‘Oh, oh, you’re friends with her?’ said one of the girls to Nory. ‘You don’t know better, you’re from America, you have no idea how squeegee your accent is.’
‘Yes, I am American, I have an American accent,’ said Nory. ‘Your accent, let me inform you, is dreadful. You bark like a sea lion.’
People giggled a little at that and that made Nory well known and made the girl furious, but the important thing was that Pamela had a chance to look some more for her prep book, which she found.
Another time Pamela lost her jacket, or maybe someone hid it. She was frantically looking, and nobody was willing to help. They just told her rude things. ‘Well, we don’t know where it is, we gave it to an old drooling man who came to the door who gave it away to Oxfam.’
Pamela kept saying, ‘I have to catch my train!’ There was the same sound in her voice that seemed to Nory as if she certainly was going to cry, but she didn’t. It was just the quality that came into her voice when she was angry — although maybe there was some crying in it. (Nory’s own record was still perfect: she had not cried. Had not and would not.) Pamela couldn’t leave without her jacket on because Mrs. Derpath stood by the door, totally on the watch-out. She would nip you by the neck, throw you around, toss you back into the classroom, if you did not have your blue blazer on. So Pamela had to find that blazer. Nory helped her, she rummaged and scrummaged, she found it under a pile of backpacks, and she said, ‘Here, Pamela, here’s your jacket.’ But it was completely trampled over and disgusting. Kids had been practically been doing the Majarajah on it, stamping back and forth without noticing. Nory helped her dust it off. ‘Thanks,’ said Pamela and she hurried away for her train. She ran in a crouching run, her backpack bouncing like a kangaroo, but her eyes looking down and a little forward on the sidewalk. It was not exactly the way a happy girl would run.
Even Nory’s friend Kira, who was turning out to be a good friend in England, didn’t want Nory to be nice to Pamela. Pamela had been quite nice to Nory in one of the early days of school, when Nory had forgotten how to get back to the Junior School building from the dining hall, once again. Nory had an atrocious sense of direction — about as atrocious as her sense of spelling, she thought sometimes, and maybe the two things were connected, because knowing which way to turn was like when you were trying to spell ‘failure’ and you didn’t know if it was ‘faleyer’ or ‘fayelyor’ or something quite else. You didn’t know whether to go northeast or southwest at the choices of vowel. Her sense of direction was so horrible that she crashed her plane four times in I.T. They had stopped learning the home row of keys on the keyboard, and they were doing a Flight Imitator, or whatever it was called, and they were supposed to land a plane in the dark according to a map, and Nory simply could not read that map. Her plane shot up toward the stars, and the lights began going around, which meant she was in a death-spin, and she crashed. She crashed so many times that day she had a bad dream about it. So her sense of direction was not at all good. ‘You’re just a disaster, aren’t you?’ said the I.T. teacher, but he said it in a very comforting way that made Nory feel better, in the same kind voice he used when he said, ‘Good morning, ladies and jellyfish.’ So anyway, Nory lost her sense of direction and got turned around and wasn’t sure where she was headed, but Pamela, when Nory asked her for help that early time, wasn’t in the least bit surprised that she didn’t know the way back, and just treated it as a normal event and very nicely walked with her, having a nice indistinct conversation.
Another time Daniella Harding wanted to scratch ‘D H’ on the back of her watch, to stand for Daniella Harding — she was a pillish girl in some ways, no question about that, although not always — and she borrowed Nory’s compass to use the point for scratching. Nory let her take it because it was flattering to be asked for something and to have it there in your pencil case, and of course, an hour later, the pencil in the compass was totally lost, gone, bye-bye. (Really the compass is called a ‘set of compasses’ and the things that stick out are called the ‘arms of the compass.’) And it was the only pencil Nory had just then, because somehow she’d lost the others, including even her mechanical pencil. That time, very nicely, Pamela let Nory borrow one of her pencils and helped her with some of her math. Nory was on the wrong track in her multiplication and was counting up all the numbers to the right of the decimal, including the numbers you add together to get the final number. Pamela showed her that it was much easier than that. You only had to count the number of numbers to the right of the decimal on the two numbers that you’re multiplying in order to get the answer.
But even if Pamela had never once been nice to Nory, Nory probably would have said something, she thought, because Pamela had just as much a right as anyone else to go off to school every day and not have her day be made into a state of misery. Her parents were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to send her there, think about that. Pamela said that she hadn’t told her parents about any of it because she hadn’t found the time. Nory told her parents about it and they said that it was brave of Nory to defend Pamela. They thought Pamela ought to go right to the teacher. But Pamela didn’t want to.
And the thing that was so impossible to figure out, was: Why was this happening? Pamela was never rude or interrupting, she wasn’t braggingly pleased with herself, she was perfectly nice to everybody. Was it some chance thing one day that made it happen that one kid decided to pick on her and then everyone else did? Or was it that there was something about the way she acted that made kids get up on the wrong side of the bed with her? Her face was a nice face — maybe a slight roundedness to it in the cheeks, and her teeth were a little bit out of whack in maybe a chipmunkish way. Or rather that was what two boys were saying one time: that she had a rat-faced look, which is a persistently rude and cruel thing to say, but those boys were known for being rude and insulting guttersnakes every chance they got. And her nose did have a pudginess about it. But Daniella’s nose had much more pudge to it and nobody took the time to fuss her out. Actually Daniella was one of the most popular kids!
Nory said to Pamela, ‘Go to Mrs. Thirm, tell Mrs. Thirm.’ But Pamela said she’d gone to Mrs. Thirm last year about something and Mrs. Thirm had said to her that she’d done all kinds of things that she said she hadn’t done, so she couldn’t go to Mrs. Thirm. Nory said, ‘Well, then, go to Mr. Pears.’ Mr. Pears was the head of the Junior School and an extremely nice man. He was the one who read them about Hector. The problem with the story about Hector, however — or, not Hector, Achilles — the problem about Achilles, Nory felt, was that he was much more a likable heroine in the beginning, when he was a newborn infant. Later on, in the part about the battle, he takes a downturn and goes bad. The ending should have worked differently. He falls in love with somebody, and he kills hundreds of people, he drags a man around behind his wagon, and he sulks away the time in his tent and says he won’t fight anymore. It’s just not anywhere near as good. The better part is earlier when a person who was half deer and half human took care of him, and fed him with deerskin. No, the person couldn’t have been half a deer, because he wouldn’t be feeding him deerskin if he were a deer, that would be cannibalism. The person was half-oxen, half-human. This half-and-half creature fed him deerskin and cream. The deerskin was for good strength, and cream or sugar for good heart or health. Nory had not followed this part exactly, because she’d been inspired by it halfway through to have the idea of a detective story about a Batman ruler and a Barbie pencil. But Achilles was still good when he was having the cream and deerskin diet. He seemed like a much less good person when he got older.