So each kid in Ms. Fisker’s class had a different number of these shapes and math skills scrummaging around in their head, and Ms. Fisker had everything that they had in their heads in her head, at just the level that they had it, each of them, which was part of why she was such a good teacher. After Carl luckily left, Nory got used to the class and Ms. Fisker started to like her and told her things. The most amazing thing Ms. Fisker told her was that she was getting married and going to a different city. It was really amazing to think of Ms. Fisker, one of the proudest teachers, getting married, but she did. Of course, she had been married once before and had a son who was eighteen, but the class hadn’t really taken that in. They didn’t really know that very much. Ms. Fisker had a mischevious cat, and she would wake up, and the cat would prance around on her, and knock down her bottles. Her cat was a mischievous little thing. One time her son had had an operation on his knee and the cat jumped up on his leg and she said he almost went through the ceiling. If you were designing a teacher from scrap, you couldn’t design a teacher better than Ms. Fisker. But Ms. Fisker’s last day at the school was at the teacher-appreciation dinner at the end of the year. The main dish at the teacher-appreciation dinner was a huge fried pig. Its head was there on the big pan in the middle of the table. The head of a pig was not in Nory’s opinion a good menu choice for a teacher-appreciation dinner since there were a lot of younger kids who might be very bothered by the sight of that head, not to mention older kids such as Nory herself who might be revolted as well. You could see its closed eyes. To be polite, she ate a taste of the pig, but only a taste. And that was the last she saw of Ms. Fisker for quite a while.
The teacher who came in place of Ms. Fisker was Ms. Beryl, who was good but totally different. She liked talking about herself a lot, whereas Ms. Fisker only told them a few careful things, such as about her cat in the morning. Ms. Beryl gave out extremely hard spelling lists with words like ‘dicotyledon’ and ‘pinnate’ and ‘microeconomics’ because she was probably more interested in the much older kids, the eleven-year-olds, and wanted them to be getting ready to go to college. It kind of slipped Ms. Beryl’s mind that the younger kids were still trying to get it into their heads how to spell ‘really’ and ‘tomorrow’ and ‘would’ and ‘unknown.’ Nory had a custom of spelling ‘tomorrow’ as ‘tomaro.’ The math suddenly turned into a jostle of cube roots and algebra kinds of things, with x’s and y’s and breaking things down into their factories, when Nory was still trudging away with her times tables. As her friend Bernice said, ‘When you wear a bra, you study algebra, not before.’
So Nory got exceedingly distracted, looking at the days of the week on the wall calendar and thinking ‘SuMTWTHFRS, hmm, that could almost spell smothers with furs,’ and from time to time she got into a state of click-laughing with Bernice, who was an easy person to get into a state of click-laughing. They positively could not stop, even though they were almost on the edge of crying, begging each other with their eyes not to start out on another huge laugh, and Ms. Beryl would get furious. Click-laughing is just when you laugh so heroriously that you only make little tiny sounds at the back of your throat. It set Ms. Beryl on fire, and one time, she wrote a note in Nory’s booklet that said that Nory must make a more asserted effort on her concentration skills, because her constantly wanting to know what others were doing around her and her constantly being unable to resist distracting them from what they were working on by giggling was her FATAL FLAW. Ms. Beryl read her note to Nory’s mother and underlined FATAL FLAW three times while she read. Nory was standing a short distance away, pretending to be thinking over other things or nothing, but she heard it near and clear. On the other hand, she wasn’t exactly sure what a fatal flaw meant. But now that she had been going to Classics class at the Junior School and had learned about heroines like Achilles, she knew.
The fatal flaw was quite similar in what it means to the last straw, and the last straw was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The last straw was NOT, REPEAT NOT the last straw in the machine at a restaurant that when it was taken meant the machine was empty and you would have to drink your milkshake sadly without a straw. Kids find out rather quickly that it is less fun to drink the normal way, with your mouth, because with a straw it’s as if you have magical powers and are telling telling the drink, ‘Kazam, kazaw, now climb the straw!’
Nory suspected that the straw that broke that camel’s back was an unsensible idea anyway, because first of all, stop and think of that poor camel. How could it happen? Doesn’t he have something to say about the situation? Also, camels’ backs are pretty strong things. If you’ve ridden on them, you know that they can support at least two people, if not three. And if they are able to support two or three people, they should be able to support a lot, a lot, a lot of hay, because hay doesn’t weigh very much at all, and some people weigh quite a bit. One single straw might weigh a thousandth of a gram, so two straws would weigh two thousandths of a gram, and three straws three thousandths of a gram, and so on, and so on. If they got enough straws together to weigh a very large amount of pounds, a massive knob of straw or a rectangle of straw like the ones that are out in the middle of the fields you see when you drive for what seems like hours and hours to Stately Homes, the huge shape would plop off before they got it all strapped on. Just stuffing the last straw under the strap of rope that was tying it all together, ever so gently, would make the huge heaviness start to tilt, and the straps under the camel’s stomach would slip, which might give him an Indian burn, and the whole thing would thump to the side on the ground, unless they somehow had a machine that condensed every single bit of straw together into tiny blocks the size of sugar cubes that were so heavy you could barely lift them without a pulley and you put them all over the camel’s back somehow. But that would be quite unusual.
And the other main point was, a camel is a mammal and a mammal is a sensible animal. He’s not just going to freeze in place there. As soon as the load felt like it was getting uncontrollably heavy, he would fold his knees under him the way they do. He wouldn’t stand there and have a major injury. When camels get cross they do something about it. They squirt large amounts of spit from their mouths, for one thing. That happened to Captain Haddock in Tintin one time. He was tickling the camel under the chin, and then suddenly, pshooo, his head is gone and a huge splash of camel saliva is in its place. So if you are the one in charge of putting the last straw on the camel’s back, watch out for that risk. And also, if Nory was anywhere near by, watch out for Nory, too, because she had seen the camels at the zoo, which had hurt-looking gray places on their knees from having kneeled down on rough gravel all the time rather than soft sand, and she had cut her knee on a rock once while she was swimming, and then the cut had opened again and bled, leaving a bigger scar than she had expected, so she knew what it was like to have sore knees. She had enough empathy for camels that if she saw a camel in the desert that was being loaded up so much that its back might be broken she would walk out in front of the people who were doing it and she would just say, ‘Stop, there is a fatal flaw in what you’re doing. You’re going to hurt the camel.’