‘Oh, are you okay?’ Nory asked her.
‘If I were “okay,” would I be sitting down with tears pouring down my face?’ Jessica said.
‘No,’ said Nory. Almost all children were rude sometimes. Nory herself was quite rude from time to time. Once she had told a boy who had said her teeth were too big that his shoes were dusty. He had turned bright red and looked so hurt that she felt bad afterward.
It wasn’t a good idea to stop any possibility of liking a person because of one single thing they did. Sometimes people forget themselves. Sometimes, though, what a child did was so bad, so severe, that you lost all your ability to keep up any friendly feelings toward them. Such a thing happened last year at International Chinese Montessori School, when Bernice wrote Nory a folded note that said ‘I’m sorry’ on the front, after they had an argument, and then inside it said, ‘Dear Eleanor, I’m sorry, but I am not going to live with you in a house when we grow up, I’m going to live with my first best friend.’ That was just the limit, that ‘first’—Nory couldn’t now detect one tiny scrabjib of friendship for Bernice in her heart when she thought of her. Her best friend now was Debbie, probably, who was shyer and nicer.
Littleguy occasionally said rude things that could hurt your feelings, but he was two and usually it was a question of him just not understanding what he was saying. Once on Saturday afternoon for instance Nory tried to teach Littleguy how to play field hockey, after having spent some of her morning on Astroturf learning the basics. He hurt her feelings when he rejected a hockey stick she especially made for him out of a wooden pole, a toilet-paper tube taped on at an angle, and some green ribbon from her Samantha doll as decoration spiraled around. She had been rather pleased with this homemade stick.
‘Littleguy — so do you like it or do you hate it?’ she asked him, wanting to jostle him into saying a little thank-you.
‘I hate it,’ said Littleguy, but in a pleasant, good-natured way. ‘I want that stick,’ meaning Nory’s real stick.
‘That’s not the right way to talk to Nory,’ called out Nory’s father from inside. ‘She made that hockey stick especially for you and used a whole green Samantha ribbon and a toilet-paper tube to decorate it.’
‘I’m sorry, Nory, I’m sorry, Nory,’ kind little Littleguy said, very nicely, looking up at her with his serious little mouth and hopeful eyes.
Nory said, ‘Thank you, Littleguy.’ She loved the open feeling you got when someone said I’m sorry to you after you were mad or hurt-feelinged at them — the feeling of the scrumpled paper of the unhappiness going away from your chest. It made you almost burst with generousness toward them. ‘But it’s really my fault,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to you for asking the question confusingly in such a way that you couldn’t tell which way was the right way to answer for politeness.’
‘Me, too,’ said Littleguy. ‘Do you want to see my gooseneck trailer? It’s had a bad mergency. It’s stuck in the mud.’
Littleguy of course cried a hundred times a day — he had about eight different kinds of crying, several of them rather ear-gnashing — but Nory almost never cried because she had learned a few years earlier that it more or less ruins your reputation to cry, even if someone says something that makes you want to. It’s very embarrassing to cry. Boys especially will like you more if you don’t cry, and want to be your friend. Jessica cried when she fell on the Astroturf but it was a pretty bad fall, two knees at the same time. And she said the rude thing to Nory partly just because she was purely a rude girl some of the time, but partly because she was embarrassed, and she was very serious about boys, in almost a teenagery way, or not quite in a teenagery way but in a double-digit kind of way, and she probably worried that her enemy-friend, Daniella Harding, would tell Colin Deat that she had cried on the hockey field. Not as many people cried at this school as at Nory’s old school.
There were two times this year so far Nory almost, almost cried. One was when Shelly Quettner found out that Nory kind of liked a boy by the name of Jacob Lewes. Nory told it to Daniella Harding, who turned out to be Shelly Quettner’s sidekick in the whole process. Shelly started saying to Daniella, ‘What did she say? What? What? What?’ And she squeezed it out of her. Or maybe Daniella wanted to tell her all along, it wasn’t so clear. Instantly Shelly Quettner was saying to the class, ‘Nory fancies Jacob Lewes!’
Everybody said, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ Jacob Lewes immediately turned dead red and stared at his pencil case. Nory was red, too, but only in the places that she got red, which were on the sides of her cheeks, so that her blush turned into long sideburn-things. People said, ‘Well? Do you fancy him?’ Nory thought seriously about denying it, because honesty may be the best policy at times but it certainly does seem painful at other times. But it’s painful the other way, too, because if you say, ‘No, I certainly do not fancy Jacob Lewes, whatever for?’ then Jacob Lewes’s feelings might be a tiny bit hurt, even though he would also act very relieved to hear it, and also you then right away think, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have tolden a lie,’ and you have to say, ‘Well, actually, yes, I mispoke, I do fancy him.’ So you have twice as much pain as if you had just gone ahead and admitted it, because you have the pain of feeling the guilt of lying and the pain of admitting that you do fancy him.
So Nory said, ‘Well, I do think he’s nice.’
Julia Sollen said, ‘You’re blushing!’
‘Yes, I know that,’ said Nory. ‘Any further questions?’ It was all quite terrible and there was a sliver of a moment when Nory thought, ‘This is so bad that I have a slight feeling in my lips of wanting to cry, should I cry?’
Luckily one girl came up and said, ‘You know you should tell everybody that Shelly Quettner fancies Colin Deat,’ because that was what Shelly had told someone, and Nory thought about it and almost did it but then she thought, Do Unto Others. Nory’s conclusion was that Daniella Harding was definitely not going to get told any of her secrets anymore.
It turned out that Nory didn’t really fancy Jacob Lewes so much as all that. First, he said tiresome things about how he hated Barbie dolls, which is what American boys do, and then especially after he started to make fun of Pamela Shavers. By the way, ‘fancy’ was the word they used for it in England, and it was an idiotic, dumb, stupid word, fancy, but not as horrible as if Shelly had said, ‘Nory loves Jacob Lewes.’ The good thing about experiencing that horribleness, though, was that because she’d already gone through the ‘Nory fancies Somebody’ business, she could talk to a boy like Roger Sharpless and nobody would think a thing of it. One time Nory was fighting around with Roger in a playing way and Roger got a little vicious and swopped her in the side of the face with a rolled-up geography booklet. He didn’t know it would hurt as much as it did, because when you roll up something like a magazine or a thin floppy book you think it will be kind of soft and springy, like a rolled-up piece of paper, but actually it can feel as hard as a metal pipe, just about. Nory said, laughing, ‘Roger, you’re going to give me a black eye, now.’ And she thought, ‘Oh dear, oh dear, they’re going to see my eye, it’s full of water.’ And then she remembered that one time at her old school she’d thought her eyes would look terribly full of water and she went into the bathroom to check and she found out that you couldn’t even tell unless you were really looking. So she thought, ‘No, I don’t think they’ll notice.’ And Roger didn’t seem worried at all. But he did nicely say he was sorry to have swopped her with his geography booklet.