The Everlasting Story of Nory

44. Six Extra Brains

Her mother picked her up from school at twelve-thirty, and Nory asked right on the spot if she could go over to Kira’s house the next day. Nory’s mother and father discussed it. The difficulty was that they were going to drive to Wimpole, which was a Stately Home, the next day. ‘Couldn’t Kira come with us?’ Nory asked. Nory’s mother and father looked at each other and made their ‘I don’t see why not’ expressions. So Nory scrummaged around in her backpack and found Kira’s phone number on a little folded piece of paper in her pencil case. She called the number: ‘Hello, this is Eleanor, could I please speak to Kira?’ Then Kira came to the phone and Nory invited her to come with them to Wimpole. Nory heard Kira shout, ‘Can I go to Wimpole tomorrow afternoon?’ Then she heard, ‘Wimpole!’ Then, ‘WIMPOLE!’ Then, ‘With Nory.’ Then she heard, ‘A girl from school. Yes.’ Then after a second Kira came back on and said, ‘Yes, I can go, but my mother would like to talk to your mother to sort out the logistics.’ So it was all settled that Kira was coming over an hour before they left so they could play a little, as well. And Wimpole was a good place to go because Nory’s mother said it had a farm with a number of endangered species of cows and pigs and goats, which made it good for kids of all age groups. Nory was so happy to hear the good news that she cleaned up her room for Kira from the northeast corner to the southeast corner, like a hot butterknife. And what usually happened happened again as usual, which was that as she cleaned she began rearranging her dolls, and thinking of little events that could happen in their adventurous everlasting lives. So while Littleguy took a nap in a little clump on the couch she came down with two dolls and sat next to him and started to tell herself a story of Mariana. But she kept getting distracted by the idea that Kira was coming over, so she put it on the back of the stove.

Kira’s mother dropped Kira off and Nory felt the surprise of ‘Wow, this is very strange to have Kira in my house,’ because of course she was used to seeing her at school. They were a tad-bit shy with each other for a few minutes, but then everything turned pleasantly chatty as can be, except for one very big hitch. Kira was being brought up, through her whole childhood, without any TV allowed in her house, so of course as soon as she came over to Nory’s house she was desperately craving a long juicy watch of TV. She knew precisely what was on, and she knew what she wanted to see. It was an American cartoon called Space KeBob 7.

Space KeBob 7 was about a fifteen-year-old named Space KeBob with a huge skull that was built up using bone grafts. Six extra brains were stored inside his skull, which had little partitions in it sort of like the chambered nautilus, and he was able to connect up to each of the brains by unplugging a wire and connecting to the next brain, so that if he wanted to think like, for example, a wise old Native American man, he plugged into that plug and connected up to that brain, and if he wanted to think like a falcon, he connected up to a tiny little falcon brain. The six extra brains plus the boy’s personal brain he was born with equals seven, which was why ‘Space KeBob 7’ was the most logical name for the show. Nory wasn’t wild on seeing it, because she had seen plenty of the episodes and they usually had some sort of enormous space-dragon with a gargling voice. Also it didn’t make sense because if you were the bad guy it would be quite easy to take a little dab of modeling clay and press it into a couple of the boy’s brain plugs and Space KeBob 7 would immediately be Space KeBob 5, and a little more clay stuffed in a few more sockets, he’d be Space KeBob 3, then Space KeBob 2, and then he would be right back down to his own brain, with nothing else to rely on, and it wouldn’t be a popular show anymore and would just be a shy little slip of a cartoon about an average kid in space.

But Kira was passionately interested in seeing it, since she almost never had an opportunity to, so they watched it from start to finish. Nory got very sleepy. She had woken up early that morning, and again gone right to the Art Room with Littleguy. Littleguy had seen some styrophone packing chips in a box and said, ‘They look like tato chips.’ So Nory stapled together a bag of pretend potato chips out of them that said:

EVER LASTING

CRISPS

** Now Even Freasher **

Nory wasn’t allowed to eat the kind of Prawn chips that Pamela usually brought in for break except on special occasions because they had an artificial fragrance of sugar in them and Nory’s parents didn’t want her to possibly get brain damage from a chemical molecule that dressed up in a sweet disguise as if it was sugar when really there was nothing sugary about it, so that your brain didn’t know how to clean itself out after the feeling of sweetness was gone from your mind. Kira didn’t care for Prawn chips — but they really were wonderful because they dissolved on your tongue almost as if they were that kind of super-sour candy that foams up on your tongue.

Finally Space KeBob 7 was over and Nory and Kira went up to Nory’s room and Nory showed Kira her dolls. Kira was polite about them, but not as interested as she might have been. She did like the little metal cars on the edge of the bathtub that changed color depending on whether they were dipped in cold water or hot water. So they played with the color-changing cars for a while. Kira didn’t seem to want to try to get a story going about them, though, the way Debbie probably would have.