‘Take a seat and join us, Kira,’ said Nory. ‘We’re having our break here.’
Kira said, ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’ That was what she said when she wanted to go away but didn’t want to say so. She didn’t want kids to see her near Pamela. Pamela was quiet. Pamela didn’t like Kira, because Kira didn’t like Pamela, and Kira didn’t like Pamela because nobody else liked Pamela.
Colin Sharings came up and said to Pamela, ‘Have you ever gone bungee jumping?’
‘No,’ Pamela said.
‘Good,’ said Colin, ‘because you’d probably break the cord and make a mess on the rocks.’
‘That is an idiotic, nitwitted, dumb, and very stupid thing to say,’ said Nory.
‘Are you friends with Pamela?’ Colin asked, pretending to be amazed.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Nory. ‘And you are quite attractive. For a dead monkfish.’
‘Oh, thank you, little American girl,’ said Colin, who had a curly little mouth. ‘Little Americayan. Take care that your friend Pamela doesn’t get on any boats. They’ll sink to the bottom as soon as she goes aboard. And as you may know, we dead monkfishes are quite hungry.’ Having finished up with his insults for the day, he walked off with his nose aimed high.
‘Colin Sharings is just awful,’ said Nory.
‘With a knob of butter and some parsley on his head,’ said Pamela, ‘he would look quite fishy.’ She held out the bag of prawn chips for Nory to have another.
‘These are infinitely delicious prawn chips,’ said Nory. ‘Where do you get them?’
‘My mum gets them from Tesco,’ said Pamela.
‘We go to Tesco, too,’ said Nory.
‘It’s quite a popular place to shop,’ said Pamela. ‘I think we probably should go in now.’
36. A Bird Problem
After break it was on to the next event, because each school day was packed with tons and tons and tons of events — good events, bad events, mezzo-mezzo events, confusing events, alarming events. The next event was LT., where the class was trying to land their airplanes on an island. Nory mostly taxied around the airport, which was quite enjoyable. Finally she got her plane to take off down the runway, but then she started having some trouble. She pressed on one of the arrow keys, and if you held on to it for too long (which she was desperately doing to steer her plane back in a straighter direction) the plane went into an acute turn, which is the opposite of an obtuse turn, and would not ever turn back, it would just crash. So she crashed, as usual, but this time she not only crashed her own plane, she somehow curled persistently all the way around and crashed the plane that was following along behind her. Mr. Stone, the teacher, shook his head and said: ‘Millions of pounds of expensive technology, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.’
Mr. Stone was a very nice teacher and probably the only teacher Nory had who hadn’t yet said shutup to the class. All the teachers said shutup, even Mr. Blithrenner, the history teacher, who was a delight and knew every strange fact you could imagine. No grownup would have said shutup at the International Chinese Montessori School, but here, boy oh boy, the word was all over the place. Mr. Blithrenner was explaining, half jokingly, that there simply had to be bloodshed in the Aztec religion each and every day because the sunsets and sunrises were much redder and darker in America, and the Aztec religion was a religion of the sun. So blood had to be shed every day or the sun would become angry and simply refuse to rise, which would be a disaster. That explained the confusion. But two of the boys were being very disruptive and chitter-chatting about human sacrifices, and finally Mr. Blithrenner reached his limit and said, ‘Colin, Jacob! Just — shut—up!’ And they did.
Mrs. Thirm said shutup, too. The first time she did she put her hand up to her mouth, and the class was in shock, thinking, ‘Wait just a tiny minute, teachers don’t say that.’ But now they’d gotten used to hearing it: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ Not that often, though. At least the teachers didn’t say, ‘Shut your trap,’ which was something Nory sometimes said to other kids, even though she knew she shouldn’t. Sometimes she was noisy and interrupting in class, too, and then she felt guilty and when one of her parents picked her up at the end of the day she said, ‘I can’t have tea because I was not particularly good today. I talked a lot and laughed a lot and drew madly on my fingernail.’
But Mr. Stone, the I.T. teacher, never said shutup. Nory one time called the little rectangle that was in the middle of the screen the Bermuda Rectangle, because inside it were five little green blobs that were islands and on one of the five islands was the little landing strip — and Mr. Stone liked that name for it and started calling it that, too, which made Nory feel proud. If you can imagine trying to land a huge airplane on a popsicle stick, that’s what it felt like to approach the Bermuda Rectangle. There was a ninety-percent guarantee that they would crash. Nory liked the old unit of I.T. better, when they were doing touch-typing, where if you make a mistake and typed a j for a k it just made a fly-buzzing sound and said ‘Try again.’ The next unit would be good, though: they were going to put on black hats with visors that plugged in and do Virgil Reality using the four new computers that were set up especially for multi-mediorite.
Then all the fifth-year kids went to lunch. No jacket potato for Nory this time, sadly enough, because Nory’s mother was quite firm about how Nory had to have something meaty from time to time. Fortunately they didn’t have the ham on display as a possibility. ‘Oh, the ham,’ Nory thought, ‘the salty ham of last week.’ She wanted to make an ‘ulll’ sound in her throat when that ham sprang to mind. It was a flat round thing with a narrow border of fat almost all the way around it, a capital G shape of fat, and it was dead cold and pale red. Actually it started out hot but got cold later. Nory was going to put it away and not eat it after one tiny bite. One of the people serving the food had said, ‘Ham?’ and given Nory such a nice tender smile that Nory said, ‘Yes, please.’ She should definitely have said, ‘No, thank you.’ But she felt that the person serving the ham might have her feelings hurt, so she said, ‘Yes, please.’ Also there didn’t seem much like anything else she would like that day, so she got the flap of ham. But one taste and she was salted off her rocker. The music teacher came by and said, ‘You should eat more of that delicious ham, what a waste.’ Nory ate it and ate it. The teacher came by again and said, ‘You should eat a little more.’ So Nory ate a lot more, chewing endlessly, about two thousand and one chews of ham. Kira was whispering advice the whole time. ‘Hide some of it, Nory, hide it in here,’ she said, pointing to Nory’s pencil case. Nory said no way could she hide the ham in her pencil case, not after all she’d been through with that pencil case. Finally she finished most of it. Maybe it was Danish ham. Mr. Blithrenner told his class one day that he didn’t buy Danish ham these days because Danish people keep the young hams locked up in tiny lockers when they’re alive and don’t let them get any light or fresh air. Or rather, the young pigs. That was when he was talking about salting meats. The important thing people should know about the tip of finding the right direction to sail to shore by throwing the pig overboard is that you had to pull the pig back onto the ship very fast, because pigs have sharp what’s-known-as trotters and could injure their face by desperately swimming. Pigs can smell mushrooms underground very well, amazingly well, in fact, so maybe even way out on the ocean they are smelling the underground mushrooms and that’s why sailors can use them as compasses. Trotters are the things they trot on, sort of like hooves.