‘You should have told Mrs. Hoadley that Thomas was the very one who made you trip!’ said Nory to Pamela. ‘Now she probably thinks you tripped on your own two feet! You have to tell them!’ But Pamela was still thoroughly mum’s-the-word. That’s why she was having the absolute worst year of her life, while Nory was having the absolute best year of her life, just about. A few people teased Nory about her accent or said she was ugly, but nobody would ever possibly dare to sneak up on her and kick her, because if someone kicked her, oh boy, she would be off like a rocket and chase them down and kick right back just as hard, and if they hid her jacket she would wring whoever’s neck who hid it, and if somebody tried to capture her duffel-coat peg with their duffel-coat she would scrummage fiercely for it and get her duffel-coat peg back, no questions asked. But Pamela never fought. It was not her personality to fight, or if it was, they’d changed her personality bit by bit since the beginning of the year by being constantly awful to her. When Nory said to two of the kids, ‘You better stop being mean to Pamela or she’s going to tell Mr. Pears,’ they just laughed, they didn’t bother to stop, because they knew that Pamela wasn’t going to Mr. Pears. She never had and never would. Again and again Nory said, ‘Pamela, it would really be much better if you told somebody,’ but she didn’t want to at all. So no matter how much Nory wanted to take one of them by the scroll of the neck to Mr. Pears, she couldn’t, since Mr. Pears would have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and so on and so on. So the bullying went its merry way.
Nory planned out things she could say to the people who were doing it, but words didn’t really help because the boys kicked and then disappeared, and whatever insulting thing you wanted to say couldn’t be said in time for the person you wanted to insult to be insulted. Nory did try to fight back at Thomas Mottle by calling him Cinderella’s stepsister a few times, since one time in drama class Thomas had played the part of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, wearing a big blond wig. ‘Just the sort of thing Cinderella’s ugly stepsister would do,’ Nory said to him.
‘Hardly!’ he said. And that was that.
49. Word-Fighting
Even Julia Sollen was a little shocked and a little bit nice to Pamela after she saw her being kicked by the revolting Thomas. If you hear that somebody took a kick at somebody, you just think, ‘Oh, I see, that’s bad.’ But if you see it eye to eye, the sneakiness of it, the pure meanness of it, it is something quite else besides. Nory was furious to think that a kid could have a basic urge to kick in his impudent mind and then get away with doing it, just because he knew from his observations that Pamela wouldn’t be the type of person to kick him back, so he was safe from punishment. Maybe there was so much constant kicking of shins in England because all the boys wanted to be footballers when they grew up. That was what they said that they wanted to be in class, anyway, except for a few kids like Roger Sharpless, who said that he wanted to go to Durham and learn to make barometers. In football, which is actually soccer, you use your feet more than your hands, so you have all this practiced ability with your feet that you could easily use for barking up the wrong shin.
So a few of the kids were beginning to go over to Nory’s side and be a little nicer to Pamela. And Roger Sharpless always had been nice to Pamela. However, Kira was still trying her hardest to get Nory to stop being Pamela’s friend. She’d say things like, ‘Nory, you do know, don’t you, that you’re the only person in the whole school who likes her.’
‘I don’t know if that’s quite true,’ said Nory.
‘Yes, it is true,’ said Kira. ‘Nobody else is her friend, nobody.’
But Pamela did definitely have other friends from time to time. One time she waited a very long time to meet one of her friends who was in sixth year. Nory waited with her—Pamela said it was just a quarter of an hour they waited but Nory thought it was more like fifteen minutes. And even if Nory was the only one in the whole Junior School who was steadily Pamela’s friend, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she thought. What in the world was so bad about being Pamela’s one and only real friend?
Also, Nory liked being Pamela’s friend, because she liked planning out with Pamela what kind of vicious attacks she could use to fight back for Pamela, and she admired that Pamela was good at maths, since if you were good at maths it allowed you to go on and do so many different things in science or dentistry, and she liked that Pamela had unusual aspects about herself, such as being double-jointed. Pamela couldn’t use certain kinds of pens, she told Nory, because she was extremely double-jointed. Her thumb was a whole level further of being exposable than most normal people. She had to use a special other kind of pen. It looked like a simple everyday kind of medium-nib fountain pen to Nory, but she didn’t say so. So there were surprising things like that about Pamela that Nory liked, and she also just liked Pamela’s very hush-hush way of talking to you—Pamela always spoke very softly and had quite a lot to say but you had to listen very carefully because she only spoke to one person at a time and she was very particular about who she told things to, which in this old day and age is probably a good thing.
Nory’s parents got extremely upset when they heard the news from Nory that Pamela was having an even worse time of it now than ever. They said that things had gotten utterly untolerable and something just had to be done. The mistreatment of Pamela was something that they personally had to go to Mr. Pears about, they said, or straight to Pamela’s parents, because it simply couldn’t be allowed to go on. Nory cried at the dinner table and said that it was Pamela’s choice and nobody else’s, and Pamela absolutely, definitely did not want the teachers or her parents to know, and she had made Nory promise, so please, please, please not yet. But Nory did promise to go to the teacher again herself, at least, and announce that physical shin-kicking was now going on. And her parents promised Nory, not exactly as a trade (since they wanted her to get one, too), but sort of as a trade, that she could have a gum-guarder. A gum-guarder was a thing you use to keep your teeth from getting knocked out. If a hockey stick whams into your mouth and you have a gum-guarder on you would get a fat lip, but no particular tooth would fall out. Nory wanted the gum-guarder because other kids had them and she thought it would make her feel stronger and more able to stop the bigger kids from being bad to Pamela, even when she wasn’t wearing it. She could think, ‘Aha, I have a powerful gum-guarder, nobody can bother me now!’ Also she wanted to be sure that none of her teeth tumbled out onto the Astroturf. If you want to be a dentist your own teeth are kind of an advertisement of your work, and it’s important that there is nothing strange about them, or people will say, ‘Oh no, I won’t go to that dentist to have my teeth fixed, because take a gander at hers.’
Nory went ahead and told Mrs. Thirm that she had a friend—a friend who was quite possibly the same friend as she had talked to her about before, who was now being—no question about it—bullied. Nory had promised her friend not to say what the exact bullying was, but ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said. ‘It involves a boy’s foot, and a shoe, and a shin, pure and simple.’ Mrs. Thirm said, ‘Thank you, Nory, it’s good of you to let us know.’
Sometimes it was quite efficient to tell two boys, say, who were being bad to Pamela that they were ‘imbecile-idiot-numbskull-nitwits,’ saying the words super-fast, or tell them, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t sleep on your side at night, because your pea-brain might tumble out your ear.’ But some of the older kids had a style of word-fighting that Nory couldn’t do anything against, because it was just too confident. Pamela asked Nory one time to help fight back against an older girl named Janet who was constantly saying mean things about Pamela’s cheeks. Nory said to the girl, ‘Excuse me, would you please do me a favor and stop being mean to Pamela or take a long deep dip in a dump?’
The girl looked at Nory for about a minute and a half and said, ‘Turn around, I don’t like looking at your face.’
‘Well,’ said Nory, ‘I don’t like looking at your face!’
‘If you don’t like it, do
n’t look at it,’ said the girl.
‘Well, if you don’t like looking at my face don’t look at my face either!’ said Nory. The girl laughed and flossed off to the library because she fancied one of the librarians, a boy in seventh year, and the next time Pamela asked Nory to fight back with words against that girl Nory said, Gee, she could try, but she just didn’t think she could do all that much against her, because the girl was so sure of herself and so able to think quickly in those kinds of tense moments.
50. The Core of the Friendship
In Geography they began doing the countries of Europe—in other words, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Lapland, the UK or United Kingdom, and of course, not to be forgotten, England itself. Land after land. There were an amazing number of big and little lands all fitting nicely tucked together, and when you concentrated in on one, you tended to forget about the others, although there was just as much going on in them, too, every day of the week. And when you concentrated on all of them, the low countries and the high countries and the medium or ‘mixed-traffic’ countries, as Littleguy would call them (if he knew clearly what a country was), since he called a plain donut with chocolate frosting on top a ‘mixed-traffic donut’ on the idea that an engine like James the Red Engine that can pull either passenger cars or freight cars is a ‘mixed-traffic engine’—when you concentrated on Belgium and Barcelona and whatnot (those are just examples), you forgot about America, something that you would think would not be all that easy to forget. One day Nory almost lost her geography book and had to take out everything from her backpack, looking for it. She found it, finally, but she also found, way down at the bottom, some Flake 99 wrappers and six old conkers. They were turning rotten. They were black in some places and white in other places and they were wet soggy things that when you touched them you wished you hadn’t. They smelled extremely good, though, because they were becoming peat.
Nory missed playing with Kira under the conker tree, all those weeks ago—or not that many weeks, actually—and she had a feeling that she and Kira were not such good friends now as they had been then. Kira had something of an idea of being friends, true, but not the whole idea. A friendship was like the core of something, not a conker but something really basic like an apple, and there were all these things around it—the peel and the leaves and the wax they put on the peel to make it shiny, and whatnot. The shiny peel is a fun part, but the friendship has to go down and down into the very core, and Kira didn’t seem to understand what that core should be. Or maybe she just had a different opinion of what it should be than Nory did. Nory believed that the core was not just to stick together and be friendly from time to time, as the case may be, and definitely not always to be in a competition every second, and not to just be tomboyishly friendly, but also to be able to empty your heart out to the person. Say, for instance, you had the horribly embarrassing secret that you were keeping inside that you really loved playing with Barbies, and you were afraid to tell anyone because boys, especially, not to mention some girls, are vicious about instantly making fun of anybody who likes Barbies and they laugh at you for liking them. To a real friend you could casually empty your heart out by saying, ‘You know what? I really like Barbies.’ And there would be no problem. They would be able to be trusted not only not to tell anybody but not to laugh at you, either. And a real friend, if you had another friend that people were being awful to, wouldn’t say ‘Stop being friends with that person, nobody else is friends with her, stay away from her.’
Mostly it was connected with Pamela. Kira was never directly mean to Pamela the way the other kids were. Then again, she was never directly nice to her either. But Pamela still didn’t know how strict Kira was about things like not eating at the same table with her. It was probably a good thing she didn’t know. When Pamela steered toward a table where Kira was sitting, Nory would say, ‘Oh, er, Pamela, that table looks a little full, urn, why don’t we go to that other table over there?’ And of course Kira when that happened would be furious that Nory would prefer to eat with Pamela at a separate table and not with her. But really it was Kira’s choice, not Nory’s, since Nory would have been happy as a horse to eat with them both if they got along together. One time Kira and Nory were walking to lunch together and Pamela came up to walk with them, and Kira said, ‘Oh, Pamela, your backpack! You forgot to put away your backpack, better hurry back! Nory, we’ll go on ahead! Hurry and put away your backpack, Pamela!’
‘I don’t absolutely have to put it away,’ said Pamela.
‘But you really ought to,’ said Kira. ‘It’s so clumsy, really you shouldn’t take it along. Go on and put it away, Pamela! Go on!’
‘She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to, Kira,’ said Nory, because she could see that Pamela’s feelings were a ways down the path toward getting hurt.
Kira then grabbed Nory’s arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ But Pamela grabbed Nory’s other arm and said, ‘Stay, Nory, stay.’ Both pulled, Pamela on one arm and Kira on the other arm, and they started circling around. It was almost fun. Then Kira gave up and asked Nory if she could borrow two p. Nory gave her the two p and Kira went off to be with Shelly and Daniella, and Nory went to lunch with Pamela.
‘Does Kira secretly hate me as much as the others do?’ asked Pamela.
Nory decided it wouldn’t be such a smart idea to admit straight out that Kira didn’t like Pamela, since she’d already made that mistake once before, and after all there was still plenty of ways Pamela could be hurt, even now. Even if Pamela basically knew something was true she didn’t have to have it rubbed in her nose. So Nory said, ‘You know, I don’t understand Kira one bit. Sometimes she’s as nice as a friend can be, and then sometimes she’s so competitive about who is friends with who and who walks with who and who sits with who and bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup. From how she reacts to me being friends with you I would say that she likes her friends to be only her friends and nobody else’s, like she’s got the copyright on that particular friend. She is so marvelously in awe of how other kids act that she can’t think privately what would be the obviously right thing and draw her own conclusions.’
‘I’ll be very glad when we reach the end of term,’ said Pamela.
Nory was suddenly reminded of something she had thought of in the mirror brushing her teeth. ‘You know what we should do?’ she said. ‘Okay, you don’t want to tell the teachers or your parents. But we could still write a book about your whole experience, every good or bad thing that somebody did, Thomas kicking you in the shin, hogging your duffel peg, every single thing. We could make a timeline, first this happened, then that happened.’
Pamela shook her head fiercely. ‘It isn’t something that I want to think about any more than I have to.’
‘Oh, but think about it: you would be thinking about it not in the unhappy way of having it just anonymously happen to you, but in the way of telling it,’ Nory said. ‘And then other kids could read it and know what happened, the story of one girl, or two friends. We could do it together.’
‘I can’t imagine that it would interest people, and I wouldn’t dream of doing it,’ said Pamela. ‘I like to write about nice things.’
‘Okay,’ said Nory, ‘how about—not a book about the present, but a book about the future. Say when we’re both eighteen and we go off to college and have adventures.’
Pamela gave it a second of thought and nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but I can only come up with the adventures because I’m double-jointed and don’t particularly like writing as it hurts my thumb. But I’ll give you hints for some of the adventures. For instance, we could visit a live volcano together and have an adventure. I once visited a live volcano.’
‘That’s perfect!’ said Nory. ‘What name do you want for yourself?’
‘Claudia,’ said Pamela.
Before bed Nory wrote the first page of the book, which was called ‘The Adventures of Sally and Claudia.’
The Adventures of Sally and Claudia
‘Mom I’ll need my file as well,’ Claudia screamed up the stairs. In her freshly washed uniform, she looked as if she was going to a disco rather than Oxford University. She was 18 very smart, and especially keen on maths and the study of vulcanos. She had only just left Threll Senior School and missed it alot and so she might as she had started there when she was in year six and never missed a year. One of the reasons she missed it so much was because of her best friend Sally who had been her friend from her first day at Threll School to her last.
Sally was a very tall girl who was extreamely interested in dentestry and was American. She was know going to Stanford University while her brother borded at Threll School and was a prephect. He was taking a class in model bildiung, where he was bilding a large balsa wood model of the Mallard, which as many are aware is a preticular kind of high speed steam traine. For this whol life he had been interested in everything about traines and it looked as if that woud continue into his double-digets.
If Claudia only knew that Sally was sitting at a table even now and thinking about her, while she did her studying! Claudia was still thinking about Sally as she set off for school on the wet path with her hair sopping wet because of the rain.
The Everlasting Story of Nory Page 19