So a few of the kids were beginning to go over to Nory’s side and be a little nicer to Pamela. And Roger Sharpless always had been nice to Pamela. However, Kira was still trying her hardest to get Nory to stop being Pamela’s friend. She’d say things like, ‘Nory, you do know, don’t you, that you’re the only person in the whole school who likes her.’
‘I don’t know if that’s quite true,’ said Nory.
‘Yes, it is true,’ said Kira. ‘Nobody else is her friend, nobody.’
But Pamela did definitely have other friends from time to time. One time she waited a very long time to meet one of her friends who was in sixth year. Nory waited with her — Pamela said it was just a quarter of an hour they waited but Nory thought it was more like fifteen minutes. And even if Nory was the only one in the whole Junior School who was steadily Pamela’s friend, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she thought. What in the world was so bad about being Pamela’s one and only real friend?
Also, Nory liked being Pamela’s friend, because she liked planning out with Pamela what kind of vicious attacks she could use to fight back for Pamela, and she admired that Pamela was good at maths, since if you were good at maths it allowed you to go on and do so many different things in science or dentistry, and she liked that Pamela had unusual aspects about herself, such as being double-jointed. Pamela couldn’t use certain kinds of pens, she told Nory, because she was extremely double-jointed. Her thumb was a whole level further of being exposable than most normal people. She had to use a special other kind of pen. It looked like a simple everyday kind of medium-nib fountain pen to Nory, but she didn’t say so. So there were surprising things like that about Pamela that Nory liked, and she also just liked Pamela’s very hush-hush way of talking to you — Pamela always spoke very softly and had quite a lot to say but you had to listen very carefully because she only spoke to one person at a time and she was very particular about who she told things to, which in this old day and age is probably a good thing.
Nory’s parents got extremely upset when they heard the news from Nory that Pamela was having an even worse time of it now than ever. They said that things had gotten utterly untolerable and something just had to be done. The mistreatment of Pamela was something that they personally had to go to Mr. Pears about, they said, or straight to Pamela’s parents, because it simply couldn’t be allowed to go on. Nory cried at the dinner table and said that it was Pamela’s choice and nobody else’s, and Pamela absolutely, definitely did not want the teachers or her parents to know, and she had made Nory promise, so please, please, please not yet. But Nory did promise to go to the teacher again herself, at least, and announce that physical shin-kicking was now going on. And her parents promised Nory, not exactly as a trade (since they wanted her to get one, too), but sort of as a trade, that she could have a gum-guarder. A gum-guarder was a thing you use to keep your teeth from getting knocked out. If a hockey stick whams into your mouth and you have a gum-guarder on you would get a fat lip, but no particular tooth would fall out. Nory wanted the gum-guarder because other kids had them and she thought it would make her feel stronger and more able to stop the bigger kids from being bad to Pamela, even when she wasn’t wearing it. She could think, ‘Aha, I have a powerful gum-guarder, nobody can bother me now!’ Also she wanted to be sure that none of her teeth tumbled out onto the Astroturf. If you want to be a dentist your own teeth are kind of an advertisement of your work, and it’s important that there is nothing strange about them, or people will say, ‘Oh no, I won’t go to that dentist to have my teeth fixed, because take a gander at hers.’
Nory went ahead and told Mrs. Thirm that she had a friend — a friend who was quite possibly the same friend as she had talked to her about before, who was now being — no question about it — bullied. Nory had promised her friend not to say what the exact bullying was, but ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said. ‘It involves a boy’s foot, and a shoe, and a shin, pure and simple.’ Mrs. Thirm said, ‘Thank you, Nory, it’s good of you to let us know.’
Sometimes it was quite efficient to tell two boys, say, who were being bad to Pamela that they were ‘imbecile-idiot-numbskull-nitwits,’ saying the words super-fast, or tell them, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t sleep on your side at night, because your pea-brain might tumble out your ear.’ But some of the older kids had a style of word-fighting that Nory couldn’t do anything against, because it was just too confident. Pamela asked Nory one time to help fight back against an older girl named Janet who was constantly saying mean things about Pamela’s cheeks. Nory said to the girl, ‘Excuse me, would you please do me a favor and stop being mean to Pamela or take a long deep dip in a dump?’
The girl looked at Nory for about a minute and a half and said, ‘Turn around, I don’t like looking at your face.’
‘Well,’ said Nory, ‘I don’t like looking at your face!’
‘If you don’t like it, don’t look at it,’ said the girl.
‘Well, if you don’t like looking at my face don’t look at my face either!’ said Nory. The girl laughed and flossed off to the library because she fancied one of the librarians, a boy in seventh year, and the next time Pamela asked Nory to fight back with words against that girl Nory said, Gee, she could try, but she just didn’t think she could do all that much against her, because the girl was so sure of herself and so able to think quickly in those kinds of tense moments.
50. The Core of the Friendship
In Geography they began doing the countries of Europe — in other words, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Lapland, the UK or United Kingdom, and of course, not to be forgotten, England itself. Land after land. There were an amazing number of big and little lands all fitting nicely tucked together, and when you concentrated in on one, you tended to forget about the others, although there was just as much going on in them, too, every day of the week. And when you concentrated on all of them, the low countries and the high countries and the medium or ‘mixed-traffic’ countries, as Littleguy would call them (if he knew clearly what a country was), since he called a plain donut with chocolate frosting on top a ‘mixed-traffic donut’ on the idea that an engine like James the Red Engine that can pull either passenger cars or freight cars is a ‘mixed-traffic engine’—when you concentrated on Belgium and Barcelona and whatnot (those are just examples), you forgot about America, something that you would think would not be all that easy to forget. One day Nory almost lost her geography book and had to take out everything from her backpack, looking for it. She found it, finally, but she also found, way down at the bottom, some Flake 99 wrappers and six old conkers. They were turning rotten. They were black in some places and white in other places and they were wet soggy things that when you touched them you wished you hadn’t. They smelled extremely good, though, because they were becoming peat.
Nory missed playing with Kira under the conker tree, all those weeks ago — or not that many weeks, actually — and she had a feeling that she and Kira were not such good friends now as they had been then. Kira had something of an idea of being friends, true, but not the whole idea. A friendship was like the core of something, not a conker but something really basic like an apple, and there were all these things around it — the peel and the leaves and the wax they put on the peel to make it shiny, and whatnot. The shiny peel is a fun part, but the friendship has to go down and down into the very core, and Kira didn’t seem to understand what that core should be. Or maybe she just had a different opinion of what it should be than Nory did. Nory believed that the core was not just to stick together and be friendly from time to time, as the case may be, and definitely not always to be in a competition every second, and not to just be tomboyishly friendly, but also to be able to empty your heart out to the person. Say, for instance, you had the horribly embarrassing secret that you were keeping inside that you really loved playing with Barbies, and you were afraid to tell anyone because boys, especially, not to mention some girls, are vicious about instantly making fun of anybody who likes Barbies and they laugh at you for liking them. To a real friend you could casually empty your heart out by saying, ‘You know what? I really like Barbies.’ And there would be no problem. They would be able to be trusted not only not to tell anybody but not to laugh at you, either. And a real friend, if you had another friend that people were being awful to, wouldn’t say ‘Stop being friends with that person, nobody else is friends with her, stay away from her.’