The Everlasting Story of Nory

5. A Slight Problem After Lunch

At least if Nory had a bad dream she could go into her parents’ room and poke at them gently until they woke up enough to comfort her back down. Not every kid had that kind of luck. Some of the kids at Threll School were there all day and all night, twenty-four hours a week. Roger Sharpless was a very short boy with an intelligent face like a detective who cried on the first day in the Cathedral during service during the first week. ‘Why are you crying?’ Nory asked, in a whisper. ‘Sometimes I cry during the day,’ he whispered back. Afterward, when they were walking to the Junior School building, he said that he missed his parents horribly. He said that the sight of the little white pillow on his bed in his room reminded him of his old room and that made him cry, because think about it, going away from everything you know, your rugs, your windows, your parents, your driveway, your exact look of street, can be quite a shock to a nine-year-old. He also told her a fact that he said he would never forget in his whole life, because he had gotten it wrong on a test one time: the Greeks wrote by making marks on wax. Nory felt that it was kind of him to tell her, because now she would never forget it either.

The day after that she had a much less good experience. She dropped her tray in the dining hall when it was full of fresh food. Kira, one of her new sort-of friends, said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, somebody else will get it.’ But Nory didn’t feel right about leaving the mess in a lavish plop on the floor and walking on. The jacket potato did not look its best. An older girl scooped down to help her, and finally a woman came by with a mop. But by then all the other kids from her class had gone off and were eating merrily along, chew chew chew, getting far ahead of her. Not only that, but the line had gotten very long, because a whole conjugation of older boys had come in. She didn’t want to cut in, so she went to the back and waited all over again. The line was so long it even went down a few steps of the stairs, which gave her a chance to look at Prior Rowland’s fur collar.

Finally she got a new tray of food, and she sat anonymously down. People in her class were leaving to go back to the Junior School building. One after another they were going. Nory had her eye on them the whole time, except when she was looking down at her plate. She thought, ‘Ah, but she’s still there, so it’s okay.’ And then when that girl left, she said to herself, ‘Ah, well, she’s still there, so when worse goes to worse, I can go back with her.’ The problem was that the Junior School was far away from the dining hall, across two streets, and Nory had an awful if not atrocious sense of direction and knew she would never find it by herself. So she ate and ate and finished up and whammed out the door of the dining hall, hurrying to be with a girl who was in her class. Dorette was her name. Dorette said, ‘Sorry I can’t talk, I’m meeting a friend.’

Nory said, ‘Oh, okay.’ The other girl came up. It was a girl Nory didn’t like very much because she had said that Nory had a ‘squeegee’ accent on one of the first days of school. Nory stood a little way behind and started following them as they went around the buildings toward the old gate.

Dorette turned and said, ‘Go away. Why are you following us?’

‘Because I don’t know the way home,’ said Nory.

‘Home? Home?’ the girls said.

‘I mean, the way back to the class,’ said Nory.

‘Oh, go on, you know the way,’ the two girls said. ‘You lead us, and we’ll follow.’

So Nory started tenderly walking in front of them down the street, not vastly sure she was pointing in the right direction. There was a road curving up a hill that didn’t look familiar. There were no crosswalks. She turned around and noticed that the girls weren’t behind her. She started to feel scattered and scared. Then the two girls jumped out from behind a bush with red berries and laughed. She started following them again, and they told her to go away. Fortunately just at that point a teacher came out from a door in the building and the two girls said, all nicey-nicey, ‘Hello Mr. So-and-so.’ They began chatting with him. Nory was worried that they would tell the teacher that she had been following them and she would get in trouble, but they didn’t. So she could sneak along, pace by pace, some distance behind, from bush to bush. That was how she was able to get back. Later that day, on the playground, another girl said, ‘Hah-hah, you were sent back, you were sent back.’ Nory had no idea what the girl was talking about, so she said, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘For dropping your tray,’ the girl said. Nory said, ‘I was not. I went to the end of the line because you shouldn’t cut in. And I’m from America. We don’t say sent back in America to mean what you mean. We don’t say bin in America, we say trashcan. We don’t say crayons when we’re talking about colored pencils, we skip to the case and say colored pencils. Got it?’

The girl made a rabbit-nibbling face and shuffled off to Buffalo.

In history class that day, the teacher was talking about the Crusades, and he suddenly said, in the weirdest cowboy accent you ever heard, ‘And they went in, shootin’ and hollerin’ and plunderin’ up tarnation, by golly.’ Then he said to Nory, ‘I’m sorry. I should have asked your permission first. Do you mind if I make fun of the way Americans talk?’

Nory said, ‘If you think that’s the way Americans talk, go right ahead.’

The teacher said, ‘Thank you. And I give you permission to call us limeys whenever you like.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nory. ‘But why would I want to say that?’

‘In the States, that’s what you call us, is it not?’ said the teacher.

‘I don’t know, but I don’t think so,’ said Nory. ‘What are limeys?’

‘Ah, they’re an ancient seafaring people who eat limes on shipboard to keep their teeth from falling out,’ said Mr. Blithrenner.