
“My height,” said Elphaba. “Or my astoundingly good looks.”
“I think those are more my areas of expertise,” Avaric said smugly. And rather rudely, Elphaba thought. Boq straightened his spine but gained no more than a centimeter.
“Perhaps in the way a Fish can be an expert on the desert,” she mused. “Or a human on the plight of the Animals. That is to say, in theory. And look, there’s the coach.”
She said this with some relief and a smidge too early. The coach had only just rounded the corner nearly half a mile up the road. Elphaba stared at its form, the billowing dust clouds behind it, and begged it to hurry so she would not have to listen to Master Avaric’s reply. Finally it stopped in front of them and Elphaba busied herself with balancing her suitcase on the top and sniping at Boq for not securing his quickly enough. He crept into the coach seeming somewhat wilted, but Elphaba found she had little sympathy for him as the orchestrator of the trip. How low, really, to misuse a childhood friendship in this way. If Elphaba had any contact to children—and thankfully, she did not—she would have recommended having no childhood friends whatsoever, lest they fall in love with annoying acquaintances.
“So Miss Galinda is your roommate,” Master Avaric said as the coach began to roll over the road. Elphaba fought the urge to look at her watch; it would only sour her mood further to see how early in the day it was. “And Misses Shannee and Pfenpfen—”
“Pfannee and Shenshen,” Boq corrected. “Also of Crage Hall.”
And wealth, Elphaba thought, but didn’t say it.
“So we have three girls at this lake house. A girl for each of us,” Avaric said. “Or rather, Boq and I will have our pick, and you can go off with a book into the corner.” Rather mockingly, he added, “Boq tells me you always have your nose buried in a book.”
“I said you like to read, Elphie,” Boq corrected hastily, looking between his friend and his humiliator.
“I wish I would always have my nose in a book,” Elphaba said, ignoring him, “because that would mean by definition that I would have a book here, and not be forced to listen to your inane babbling. Boq, is he always like this? Or shall we have the coach turned around and Master Avaric examined for a fever?”
“He gets better when you get to know him,” Boq said, now a touch green in the face. Elphaba thought it suited her more. “With time.”
Elphaba rolled her eyes inwardly. “So much time that we will all be dead in the ground, I presume.”
It seemed a more attractive alternative to the trip and the coach, to having to live with that embarrassing churn of anticipation in her stomach. Whatever Galinda had meant with what she’d written—with her flair for the dramatic, as Elphaba tried to remind herself—it had piqued interest.
Boq stared out the window. Avaric, proving himself at least literate, concerned himself with a racing form. Elphaba glowered down at the floor, then amused herself by watching the flat green fields outside begin to undulate. Though Shiz was surrounded by green, it was rather boring country. Perhaps a little change would do some good.
--
By the fifth hour, Elphaba was beginning to regret not riding atop the carriage with the tiktok creature. While she had to alternatively tolerate Master Avaric’s banter with Boq or his stony glares, Grommetik had nothing but fresh air and the rattle of the coach’s wheels. Presumably it was too late to clamber up at this point. Elphaba considered it, very briefly, allowing her mind to spin a story in which she leapt out of the moving coach, held onto the side like a lizard, and scrambled upwards.
Then Boq snored a little and she resigned herself to her fate.
The coach unloaded them at Neverdale, a village that seemed rural more out of principle than anything else. The postcards read The Sleepiest Little Town in Oz and could hardly be properly examined for being plucked off their frames so quickly. The storefronts had arced gables and signs written in a curling, old-fashioned script, but they advertised the newest fashion out of the Emerald City.
They reached the inn after a few minutes, a short, squat building covered in vines.
“Can’t I stay here?” Elphaba suggested. “I can watch the suitcases while you go to Caprice-in-the-Whatever—”
“Caprice-in-the-Pines,” corrected Boq, fussing over his hair in the mirror.
“—and amuse yourself with Misses Galinda, Shenshen, and Pfannee, and you can just give them a hearty hello from me. Though not too hearty, or it won’t be quite credible.”
“Elphie.” Boq looked away and frowned in her direction. “If you don’t come, Miss Galinda will be disappointed.”
Avaric scoffed in disbelief as he waited by the door.
“No, she will be,” Boq said insistently. “She wrote to you so lovingly.”
“She was intoxicated as she wrote,” Elphaba suggested. “Possessed, by the vengeful spirit of the lake. A woman drowned by a former lover, who had seduced her only to receive her vast family wealth—”
“Is it that hard to believe that your roomie misses your company?” Boq interrupted her, tilting his head. “Sharing a room begets the most intimate of friendships.”
Elphaba, trying to decide whether he meant it or not, studied him with her lips pressed together in a thin line. “Not for Galinda,” she said finally. “While we converse occasionally—occasionally, Boq, and never about you, don’t give me that look—it’s mainly trivialities, or Galinda chattering to herself.” A rather annoying trait, Elphaba thought. At the beginning she had tried to read through Galinda’s incessant monologues, but she’d had a hard time tuning her out as of late. At least before Galinda had departed for the summer and left a heavy silence that, Elphaba told herself, she much preferred.
“But perhaps a sisterly affection for you has developed on those occasions,” Boq said. He ruffled his hair again, then dabbed on a bit of cologne onto his neck with his wrist. The movement reminded Elphaba of a cat scratching a flea-ridden neck with a hind paw.
“Ha,” said Elphaba. “Galinda is an only child if I’ve ever seen one. Her parents—”
“Whoever this Miss Galinda is, I’m dying to meet her,” Avaric intoned from the front of the room. “Because then at least I will not be stuck with the two of you.”
Boq, turning rather pale at this, nodded hastily and shook out his sleeves. “I’m ready,” he announced. “Elphie?”
“I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes watching you preen at yourself,” Elphaba snapped. “If you’re going to insist I come along, I’m ready. If not, I don’t think I shall ever be ready—”
She yelped as Boq took her sleeve in his hand and yanked her towards the door. “I won’t have you disappointing Miss Galinda,” he said sternly. “You’re coming, and that’s final.”
“Really,” Elphaba said, removing herself from his grasp. “The gall of you. I wish I had a proper chaperone who could wallop you on the head with a book or a cane. Instead I only have Avaric, whom I am considering walloping—”
“I’m not even doing anything,” Avaric protested.
“—and that tiktok creature, which is more likely to chime the hour than do anything of use.”
Grommetik made a shrug-like motion.
They stepped outside into the sweet air of Highsummer and a town that was beginning to fill with its evening rush. As it had already been full during the afternoon lull, it was now uncomfortably crowded. Elphaba had to keep her eyes fixed on Boq to avoid losing him, slightly envious that he just had to keep track of a green girl.
She didn’t much care if she lost Avaric and found it rather a pity when he slipped out of the crowd with her and Boq.
“And you’re sure of the direction?” Elphaba asked Boq, silently hoping they’d get lost and have to turn around. The blunt excitement at the thought of seeing Galinda—if one could call it that, Elphaba now suspected it had been case of acute indigestion—had tapered, leaving only a queasy sort of dread. Also a sign of indigestion, Elphaba supposed.
“Yes,” Boq said confidently. “The innkeeper said it’s down this path, about a mile, then right along the river. The house is past the bridge.”
“Galinda’s directions weren’t that precise,” Elphaba supplied for Avaric. “Which is unsurprising. She would get lost in her own closet, considering its size and her sense of direction.”
“Charming,” said Avaric.
Boq sighed inadvertently. Elphaba rolled her eyes. The path was narrow, threading its way through a thick wood. Perhaps it would grow narrower and narrower, until it came to a sharp point. An arrow leading them to Galinda, in her blonde glory.
And Pfannee and Shenshen.
They marched in relative silence, Avaric up ahead, Elphaba in the middle, Boq rounding up the back. Elphaba, at first satisfied with the steady rhythm of her boots on the uneven ground, found herself increasingly aware of the snap of twigs as they walked, the birds warbling in a chorus above them.
Sighing at herself, she kicked a strobilus down the path. “The name ‘Caprice-in-the-Pines’ seems like false advertising,” she complained. “While I’ll admit the overwhelming impression of the trees is conifer, spruce is far outweighing the house’s namesake.”
“Caprice-in-the-Spruces doesn’t have the same ring to it,” Boq remarked. “Perhaps it was a matter of artistic license, or self-expression for the owner of the house.”
“Then why position oneself at all regarding the species of tree?” Elphaba snapped. “Caprice-in-the-Trees has a charming little internal rhyme to it and the advantage of botanical accuracy.”
Ahead of them, Avaric’s steps thudded more intensely than usual down the path. Elphaba could not hide a grin at the thought of annoying him. “Master Avaric,” she called sweetly, trying to approximate Galinda’s tone whenever she attempted to cajole Elphaba into stoking the fire despite already being in bed, “what do you say of the name?” Pausing for effect, she flashed a smile at the back of his head. “Pardon,” she continued. “I forgot your estate is called Tenmeadows, and therefore you must have little to contribute regarding the creativity of placenames.”
“Boq,” Avaric wondered out loud, “do you hear anything? Perhaps a particularly croaky frog?”
“Ten meadows are an exceedingly tedious geographic feature,” Elphaba continued. “I also wonder in which vicinity these ten meadows can be found. Across the entire estate? Or are they lined up after each other? In this case, how can one differentiate where one meadow ends and the next begins? It may all just be one meadow, though the Margreave of Onemeadow is hardly—”
“Elphie,” hissed Boq, “can’t you leave it?”
“I’m just curious,” Elphaba replied, but she fell silent as Boq’s face was already a very plummy red.
“This Miss Galinda better be charming,” she heard Avaric mutter from up ahead. “At least we’ll soon find out. There’s the bridge.”
--
Alone in the guestroom provided to her, Elphaba sat on the bed.
It would have been an adequate guestroom, if one was actually a guest. If one was whatever Elphaba was—a joke taken too far, more or less—it seemed more like a prison. And yet its walls, wood-paneled and decorated with portraits of Pfannee’s ancestry, were much preferable to whatever waited outside. Galinda, golden hair lighter than Elphaba recalled, perhaps from the sun, sitting with her legs outstretched over two or three steps. Pfannee and Shenshen, who were practically interchangeable in Elphaba’s mind, though she assumed one was taller and the other shorter or the other way around. Boq, whose eyes had ticked between her and Galinda in shock and pity. For himself or for Elphaba, she didn’t know. But his summer romance with Galinda had gotten off to a bad start; it had not only stumbled right out the gate but fallen down a jagged cliff onto the rocks beneath. If Elphaba was unwanted, he was even more unwanted, not even the butt of the joke but rather an accessory that ought to have been surgically removed.
The thought was a little comforting.
Although she knew she would regret it, Elphaba crossed over to her suitcase and rifled through it to find the book she had folded “Galinda’s” letter into. She squinted, studying the words for signs she should have recognized. Did Galinda dot her i’s in that way? Did she not write her uppercase A with a bit more of a flourish at the end? Was the overall impression of her handwriting not that its maker had an eye for a certain aesthetic? Reading back over it, she heard Pfannee’s simpering voice in the pattern of the words. Galinda tended a bit more towards digression and repetition, along with a wry self-deprecation. Ironically, of course. Self-deprecation said with the certainty of someone who was very convinced of herself.
And as for the reason “Galinda” had “dared not to write”…
Well. Elphaba found it needlessly cruel to make up a secret. The incessant curiosity lingered, despite its false basis. She would just have to live with that. She occupied herself by stubbornly unpacking every item of clothing she had stuffed into the suitcase and stacking the pile of books she had intended to read while everyone else amused themselves in the water neatly. Even in an ideal world—one where Galinda had sent the letter, or some iteration of it, and had greeted Elphaba warmly as one would a friend—she would have spent the majority of the next few days alone.
No matter. None of that had to change. The others could amuse themselves or go back to Neverdale or Shiz or Quadling Country, for all Elphaba cared, and she would sit here and read, as was the original plan, and what she would have been doing at Shiz, had Boq not been so stupidly naïve and conceited and besotted with the concept of Galinda wanting him there.
--
As Elphaba began to get hungry, there was a knock at the door.
Expecting Boq, she strode towards it and opened it. “Hello,” she said. Her gaze, falling down to where his eyes would be, met only the plunge of a lace neckline and an expanse of pale skin. Head shooting upwards in confusion, Elphaba cleared her throat.
“Miss Elphaba,” Galinda greeted her curtly. “I see you’ve managed to locate my eyes. Really, how much like Master Avaric of you.”
“I was expecting Boq,” Elphaba grumbled, a smoldering heat in her face. “Not your décolletage. What do you want?”
“It’s dinnertime,” said Galinda.
“I’m fasting,” Elphaba replied. “It’s…”
She could not bring herself to say for religious reasons.
“You must think me stupid.” Galinda pursed her lips, plump and glossed with something that shimmered in the dim hall light. “If I am to believe that, I mean.”
“Well, we all believe stupid things occasionally,” Elphaba retorted. “Now go. Tell your friends I’m subsisting off air and knowledge alone.”
“You must eat something,” insisted Galinda. “I won't allow the Thropp Third Descending to starve in some cabin in the Gillikinese province.”
“So if I had no station or title to my name you would let me wither away?” Elphaba knew she was being unreasonable, but she couldn’t stop.
One of Galinda’s teeth teased her bottom lip, then released it redder than it had been. “That’s not what I mean, Elphaba.”
“You should call me the Thropp Third Descending,” Elphaba commented, stepping away from the door and sitting down on the bed. Performatively, she picked up a book. “Since you are apparently willing to let Elphaba starve.”
“I am willing to let neither starve,” Galinda sighed. “Despite your best efforts to keep me from this goal.”
“Hm.” Elphaba sniffed, planning on creeping downstairs and stealing a loaf of bread out of the pantry once everyone was asleep. She opened the book to a random page.
“Miss Elphaba, it is rather rude to read while someone is speaking to you. I came all the way upstairs; it’s two whole flights of stairs, very steep, and I had a long day in the sun. Relaxation is so tiring, you must know. And now—”
“I am reading about the nature of evil,” Elphaba said snidely. “A topic most relevant for my current situation.”
Galinda crossed her arms. “Oh, and what does it say, then?”
Elphaba looked down at the page, as if she were reading aloud. “Galinda of the Arduennas—”
“Honestly,” Galinda huffed, and left the room.
She returned a few minutes later, once Elphaba had put the book to one side and resigned herself to staring up at the ceiling. “Not you again,” Elphaba groaned. “Are you lost?”
“Here is a dinner,” Galinda said curtly as she set a plate down on the desk with a thud. “So you will not wither away.”
Elphaba sat up and crossed her arms. “And what is this for?”
“What does one do with food?” Galinda rolled her eyes. “Though if you wish to mash it up against the wall, target the portraits.” She motioned towards the dozens of old-and-forgotten Pfannees on the wall, each staring at Elphaba with a perturbed expression. Indignance from beyond the grave, at this green girl in their home. “I am rather angry at Pfannee.”
“Well, how do you think I feel,” Elphaba said flatly. She had shuffled to the far end of the bed in order to study the plate Galinda had set down, a cloud of mashed potatoes and what looked to be some roasted carrots.
“There was a venison steak,” Galinda said awkwardly, “but I left it off.”
Elphaba’s eyes darted between the plate and her roommate, who idled in the doorway with her hands knotting and unknotting themselves from each other.
“Thank you,” said Elphaba finally. “I’ll take my meal alone now.”
“I had a question,” Galinda burst out. “It’s the least you can do now, after—"
She motioned to the plate.
Elphaba rolled her eyes. Of course there was a transaction attached to each of Galinda’s niceties. “And if I reject the meal, can I avoid the question?” Elphaba asked. In the same moment her stomach growled, almost comically loud.
“Yes,” Galinda said primly, shaking her hair back behind her shoulders. She stepped towards the bed, dark sweep of eyelashes tilted down. There was a touch of red to her cheeks, though Elphaba could not tell if it was from a sunburn or something else. “And since we both know you’re not going to do that: why ever did you come here?”
Weighing her options, Elphaba relented. “I was invited,” she said. “Or at least I thought I was. And Master Boq insisted. You should ask him why he’s here.” Boq, with his eternal hopelessness and his hands wrung together at the thought of his most precious Galinda. Ah, to hell with it, thought Elphaba. As she had been humiliated, Boq should be, too. “On second thought, I’ll save you the suspense. He’s utterly obsessed with you, as only a fool could be, so I suggest you go and deal with that, however it is one deals with such things.” Not that I would know, she nearly added, but the words brought a queasy sting to her chest and what was self-deprecation for, if not to amuse herself?
Galinda’s hands danced along the foot of the bed, which was carved in the intricate way only people with too much money found appealing. “But whatever was in that letter to convince you to come?”
“I can’t desire a lake holiday?” Elphaba crossed her arms. “And besides, why all the questions? If it flatters you, imagine that I wanted to see my roomie, that I haven’t enjoyed not having to listen to her incessant jabbering—”
“I recall, Miss Elphaba, that you’re allergic to water, so pardon me for finding it strange you wanted to come to a lake house—”
“So I am.” Elphaba blinked. “Imagine, then, that I was looking to capitalize on Pfannee’s wealth. Drink her most expensive champagne, eat all the seasonal fruits, tear up her silken bedsheets—”
“They’re linen,” Galinda said, frowning. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“This entire situation is ridiculous,” Elphaba said, spreading her hands towards the walls. “Now leave me be. Go off with Boq, or whoever wishes to speak to you.”
“And what will you do, Miss Elphaba?”
Dropping her head back onto her pillow, Elphaba glared at the ceiling. “I’ll enjoy my vacation.”
--
“You never did tell me what was in the letter.”
Galinda stood in the door with a plate of crumbly biscuits in her hand. She looked quite out of place like that. Serving rather than being served. Elphaba expected her to take a step forward and tip the plate over, but she simply idled.
“Yet another meal? Tell me, Miss Galinda—I’ve always thought an advantage of vacationing is the cross-cultural exchange. Is this a Gillikinese custom?” Elphaba got up from the desk and studied the plate of food. Dissatisfied, she went back to the desk and looked at the letter she’d scratched out to Nessarose, knowing she wouldn’t send it. Dear Nessarose, she had written. I am currently vacationing with my awful roommate. I am learning about new depths to misery. “Regardless, you haven’t given me any time to get hungry. If I didn’t know better, I would think you were fattening me up, so you could roast me on a spit at high noon.”
“You flatter yourself,” Galinda said. Her lips twitched with a faint amusement. “Besides, we have enough food, so we have not yet considered this.”
Elphaba snorted. “Yet.”
“Who knows what the summer will bring, frankly.”
“I can’t imagine I’m particularly tasty.”
Galinda set the plate down on the desk in front of Elphaba. The porcelain shimmered white, like a flash of bone through an open wound. “Well, there’s always Ama Clipp,” she said airily.
Grumbling to avoid laughing, Elphaba took a biscuit.
“You’ve avoided the question again,” Galinda pointed out.
Elphaba finished chewing and swallowed. “My mouth is full,” she said, “so I’m afraid I can’t speak about that now.” She crammed another biscuit into her mouth, before Galinda would have the chance to answer. “It’d be unbecoming,” she added, making sure to muffle her words.
Galinda’s eyebrow spiked upwards. “How convenient. I could just ask Pfannee, you know.”
“Fine.” Elphaba stood and yanked her bag up off the floor. “Here.” She thrust a piece of paper out to Galinda, hating that it was neatly folded and not crumpled in a ball. “I found it an accurate facsimile of your voice, pardon me for not performing a proper analysis on the handwriting. In the future, I’ll be sure to do so. Who knows, the next time you leave me a note asking me to leave the window open it may be Miss Pfannee or Miss Shenshen, plotting my murder or to rob us blind—”
She fell silent as Galinda’s eyes got bigger and bigger, ticking down the page. “For reasons I dare not write?” she read.
“Master Boq was afraid you had come down with a terminal ailment of some sort. And while I agree that spending time with Miss Pfannee and Miss Shenshen seems akin to a terminal ailment, I tried to assure him it was temporary, but he was unconvinced.”
Sighing, Galinda reached the bottom of the page. “Ever your loving friend,” she read out loud. She folded the letter cleanly in half.
Elphaba leapt forward and snatched it back. “Yes, it’s a character assassination. My sincerest condolences and all. Now will you leave me alone?”
The sunburn, or blush, or whatever it was had slowly begun to creep up Galinda’s neck until it reached the very tip of her ears. “Oh,” she muttered, hands moving fretfully towards her cheeks. “I’ll have Pfannee’s hide for this.”
“A very uninteresting color,” said Elphaba. “I’d offer my own skin, of course, but I do prefer to have it on my body, considering it keeps my vital organs inside.”
“I am never—” Galinda took a deep breath, trying to calm herself.
What Elphaba had mistaken as benign embarrassment seemed a bit more like unbridled rage. Galinda seemed barely containable in her lithe form. Elphaba found herself shrinking backwards, mildly impressed.
“I am never telling her anything ever again,” Galinda said, turned on her heel, and went out.
--
“Can we establish this in our dorm room as well?” Elphaba asked the next time Galinda arrived with a plate of food. “I must say, I do like the thought of me being able to sit at my desk with a book all day and you serving me.”
Galinda glared at her wordlessly, set the plate down, and left the room.
--
“Lunch,” Galinda announced. The plate clattered on the desk.
“Your hospitality could use some improvement,” Elphaba commented. “I thought that was important, for society girls.”
“It is,” Galinda replied. “For wanted guests. Your presence here is more akin to a—to a hostile takeover. I have no ambitions to be polite to the raccoon in the attic, either; it causes a terrible ruckus at night.”
“I am not hostile,” Elphaba snapped, suddenly finding starvation a more attractive alternative to the current conversation. “And I am not a raccoon, they have an entirely different coloring.” Her eyes flickered towards Galinda. “I’m merely sitting here,” she finished lamely.
Galinda glanced down. “So you are.”
“So I am.”
They looked at each other, silence frosting the air between them.
“Did you really think I’d written that letter?” Galinda asked finally, mouth contorted with an emotion Elphaba could not recognize. “I mean, truly, Miss Elphaba. Is that my speech cadence? Do I have such a sparse vocabulary? Do I dot my i's in such an inane way? Do you pay no attention to me whatsoever?”
“Absolutely none,” Elphaba replied. “In fact, I barely recall your name. Glinda of the Lower Lowlands, was it not? I had to ask Boq who you even were. You should be lucky he’s so obsessed with you, otherwise I would have tossed the letter into the fireplace on suspicion of fraud.”
Galinda rolled her eyes. “So if I had written that to you,” she started, “and Master Boq had not intervened, you wouldn’t have come?”
“Oh, so now we are concerning ourselves with absurd theoretical questions,” Elphaba said. She picked up a piece of broccoli from the plate, sniffed it, and let it fall back down. “What if the world turned on its head?” she mused quietly, poking her fork into a potato. “What if the Wizard unveiled himself to be a dancing Pig?”
“You mock me, Miss Elphaba.”
“I thought I was born to plague you?” Elphaba tilted her face upward to meet cool blue eyes. “Am I not just fulfilling my natural purpose, then?”
Galinda’s face reddened. “I meant in a figurative sense. That my—that it was a plague, to deal with such friends as Pfannee and Shenshen, who at the same time are capable—”
“You’re not a very convincing actress,” Elphaba said. “And your rhetoric could use some work. Please tell me you’ve decided to pursue a career other than the theatrical arts, or else I should be worried for your livelihood.”
For the first time, Galinda sat down in the room, on the armchair across from Elphaba’s desk. She perched on the very edge of it with her legs primly crossed at the ankles, as if she was preparing to run. Her sunburn bloomed a soft pink on the high arc of her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose… which was dotted with freckles, as Elphaba would have noticed if she’d cared to look more closely. Her summer dress hung loosely over her legs.
With great effort, Elphaba averted her gaze.
“I am sorry, though I hardly think you’ll believe me.” Galinda’s hands fell into her lap. Elphaba had always found her palms freakishly soft, whenever they brushed against her by accident. She tried to think of a way to integrate this into an insult, but came up empty. “Your presence took me by surprise.”
Elphaba, having nothing to say, said nothing.
“It was a cruelty,” Galinda continued. “Juvenile, ridiculous. Towards me, mind you, and though you were also, unfortunately, affected—”
Elphaba crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “I am beginning to believe you have died,” she said matter-of-factly to Galinda, “as there is no other reason why you would haunt me so. Tell me, Miss Galinda, was this the room in which you shuffled off the mortal coil? Are you waiting for some spirit to usher you into an afterlife where you can sit and curl your hair for eternity?”
“That seems boring,” said Galinda. “I’d hope my hair would stay curled, in an afterlife. It'd only be fair. But anyway, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted, it was a cruelty primarily aimed towards me. That you were caught in the crossfire, so to speak, is unfortunate, but needn’t ruin your summer holiday. You could go back to Shiz and forget about all this.” She sat back and smiled, though it did not reach her eyes.
“This has ruined my summer holiday,” Elphaba said haughtily. She swallowed hard, a burning sensation she attributed to the humiliation in her throat. “So I am liable to ruin yours as well. To leave would be to abandon that pursuit.”
Galinda, in that moment, looked caught between two poles Elphaba could not discern. Her smile softened; she leaned forward and Elphaba was struck with the scent that had nestled itself uncomfortably into their dorm room, even though it had been weeks since Galinda last applied her perfume in front of the fireplace. Then she took a deep breath and stood, shaking out her curls so that they fell over her back. “It’s useless to speak to you,” she announced. “Goodbye.”
--
Dinner was a roll of bread and a bowl of soup. “I am considering starving you out,” Galinda said as she set it down. “But due to my inherent goodness I will not.”
“My, how generous,” Elphaba said, loudly enough to cover the sound of her stomach rumbling. “How ever will I repay you?”
“Leave,” said Galinda.
“No,” replied Elphaba.
“You terrible, stubborn thing,” Galinda said, hands clenched into fists. Her face was a very pretty, mottled pink. “I am trying to get us both out with our dignities intact.”
“Your dignity is unblemished,” Elphaba said smoothly, “while mine never existed in the first place. You should be happy, Miss Galinda, that your association with me is the most embarrassing thing about you. I am to be associated with myself for the rest of my life, barring major disasters, while you will be able to look back on this moment in fifteen years and remember me only as your foolish roomie.”
It came out more honest than she had intended. Elphaba busied herself with tearing the roll apart and throwing the pieces into the soup.
Galinda bit her lip. “Miss Elphaba—”
“It’s still useless to speak to me,” Elphaba said, burning her tongue on the soup. “That won’t change.”
She did not look up to see Galinda leave.
--
Elphaba had nestled herself semi-comfortably in the scratchy blankets—she’d have to make a note of that to Pfannee when she left, really not up to par, she thought, doing her best internal Galinda impression—when her door banged open.
It was Galinda, though Elphaba thought for a moment that perhaps she was a ghost. She seemed pale—paler than usual—contrasting the red of her cheeks and lips, her hair spiraling downwards in an unruly way like she had just run against a ferocious wind.
“Galinda?” Elphaba asked, blinking to make sure she was not a trick of the light. “Has a war broken out?”
Galinda took a deep breath and smoothed her hair back, then closed the door neatly with a trembling hand. “Miss Elphaba,” she greeted her. Her voice was thready. “How do you do?”
“I’ve been less confused in my life,” Elphaba said, sitting upright. “For one, I know for a fact there’s no meal served at this time.”
“I kissed Boq,” Galinda whimpered. She slapped a hand over her mouth. “You can’t tell anyone.”
A sharp pain pricked the inside of Elphaba’s cheek. “I’ll be sure to post it on the noticeboard when we get back. Should I include a cartoon?”
“Elphaba, I’m serious.”
Elphaba conceded with a shrug. “Is there a reason you’re telling me this? Congratulations, I suppose, or my sincere condolences. Can I sleep now?”
“Oh, you are intolerable,” Galinda hissed.
“Thank you.”
“Really.” She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them, then paced around the room, a flurry of blonde hair and perfume. “I must have done something very bad in a previous life,” she said bluntly. “Or else I'm being preemptively punished for something I have yet to do.”
“Remarkable, how your current behavior falls outside review.”
“Or perhaps there’s nothing I could have done to deserve this suffering,” Galinda lamented.
“I can think of a few things,” Elphaba offered. “Should I go in alphabetical or chronological order?” She found it funny, but her roommate really did seem distressed. “Fine, you kissed Boq,” Elphaba continued, trying to sound supportive. “Is that really so terrible? Your neck might hurt from bending down tomorrow, but next time you could wear flat shoes. Or Boq could stand on a stool.”
Galinda wheeled around, aghast. “I don’t want to kiss him again.”
Elphaba felt a twinge of annoyance. “Then don’t. He’ll survive, though I’ll probably hear about it for months. I may not survive that, but that doesn’t need to concern you.”
“I didn’t mean to kiss him at all,” Galinda wailed. She strode forward in Elphaba’s direction, then changed course and dropped onto the bed face-first.
“I suppose you tripped and fell onto his mouth?” Elphaba huffed. “That seems improbable. It’s a very small target. Also, you’re on my legs.”
“Obviously not,” Galinda mumbled into the sheets, shifting so that Elphaba could reclaim herself. “Don’t be absurd. No, it—it overcame me.” She sighed. “These are very scratchy. I thought Pfannee’s parents were wealthier.”
“Hm,” Elphaba said, pulling her knees to her chest. “What a disappointment this all must be for you.”
Galinda rolled towards Elphaba onto her back, hair spilling out over the sheets. Blankly, she stared at the ceiling. “To think I thought I’d be someone,” she whispered. “I’ll have to go back to Frottica. I was the first girl from Pertha Hills at Shiz, Elphaba.”
“So you’ve mentioned, once or twice or a few dozen times.”
Galinda’s bottom lip began to tremble. “I was supposed to find a husband. Someone rich and dashing and ideally in the diamond industry.”
“Really, Galinda,” Elphaba said, uncomfortably shifting her legs to the side to avoid touching her. “Kissing Boq is—well, I can think of worse things. Few, to be fair, but there are worse things. Cholera, no doubt. And Pfannee and Shenshen—”
“You don’t understand,” Galinda cried. “I’m a joke to them already. At least cholera would not impact my social standing.”
“Galinda.”
“They’ll have a field day with this,” Galinda said. “They’ll never let me forget any of it. First you and now Boq—”
“Don’t bring me into this,” Elphaba protested, feeling queasy. “And my coming here had nothing to do with you,” she added, rather pathetically, she thought. “So why would that matter?”
Galinda had gone suspiciously red.
“Galinda?” A strange, panicked heat rushed across Elphaba’s skin. “You are referring to the letter?”
“Yes,” Galinda squeaked. “What else?”
Elphaba froze, hands interlocked over her knees. “How would I know?” she asked. “I am the punchline, the center of some conspiracy, apparently, that everyone gets to be amused by but me.”
“I am not amused,” Galinda said in shock, head snapping in Elphaba’s direction. “Has my behavior since your arrival indicated even an ounce of amusement?”
“Perhaps not amusement,” Elphaba corrected, hands digging themselves into Pfannee’s scratchy sheets. She stared at Pfannee’s awful walls, at the portraits of people with Pfannee’s chin and high forehead, all with that same knowing smirk on their face.
Galinda was a revelation, compared to them. The curve of her lips, the way her eyelids fell half-closed when her gaze swept downward, how her hair glinted in the slant of moonlight coming in the window.
Her chest heaved as she waited for Elphaba to continue. “What then, Elphaba?” she asked.
“Not amused,” Elphaba said, annoyed at how she had to search for words. “But you’re—you—”
“Really,” Galinda muttered under her breath. “You’re all criticism and no substance.”
“You will laugh at this later,” Elphaba said through her teeth. “You weren’t in on it, perhaps, but in a few years you and Pfannee and Shenshen will titter at the thought of the green girl at Lake Chorge, showing up like a fool due to a forged letter, and you’ll sweep your already windswept hair back and clutch at your diamond speculator husband’s arm and say oh, darling, it was ever so dreadful, with that horrible green thing.”
“Your imitation degrades me,” Galinda complained. “It has simply nothing of my essence. And my voice is not so high.” She cleared her throat, then pitched her speech a half-octave deeper. “And I regret to inform you that you still have not understood. It was all meant to humiliate me,” she confessed in a whisper.
“So I’m not even afforded the dignity of being the protagonist in my own public embarrassment,” said Elphaba.
“That’s what I’ve been saying.” Galinda’s voice trended upwards again, a little unsteadily. “You are an unfortunate prop. I am the target. And I will continue to be the target if word gets out about me and Boq—”
“Galinda, really. They had a laugh about it, a dreadfully screechy one, and now everyone will forget. Consider yourself lucky.”
Galinda mumbled something unintelligible.
“Galinda?”
Another mumble.
Elphaba leaned in to hear her better but found that it didn’t make much of a difference. “Galinda—”
“Don’t make me say it,” she whined.
“I don’t know what you are going to say,” Elphaba said, enunciating every syllable so that the words punched the air. “I am not in your head. You will have to use your words. But it doesn’t make sense why you would be humiliated, primarily, if Miss Pfannee wrote me a letter. Yes, your green terror of a roommate appearing out of nowhere is suboptimal at best, but we live together; we’ve been seen together before.” Elphaba waved a hand across her face for good measure. “I’m hard to forget.”
Galinda pushed herself up with her elbows, so that she was sitting upright on the bed again. They were rather close, really. Elphaba hadn’t noticed at first. And the way Galinda’s eyes creased as she fixated Elphaba was—disconcerting. Startled by the sudden movement and the intensity of Galinda’s gaze, Elphaba looked away.
“Perhaps that’s the problem,” Galinda murmured, with such a softness to her voice that Elphaba jerked her head back to see if she had been replaced in a beam of light with another creature, perhaps one more inclined to tolerate Elphaba. But no, it was just Galinda, still staring at her, frowning.
Elphaba frowned too. “You’re distracted again.”
Resigned, Galinda sighed. “The humiliation is not in your coming here,” she said. “Though that certainly didn’t help. It is in that horrible letter, in the fact that it was sent to you in the first place.”
Blinking rapidly, Elphaba tried to clear her throat. “But why?”
“I do very specially hope so for reasons I dare not write,” Galinda quoted, then closed her eyes. “I did not purposefully memorize the words. I have, in fact, tried very hard to forget them, though I fear I will be one hundred years old and on my deathbed and see Pfannee’s terrible penmanship in front of me—really, Elphaba, it’s like you don’t know me at all, and I’ve left so many notes for you over the past year—”
She seemed altogether a bit hysterical, words running into each other like paints mixed with too much water.
“Galinda,” Elphaba said, “you didn’t write them, you know.”
“Oh, but I said it to Pfannee,” she said miserably. “And Shenshen.”
“You what?”
“Not like that. Certainly not with that implication.”
Elphaba stared blankly ahead. “Implication?”
“Elphaba,” groaned Galinda.
Chastised, Elphaba shrugged.
Galinda took a shuddering breath. “I said—”
“Don’t hyperventilate,” said Elphaba crossly. “I’m not picking you up off the ground if you faint.”
Galinda glared, barely breathing at all.
“You said?” Elphaba prompted.
“I said we had developed a rapport,” Galinda admitted. “A friendship, of sorts—”
“So you lied to them,” said Elphaba. “I haven’t had many friends” —again she was too honest, and pressed a hand to her stomach to restrain herself— “but I should hope they don’t think I was born to plague them.” She smiled at Galinda, baring her teeth.
Galinda pressed her lips together. “I didn’t lie, Miss Elphaba,” she said. “Regardless, I had—naively, I suppose—hoped they would—”
“You thought they would deign to accept me?” Elphaba snorted roughly. “Those two? They look at me as if I’m contagious.”
“Not to accept you,” said Galinda. “But to think that I was... well. To think me kinder than I am.”
Elphaba began to laugh. “You thought you’d tell Pfannee and Shenshen that we get along and they’d revere you as—what? Galinda the Delusional, the patron saint of hopeless cases?” She could hardly keep herself on the bed from laughter. “Oh, you could tell them you kissed Boq out of pity,” she sputtered. “That he was dying and only your lips could soothe his pain. And just before he was about to expire, your mouths met and he sprang up, the picture of perfect health again. A miracle, really! Galinda the Healer. Saving him from dropping dead.”
Galinda’s face hardened. “I rather wish he'd dropped dead,” she grumbled. “Then I wouldn’t have to swear him to a secrecy he will almost certainly fail to uphold.”
“Come now, it can’t be that terrible to kiss you,” said Elphaba briskly. “Though I fear you’re right. He is probably penning a letter to his parents about his future wife as we speak.” She cleared her throat. “But again, we’ve strayed off topic. We were speaking of your inane desire to be liked by Pfannee and Shenshen.”
Galinda’s nostrils flared. Still she looked extraordinarily pretty, sitting with her legs hanging off Elphaba’s bed. “There’s nothing more to speak of,” she said. “The story is over. An unfortunate ending, but that’s the way the clock ticks, I suppose. Good night, Miss Elphaba, and sweet—”
“Not so fast,” Elphaba said, grabbing Galinda’s arm. It was tense, but did not jerk away. “I still don’t understand.”
Galinda turned to face her roommate, “You’re too clever for that, Elphaba.” She angled her head down, so that Elphaba could not see her eyes. “And I am too clever to believe your falsehoods for a single second.”
“Yes, we’re very clever,” said Elphaba, rolling her eyes. “How fortunate for us.” She reached deep within herself, to find some iteration of courage to speak the next words. “Say it then,” she said finally, affecting disinterest. “So we can talk openly on this matter.”
Too late, she realized she still had Galinda’s arm encased between her fingertips. She let it go.
Galinda did not look in Elphaba’s direction. “Pfannee claimed I had developed a... a romantic affection for you,” she said through clenched teeth. “It was quite the topic for a few days. They teased me mercilessly. I considered leaving, but I am not made to travel alone.” She sniffed. “I also feared it would convince them it was true.”
A frothy nausea churned through Elphaba’s stomach. “How ridiculous.”
“Hm,” Galinda murmured in agreement.
“But Boq—” Elphaba started. She paused to swallow, her mouth dry. “You kissing Boq.” She tried not to let her mouth twist in distaste. “It provides a deniability, to Pfannee’s assertions. Isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t I post it on the noticeboard?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Galinda cried, leaning forward to bury her head in her hands. “No. I don’t think so. He’s—he’s so short, Elphaba.”
“At least he isn’t green.” Elphaba shrugged. Her ears rang. Elphaba felt herself double in her perception, one part of her in the room with Galinda, avoiding eye contact, the other trapped on another floor, forced to listen through the ceiling. Distant, yet painfully close. She swallowed.
“You insult yourself,” said Galinda, but Elphaba waved her hand dismissively.
“It’s not an insult if it’s a fact,” she said without bitterness. “Particularly regarding a trait one cannot particularly influence. I am green. Boq is not. To provide further examples, I am tall, or at least taller than Boq. These are both misfortunes of our respective births, really. You are lovely, though that’s also not an accomplishment in the traditional sense—though I’m willing to make a small concession for the outrageous amount of time you spend curling your hair—”
Galinda’s mouth turned up into a pleased little grin, though it was gone before Elphaba could catch her breath.
Elphaba rolled her eyes. “Like I said, it is not an accomplishment. In contrast, Boq and I are, well. What did you say? Fun to look at, for him? And regarding me you expressed no opinion.” That night in the garden seemed to be ages ago, even though it had only been a few months at most. Elphaba tried to recall the conversation, what Galinda had said to Boq, but her mind substituted it with what had happened before, in their dorm room, as Elphaba attempted to convince Galinda to join her. The scene painted itself in broad strokes: Elphaba’s grasping words against Galinda’s quick, choreographed head shakes, which loosened her curls until they swept cleanly over her back.
In the end, she had gone along with it. Hadn’t that counted for something?
“I said you were pretty, once,” said Galinda and crossed her arms.
“That was an epoch ago,” Elphaba said. “Surely you’ve come to your senses by now.”
“I meant it,” Galinda objected. “I may not be very good at thinking and I may not be especially kind, but I did mean that.”
Elphaba scowled.
“Really,” said Galinda. “Boq is fun to look at, but you were positively entrancing, in that firelight.”
“I didn’t even have a proper mirror,” Elphaba grumbled.
Galinda rolled her eyes. “I didn’t look at you in the mirror.”
“You have a conflict of interest, now, in flattering me. You are trying to coax me into submission so I don’t tell anyone about your dalliance with Boq.”
“A brush of the lips hardly counts as a dalliance,” Galinda sniffed. “And really, Elphaba. Is it that unbelievable that I could simply compliment you for the sake of complimenting you?”
“Yes,” said Elphaba simply. “Especially with these rumors abound. You have been here in my room a suspicious amount of time. What ever will Miss Shenshen think?”
“She doesn’t think,” Galinda said, “at least not that I’ve noticed. Besides, the last they saw of me, I was heading out onto the porch. I could have drowned in the lake by now. Unfortunate, but—”
She didn’t have to say it. Unfortunate to have drowned, but at least she would have been freed from her association to Elphaba, who swallowed and felt a prickle in the back of her neck. Surely this was a sign that she wanted Galinda to leave.
“The lake would have spit you back onto shore in annoyance,” she said eventually. “And you can’t hide in here all night, there’s nowhere to sleep.” Briefly, an image flared up in her mind’s eye of—no. No, it did not. Elphaba cleared her throat, almost violently. “Galinda, you are a terrible hostess, as we have established—”
Galinda sighed.
“—and I am exhausted, so if you’ve had enough of regaling me with tales of you and—Boq”—Elphaba suddenly found it very hard to speak his name, which was curious, but not something she had neither the time nor the energy to dissect— “I’d be grateful, profoundly, if you'd let me sleep.”
Galinda took a deep breath, like she was about to say something. Elphaba felt the urge to interrupt, to press on. She forced herself to wait. A hushed darkness descended through the window: a cloud moving over the moon, a porch light fizzing out.
“You’re quite right, Miss Elphaba,” Galinda said stiffly. “I apologize for disturbing you.”
And then she was gone, with the lingering indent of her body in the sheets and the faintest scent of perfume in the air.
--
If Elphaba had thought the first coach ride to Lake Chorge had been the most unpleasant of her life, the journey back was putting up a good fight to claim the title. At least the trip with Boq and Avaric had been charged with a sort of restless anticipation that made time go quickly, the hours flitting away as something dreadful sat at their end. Now, that something dreadful had already happened, so there was only a flat grey boredom that enveloped them all. The tiktok creature, promoted to sit on the inside of the carriage out of pity or simply in the hopes that it would diffuse the tension somewhat, whirred unconsciously as its head swiveled around to glance at Ama Clutch, Elphaba, Boq, and Galinda in succession. It was remarkable how it doled out its watchfulness: completely equally, with no indication that any of its subjects were more or less pleasing to look at. More proof of its relative inability to perceive things, Elphaba thought. Anything sentient would, presumably, have let its gaze hover over Galinda’s delicate figure, the way she absentmindedly wound a piece of hair around her finger as she stared listlessly out at passing trees.
Elphaba, despite training her eyes fastidiously onto the book in front of her, had caught Boq looking once or twice. It was the only reason she even knew what was happening, as she had not wanted to miss anything particularly interesting and Boq did seem rather engaged.
“So here we are,” Galinda said as they rattled over the dusty road that Elphaba and Boq had stood at mere days ago, the solid buildings of Briscoe Hall coming into view. “I suppose you’ve had enough of torturing me for the summer?”
“Quite,” Boq mumbled, the back of his neck red.
“Perhaps,” Elphaba said, enjoying how Galinda eyebrows drew themselves together in horror. “But to reveal more would be to spoil the fun, so you’ll have to—”
“Elphie,” Boq groaned. “Haven’t you had enough?”
“I haven’t had anything,” Elphaba said blusteringly, but lost her appetite to continue when Galinda withdrew her gaze sharply and let it rest somewhere between Elphaba’s knees and the floor.
--
The next few weeks consisted, for Elphaba, mainly of silence. There was silence in the morning, after Galinda used an array of styling products that all seemed to cause different, uniquely annoying noises, silence around lunchtime, when Galinda would have usually relayed the day’s gossip to herself in the mirror while Elphaba tried to read, and silence after dinner, save for Ama Clutch fussing over them and wishing them a good night. It had an entirely different quality to the stillness that existed in Elphaba's room while Galinda cavorted with her friends at the shores of Lake Chorge. That had just been quiet, in a way Elphaba had no longer been accustomed to after months of sharing living quarters.
Not that she had a preference, one way or the other. Though with Galinda hovering around the room, she seemed to always be listening with half an ear, as if her roomie would forget what had transpired and continue prattling on at any moment. How unfair, Elphaba thought, as she leafed half-heartedly through an old Unionist sermon on faith and promise and never-ending devotion.
All concepts she considered herself utterly unfamiliar with.
It was a quiet comfort that Master Boq had been rejected more thoroughly than she. His stare across the table had been glum, the tea he was nursing spotted on the surface. Elphaba was unsure which she found more pathetic. Surely there had been some unspoken plea in his eyes, to speak to Miss Galinda on his behalf, which she had no intention of fulfilling.
And yet the possibility lingered. How unfair of Boq, to put it in her mind! It had been inconceivable to initiate a conversation by asking frivolous things like how was your day, Galinda, or attempting to string together a series of questions that would lead to natural conversation after Galinda begrudgingly inquired as to whether Elphaba still needed the light. And although having a roomie who more or less had taken an Elphaba-specific vow of silence would certainly be beneficial to her academic success, it was tiresome to be continually waiting for it to be over. If she tried—and this was an argument that Elphaba constructed over hours—and Galinda struck it down, then the silence would likely stretch on over the semester, but at least Elphaba would be able to stop listening for its end. A relief, in a way; a certainty like the click of a lock.
Elphaba brought herself to speak as the campus descended into dusty evening twilight, timing her words with a flick of a page to seem as nonchalant as possible. “Master Boq’s still rather infatuated with you.”
There was only a faint grumble from Galinda’s side of the room. Elphaba could not rule out indigestion, and so she cleared her throat. “If that is of interest to you.”
More grumbling, though Elphaba thought she detected a bit more voice to it. “It is not,” Galinda muttered. “I had nearly succeeded in wiping the entire sequence from my mind.”
“You kissing him?”
“He kissed me,” Galinda protested. There was a shuffling sound and the snap of fabric. Abandoning her page, Elphaba’s gaze slid upwards to see Galinda ostensibly fluffing a pillow, though it resembled more a grievous assault. “But I do, in fact, mean the entire unfortunate situation.”
“Your friendship with Misses Pfannee and Shenshen, then?”
Galinda punched the pillow again. Elphaba wondered briefly if it had committed a war crime in the recent past, and if Galinda thought herself assigned with capital punishment. “You find yourself particularly amusing, do you not?” she asked. Apparently deciding that the pillow had had enough, or else that it was on the cusp of being destroyed, Galinda let herself fall onto it. “It is not enough for you to ruin the entirety of my summer. You insist, Miss Elphaba, on reminding me of it constantly, of calling my abject romantic humiliation—”
“This is the first I’ve mentioned it,” Elphaba retorted, feeling a peculiar heat rise in her face. “So I have not reminded you of anything, and I certainly do not insist. How could I, if we haven’t been speaking?”
“How patently untrue,” Galinda complained. “You asked me to close the window last week. That was sufficient, as it reminded me of the windows at Caprice-in-the-Pines. And besides, there is no need for you to say anything, not when you’re—when you—”
“When I what?” Elphaba snapped. “When I am present? Forgive me, Miss Galinda, for existing within the confines of my own dorm room. I can put a burlap sack on my head, perhaps that’ll suffice.”
“The rest of you would still be visible,” sniffed Galinda.
“Then stop looking,” Elphaba said blithely. “We’ll get a partition, a brick wall in the middle of the room. You can room with someone else; petition Morrible, petition the Wizard himself, if you are so traumatized at the sight of me. You wouldn’t be the first, there’s likely an entire generation of Munchkinlander children for whom I’m a bogeyman.”
“It doesn’t matter if I see you or not,” Galinda cried. She straightened herself, a perfectly symmetrical blush dashed over her face. Elphaba had seen her remove her rouge nearly an hour ago. “It’s the thinking of you, the mere existence of you—”
She went pale with a squeak, hands fidgeting with the edges of the pillow again. Elphaba winced. It already seemed to be fraying around the edges. “Enough,” she said, striding over to her roommate. Defensively, Galinda rose from her bed, clutching the unfortunate pillow to her chest. “I will not clean up goosefeathers,” Elphaba hissed, grasping its corner, “and we both know you’ll be far too hysterical to do so. So before your pillow is an unfortunate casualty of this conversation—”
Galinda yanked the pillow back. “The filling is down,” she retorted. “Hence the softness.”
“It will not be soft if it is ripped,” Elphaba argued. The pillow careened towards her, the result of Galinda’s gaze loosening the slightest bit, or else because it had finally decided to stop withstanding the pressure. As there was no cloud of goosefeathers—or down, or whatever made its home encased in its case, cushioning Galinda’s curls night after night—Elphaba tentatively readjusted her grip. “Now if you’ll choose a household item that will break less messily to abuse—”
What happened next Elphaba found difficult to describe. Galinda managed to pull the pillow back, the fabric’s rip reverberating through the air, and through a cloud of grey-white down—so it was down, Elphaba thought, grimacing at the thought of removing it from every crack and furrow in the room—Galinda lunged at her, a faded red face and redder lips through white.
“Galinda,” Elphaba yelped, scrambling away, “I—”
Galinda ripped her eyes open—had they been closed?—and drew her neck back, the red turning brighter and deeper, running nearly into purple. “Right,” she said, a bit breathlessly, “that’ll be it for tonight.”
“Galinda—”
“Miss Elphaba,” she called, spitting out a down feather that had wormed its way into her mouth, “I am going for a walk of, say, fifteen to twenty minutes or so. I believe that’ll give me enough time to drown myself, and if you could deign to arrange the removal of my body from the canal at that point I’d be much obliged. Corpse-bloat is so unbecoming.”
She pushed past Elphaba with a curt nod and stalked towards the door, stirring up the down with her bare feet.
Elphaba, lost in the flurry for a moment, shook herself and came to just as Galinda pulled the door open. “You are not serious,” she said, following her. “You cannot possibly throw yourself in the canal—”
“What alternative do I have?” Galinda’s feet pattered down the hallway, Elphaba’s close behind. “Living with this humiliation—with you—how will I ever show my face in public? How will I ever sleep again? Which reminds me, I must ask Ama Clutch to order me a new pillow tomorrow, as the old one has been so unfortunately—”
“Torn to shreds?” Elphaba supplied.
Galinda huffed in indignation. They had nearly made it out of the building, so quick was Galinda’s step, and still she did not turn to look at Elphaba. There was a wisp of down caught in the hair at the nape of her neck. “Stop following me,” she hissed. “Go back and sleep, or read your ridiculous books, or eat your ridiculous apples or brush your ridiculous hair—”
“Am I meant to do all that at once?” Elphaba asked, following Galinda across the dimly lit grounds.
“I don’t care,” moaned Galinda. “Or I should not. Or I will not, and—”
Elphaba, reaching out on a whim, captured Galinda’s wrist between her fingers. “I don’t understand,” she said, rather weakly, but her heart was convulsing too quickly in her chest to fortify her tone. “We have been rooming together for nearly a year—that I don’t improve your social standing is clear, but still you have tolerated it.”
Galinda, breathing heavily, glared at her. “It was one thing for you to take up residency in my room,” she sniffed. “It’s quite another to take up residency in my mind in the way you do, in a way that is so apparently obvious that Pfannee and Shenshen realize it weeks before me—and if that wasn’t bad enough, to flinch and scream when I tried to kiss you—”
Elphaba choked on her own spit, or perhaps a very lost down feather. “To kiss me? Galinda—was I present for this?”
“Yes,” wailed Galinda, looking very much like she was considering stomping her foot on the ground. “Moments ago, Miss Elphaba!”
Elphaba felt a sudden chill down her spine, which spread across her limbs and torso. “Are you hallucinating?”
Gone was the tremulous indignation, gone was the screech nearly tipping over into hysteria. Instead Galinda stood silently before her, her robe clasped loosely at the waist, her nightgown curved over the swell of her breast. A stray down feather, caught in her neckline, shivered with the rise and fall of her chest. Elphaba found herself staring, inching her way forward until Galinda’s face came into view, the arch of her eyebrow, her parted lips…
Which closed promptly. “And what,” Galinda spat, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Kissing you?”
Elphaba herself had not known until that exact moment, and was so surprised at the words that she froze with her hands clenched into fists in front of her.
Galinda glanced at her dubiously. “Are you mocking me?”
“No,” Elphaba protested, jerking her head back. Inadvertently her fingers found her own lips. “I—”
“You will not be successful if you keep moving away.” Galinda shook out her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. “And I will certainly not initiate, not after the last time!”
“I haven't done this before,” mumbled Elphaba, eyes skidding to the appealing shimmer of the Suicide Canal, “and you have at least kissed Boq—”
“That was an entirely different angle,” Galinda squeaked. “You are a head and a half taller than him!”
Elphaba shuffled forward half a step and managed not to take a running leap into the water. A heady nausea coiled tightly in her stomach, twisted together like plant roots in too small a pot. Momentarily, she was afraid she would vomit onto Galinda’s face. Galinda, in her eternal entitlement, merely tilted her chin upward and let her eyelids flutter closed; she moved neither forward nor away. Elphaba fought the urge to roll her eyes. Her hand hovered over Galinda’s jaw, too afraid to touch it.
Galinda cracked her eyes open. “Have you gotten lost?”
She was so close that her breath puffed hot against Elphaba’s mouth.
“No,” Elphaba muttered, “I—”
Galinda arced her face into Elphaba’s palm, Elphaba’s hands so cold or Galinda blushing so fiercely that it felt like fire. “It isn’t difficult,” she said with a pout. “Even Boq—”
Deciding she had heard enough about Boq, Elphaba kissed her.
Galinda’s lips were very warm, almost hot; there was nearly no resistance to them. They tasted faintly of peppermint. Elphaba’s nerves broke through her, bloomed and blossomed and sparked a frenetic energy she had previously only associated with the first, dashing day of spring. It was a brief kiss, tempered by inexperience and the buzz in Elphaba’s ears, and they parted quickly but not fulfilled.
“See?” Galinda was saying.
Elphaba stared at her dumbstruck, as if Galinda had siphoned out her brains through her mouth.
Galinda’s face fell. “Don’t tell me—”
“If you make a joke about me turning into a Frog,” Elphaba murmured, “then I shall—”
There was no such joke. There was only Galinda’s mouth, pressing against Elphaba’s again, and again that curious peppermint, accompanied this time by a pale pink hand that curved its way around Elphaba’s waist as they moved against each other. “Well,” Galinda remarked, detaching both her mouth and limbs from Elphaba, “I believe I have reconsidered my suicide.”
“How reassuring,” said Elphaba, still lightheaded.
--
They slept in Elphaba’s bed together, as Galinda could not tolerate a night without a proper pillow. The rest of the many cushions in her possession, Elphaba learned, were decorative, and thus unsuitable to facilitating a good night’s sleep. Galinda stretched and kicked against her as she dreamt; her head inched closer to Elphaba’s until Elphaba found herself evicted from her own pillow onto the tome of Unionist sermons she had been hiding beneath it.
And so it was. Galinda was painfully graspable, present. More material than the Unnamed God—despite the hardcover—with every rise and fall of her stomach, solid as Elphaba crept over her to get out of bed in the morning, untwining herself from Galinda’s vice grip.
Was it blasphemy or worship, to watch her sleep? Regardless, Elphaba sank her head. Her gaze crept along the ground to avoid getting tangled in the cascade of Galinda’s hair over the edge of her pillow.
“Good morning, duckies,” said Ama Clutch, clutching a tea tray in both hands as she bustled into the room. “My, you should have seen the show last night—Miss Galinda—?”
Galinda stirred and yawned, opaline teeth against pink. “There was an accident,” she mumbled sleepily, and Elphaba felt a stab of affection, “with my pillow—”
It was only then that Ama Clutch’s gaze fell across the rest of the room, covered in down like the freshest powder snow. Her mouth dropped in a horror sufficient to trigger conversion. “By Lurline,” she gasped. “What in the—”
“Don’t worry,” dismissed Galinda, straightening herself. Elphaba saw her lips curve upwards in profile; she thought of kissing them again, in the evening after Ama Clutch had retired, in abandoned corridors after class and between faded bookshelves at the library, Galinda’s fingertips leaving prints in the dust.
Galinda, disdainfully picking a feather off the comforter, turned to Elphaba with a bright grin. “Elphie will take care of it.”
She did.