The Everlasting Story of Nory

49. Word-Fighting

Even Julia Sollen was a little shocked and a little bit nice to Pamela after she saw her being kicked by the revolting Thomas. If you hear that somebody took a kick at somebody, you just think, ‘Oh, I see, that’s bad.’ But if you see it eye to eye, the sneakiness of it, the pure meanness of it, it is something quite else besides. Nory was furious to think that a kid could have a basic urge to kick in his impudent mind and then get away with doing it, just because he knew from his observations that Pamela wouldn’t be the type of person to kick him back, so he was safe from punishment. Maybe there was so much constant kicking of shins in England because all the boys wanted to be footballers when they grew up. That was what they said that they wanted to be in class, anyway, except for a few kids like Roger Sharpless, who said that he wanted to go to Durham and learn to make barometers. In football, which is actually soccer, you use your feet more than your hands, so you have all this practiced ability with your feet that you could easily use for barking up the wrong shin.

So a few of the kids were beginning to go over to Nory’s side and be a little nicer to Pamela. And Roger Sharpless always had been nice to Pamela. However, Kira was still trying her hardest to get Nory to stop being Pamela’s friend. She’d say things like, ‘Nory, you do know, don’t you, that you’re the only person in the whole school who likes her.’

‘I don’t know if that’s quite true,’ said Nory.

‘Yes, it is true,’ said Kira. ‘Nobody else is her friend, nobody.’

But Pamela did definitely have other friends from time to time. One time she waited a very long time to meet one of her friends who was in sixth year. Nory waited with her — Pamela said it was just a quarter of an hour they waited but Nory thought it was more like fifteen minutes. And even if Nory was the only one in the whole Junior School who was steadily Pamela’s friend, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she thought. What in the world was so bad about being Pamela’s one and only real friend?

Also, Nory liked being Pamela’s friend, because she liked planning out with Pamela what kind of vicious attacks she could use to fight back for Pamela, and she admired that Pamela was good at maths, since if you were good at maths it allowed you to go on and do so many different things in science or dentistry, and she liked that Pamela had unusual aspects about herself, such as being double-jointed. Pamela couldn’t use certain kinds of pens, she told Nory, because she was extremely double-jointed. Her thumb was a whole level further of being exposable than most normal people. She had to use a special other kind of pen. It looked like a simple everyday kind of medium-nib fountain pen to Nory, but she didn’t say so. So there were surprising things like that about Pamela that Nory liked, and she also just liked Pamela’s very hush-hush way of talking to you — Pamela always spoke very softly and had quite a lot to say but you had to listen very carefully because she only spoke to one person at a time and she was very particular about who she told things to, which in this old day and age is probably a good thing.

Nory’s parents got extremely upset when they heard the news from Nory that Pamela was having an even worse time of it now than ever. They said that things had gotten utterly untolerable and something just had to be done. The mistreatment of Pamela was something that they personally had to go to Mr. Pears about, they said, or straight to Pamela’s parents, because it simply couldn’t be allowed to go on. Nory cried at the dinner table and said that it was Pamela’s choice and nobody else’s, and Pamela absolutely, definitely did not want the teachers or her parents to know, and she had made Nory promise, so please, please, please not yet. But Nory did promise to go to the teacher again herself, at least, and announce that physical shin-kicking was now going on. And her parents promised Nory, not exactly as a trade (since they wanted her to get one, too), but sort of as a trade, that she could have a gum-guarder. A gum-guarder was a thing you use to keep your teeth from getting knocked out. If a hockey stick whams into your mouth and you have a gum-guarder on you would get a fat lip, but no particular tooth would fall out. Nory wanted the gum-guarder because other kids had them and she thought it would make her feel stronger and more able to stop the bigger kids from being bad to Pamela, even when she wasn’t wearing it. She could think, ‘Aha, I have a powerful gum-guarder, nobody can bother me now!’ Also she wanted to be sure that none of her teeth tumbled out onto the Astroturf. If you want to be a dentist your own teeth are kind of an advertisement of your work, and it’s important that there is nothing strange about them, or people will say, ‘Oh no, I won’t go to that dentist to have my teeth fixed, because take a gander at hers.’

Nory went ahead and told Mrs. Thirm that she had a friend — a friend who was quite possibly the same friend as she had talked to her about before, who was now being — no question about it — bullied. Nory had promised her friend not to say what the exact bullying was, but ‘Let’s put it this way,’ she said. ‘It involves a boy’s foot, and a shoe, and a shin, pure and simple.’ Mrs. Thirm said, ‘Thank you, Nory, it’s good of you to let us know.’

Sometimes it was quite efficient to tell two boys, say, who were being bad to Pamela that they were ‘imbecile-idiot-numbskull-nitwits,’ saying the words super-fast, or tell them, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t sleep on your side at night, because your pea-brain might tumble out your ear.’ But some of the older kids had a style of word-fighting that Nory couldn’t do anything against, because it was just too confident. Pamela asked Nory one time to help fight back against an older girl named Janet who was constantly saying mean things about Pamela’s cheeks. Nory said to the girl, ‘Excuse me, would you please do me a favor and stop being mean to Pamela or take a long deep dip in a dump?’

The girl looked at Nory for about a minute and a half and said, ‘Turn around, I don’t like looking at your face.’

‘Well,’ said Nory, ‘I don’t like looking at your face!’

‘If you don’t like it, don’t look at it,’ said the girl.

‘Well, if you don’t like looking at my face don’t look at my face either!’ said Nory. The girl laughed and flossed off to the library because she fancied one of the librarians, a boy in seventh year, and the next time Pamela asked Nory to fight back with words against that girl Nory said, Gee, she could try, but she just didn’t think she could do all that much against her, because the girl was so sure of herself and so able to think quickly in those kinds of tense moments.