The Everlasting Story of Nory

36. A Bird Problem

After break it was on to the next event, because each school day was packed with tons and tons and tons of events — good events, bad events, mezzo-mezzo events, confusing events, alarming events. The next event was LT., where the class was trying to land their airplanes on an island. Nory mostly taxied around the airport, which was quite enjoyable. Finally she got her plane to take off down the runway, but then she started having some trouble. She pressed on one of the arrow keys, and if you held on to it for too long (which she was desperately doing to steer her plane back in a straighter direction) the plane went into an acute turn, which is the opposite of an obtuse turn, and would not ever turn back, it would just crash. So she crashed, as usual, but this time she not only crashed her own plane, she somehow curled persistently all the way around and crashed the plane that was following along behind her. Mr. Stone, the teacher, shook his head and said: ‘Millions of pounds of expensive technology, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.’

Mr. Stone was a very nice teacher and probably the only teacher Nory had who hadn’t yet said shutup to the class. All the teachers said shutup, even Mr. Blithrenner, the history teacher, who was a delight and knew every strange fact you could imagine. No grownup would have said shutup at the International Chinese Montessori School, but here, boy oh boy, the word was all over the place. Mr. Blithrenner was explaining, half jokingly, that there simply had to be bloodshed in the Aztec religion each and every day because the sunsets and sunrises were much redder and darker in America, and the Aztec religion was a religion of the sun. So blood had to be shed every day or the sun would become angry and simply refuse to rise, which would be a disaster. That explained the confusion. But two of the boys were being very disruptive and chitter-chatting about human sacrifices, and finally Mr. Blithrenner reached his limit and said, ‘Colin, Jacob! Just — shut—up!’ And they did.

Mrs. Thirm said shutup, too. The first time she did she put her hand up to her mouth, and the class was in shock, thinking, ‘Wait just a tiny minute, teachers don’t say that.’ But now they’d gotten used to hearing it: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ Not that often, though. At least the teachers didn’t say, ‘Shut your trap,’ which was something Nory sometimes said to other kids, even though she knew she shouldn’t. Sometimes she was noisy and interrupting in class, too, and then she felt guilty and when one of her parents picked her up at the end of the day she said, ‘I can’t have tea because I was not particularly good today. I talked a lot and laughed a lot and drew madly on my fingernail.’

But Mr. Stone, the I.T. teacher, never said shutup. Nory one time called the little rectangle that was in the middle of the screen the Bermuda Rectangle, because inside it were five little green blobs that were islands and on one of the five islands was the little landing strip — and Mr. Stone liked that name for it and started calling it that, too, which made Nory feel proud. If you can imagine trying to land a huge airplane on a popsicle stick, that’s what it felt like to approach the Bermuda Rectangle. There was a ninety-percent guarantee that they would crash. Nory liked the old unit of I.T. better, when they were doing touch-typing, where if you make a mistake and typed a j for a k it just made a fly-buzzing sound and said ‘Try again.’ The next unit would be good, though: they were going to put on black hats with visors that plugged in and do Virgil Reality using the four new computers that were set up especially for multi-mediorite.

Then all the fifth-year kids went to lunch. No jacket potato for Nory this time, sadly enough, because Nory’s mother was quite firm about how Nory had to have something meaty from time to time. Fortunately they didn’t have the ham on display as a possibility. ‘Oh, the ham,’ Nory thought, ‘the salty ham of last week.’ She wanted to make an ‘ulll’ sound in her throat when that ham sprang to mind. It was a flat round thing with a narrow border of fat almost all the way around it, a capital G shape of fat, and it was dead cold and pale red. Actually it started out hot but got cold later. Nory was going to put it away and not eat it after one tiny bite. One of the people serving the food had said, ‘Ham?’ and given Nory such a nice tender smile that Nory said, ‘Yes, please.’ She should definitely have said, ‘No, thank you.’ But she felt that the person serving the ham might have her feelings hurt, so she said, ‘Yes, please.’ Also there didn’t seem much like anything else she would like that day, so she got the flap of ham. But one taste and she was salted off her rocker. The music teacher came by and said, ‘You should eat more of that delicious ham, what a waste.’ Nory ate it and ate it. The teacher came by again and said, ‘You should eat a little more.’ So Nory ate a lot more, chewing endlessly, about two thousand and one chews of ham. Kira was whispering advice the whole time. ‘Hide some of it, Nory, hide it in here,’ she said, pointing to Nory’s pencil case. Nory said no way could she hide the ham in her pencil case, not after all she’d been through with that pencil case. Finally she finished most of it. Maybe it was Danish ham. Mr. Blithrenner told his class one day that he didn’t buy Danish ham these days because Danish people keep the young hams locked up in tiny lockers when they’re alive and don’t let them get any light or fresh air. Or rather, the young pigs. That was when he was talking about salting meats. The important thing people should know about the tip of finding the right direction to sail to shore by throwing the pig overboard is that you had to pull the pig back onto the ship very fast, because pigs have sharp what’s-known-as trotters and could injure their face by desperately swimming. Pigs can smell mushrooms underground very well, amazingly well, in fact, so maybe even way out on the ocean they are smelling the underground mushrooms and that’s why sailors can use them as compasses. Trotters are the things they trot on, sort of like hooves.

Fingernails are our hooves. Littleguy had a problem with his fingernails when he was a tiny newborn child — he would wave his arms around so clutchingly that he would scratch his face with his fingernails. Nory’s mother and father had to be careful to cut his nails all the time so there wouldn’t be too much scratching, but, poor little man, he sometimes scratched himself anyway. Nory’s fingernails got to be a problem for her at the International Chinese Montessori school, an opposite sort of problem, because Bernice had a total habit of biting her nails until they were bare round nubs, and then nibbling off the skin of her tips of her fingers, too. Since Nory was best-friends with Bernice at that time, Nory began biting her nails as well, out of friendship, because when you’re friends you start doing many of the same things. Now that she wasn’t best-friends with Bernice anymore, presto, her nails were just their usual length, if not longer. Same thing with Kira. Kira had the habit of always jumping the last three steps of any stairs she went down, for instance the stairs in the dining hall, and now that Nory was becoming better and better friends with Kira, Nory had gotten in the habit of jumping down the last three steps, too, and she was starting to find she couldn’t stop jumping, just like with biting her nails: she got near the bottom of the stairs, and before she had time to think about it, she was in the air and landing. Nory’s mother had told her strongly to stop, because her landing made a huge thud of a noise at home, but usually she would forge ahead without thinking, and then have to call out, ‘Sorry, I forgot myself!’

Debbie she hadn’t been best-friends with for long enough for that to happen, or maybe Debbie just didn’t have any weird habits like that. Another habit Nory’s brain got into was writing a letter ‘e’ after words that of course had no ‘e’—like ‘had’ or ‘sad.’ Before she would be able to remember to tell herself ‘Stop, all systems stop, don’t curl the little curl,’ she would curl the curl. This was very maddening because she’d have to use the ink eradicator. ‘Said,’ however, was not spelled ‘sayed’ as she had been under the impression it was, until Mrs. Thirm wrote it on the markerboard, but with an ‘i.’

One time just before she went to sleep, there was a bad thing that wouldn’t stop thinking itself. She started in a perfectly ordinary way going out in a rocket into the universe, and landed at the edge, on some grass, and kept on walking. She walked over the field with cows and squishy places, and came to the Great Wall that was at the far edge of the universe, and naturally she climbed that wall, and at the top, she saw another field with more cows, lighter brown this time, and grass that was a little different, too. She crossed that field, and came to a moat, and another Great Wall, climbed that wall, saw another field with more cows, black and white spotted cows this time, and she kept walking and climbing, climbing and walking, getting more and more bothered by the infinity of it. She looked behind her and there was a crowd of angry cows. They knew a way through the walls. Some of them had a look as if they were about to pull back their lips and show their teeth. Finally she went downstairs and found her mother and father talking in the kitchen in the quiet casual way that grownups talk after kids are in bed, and she said ‘A bad thing is in my head and I just can’t get it to stop. It’s like a bad screensaver.’ Nory’s mother took her back upstairs and put Cooch close to her cheek and told her not to worry, when you’re sleepy your brain sometimes repeats things for no reason. She said when she had trouble like that she sometimes thought about how she would furnish a dollhouse, going from room to room, because your brain needs a simple problem to give it something to work with. That helped enormously. She thought about the fake food in the cabinets of the dollhouse, the tiny boxes of oatmeal, with tiny packets inside, the tiny roast hams.

But fortunately, no ham whatsoever today for lunch! Instead there was a wonderful piece of some kind of brown meat, totally soft, so that you could use it as a piece of bread and just wobble it all around. Nory said, ‘Jennifer, it’s really good, taste it,’ and when Jennifer bit into it she said, ‘Mmmmm, that is delicious.’ Jennifer was just a girl who was amazingly gifted at drawing horses. So it was a good lunch, and after that came after-lunch break, which Nory spent with Kira because she’d spent the whole first break and some of lunch with Pamela and she thought it was hurting Kira, although, honestly, it wasn’t fair that Kira wouldn’t be with Nory when Nory was with Pamela. That break was when the bad thing happened. It was almost the worst thing that happened that whole day, except for a worse thing that happened later on. They were making a conker-pile, and Kira started saying — again — that whenever Nory was with Pamela it made her unpopular, which Nory was sick as a dog of hearing. Suddenly Nory wanted passionately to climb a tree, so she went over to the one that she’d been looking at that looked like the perfect tree-climbing tree, and started to try to climb it, even though a skirt and tie wasn’t the ideal outfit for doing that. She looked up, happily, and suddenly there was a discreet thud on her face. She thought, ‘Boy, quite a pinecone, oh dear.’ It felt hard, because things that are really light can feel really hard when they fall from a distance. ‘Oh, my, what a pinecone,’ Nory thought, ‘and what a lot of sap, too.’ And then she wiped with her finger and took a look at it. ‘This is not good looking sap,’ she thought. ‘This is not the kind of sap I’m used to. This is brown sap with a berry-skin in it.’ Then she realized what it was and said, ‘Kira! A disgusting bird took its leisure on me!’

Kira came running over and looked at her. ‘Oh, Nory,’ she said. ‘Oh, dear. Oh, yuck. Come on inside.’ Nory held her face out so that the rest of the bird leisure wouldn’t drip on her jacket and Kira led her to the bathroom. They spent quite a good amount of time cleaning up.

‘Smell my hand, does it smell okay?’ said Nory.

Kira smelled it. ‘It just smells like soap.’ Then she thought for a moment. ‘Wait, let me sniff it again.’ She sniffed it again. ‘You’re fine, just soap.’

They were a tiny bit late for French class, but when they explained to the teacher what had happened, she said, ‘Fine, fine.’ The French teacher was a young, short-haired, dark-haired, short-bodied, stylish-dressed person. She had a wonderful way of saying ‘superb’ and she said it a lot, probably too much for some people’s taste.