Nicholson Baker: The Everlasting Story of Nory

Then that afternoon Nory watched Thomas Mottle sneak up behind Pamela and kick her very viciously in the back of the leg and then try to dash off. He was probably thinking he would disappear as quick as lightning, which is what the boys would normally do. Naturally Pamela fell down and her books splattered out on the path. She turned bright red this time, and she cried a little, too. Nory was a ways away with some other kids so she only saw it off from a distance, and she was on her way over to help Pamela, when one eighth of a second after Thomas kicked, Mrs. Hoadley, the science teacher, appeared from out of somewhere, and stepped up to the plate. Thomas Mottle saw her and completely changed. He was a different child. Very purely and simply he helped Pamela up and picked up her books, one by one. By the time Nory got there she heard Mrs. Hoadley saying, ‘Thank you very much, Thomas.’ That was they way they acted, these blasted bullies — not just kicking someone in the shins, but then as soon as the teacher was on the spot, pretending to be sweet as pie, nicely helping the person.

‘You should have told Mrs. Hoadley that Thomas was the very one who made you trip!’ said Nory to Pamela. ‘Now she probably thinks you tripped on your own two feet! You have to tell them!’ But Pamela was still thoroughly mum’s-the-word. That’s why she was having the absolute worst year of her life, while Nory was having the absolute best year of her life, just about. A few people teased Nory about her accent or said she was ugly, but nobody would ever possibly dare to sneak up on her and kick her, because if someone kicked her, oh boy, she would be off like a rocket and chase them down and kick right back just as hard, and if they hid her jacket she would wring whoever’s neck who hid it, and if somebody tried to capture her duffel-coat peg with their duffel-coat she would scrummage fiercely for it and get her duffel-coat peg back, no questions asked. But Pamela never fought. It was not her personality to fight, or if it was, they’d changed her personality bit by bit since the beginning of the year by being constantly awful to her. When Nory said to two of the kids, ‘You better stop being mean to Pamela or she’s going to tell Mr. Pears,’ they just laughed, they didn’t bother to stop, because they knew that Pamela wasn’t going to Mr. Pears. She never had and never would. Again and again Nory said, ‘Pamela, it would really be much better if you told somebody,’ but she didn’t want to at all. So no matter how much Nory wanted to take one of them by the scroll of the neck to Mr. Pears, she couldn’t, since Mr. Pears would have a word with Mrs. Thirm, and so on and so on. So the bullying went its merry way.

Nory planned out things she could say to the people who were doing it, but words didn’t really help because the boys kicked and then disappeared, and whatever insulting thing you wanted to say couldn’t be said in time for the person you wanted to insult to be insulted. Nory did try to fight back at Thomas Mottle by calling him Cinderella’s stepsister a few times, since one time in drama class Thomas had played the part of one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, wearing a big blond wig. ‘Just the sort of thing Cinderella’s ugly stepsister would do,’ Nory said to him.

‘Hardly!’ he said. And that was that.

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.’