‘All right,’ said the princes. ‘I just tie it up every day with silk bows. Oh, but you wouldn’t have any, would you?’ And she handed the girl five silk bows, one blue, one red, and one TO BE CONTINUED.
53. Good Result
The very next day two unusually wonderful things happened. First, Nory was the lucky getter of a letter. The mail in Threll was delivered by men on bicycles with big red packs strapped to their handlebars, and it came early in the morning, before breakfast-time. Littleguy brought the envelopes into the kitchen, saying ‘Mail livery! Mail livery!’ Nory’s father stopped singing to the microwave and said, ‘Something for you, Nory.’ She read it:
Dear Eleanor,
How are you? Ive been making lots of strange things with FIMO latley, including tarts pies and cakes. I miss you too. I wish I could pay a visit but that’s not even a possibilility. So when are you coming back? Ms. Beryl is moving away so Ms. Fisker is coming back, maybe!!! I won second place in the soccer turnemint. Love from your friend, Deborah.
‘Aw, that’s so nice,’ Nory said, folding the letter to herself. It made her suddenly strongly love Debbie and miss her, and made her think, ‘How could I be letting such a good friend trickle away from my thinking just because there’s so much going on here in England?’ She hummed Ji Gong, the song about the crazy monk, on the way to school, looking down at her feet and remembering every detail about Debbie and her panda collection, and she thought about going back to school at the International Chinese Montessori School, and of how fun it was to know Chinese and to be able to point out to her parents some Chinese characters on the sidewalk in Chinatown that said something like ‘Warning, telephone here’ in orange paint.
Then, Wonderful Event Number Two, at schooclass="underline" towards the end of the day, Mrs. Thirm came up to Nory outside and said, ‘I’d like to give you this.’ It was a small piece of paper with a seal on it and a signature.
‘Thank you,’ said Nory, not by any means grasping what it was all about.
‘It’s a Good Result for being kind to Pamela,’ Mrs. Thirm said.
Nory’s face got a totally flabbledigastered look of complete amazement on it. She said, ‘Wow, you’re kidding, thank you, thank you!’
Nory only knew a little bit about Good Results. A Good Result was one of the best possible things you could ever get at the Junior School, higher than getting an Excellent, and if you got five of them in a row, you got a gift certificate to buy a special book of your choice. Good Results weren’t too unusual, though, since quite a few of the girls had gotten them for different things, like for music or science projects or maths or handwriting. But still, Nory had never even come close to getting one, and she never knew that it was possible to get one for something like being nice to Pamela. She was standing in some mud in a dazzle-and-a-half of pure delight, when Mr. Pears came up to her and pointed to the piece of paper and sort of gave her a wink and said, ‘That’s my favorite kind of Good Result, for kindness.’
‘Thank you,’ Nory said. She was in a state of triumph, pleased out of her gourd, and she hopped up and down and told everyone who was nearby her, ‘I got my first Good Result, I got my first Good Result!’
‘Really?’ said Shelly Quettner. ‘What for?’
‘For being kind to Pamela,’ Nory said. But then she thought, ‘Oops,’ because it didn’t feel quite right to tell. On the other hand, she wanted to tell everyone, because it proved without a doubt that if you went against the bad things that kids were doing a good thing could unexpectedly happen to you when you least expect it. She ran over to Kira.
‘Kira, I got a Good Result for being nice to Pamela!’ she said.
‘You didn’t,’ said Kira.
‘Yes, I did,’ said Nory. ‘If you don’t believe me, look at this.’
Kira looked at the paper and got angry and said, ‘It’s not as good a Good Result as if you’d got one for a particular subject. Many people get those.’
‘No,’ said Nory. ‘Mr. Pears said that this was his favorite kind of Good Result. He seemed to think it was somewhat unusual. You’re jealous.’
‘I am not!’ said Kira.
‘You most certainly are!’ said Nory.
‘I most certainly am not!’ said Kira.
‘Okay, I’ll take your word for it, Kira,’ said Nory. ‘You’re not jealous.’
Later Roger Sharpless came over. Usually what he did was to pretend to kick Nory in the shins, so that Nory could get back at him by pretending to kick him: onk, conk, onk, conk. Or they would do a strange kind of punching in which they would punch at each other’s fists and then say, ‘Ow!’ and walk around making a huge production of their injured hand, flapping it around, even though it wasn’t injured the least bit. But this time Roger just said: ‘I think you ought to know that Pamela is unhappy because Shelly Quettner told her that the reason you’ve been being nice to her is that you’ve been trying to get a Good Result, and according to Shelly you’ve finally got what you wanted.’
Nory turned as red as a piece of origami paper. ‘That’s not true!’ she said. ‘Yes, I did get a Good Result, but I didn’t plan on it, I didn’t even know you could get a Good Result for something like that!’
‘I told Shelly she was a nitwit,’ said Roger. ‘But you should have a word with Pamela.’
Nory tried to find Pamela but she couldn’t find her anywhere. The next day she sat with her at lunch but Pamela was quiet. ‘What Shelly said is totally, totally not true,’ said Nory.
‘You have been very nice to me,’ said Pamela.
‘But do you believe me?’ Nory asked.
‘Believe you about what?’
‘That it’s totally untrue?’
‘I believe you,’ said Pamela, ‘but I’d prefer to talk about something else.’
‘What do you want to talk about?’ Nory asked.
‘I have no idea,’ said Pamela.
‘Well, what’s your favorite color?’ Nory asked.
‘Turquoise,’ said Pamela.
‘Ah yes, turquoise, good.’ Nory pretended to note it down in an imaginary notebook. ‘And what’s your favorite vegetable?’
‘Spinach.’
‘Spinach, ah yes, very interesting.’ Then there was a long silence. Finally Nory said, ‘Okay, what’s your favorite piece of potato chip on this plate?’
‘That bit,’ said Pamela, and ate it.
‘That was chip number 1306B, yes, yes. I have that noted down. Now, what’s your favorite water molecule?’
‘What do you mean what’s my favorite water molecule?’ said Pamela. ‘What’s your favorite water molecule?’
Nory put her eye close to Pamela’s glass of water and peered in. She said, ‘It’s a difficult case, but I believe my very favorite is that particular one there, sort of near the top. See it? A little to the side of the tiny air bubble. That one. What’s yours?’
Pamela poked her finger straight into Nory’s glass of water. ‘That one,’ she said.
Nory laughed. ‘Which one?’ said Nory.
Pamela pulled her finger out of the water and flicked it so that a drop or two splashed on Nory’s face. ‘That one,’ she said.
‘Ah yes, that one,’ said Nory.
54. End of Term
The day before the last full day before the End of Term, everybody in the school was told to pack up everything in their backpacks and kits and take it all home. Every book, every notebook, every pen, every pencil case, every netball outfit and pair of shoes — home. The next day, the science teacher passed out strange dull little pencils, since of course their pens were no longer available, and told them to spend the class finding as many words as they could in scientific and cathedral. This was the kind of thing that Nory was never good at, and in ‘scientific’ she only found words like ‘in’ and ‘it’ and ‘sit.’ For ‘cathedral’ Roger Sharpless gave her the very useful hint of starting at the end and going backwards, and she luckily found ‘lard’ right off the bat, which was a more important word in England than in America, and ‘death.’ Roger said afterward that you could easily have gotten ‘teach’ from the word, too, but her brain unfortunately didn’t work that way. During break Nory and Roger were pretending to chop off each other’s heads with their bare hands when a boy came up and blurted out, ‘You like Pamela, don’t you?’