At first Galinda didn’t mention who her roomie was. And Elphaba showed no sign of expecting Galinda’s company, which was a relief. But the gossip had to start sooner or later. The first wave of discussion about Elphaba concerned her wardrobe and her evident poverty, as if her classmates were above noticing her sickly and sickening color. “Someone told me that Madame Head had said Miss Elphaba was the Thropp Third Descending from Nest Hardings,” said Pfannee, who was also a Munch-kinlander, but one of diminutive stock, not full-size like the Thropp family. “The Thropps are highly regarded in Nest Hardings and even beyond. The Eminent Thropp put together the area’s militia and tore up the Yellow Brick Road that the Ozma Regent had been laying in when we all were small—before the Glorious Revolution. There was no callousness in the Eminent Thropp or his wife or family, including his granddaughter Melena, you can be assured.” By callousness, of course, Pfannee meant greenness.
“But how the mighty have fallen! She’s as ragged as a gypsy,” observed Milla. “Have you ever seen such tawdry dresses? Her Ama should be sacked.”
“She has no Ama, I think,” said Shenshen. Galinda, who knew for sure, said nothing.
“They said she had spent time in Quadling Country,” Milla went on. “Perhaps her family had been exiled as criminals?”
“Or they were speculators in rubies,” said Shenshen.
“Then where’s the wealth?” snapped Milla. “Speculators in rubies did very well, Miss Shenshen. Our Miss Elphaba doesn’t have two barter tokens to rub together and call her own.”
“Perhaps it’s a kind of religious calling? A chosen poverty?” suggested Pfannee, and at this nonsense they all threw back their heads and chortled.
Elphaba, coming into the buttery for a cup of coffee, caused them to escalate into louder roars of laughter. Elphaba did not look over at them, but every other student did glance their way, each girl longing to be included in the jollity, which made the four new friends feel just fine.
Galinda was slow coming to terms with actual learning. She had considered her admission into Shiz University as a sort of testimony to her brilliance, and believed that she would adorn the halls of learning with her beauty and occasional clever sayings. She supposed, glumly, that she had meant to be a sort of living marble bust: This is Youthful Intelligence; admire Her. Isn’t She lovely?
It hadn’t actually dawned on Galinda that there was more to learn, and furthermore that she was expected to do it. The education all the new girls chiefly wanted, of course, had nothing to do with Madame Morrible or the prattling Animals at lecterns and on daises. What the girls wanted wasn’t equations, or quotations, or orations—they wanted Shiz itself. City life. The broad, offensive panoply of life and Life, seamlessly intertwined.
Galinda was relieved that Elphaba never took part in the outings the Amas organized. Since they often stopped at a lunchroom for a modest meal, the weekly brigade became known informally as the Chowder and Marching Society. The university district was aflame with autumn color, not just of dying leaves, but also of fraternity pennants, fluttering from rooftop and spire.
Galinda soaked up the architecture of Shiz. Here and there, mostly in protected College yards and side streets, the oldest surviving domestic architecture still leaned, ancient wattle-and-daub and exposed stud framing held up like paralytic grannies by stronger, newer relatives on either side. Then, in dizzying succession, unparalleled glories: Bloodstone Medieval, Merthic (both Least and the more fantastical Late), Gallantine with its symmetries and restraint, Gallantine Reformed with all those festering ogees and broken pediments, Bluestone Revival, Imperial Bombast, and Industrial Modern, or, as the critics in the liberal press put it, High Hostile Crudstyle, the form propagated by the modernity-minded Wizard of Oz.
Besides architecture, the excitement was tame, to be sure. On one notable occasion, which no Crage Hall girl present ever forgot, the senior boys from Three Queens College across the canal, for a lark and a dare, had tanked themselves up with beer in the middle of the afternoon, had hired a White Bear violinist, and had gone down to dance together under the willow trees, wearing nothing but their clinging cotton drawers and their school scarves. It was deliciously pagan, as they had set an old chipped statue of Lurline the Fairy Queen on a three-legged stool, and she seemed to smile at their loose-limbed gaiety. The girls and the Amas pretended shock, but poorly; they lingered, watching, until horrified proctors from Three Queens came rushing out to round the revelers up. Near nudity was one thing, but public Lurlinism—even as a joke—bordered on being intolerably retrograde, even royalist. And that did not do in the Wizard’s reign.
One Saturday evening, when the Amas had a rare night off and had taken themselves in to a pleasure faith meeting in Ticknor Circus, Galinda had a brief and silly squabble with Pfannee and Shenshen, after which she retired early to her bedchamber, complaining of a headache. Elphaba was sitting up in her bed with the commissary brown blanket tucked around her. She was hunched forward over a book, as usual, and her hair hung down like brackets on either s
ide of her face. She looked to Galinda like one of those etchings—the natural history books were full of them—of odd Winkie mountain women who hide their strangeness with a shawl over the head. Elphaba was munching on the pips of an apple, having eaten all the rest of it. “Well, you look cozy enough, Miss Elphaba,” said Galinda, challengingly. In three months it was the first social remark she had managed to make to her roomie.
“Looks are only looks,” said Elphaba, not looking up.
“Will it break your concentration if I sit in front of the fire?”
“You cast a shadow if you sit just there.”
“Oh, sorry,” said Galinda, and moved. “Mustn’t cast shadows, must we, when urgent words are waiting to be read?”
Elphaba was back in her book already, and didn’t answer.
“What the dickens are you reading, night and day?”
It seemed as if Elphaba were coming up for air from a still, isolated pool. “While I don’t read the same thing every day, you know, tonight I am reading some of the speeches of the early unionist fathers.”
“Why ever would anyone want to do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to read them. I’m just reading them.”
“But why? Miss Elphaba the Delirious, why, why?”
Elphaba looked up at Galinda and smiled. “Elphaba the Delirious. I like it.”
Before she had a chance to bite it back, Galinda returned the smile, and at the same time a sweeping wind sent a handful of hail against the glass, and the latch broke. Galinda leaped to swing the casement shut, but Elphaba scuttled to the far corner of the room, away from the wet. “Give me the leather luggage grip, Miss Elphaba, from inside my satchel—there on the shelf, behind the hatboxes—yes—and I’ll secure this until we can get the porter to fix it tomorrow.” Elphaba found the strap, but in doing so the hat boxes tumbled down, and three colorful hats rolled out onto the cold floor. While Galinda scrabbled up on a chair to organize the window shut again, Elphaba returned the hats to their boxes. “Oh, try it on, try that one on,” said Galinda. She meant to have something to laugh at, to tell Misses Pfannee and Shenshen about and so to work her way back into their good graces.
“Oh, I daren’t, Miss Galinda,” Elphaba said, and went to set the hat away.
“No, do, I insist,” Galinda said, “for a lark. I’ve never seen you in something pretty.”
“I don’t wear pretty things.”
