The next thing that happened, not counting music, which was fairly anonymous, was that everyone was outside, waiting to be picked up. Nory was out with a bunch of other kids, including Kira. Pamela came out and sat down nearby with a big sigh and slumped her backpack down, and everyone froze and went dead quiet. Pamela concentrated on doing a strange thing, which was: taking off her shoe and sock and checking on an orange Band Aid that was on her toe. That was such an unexpected thing for Pamela to do that all the girls started to laugh at her, and then Nory couldn’t help it and she laughed, too, although she felt it was mean. Jessica said to Nory, ‘Can you please get her to go away?’
‘Why should I?’ said Nory. ‘She’s happy there. No, I can’t get her to go away.’
Kira grabbed her arm and pulled her over and said, ‘Nory! The more on her side you are the less popular you’ll be.’
‘Kira, is that all you can think about in this school?’ said Nory. ‘If you’re my friend and Pamela’s my friend I’m just fine in the area of being popular.’
‘You’re not thinking!’ said Kira, in a whisper-shout, which is when you shout, but you do it in a whispering voice rather than a shouting voice.
‘Oh, puff,’ said Nory. She went to sit down next to Pamela and said, ‘Hi, Pamela.’ Pamela said ‘Hello,’ and kept checking away at her bandage, which had that old bandage look to it. Then she put her sock and shoe back on. Kira was waving to Nory very urgently, over and over, saying, ‘Nory! Come over here!’ with her mouth. Nory shook her head in refusion as if to mean ‘Pardon me, but I’m sitting with Pamela.’ To Pamela, she said, ‘You should tell the teacher about those girls.’
Pamela said, ‘Girls? The girls are the least of my problems, it’s the boys who are giving me a headache.’ She pointed over at some of the boys who were in a little group on the steps pointing at her and pretending to throw up at the sight of her. But you could tell that it hurt Pamela that the girls had laughed at her when she looked at her Band Aid, including Nory, because you could hear the same crying in her voice, unless that was just the way she talked when she was angry, with a little sort of trembling. She’d wanted to be near the girls but she knew they wouldn’t want her to be there, so she’d made up this idea of checking her Band Aid, maybe, which turned out to be so unexpected of a thing to do at that second that it worked out even less well than if she’d just walked over and said hello to everyone and nobody had answered. Pamela didn’t understand that the girls were just as bad as the boys, not in shoving her into the boxes, but in just going along with this whole Porkinson Banger of an idea that Pamela was for no convinceable reason a kid who should be put into a state of misery every born day she went to school. Or probably Pamela did understand it, but didn’t want to admit it, because obviously you don’t want to think that everyone dislikes you. Nory told herself, ‘Forget it, just forget it, don’t talk to her about the other kids, just talk to her about something totally separate from the meanness that’s going on, and show the other kids that Pamela is a kid like any other kid at the Junior School who can have a friend who will sit down next to her and talk to her normally.’ So Nory told her a joke she remembered from Garfield. Garfield was her favorite comic strip, because it was really hilarious and really well drawn. Garfield went up in a tree to catch a bird in a nest. He had it clutched in his hand and was just about to eat it, when a mother bird the size of an eagle came in the back yard and glared at him with a vicious glare. Garfield looked up, still squeezing the bird in his hand, and said, ‘Um — chirp? Chirp?’ The eagle pecked at him wildly and Garfield got down from the tree and was all touseled and ruffled and bruised from the eagle. He said, ‘Well, it was worth a try.’
Pamela nodded a little and managed a sad little grin of a smile. Then Nory asked her what books she was reading for Readathon. Pamela took a big breath and said, ‘Well, I’m reading The Call of the Wild.’ She started telling Nory the plot of the story, which was about a magnificent dog who gets stolen away, and then she hopped up and said, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll miss my train.’ Then she said, ‘Thanks, Nory, bye,’ and nodded at Nory a little, which made Nory happier and made her stop feeling the guiltiness she had been feeling about being magnetized into laughing at her when Pamela had first taken off her sock. Pamela seemed definitely more cheered up by the time she dashed off. Then Nory sat back down on the wall and waited to be picked up by her mother or her father. Kira didn’t come over to sit next to her, but that wasn’t too surprising, only a little saddening.
There was a humongous sign in one of the halls that said ‘Bullies Are Banned’ in balloon writing. Balloon writing was a very, very thick kind of puffy writing.
39. Reading Tintin to Her Babies
That night, after Nory’s mother read to her and her father brought her up a glass of water, Nory bundled Cooch and Samantha together in bed with her, with a plan of reading some Tintin in Tibet to them, because they were just about ready for that level of book now, as long as you explained some of the words. The difficult thing about reading to any of her dolls, as you may imagine, was that it was hard to keep both children sitting up so that they could see the book. They tended to slide down or over, and then Nory would have to tilt the book so that if Samantha was staring off toward a corner of the ceiling she could still have the chance to see the pictures, as long as Nory held the book right down over her head, and the same thing with Coochie. In the case of Tintin books you really had to be able to see the pictures — in fact if you were the one reading you had to point to each person’s head in each square as you read what they said so that the person you were reading to would know who was talking. The pictures were very important to the story, because Herge was such a good drawer, especially of mountains and people climbing mountains wearing backpacks. His dreams were very realistic. Captain Haddock dozes off while he’s walking along and dreams a number of strange things that change from one picture to the next as he’s walking. Nory had only sleptwalked a few times. One time she sleptwalked into the closet in Littleguy’s room when she was eight and was under the general impression that it was the bathroom and so she peed carefully there, pulled up her pajama-bottoms, and went straight back to her bed.
The hard thing about holding the book so that Cooch and Samantha could see was that then it was not all that easy for Nory to see, and her arms and shoulders got so tired that they started to have a case of the sparklies, and couldn’t hold the book up for one more second. Luckily Cooch and Samantha both corked off in a very short time and she could relax the book and scoot down in her bed. Nory felt sleepy, too, but not quite enough to go to sleep herself. She didn’t feel that there was any major bad dream getting itself ready to bother her — probably the last bad dream had been bad enough that she might not have any more for a month or two. So she wasn’t bothered about that. But she wasn’t completely sleepy, and she didn’t want to start another Jill Murphy book about the Worst Witch, even though it was Readathon, because her brain was stuffed to the gizzard with reading for Readathon, and yes, by all means, leukemia was a horrible disease to strike a small innocent child but she would read more Jill Murphy books at another time, since they were very, very good books. Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?