The Everlasting Story of Nory

38. More Things That Happened to Pamela

The next thing in the order of the day was that they were supposed to go to music class, and that’s what Nory was in the process of doing, but she went by a place near the auditorium where there were some wooden boxes, because she took the wrong turn in the hall, and she found some boys crowding around saying ‘Feeding time, Pamela.’ Pamela was shoved back behind one of the boxes and she was hiding there. It was just after the sixth year kids’ drama class. Nory couldn’t understand exactly what was happening except that Pamela couldn’t come out and wouldn’t come out, and the boys were saying stuff about ‘Eat,’ and saying ‘Are you hungry, Pamela?’ One of them said: ‘Feed the monster.’

Nory said, ‘Let Pamela out! Stop it, let her out!’ But they wouldn’t. Then the French teacher walked by and the boys went into a quick flutter. They said, ’Sssh, don’t let her see.

‘Pamela, please come on out,’ said Nory, while the teacher could hear, so she would notice the situation. The boys were all pretending to be doing something else. The teacher said, ‘Pamela? Are you there? Come out.’ So Pamela did. Nory said, ‘Hi, Pamela, come on, let’s get our stuff.’ Nory got her hurried away and waved to the French teacher who waved back. The French teacher probably didn’t know much of what was going on, but that was good because Pamela did not want any teachers to know, because then they would have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and then she would have to have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and she thought Mrs. Thirm thought she’d done all those bad things last year.

Nory said, ‘Pamela, you’ve got to go to Mr. Pears, because Mr. Pears is very nice. You’ve got to complaint to him. If you don’t complaint to him nothing will get better. It’ll just keep getting worse.’ But Pamela said she couldn’t find the time to complaint to him. The problem was that if you get bullied for a certain amount of time, you start thinking that it’s average to be bullied and you end up stopping being able to fight back for yourself. It’s like having a cold for so long that you start thinking its normal to have a stuffed-up nose. Nory didn’t want to say that to Pamela because it wasn’t the perfect thing to say. Pamela had the sound of almost-but-not-quite-crying in her voice when she said, ‘I have to get my stuff,’ and she went off.

The next thing that happened, not counting music, which was fairly anonymous, was that everyone was outside, waiting to be picked up. Nory was out with a bunch of other kids, including Kira. Pamela came out and sat down nearby with a big sigh and slumped her backpack down, and everyone froze and went dead quiet. Pamela concentrated on doing a strange thing, which was: taking off her shoe and sock and checking on an orange Band Aid that was on her toe. That was such an unexpected thing for Pamela to do that all the girls started to laugh at her, and then Nory couldn’t help it and she laughed, too, although she felt it was mean. Jessica said to Nory, ‘Can you please get her to go away?’

‘Why should I?’ said Nory. ‘She’s happy there. No, I can’t get her to go away.’

Kira grabbed her arm and pulled her over and said, ‘Nory! The more on her side you are the less popular you’ll be.’

‘Kira, is that all you can think about in this school?’ said Nory. ‘If you’re my friend and Pamela’s my friend I’m just fine in the area of being popular.’

‘You’re not thinking!’ said Kira, in a whisper-shout, which is when you shout, but you do it in a whispering voice rather than a shouting voice.

‘Oh, puff,’ said Nory. She went to sit down next to Pamela and said, ‘Hi, Pamela.’ Pamela said ‘Hello,’ and kept checking away at her bandage, which had that old bandage look to it. Then she put her sock and shoe back on. Kira was waving to Nory very urgently, over and over, saying, ‘Nory! Come over here!’ with her mouth. Nory shook her head in refusion as if to mean ‘Pardon me, but I’m sitting with Pamela.’ To Pamela, she said, ‘You should tell the teacher about those girls.’

Pamela said, ‘Girls? The girls are the least of my problems, it’s the boys who are giving me a headache.’ She pointed over at some of the boys who were in a little group on the steps pointing at her and pretending to throw up at the sight of her. But you could tell that it hurt Pamela that the girls had laughed at her when she looked at her Band Aid, including Nory, because you could hear the same crying in her voice, unless that was just the way she talked when she was angry, with a little sort of trembling. She’d wanted to be near the girls but she knew they wouldn’t want her to be there, so she’d made up this idea of checking her Band Aid, maybe, which turned out to be so unexpected of a thing to do at that second that it worked out even less well than if she’d just walked over and said hello to everyone and nobody had answered. Pamela didn’t understand that the girls were just as bad as the boys, not in shoving her into the boxes, but in just going along with this whole Porkinson Banger of an idea that Pamela was for no convinceable reason a kid who should be put into a state of misery every born day she went to school. Or probably Pamela did understand it, but didn’t want to admit it, because obviously you don’t want to think that everyone dislikes you. Nory told herself, ‘Forget it, just forget it, don’t talk to her about the other kids, just talk to her about something totally separate from the meanness that’s going on, and show the other kids that Pamela is a kid like any other kid at the Junior School who can have a friend who will sit down next to her and talk to her normally.’ So Nory told her a joke she remembered from Garfield. Garfield was her favorite comic strip, because it was really hilarious and really well drawn. Garfield went up in a tree to catch a bird in a nest. He had it clutched in his hand and was just about to eat it, when a mother bird the size of an eagle came in the back yard and glared at him with a vicious glare. Garfield looked up, still squeezing the bird in his hand, and said, ‘Um — chirp? Chirp?’ The eagle pecked at him wildly and Garfield got down from the tree and was all touseled and ruffled and bruised from the eagle. He said, ‘Well, it was worth a try.’

Pamela nodded a little and managed a sad little grin of a smile. Then Nory asked her what books she was reading for Readathon. Pamela took a big breath and said, ‘Well, I’m reading The Call of the Wild.’ She started telling Nory the plot of the story, which was about a magnificent dog who gets stolen away, and then she hopped up and said, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll miss my train.’ Then she said, ‘Thanks, Nory, bye,’ and nodded at Nory a little, which made Nory happier and made her stop feeling the guiltiness she had been feeling about being magnetized into laughing at her when Pamela had first taken off her sock. Pamela seemed definitely more cheered up by the time she dashed off. Then Nory sat back down on the wall and waited to be picked up by her mother or her father. Kira didn’t come over to sit next to her, but that wasn’t too surprising, only a little saddening.

There was a humongous sign in one of the halls that said ‘Bullies Are Banned’ in balloon writing. Balloon writing was a very, very thick kind of puffy writing.