Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

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.

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.’