Fingernails are our hooves. Littleguy had a problem with his fingernails when he was a tiny newborn child — he would wave his arms around so clutchingly that he would scratch his face with his fingernails. Nory’s mother and father had to be careful to cut his nails all the time so there wouldn’t be too much scratching, but, poor little man, he sometimes scratched himself anyway. Nory’s fingernails got to be a problem for her at the International Chinese Montessori school, an opposite sort of problem, because Bernice had a total habit of biting her nails until they were bare round nubs, and then nibbling off the skin of her tips of her fingers, too. Since Nory was best-friends with Bernice at that time, Nory began biting her nails as well, out of friendship, because when you’re friends you start doing many of the same things. Now that she wasn’t best-friends with Bernice anymore, presto, her nails were just their usual length, if not longer. Same thing with Kira. Kira had the habit of always jumping the last three steps of any stairs she went down, for instance the stairs in the dining hall, and now that Nory was becoming better and better friends with Kira, Nory had gotten in the habit of jumping down the last three steps, too, and she was starting to find she couldn’t stop jumping, just like with biting her nails: she got near the bottom of the stairs, and before she had time to think about it, she was in the air and landing. Nory’s mother had told her strongly to stop, because her landing made a huge thud of a noise at home, but usually she would forge ahead without thinking, and then have to call out, ‘Sorry, I forgot myself!’
Debbie she hadn’t been best-friends with for long enough for that to happen, or maybe Debbie just didn’t have any weird habits like that. Another habit Nory’s brain got into was writing a letter ‘e’ after words that of course had no ‘e’—like ‘had’ or ‘sad.’ Before she would be able to remember to tell herself ‘Stop, all systems stop, don’t curl the little curl,’ she would curl the curl. This was very maddening because she’d have to use the ink eradicator. ‘Said,’ however, was not spelled ‘sayed’ as she had been under the impression it was, until Mrs. Thirm wrote it on the markerboard, but with an ‘i.’
One time just before she went to sleep, there was a bad thing that wouldn’t stop thinking itself. She started in a perfectly ordinary way going out in a rocket into the universe, and landed at the edge, on some grass, and kept on walking. She walked over the field with cows and squishy places, and came to the Great Wall that was at the far edge of the universe, and naturally she climbed that wall, and at the top, she saw another field with more cows, lighter brown this time, and grass that was a little different, too. She crossed that field, and came to a moat, and another Great Wall, climbed that wall, saw another field with more cows, black and white spotted cows this time, and she kept walking and climbing, climbing and walking, getting more and more bothered by the infinity of it. She looked behind her and there was a crowd of angry cows. They knew a way through the walls. Some of them had a look as if they were about to pull back their lips and show their teeth. Finally she went downstairs and found her mother and father talking in the kitchen in the quiet casual way that grownups talk after kids are in bed, and she said ‘A bad thing is in my head and I just can’t get it to stop. It’s like a bad screensaver.’ Nory’s mother took her back upstairs and put Cooch close to her cheek and told her not to worry, when you’re sleepy your brain sometimes repeats things for no reason. She said when she had trouble like that she sometimes thought about how she would furnish a dollhouse, going from room to room, because your brain needs a simple problem to give it something to work with. That helped enormously. She thought about the fake food in the cabinets of the dollhouse, the tiny boxes of oatmeal, with tiny packets inside, the tiny roast hams.
But fortunately, no ham whatsoever today for lunch! Instead there was a wonderful piece of some kind of brown meat, totally soft, so that you could use it as a piece of bread and just wobble it all around. Nory said, ‘Jennifer, it’s really good, taste it,’ and when Jennifer bit into it she said, ‘Mmmmm, that is delicious.’ Jennifer was just a girl who was amazingly gifted at drawing horses. So it was a good lunch, and after that came after-lunch break, which Nory spent with Kira because she’d spent the whole first break and some of lunch with Pamela and she thought it was hurting Kira, although, honestly, it wasn’t fair that Kira wouldn’t be with Nory when Nory was with Pamela. That break was when the bad thing happened. It was almost the worst thing that happened that whole day, except for a worse thing that happened later on. They were making a conker-pile, and Kira started saying — again — that whenever Nory was with Pamela it made her unpopular, which Nory was sick as a dog of hearing. Suddenly Nory wanted passionately to climb a tree, so she went over to the one that she’d been looking at that looked like the perfect tree-climbing tree, and started to try to climb it, even though a skirt and tie wasn’t the ideal outfit for doing that. She looked up, happily, and suddenly there was a discreet thud on her face. She thought, ‘Boy, quite a pinecone, oh dear.’ It felt hard, because things that are really light can feel really hard when they fall from a distance. ‘Oh, my, what a pinecone,’ Nory thought, ‘and what a lot of sap, too.’ And then she wiped with her finger and took a look at it. ‘This is not good looking sap,’ she thought. ‘This is not the kind of sap I’m used to. This is brown sap with a berry-skin in it.’ Then she realized what it was and said, ‘Kira! A disgusting bird took its leisure on me!’
Kira came running over and looked at her. ‘Oh, Nory,’ she said. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, yuck. Come on inside.’ Nory held her face out so that the rest of the bird leisure wouldn’t drip on her jacket and Kira led her to the bathroom. They spent quite a good amount of time cleaning up.
‘Smell my hand, does it smell okay?’ said Nory.
Kira smelled it. ‘It just smells like soap.’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘Wait, let me sniff it again.’ She sniffed it again. ‘You’re fine, just soap.’
They were a tiny bit late for French class, but when they explained to the teacher what had happened, she said, ‘Fine, fine.’ The French teacher was a young, short-haired, dark-haired, short-bodied, stylish-dressed person. She had a wonderful way of saying ‘superb’ and she said it a lot, probably too much for some people’s taste.
37. Pig Bladders
Then there was drama class, where they were doing sword fighting. Sword fighting is useful to know because you never know when you might be in a play in which there was sword fighting. Although that was as if a student said, ‘I.T. is useful because you never know when you might need to spend the morning taxiing all over the airport in an airplane.’ The drama teacher warned them again that you have to be very very careful with sword fighting, because even though the swords aren’t sharp, they’re heavy. And they were heavy, they weighed about five hundred grams, Nory thought. The teacher told a story about going to see a play by Shakespeare where a man had a rib broken by a wooden sword because he was supposed to take three steps one way and he forgot and took three steps in the opposite way by mistake and wound up in exactly the wrong place. A wooden sword plunged through a curtain, for some reason in the play, and slammed right into his ribcage and he had to go out on a stretcher, not as an actor but sincerely as an injured person. Shakespeare was famous for writing plays. Boy were they ever plays, and boy were they ever long. Nory’s aunt and uncle took her to a Shakespeare play outside in a park one time, Romeo and Juliet. It might have been very interesting for a twelve-year-old, but for an eight-year-old, which was how old she had been when she went, it was impossible to understand, too long, and extremely boring. Thank goodness for the Inman Toffees that Nory’s aunt brought along — Nory ate quite a number of them and thought about what it was like to chew them. Sometimes you think when the candy sticks to your teeth that maybe your teeth will be plucked right out, but they’re stuck into the gums pretty strongly.