‘My, you are slow,’ said Nory. ‘I’ve already answered that question about four separate times.’
‘Of course Nory likes Pamela,’ said Roger to the boy. ‘Pamela is a hundred times nicer than you are. You are a sorry bowl of soup.’
The boy made a delighted expression and skipped off. Soon after that, when Nory was walking to I.T., a few people came up and smirked wildly at Nory. They said, ‘You fancy Roger Sharpless! You fancy Roger Sharpless!’
Nory thought of saying ‘I certainly do not!’ But she didn’t want to lie. So she said, ‘Well, I do like him, yes.’
When they were gone Nory was quite relieved to remember to herself, ‘I’ve got this secret that’s burning a hole in my pocket and I need to talk about it with someone, and I can’t talk about it with Shelly or even Kira, but I can with Pamela, because she’s a friend and she can be trusted with the situation.’ So later she went ahead and told Pamela, ‘You know what? I used to fancy Jacob Lewes, because I’m attracted to boys who are my height or taller than me and highly intelligent and a tiny bit mean and kind of ugly in a particular way. But now, guess what? I fancy Roger Sharpless.’
‘Oh, yes, Roger Sharpless is beautiful,’ said Pamela. ‘I fancy him too.’
‘No way!’ said Nory. ‘I’m quite shocked!’
‘Just kidding,’ said Pamela. ‘I think.’
On the very last day of term, all they had was house meetings and then Cathedral. Then each kid was supposed to meet their parents. Nory gave cards to Mr. Blithrenner and Mr. Stone and Mrs. Hoadley and Mrs. Hant and all her teachers, and to Mrs. Thirm she gave chocolates that she and Littleguy had made the night before. They made the chocolates by melting down a big chocolate bar and pouring it into little plastic molds. One of the molds had turned out to be of an owl. ‘But not a scary owl,’ Littleguy said, when he saw what it was. ‘A chocolate owl. A chocolate owl is not a scary owl.’
In return Mrs. Thirm gave all the kids in class chocolates each, or caramel candies each, from a box, whichever they wanted. Someone said, ‘Let’s say thanks to Mrs. Thirm!’ Everyone shouted, ‘Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!’ Then everyone put their chairs up on the tables for the last, last, last time that term, and while Nory was lining up the little metal sliders on the legs of her chair on the tabletop so that it was perfectly straight, since that was how it would sit, in just that precise position, until she came back after Christmas, she had a strange feeling of never wanting that term of school to be over but wanting it to go on and on to an endless limit. She slipped Pamela a little present of a pop-up card, homemade, which had a cutout of herself and Pamela in their school clothes standing on top of a little volcano, and she made it so the volcano leaned forward a slight extent when the card opened, which you can do fairly easily by cutting two little slices in the folded-over edge so that the place where you cut can be folded outward the opposite way as a little ledge for something to be attached to. The Pamela pop-up and the Nory pop-up each had one flexible arm that waved back and forth when you pulled the two louvers at the bottom that ran all the way up the back of the card as two strips of paper and sometimes got completely out of whack. They both were saying, ‘We made it!’ and a bird was tucked conveniently halfway in a pocket of paper that was shaped as a cloud.
A little while later Nory remembered something Mr. Pears quite sternly said about not enough people saying thank you personally to the parents who organized the party before the fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, so she personally said, ‘Thank you for the chocolate,’ to Mrs. Thirm. But she said it quietly, while Mrs. Thirm’s back was turned, because sometimes it makes you shy to say thank you in person before anyone else has cleared the path by saying thank you. Shelly Quettner heard her say it and spun around and said much more loudly, ‘Thank you for the chocolate, Mrs. Thirm!’ Mrs. Thirm turned and smiled at Shelly and said, ‘You’re welcome.’ But that was quite all right because it isn’t the giving, it’s the thought that counts. ‘On the other hand, if the other person doesn’t know that you’ve thought the thought, how can it count?’ Nory wondered.
Everyone streamed up the path toward the Cathedral and Nory looked at them walking. Each kid had their own particular personality, good or bad or mezzo mezzo, and each personality, no matter what it was, was interesting in some way. Sometimes a kid lost their personality for Nory when all they seemed to want to do was to be cruel to Pamela — then they just became a dull, boring idiot, shuffling through the day — but just lately some kids were getting more preoccupied in other things and losing interest in being cruel to Pamela, to a certain extent, though not totally. Maybe a little bit of the reason was because they saw that Nory was persistently going to be Pamela’s friend, and so they began to notice that it wasn’t necessarily the absolute end of the world to be Pamela’s friend as well or at least not be her vicious enemy.
Inside, since it was a very bright cold day, the green light blasted in through the Jasperium and onto quite a few kids, including Nory. She didn’t exactly think God’s thoughts, but she thought: ‘Frankly, I love school.’ ‘Love’ was one of the most important of all the words that seemed to be spelled wrong on purpose, just to confuse you. It should be spelled ‘lov’ because the rule is that an e makes things long, and there is no long l or long o or long v. For example, it’s not ‘I loave school,’ it’s ‘I lov school.’ But however it was spelled, it was true. The best thing about school was that there were so many teachers teaching different things, so that you learned about how to get stabbed in drama, or about the Aztecs, or the Virgin Mary, or how to type or how to not cry when your plane crashes six times in a row, or about Achilles being dipped into the water, or the friction in a brick, or any amount of things, and there were so many hundreds of kids, and each kid was given quite a bit of responsibility. They were treated as if they were hundreds and hundreds of adults pouring in to work at a factory, wearing a jacket and tie, with that level of independence. You walked to and from Cathedral and to and from lunch, and during break you could choose to go to the art room or the library or back to your classroom or stay outside, whatever you wanted, and you would run into all of the people you knew, and each time you saw someone you had a particular thought, like ‘Ah yes, Colin, who is always asking to borrow my eraser,’ or ‘Ah, Kira, how are you? Haven’t seen you in a while!’
A sad thing was that Kira and Nory had stopped being very, very good friends because of Pamela. But it wasn’t really Kira’s fault or Pamela’s fault. It was the fault of all the people who had decided not to like Pamela. If they hadn’t been at the Junior School, then there would have been no problem. Of course you could say that there wouldn’t have been much of a Junior School, either, since almost everyone was part of the meanness from time to time. But now that some of the kids had decided that they liked Pamela better, or weren’t going to bother to hate her, presto, Kira was liking Nory better again.