The Everlasting Story of Nory

50. The Core of the Friendship

In Geography they began doing the countries of Europe — in other words, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Lapland, the UK or United Kingdom, and of course, not to be forgotten, England itself. Land after land. There were an amazing number of big and little lands all fitting nicely tucked together, and when you concentrated in on one, you tended to forget about the others, although there was just as much going on in them, too, every day of the week. And when you concentrated on all of them, the low countries and the high countries and the medium or ‘mixed-traffic’ countries, as Littleguy would call them (if he knew clearly what a country was), since he called a plain donut with chocolate frosting on top a ‘mixed-traffic donut’ on the idea that an engine like James the Red Engine that can pull either passenger cars or freight cars is a ‘mixed-traffic engine’—when you concentrated on Belgium and Barcelona and whatnot (those are just examples), you forgot about America, something that you would think would not be all that easy to forget. One day Nory almost lost her geography book and had to take out everything from her backpack, looking for it. She found it, finally, but she also found, way down at the bottom, some Flake 99 wrappers and six old conkers. They were turning rotten. They were black in some places and white in other places and they were wet soggy things that when you touched them you wished you hadn’t. They smelled extremely good, though, because they were becoming peat.

Nory missed playing with Kira under the conker tree, all those weeks ago — or not that many weeks, actually — and she had a feeling that she and Kira were not such good friends now as they had been then. Kira had something of an idea of being friends, true, but not the whole idea. A friendship was like the core of something, not a conker but something really basic like an apple, and there were all these things around it — the peel and the leaves and the wax they put on the peel to make it shiny, and whatnot. The shiny peel is a fun part, but the friendship has to go down and down into the very core, and Kira didn’t seem to understand what that core should be. Or maybe she just had a different opinion of what it should be than Nory did. Nory believed that the core was not just to stick together and be friendly from time to time, as the case may be, and definitely not always to be in a competition every second, and not to just be tomboyishly friendly, but also to be able to empty your heart out to the person. Say, for instance, you had the horribly embarrassing secret that you were keeping inside that you really loved playing with Barbies, and you were afraid to tell anyone because boys, especially, not to mention some girls, are vicious about instantly making fun of anybody who likes Barbies and they laugh at you for liking them. To a real friend you could casually empty your heart out by saying, ‘You know what? I really like Barbies.’ And there would be no problem. They would be able to be trusted not only not to tell anybody but not to laugh at you, either. And a real friend, if you had another friend that people were being awful to, wouldn’t say ‘Stop being friends with that person, nobody else is friends with her, stay away from her.’

Mostly it was connected with Pamela. Kira was never directly mean to Pamela the way the other kids were. Then again, she was never directly nice to her either. But Pamela still didn’t know how strict Kira was about things like not eating at the same table with her. It was probably a good thing she didn’t know. When Pamela steered toward a table where Kira was sitting, Nory would say, ‘Oh, er, Pamela, that table looks a little full, urn, why don’t we go to that other table over there?’ And of course Kira when that happened would be furious that Nory would prefer to eat with Pamela at a separate table and not with her. But really it was Kira’s choice, not Nory’s, since Nory would have been happy as a horse to eat with them both if they got along together. One time Kira and Nory were walking to lunch together and Pamela came up to walk with them, and Kira said, ‘Oh, Pamela, your backpack! You forgot to put away your backpack, better hurry back! Nory, we’ll go on ahead! Hurry and put away your backpack, Pamela!’

‘I don’t absolutely have to put it away,’ said Pamela.

‘But you really ought to,’ said Kira. ‘It’s so clumsy, really you shouldn’t take it along. Go on and put it away, Pamela! Go on!’

‘She doesn’t have to if she doesn’t want to, Kira,’ said Nory, because she could see that Pamela’s feelings were a ways down the path toward getting hurt.

Kira then grabbed Nory’s arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ But Pamela grabbed Nory’s other arm and said, ‘Stay, Nory, stay.’ Both pulled, Pamela on one arm and Kira on the other arm, and they started circling around. It was almost fun. Then Kira gave up and asked Nory if she could borrow two p. Nory gave her the two p and Kira went off to be with Shelly and Daniella, and Nory went to lunch with Pamela.

‘Does Kira secretly hate me as much as the others do?’ asked Pamela.

Nory decided it wouldn’t be such a smart idea to admit straight out that Kira didn’t like Pamela, since she’d already made that mistake once before, and after all there was still plenty of ways Pamela could be hurt, even now. Even if Pamela basically knew something was true she didn’t have to have it rubbed in her nose. So Nory said, ‘You know, I don’t understand Kira one bit. Sometimes she’s as nice as a friend can be, and then sometimes she’s so competitive about who is friends with who and who walks with who and who sits with who and bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup bup. From how she reacts to me being friends with you I would say that she likes her friends to be only her friends and nobody else’s, like she’s got the copyright on that particular friend. She is so marvelously in awe of how other kids act that she can’t think privately what would be the obviously right thing and draw her own conclusions.’

‘I’ll be very glad when we reach the end of term,’ said Pamela.

Nory was suddenly reminded of something she had thought of in the mirror brushing her teeth. ‘You know what we should do?’ she said. ‘Okay, you don’t want to tell the teachers or your parents. But we could still write a book about your whole experience, every good or bad thing that somebody did, Thomas kicking you in the shin, hogging your duffel peg, every single thing. We could make a timeline, first this happened, then that happened.’

Pamela shook her head fiercely. ‘It isn’t something that I want to think about any more than I have to.’

‘Oh, but think about it: you would be thinking about it not in the unhappy way of having it just anonymously happen to you, but in the way of telling it,’ Nory said. ‘And then other kids could read it and know what happened, the story of one girl, or two friends. We could do it together.’

‘I can’t imagine that it would interest people, and I wouldn’t dream of doing it,’ said Pamela. ‘I like to write about nice things.’

‘Okay,’ said Nory, ‘how about — not a book about the present, but a book about the future. Say when we’re both eighteen and we go off to college and have adventures.’

Pamela gave it a second of thought and nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘but I can only come up with the adventures because I’m double-jointed and don’t particularly like writing as it hurts my thumb. But I’ll give you hints for some of the adventures. For instance, we could visit a live volcano together and have an adventure. I once visited a live volcano.’

‘That’s perfect!’ said Nory. ‘What name do you want for yourself?’

‘Claudia,’ said Pamela.

Before bed Nory wrote the first page of the book, which was called ‘The Adventures of Sally and Claudia.’

The Adventures of Sally and Claudia

‘Mom I’ll need my file as well,’ Claudia screamed up the stairs. In her freshly washed uniform, she looked as if she was going to a disco rather than Oxford University. She was 18 very smart, and especially keen on maths and the study of vulcanos. She had only just left Threll Senior School and missed it alot and so she might as she had started there when she was in year six and never missed a year. One of the reasons she missed it so much was because of her best friend Sally who had been her friend from her first day at Threll School to her last.

Sally was a very tall girl who was extreamely interested in dentestry and was American. She was know going to Stanford University while her brother borded at Threll School and was a prephect. He was taking a class in model bildiung, where he was bilding a large balsa wood model of the Mallard, which as many are aware is a preticular kind of high speed steam traine. For this whol life he had been interested in everything about traines and it looked as if that woud continue into his double-digets.

If Claudia only knew that Sally was sitting at a table even now and thinking about her, while she did her studying! Claudia was still thinking about Sally as she set off for school on the wet path with her hair sopping wet because of the rain.

As she reached school she could almost see Sally as she had been in Year Six in her school, she felt she could give anything to see Sally agin. So did Sally, who was now hard at work writing a letter to Claudia It went like this:

Dear Claudia,

I miss you so much and think about you every day. I had a maths exam today and I did all right but I could have done better if I hade seen you befor. How are things in England?

Love,

Sally, your friend

TO BE CONTINUED.…

Nory showed the page to Pamela the next day, and Pamela read it over twice carefully. ‘One very important thing you should know is that here we don’t say Mom, we say Mum, and we spell it with a u,’ Pamela said. ‘And I think you shouldn’t describe Claudia by her interests, but by how she looks. You probably should rewrite the beginning including a bit more about her appearance.’ That was Pamela’s complete reaction. She didn’t say ‘Good,’ or ‘Nice try,’ or ‘Well done,’ or anything like that. (If you fell or dropped something, sometimes the boys would call out, ‘Well done!’)

Nory thought to herself, ‘If you don’t want to write it, Pamela, fine, but don’t refuse to help write it and then tell me to rewrite it. I did the best I could.’ But maybe Pamela was a little embarrassed by the mention of the two of them being best friends, since they’d never actually talked about being best friends.

They chatted about the book quite a number of times after that, but the first page was the one and only page that got written down. Oh well.