‘ “Yes,” ’ said Kira.
‘The bad girl sang a carol at the first part,’ said Nory, ‘just to make herself more popular. A goose could have sang it better than she did. She sang it like a wild chicken.’
‘Then the dance was to begin,’ said Kira. ‘The two sisters, not knowing each other of course, because they had chosen different outfits deliberately and not telling each other what they were being and what they would look like, chose themselves. They danced with each other.’ And then Kira whispered her advice to Nory: ‘The bad girl has to fall.’
‘First their steps went quickly,’ said Nory, nodding. ‘The good girl, Emmerine, had swift lovely steps. But the bad girl, Kruselda’s steps were big and bulgy, slow and ugly steps. They danced on together for a long time, until Kruselda finally remembered what she was to do. She was just about to do it, but there was a corner of the rug that was flipped back. She tripped on the rug, fell on her chin, and made her nose be an awful shape, which looked so awful and swollen that no one wanted to look at her for the rest of the day, so she decided to sing …’
‘But then decided no, she would not sing,’ said Kira, quite strongly. ‘Instead her mask and fake hair came off, and everyone knew who she was and she had to …’
‘Duck for apples!’ said Nory. ‘She ducked and ducked and ducked, but her face was so dirty and ugly from the beginning that it turned an awful red, and …’
‘No one would look at her and she was in disgrace,’ said Kira. ‘And she learned to be nicer. The …’
‘The Dog was important to the story, too,’ said Nory, because she didn’t want to say, ‘end,’ which Kira of course wanted her to say.
‘No, the end,’ said Kira.
‘The end!’ sang Nory. ‘The end — the end, the end, the end, oh way-ay-end! And then — and then — and then and then and then and then and THEN!’
‘Then that was the end,’ said Kira.
Nory’s parents called out ‘Nice story’ from the front.
‘I have a story to tell!’ said Littleguy, waving his hands in his car seat. ‘It’s about two girls and it’s the story you telled. There are two good girls. One’s bad and one’s good. They cide to to something. The end.’
‘I like it, good,’ said Nory.
‘But it’s not the end,’ said Littleguy. ‘There’s something they had to make up, their momma said they can make marshmellons, they cide to make something, and it’s something they made. They made two engines, the Flying Scotsman and the Mallard. Steam engines! And there was something in the party. It was a double-decker jelly cake, a double-decker bus, to eat. Like a double-decker bus. When it went in the sun, it rolled out, it drived, when it was on the grass it drove!’
‘A double-decker jelly cake,’ said Nory, ‘Good story, Littleguy.’
‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘It’s a big digger, the scooper, scooper, it goes, kksssh, scooper, scooper, digger. And then there was a big thing there, a dumptruck, auger driller, a front loader.’
‘Yay, good story,’ said Nory.
‘Not quite yet,’ said Littleguy. ‘And there was something in the story, once upon a time, I have another story, I have another story too! Another story!’
‘Okay, just one more story,’ called Nory’s mother.
‘Once upon a time were two flat holes, and there was a big digger truck came over and ran over they, and got dirty dirt on they. They washed their feeties and eyes and toesies and they were all clean, the end.’
They dropped Kira off at her house and the outing was over.
46. Marks
About a week later the Threll School stopped for a vacation. Nory and Pamela shook hands, as if to say, ‘We made it.’ Kira went with her family to a place nearby London, so they didn’t see each other. Guy Fawkes Day happened during the break. There was a huge enormous bondfire and life-size models of Guy Fawkes were thrown into the bondfire. Nory was expecting the models to be little voodoo dolls of Guy Fawkes, not huge floppy heavy dolls the size of people, but life-size was how they did it. Guy Fawkes was a strongly Catholic man who had snuck barrel after barrel of gunpowder down into the basement, and he was just about to blow up the king when he was caught. So they burnt Guy Fawkes in a bondfire and now they have fireworks to celebrate that. Guy Fawkes Day is much more important a holiday in England than Halloween. Possibly they first chopped off Guy Fawkes’s head then burned him in the bondfire, Nory wasn’t clear on that, but that would certainly have been Nory’s preference, because she was not attracted to the idea of being burned. In any case, he was severely punished, in a way the Aztecs would understand quite well. Nory burned her finger on a sparkler in the backyard after the fireworks were over, because the metal got remarkably hot. The skin turned white where it was singed but it felt better when she put an ice cube on it.
No letter from Debbie came in the mail during break, but something else did: Nory’s marks. At International Chinese Montessori School they didn’t have marks at all, just a special conference with Nory sitting there with her parents. The teachers always said this and that: ‘Eleanor, oh, yes: bright, nice girl, talks too much, though, and she has to work harder on her spelling.’ The principal, Xiao Zhang, translated for the Chinese teacher, since Nory’s parents didn’t understand Chinese. There was never a piece of paper with marks on it that said good or bad, the way there turned out to be at Threll school. Threll sent out a sheet of paper with a list of Nory’s different classes and a set of boxes for either Excellent, or Good, or Satisfactory, or Weak, or Poor. Nory got all checkmarks for Satisfactory, except for one Good, in History. No Excellents whatever. She was a little disappointed not to get a Good in Classics because she had liked that class more than all the others and listened like a demon when Mr. Pears read to them. But she was relieved because she had been very worried that she was going to get a Weak in French because the French was completely refusing to stick in her head. Her goal for the year, she decided, was never ever to get a Weak or a Poor. But still, she was a tiny bit sad about English, because she thought her story about the girl and the dog wasn’t just a drab old Satisfactory. It wasn’t just the minimum you had to do, it was actually somewhat above the bare necessities and was possibly in the Good category.
But probably the objection for Mrs. Thirm was that Nory was supposed to write a shorter story that she would finish, and instead she’d written a longer one that ended with TO BE CONTINUED, and also of course her spelling was a disgrace-and-a-half, although Nory’s father said Nory spelled better than anyone did a thousand or two thousand years ago, because back then they had about eight different ways to spell every English word, and people just chose whichever way they felt like. They would say, ‘Today I think I’ll spell chair as chayer and tomorrow chayrre and the day after that, hmm, chaier might be nice, and the day after that I think it will be chere.’ Now it had to be chair every time, no matter what mood you were in.
47. Three Forbidden Words
One other reason Nory might have only gotten a Satisfactory and not a Good in English was that it turned out that Mrs. Thirm was not terribly fond of ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said.’ When they went back to school after break Mrs. Thirm told them that from then on they had to try whenever they could not to use ‘nice’ or ‘then’ or ‘said’ in their assignments, because they were extremely overused and she was tired of seeing them in their books. Nory felt a little discombobbledied at hearing that, because she used ‘nice’ and ‘then’ and ‘said’ quite often. There were only so many different ways you could say, ‘he laughed,’ ‘she giggled,’ ‘he answered,’ ‘they whispered,’ and so forth and so on, before you suddenly felt, ‘Okay, ladies and jellyfish, it’s time to go back to good old she said.’ And without ‘then’ Nory had to use ‘the following day’ or ‘the next thing that happened was’ or ‘later that week’ or ‘Three days passed,’ which were fine, but so was ‘then.’