Nicholson Baker - The Everlasting Story of Nory

Later Roger Sharpless came over. Usually what he did was to pretend to kick Nory in the shins, so that Nory could get back at him by pretending to kick him: onk, conk , onk, conk . Or they would do a strange kind of punching in which they would punch at each other’s fists and then say, ‘Ow!’ and walk around making a huge production of their injured hand, flapping it around, even though it wasn’t injured the least bit. But this time Roger just said: ‘I think you ought to know that Pamela is unhappy because Shelly Quettner told her that the reason you’ve been being nice to her is that you’ve been trying to get a Good Result, and according to Shelly you’ve finally got what you wanted.’

Nory turned as red as a piece of origami paper. ‘That’s not true!’ she said. ‘Yes, I did get a Good Result, but I didn’t plan on it, I didn’t even know you could get a Good Result for something like that!’

‘I told Shelly she was a nitwit,’ said Roger. ‘But you should have a word with Pamela.’

Nory tried to find Pamela but she couldn’t find her anywhere. The next day she sat with her at lunch but Pamela was quiet. ‘What Shelly said is totally, totally not true,’ said Nory.

‘You have been very nice to me,’ said Pamela.

‘But do you believe me?’ Nory asked.

‘Believe you about what?’

‘That it’s totally untrue?’

‘I believe you,’ said Pamela, ‘but I’d prefer to talk about something else.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’ Nory asked.

‘I have no idea,’ said Pamela.

‘Well, what’s your favorite color?’ Nory asked.

‘Turquoise,’ said Pamela.

‘Ah yes, turquoise, good.’ Nory pretended to note it down in an imaginary notebook. ‘And what’s your favorite vegetable?’

‘Spinach.’

‘Spinach, ah yes, very interesting.’ Then there was a long silence. Finally Nory said, ‘Okay, what’s your favorite piece of potato chip on this plate?’

‘That bit,’ said Pamela, and ate it.

‘That was chip number 1306B, yes, yes. I have that noted down. Now, what’s your favorite water molecule?’

‘What do you mean what’s my favorite water molecule?’ said Pamela. ‘What’s your favorite water molecule?’

Nory put her eye close to Pamela’s glass of water and peered in. She said, ‘It’s a difficult case, but I believe my very favorite is that particular one there, sort of near the top. See it? A little to the side of the tiny air bubble. That one. What’s yours?’

Pamela poked her finger straight into Nory’s glass of water. ‘That one,’ she said.

Nory laughed. ‘Which one?’ said Nory.

Pamela pulled her finger out of the water and flicked it so that a drop or two splashed on Nory’s face. ‘That one,’ she said.

‘Ah yes, that one,’ said Nory.

The day before the last full day before the End of Term, everybody in the school was told to pack up everything in their backpacks and kits and take it all home. Every book, every notebook, every pen, every pencil case, every netball outfit and pair of shoes — home. The next day, the science teacher passed out strange dull little pencils, since of course their pens were no longer available, and told them to spend the class finding as many words as they could in scientific and cathedral . This was the kind of thing that Nory was never good at, and in ‘scientific’ she only found words like ‘in’ and ‘it’ and ‘sit.’ For ‘cathedral’ Roger Sharpless gave her the very useful hint of starting at the end and going backwards, and she luckily found ‘lard’ right off the bat, which was a more important word in England than in America, and ‘death.’ Roger said afterward that you could easily have gotten ‘teach’ from the word, too, but her brain unfortunately didn’t work that way. During break Nory and Roger were pretending to chop off each other’s heads with their bare hands when a boy came up and blurted out, ‘You like Pamela, don’t you?’

‘My, you are slow,’ said Nory. ‘I’ve already answered that question about four separate times.’

‘Of course Nory likes Pamela,’ said Roger to the boy. ‘Pamela is a hundred times nicer than you are. You are a sorry bowl of soup.’

The boy made a delighted expression and skipped off. Soon after that, when Nory was walking to I.T., a few people came up and smirked wildly at Nory. They said, ‘You fancy Roger Sharpless! You fancy Roger Sharpless!’

Nory thought of saying ‘I certainly do not!’ But she didn’t want to lie. So she said, ‘Well, I do like him, yes.’

When they were gone Nory was quite relieved to remember to herself, ‘I’ve got this secret that’s burning a hole in my pocket and I need to talk about it with someone, and I can’t talk about it with Shelly or even Kira, but I can with Pamela, because she’s a friend and she can be trusted with the situation.’ So later she went ahead and told Pamela, ‘You know what? I used to fancy Jacob Lewes, because I’m attracted to boys who are my height or taller than me and highly intelligent and a tiny bit mean and kind of ugly in a particular way. But now, guess what? I fancy Roger Sharpless.’

‘Oh, yes, Roger Sharpless is beautiful,’ said Pamela. ‘I fancy him too.’

‘No way!’ said Nory. ‘I’m quite shocked!’

‘Just kidding,’ said Pamela. ‘I think.’

On the very last day of term, all they had was house meetings and then Cathedral. Then each kid was supposed to meet their parents. Nory gave cards to Mr. Blithrenner and Mr. Stone and Mrs. Hoadley and Mrs. Hant and all her teachers, and to Mrs. Thirm she gave chocolates that she and Littleguy had made the night before. They made the chocolates by melting down a big chocolate bar and pouring it into little plastic molds. One of the molds had turned out to be of an owl. ‘But not a scary owl,’ Littleguy said, when he saw what it was. ‘A chocolate owl. A chocolate owl is not a scary owl.’

In return Mrs. Thirm gave all the kids in class chocolates each, or caramel candies each, from a box, whichever they wanted. Someone said, ‘Let’s say thanks to Mrs. Thirm!’ Everyone shouted, ‘Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!’ Then everyone put their chairs up on the tables for the last, last, last time that term, and while Nory was lining up the little metal sliders on the legs of her chair on the tabletop so that it was perfectly straight, since that was how it would sit, in just that precise position, until she came back after Christmas, she had a strange feeling of never wanting that term of school to be over but wanting it to go on and on to an endless limit. She slipped Pamela a little present of a pop-up card, homemade, which had a cutout of herself and Pamela in their school clothes standing on top of a little volcano, and she made it so the volcano leaned forward a slight extent when the card opened, which you can do fairly easily by cutting two little slices in the folded-over edge so that the place where you cut can be folded outward the opposite way as a little ledge for something to be attached to. The Pamela pop-up and the Nory pop-up each had one flexible arm that waved back and forth when you pulled the two louvers at the bottom that ran all the way up the back of the card as two strips of paper and sometimes got completely out of whack. They both were saying, ‘We made it!’ and a bird was tucked conveniently halfway in a pocket of paper that was shaped as a cloud.

A little while later Nory remembered something Mr. Pears quite sternly said about not enough people saying thank you personally to the parents who organized the party before the fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, so she personally said, ‘Thank you for the chocolate,’ to Mrs. Thirm. But she said it quietly, while Mrs. Thirm’s back was turned, because sometimes it makes you shy to say thank you in person before anyone else has cleared the path by saying thank you. Shelly Quettner heard her say it and spun around and said much more loudly, ‘Thank you for the chocolate, Mrs. Thirm!’ Mrs. Thirm turned and smiled at Shelly and said, ‘You’re welcome.’ But that was quite all right because it isn’t the giving, it’s the thought that counts. ‘On the other hand, if the other person doesn’t know that you’ve thought the thought, how can it count?’ Nory wondered.