Nory said to it, very confidentially, ‘Don’t fly yet, Ladybug. Ladybug, if you try to fly, I’m going to have to confiscate your ability of flying. I can’t confiscate you, but I can cup my hand over you and confiscate your ability of flying.’ Confiscate was a word she’d learned from a boy who walked back with her from lunch one day. He said that it was a good thing she wasn’t in Five-K, because in Five-K the teacher was awful. If you write in pencil and you were supposed to write in pen, or do something of that level of badness, the teacher would confiscate your pencil and tell you she was going to give it back the next day, and then she never gave it back. The boy said he stole his pencil back. He said, ‘And rightly stole it!’ He opened up the teacher’s drawer and had to fumble through it to find his pencil because it was bursting at the gills with confiscated things.
Ladybugs are very useful bugs because they eat aphids. Nory used to think, ‘Poor little aphids.’ But aphids eat the ladybugs’ eggs, so ladybugs have a right to hate them. It was something a little like Rikki Tikki Tavi and the snake. Nory’s mother said that when a gardener bought a whole jug of ladybugs they had to let them out at night so they don’t know where they are and settle down with those particular aphids as their enemy. Otherwise they might try to escape to the other aphids, which they know better and hate more, because those were the ones who actually ate their eggs. Human beings have an unusual amount of power over the lives of bugs. Kids kill thousands of bugs every day without dropping a hat. Once Nory was looking at a ladybug that was either dead or alive, she couldn’t tell, maybe playing dead or just relaxing or sunbathing or burnt in the sun. But then someone came walking along, not thinking about what she was doing, but just walking along, and she smashed the ladybug, without even seeing it. A green spread out. Insects have green blood. Now, if that had been a child who had been squushed, everyone would be tearing their hair out. Even if a small thing happens to a child, she remembers it and talks about it for a long time. Maybe insects’ blood is white or some other color, and only turns green when it is exposed to air. We think human blood is red but it’s blue just before it comes out of a cut. The very second it reaches the edge of the cut, it changes, in the twinkling of an eye, because of the air.
They were watching a pianist one night, Nory’s mother, Nory’s father, and Nory, because when Nory called her friend Kira, Kira said ‘You’ve got to watch this great piano contest.’ Littleguy was playing with James the Red Engine. One of the people in the contest played the piano so hard he got a red spot on the back of his thumb. He was from Yugoslaw. Nory saw it and said, ‘He’s hurt himself.’
‘Oh, I think it’s just a shadow,’ said Nory’s father.
But it wasn’t. There were little spots of blood on the piano keys. Then the next person had to play. Think of him sitting down and seeing ladybugs of blood all over the piano. He can’t wipe them off because the wiping would make an ugly sound and the judges might remember the ugly sound very well, since it was the very first thing he played, and give him a bad result. His eye would be distracted by the blood and he would make more mistakes, maybe. Or he might think, ‘Hah hah! I won’t bleed, no sir!’ It was sad to think of the people in the contest who practiced so hard their whole lives long and still eventfully lost.
That little thing, a bleeding thumb, was a big thing for a person. For an insect or some other small creature it would be minor. One time Nory scrumpled up a leaf to put it on the compost pile in Palo Alto. She didn’t know that there was a snail on the other side of the leaf. So she accidentally crunched the snail, and she got snail slime all over her hand. It was awful. She hadn’t meant to scrumple the snail. From then on, whenever she picked up a leaf, she turned it over to see if anything was on the other side. Very often there was. Another time she caught a butterfly and was trying to put it in ajar with some grass blades. Its body was in the jar, but its head was accidentally outside, and she didn’t know that, while she was turning the lid of the jar. She looked over and there was its head outside the jar. She snatched the lid away and the head was still partly attached. The butterfly flew away. But she felt the guilt of the idea of having done that pull at her horribly.
Nory’s father said that feeling guilty was useful because when you felt it you had a piece of useful knowledge: you knew that you didn’t want to do that thing, whatever it was, that made you feel guilty, so the guiltiness was a way of teaching yourself what you ought to do in the future. In some cases that was true but Nory felt horribly guilty about having scrumpled the snail and screwed the lid on the butterfly’s head even though she hadn’t meant to.
But the guiltiness did stay in her mind and make her act differently. For instance, three kids found a butterfly on a tree near the dining hall at Threll School one time, near the beginning of term. They were trying to make it fly, but it wasn’t cooperating. One of the girls wanted to put it in her backpack. Immediately, Nory thought, ‘If it goes in there, with all the heavy books and notebooks, it will end up like one of the cookies that I put in my backpack that is now just a dust of crumbs. It will be the death of that butterfly.’ So she said to the girl, ‘Here, take my pencil case and put the butterfly in there.’ The girl carelessly took it and put the butterfly in. That meant that Nory was totally without a pencil case. The pencil case had pencils, including a Barbie pencil, her medium nib pen, her ink eradicator, her National Trust eraser, ruler, protractors, everything. She had to borrow pens from kids, and at first they were nice about it, but after a few days they were really mean about it and said, ‘Are you going to beg for a pen again? I’ll tell you right now you can’t have one.’
Of course one of the reasons she’d given the girl her pencil case was not just to protect the butterfly, but probably more because she wanted the girl to be impressed by her generous act of handing over the pencil case. Finally her mother said, ‘You must get that pencil case back from that girl or you will have to buy another pencil case out of your own allowance.’ So Nory asked the girl for the pencil case back and got it at the end of the day, feeling huge relief.
Another story about a pencil case was a more horrible one. Daniella Harding said, and Nory wasn’t sure if she was telling the truth, but she said that she got the pointy end of a protractor stuck through her cheek. Kira asked, ‘Did you scream?’ Daniella said that she’d had to go to the san. She got a little scar on her face. But Nory had had a friend at the International Chinese Montessori School in Palo Alto who was always making things up, and ever since then she was not so quick to believe everything every kid told her, especially if they told the story a certain way. She could have gotten the scar from poking herself with a pencil. Or it just could have been a simple fall-down-and-scrape-your-face.
13. Close Calls with Crying
A lot of Nory’s stories used to be about her most beloved stuffed animal, a puppet raccoon called Sarah Laura Maria, who was often being stolen away by a bad witch and helped by a good witch, stuff like that, but lately Nory had begun a whole set of stories about a girl named Mariana who has a very sad but in some ways good life. Coochie, which was Nory’s other name for Raccoon, still was in some stories of her own, too. Cooch had recently begun attending a boarding school as a day student in the dresser in the guest room of the house in Threll they were renting. Samantha and Linnea and Vera, other dolls, were going there as well, each in its own drawer. They were full boarders. There were quite a number of flying squirrels at the school, who would climb on the play-structure and fly off in great arches. Coochie tried to do it but she had eaten too many jacket potatoes for lunch and she fell down and got badly scraped and bruised. It wasn’t the sort of scrape you get when you scrape your knee on the Astroturf, which makes it completely red, it was more of a real cut. A girl in Nory’s class named Jessica — the one who said Nory had a ‘squeegee accent’ on one of the first days — fell on the Astroturf and got two red knees when they were playing hockey.