The English class read their Readathon books pretty well for a while, although there had to be some chatting. Absolutely no chatting was a little bit hard to ask. Then the teacher went out of the room, and the chatting turned to a muttering and a chittering and a smattering and a fluttering in every direction, because when the teacher goes out, let the rumpus begin. The two main chitter-chatterers for most of the time were Paul and Ovaltine, who was called that because his first name was Oliver, and he liked Ovaltine—or maybe he was just a good sport and said he liked Ovaltine, since basically everyone liked Ovaltine and you wouldn’t normally make a big thing out of liking it and, for instance, stand up on a chair and say, ‘Hi, everybody, I like Ovaltine!’—and his last name was Dean, and his face was oval, and maybe another reason that Nory couldn’t remember, but that covered most of it. Paul and Ovaltine were friends but they couldn’t stop talking and arguing, on and on and on and on. As soon as the teacher was gone they started fighting, and they actually drew on each other’s cheeks.
Then the teacher came back in and everybody dove headfirst back to the Readathon. And then the bell rang and it was time for the next lesson, which was Classics. But unfortunately Classics was totally devoted to Readathon, too, so no chance for Nory to ask her questions about Achilles.
33. Unexplained Mysteries
Her questions were: The only place that Achilles wasn’t immortal was in the back of his ankle, in what’s known as his heel, because his mother did less than a perfect and less than a gentle job of dipping him. So, Nory felt, the only place he absolutely has to wear armour was around his ankles. He could fight in whatever strange underwear they had back in ancient times except for two huge gold and silver dust-ruffles around his ankles. Nory knew a little about ancient underwear because of the movie, Ji Gong, about the crazy monk. In it a rich, rich, rich man got naked in clothes that he would have worn very long ago. If you were rich in China your underclothes would be little shorts and a huge apron over your chest that tied in the back.
It would not matter how many times Achilles was stabbed in the neck or the heart—those parts were totally immortal. He would never have to fight back with Hector, he could just stand there with his hands at his sides and let Hector stab and jab the day away. But then you would miss the good part later, when they fight so fast and were so good at swordfighting that the crashing together of the swords made sparks, and the light of the sparks could be seen for miles in the night sky. But probably that wasn’t true. It was probably two stumbling men, swamped with blood, shouting bad words at each other and fighting in the mud until one slumped down. Nory hated when people said that oh yes, so-and-so ‘bit the dust,’ because what it meant was that the person lost his balance and fell at a point of being so faintingly weak and near dying that he couldn’t even put his hands out to stop himself when he fell, and so his teeth hit and dug a little way into the mud or dust or dirt, which was sad and a little disgusting to think about. But say a young child had been crouching in a doorway watching, a frightened young thing. She would have seen the fight, and then seen everyone else stab each other and die off, and when she was older her child would ask her, ‘Mommy, tell a story of a bad thing that happened to you as a child,’ just the way Nory herself always used to ask her mother and father that same question, so many times. ‘Tell me a bad thing that happened to you as a child.’ Nory asked it, year after year, and her mother and father told their stories of getting stitches in their thumb or getting hit by a car while running after a paper airplane or being kicked under the sinks in the school bathroom or mocked for long hair or falling one floor down and getting a concussion and then having to stay awake all night hearing Winnie the Pooh so they wouldn’t doze into a coma (this last bad thing happened to Nory’s mother when she was four), until her parents ran dry of bad things and had to start all over again with one of the early ones.
The girl who saw Hector get stabbed to death would say to her young child that she saw Hector and Achilles fight and Hector die, and the child would say, ‘What did they look like fighting?’ The mother wouldn’t want to say what it really looked like when a sword puncture-wounded deep into someone’s body, since it was a plain basic gruesome thing like the sight of the butterfly’s little head when she made the mistake with the lid, and she would think around for something else, and would have an instinct to say ah, that she saw the swords sparkling each time they smashed together, something nice like that, because maybe there was a poem already in Latin or some African-American language that people spoke in those days, or ancient Chinese, about swords sparkling. When you’re asked to say how you saw something you almost have to give up the idea of doing it exactly, since whatever bad thing happened had a happy ending because here you are, an everlasting grownup, happily holding a child.
‘But all right,’ Nory thought, ‘let’s say that the story is obviously made up in certain aspects, the way that legends so very often are.’ Myths were totally made up from scrap, according to Mr. Pears, but legends were a combination of made up and true-to-life. Even still, just to have it be a working legend, you need to know the kind of way that Achilles was immortal, and the story doesn’t provide you with that. Say Hector tried to stab him in the chest. There were three possibilities of what could happen. The sword could just not be able to go into Achilles at all, even an eighty-sixth of an inch, because his skin would be incredibly durable and unable to be cut in a good, sensible immortal way. Or the sword could go in just as deep as it would be in a normal human and hurt him very badly, so badly that he would have to be in the hospital, since you can be severely badly injured and be under intensive care in the hospital and still not die. Or the sword would swish completely through the chest as if it was the chest of a realistic ghost and Achilles would only feel a little sense of tickling inside, like when you swallow a very cold, pure, sour glass of cran-blackberry juice and feel it pouring down your ribcage in a waterfall.
But that’s not really even the difficult part of the question. Achilles is definitely killed by a poison arrow. Mr. Pears stressed that they had to remember that it was a poison arrow. The arrow goes into the mortal part of him, his heel, making a nasty puncture wound. But if the poison killed only his heel, he would survive just fine, since you can survive losing your whole foot or even your whole leg. If your head dies, you die. If your heart dies, you die. If your liver dies, even, you die. But if your ankle dies? It would hurt, no question about that, it would not be a comfortable or cozy experience at all, at all, because you would probably have to have your foot chopped off above the ankle so there wouldn’t be any gangrene. Gangrene was a situation that Nory knew about from Debbie, who said mountain climbers usually got it. Debbie made up a pretty funny joke about it. When you had gangrene, the doctors all crowded around your foot, if it was your foot that had it, and shook their heads and said, ‘It’s green, gang,’ and then, chop, off goes the foot, in the trash, two points. Debbie had a tape of an expedition to climb a very difficult-to-climb mountain, Mount Everlast. One guy fell and his foot broke so that it bent back against his leg in not a natural way, and it got badly infested, because the bone was projecting out, and they ran out of antibiotics, so they had to put plastic tubes all through the injury at his ankle, so water was pouring through his ankle every second. But he was all right once he got back to civilization.
So Achilles would not be able to kill as many people after they had to cut off his foot, since he would have to fight hopping to and fro, or rolling around in a wheelchair, or a wheelchariot, going ‘Charge! Rip, slash, stab, rip,’ at people and then frantically pushing the wheels. But he wouldn’t die. He would not die and be buried underground because the immortality wouldn’t let him. So you have to assume that it’s the poison spreading that does it. But this can’t be exactly correct because remember, if you’re Achilles, every cell in the rest of your body is immortal. Totally immortal. If you looked through an electronic microscope on the highest power, each molecule of the poison would be there w
ith a little sword of stabbing chemicals pointing harshly at each cell, and each cell would be fighting harshly back, and you could see the sparks for millimeters around, but each cell would win each fight. The cells wouldn’t die. And then you have to think of this as well: in real life, your cells do die, and you get a whole new crop of cells every year, or every five years. The old cells get dissolved and get sent down by your blood to your bladder, and your bladder takes it from there. If you were Achilles, no cell would die, so you would get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, since your bones would be adding cells on, and no cells would be leaving, and your muscles, same thing, and your skin, same thing, every part of you would be growing in size and expanding like the expanding universe so after a little while you would be this absolutely huge monstrous thing just because you were immortal.
34. Things to Rem
So those were the basic questions that Nory wanted to ask Mr. Pears but couldn’t, and instead of asking them, she finished her book about the hen who wouldn’t give up. She wrote down on her Readathon sheet that she’d finished the book, and she saw her plain old ruler in her pencil case, which was made of plain clear and red plastic, and she listed through all the fancy rulers she had back in Palo Alto. She had a whole collection—two Lisa Frank rulers, a Pompeii ruler, a Little Mermaid ruler, a ruler that had liquid in it that fishes slowly swam through, and the Hello Kitty rulers from the Sanrio store in Japan Center, and on and on, maybe twenty feet worth of rulers, and all of that was plus a whole separate collection of erasers. Maybe this wasn’t quite as good as having a collection of fake food but it was something that Nory thought she should really be more pleased about. She kept her erasers in a blue icecube tray, not in the freezer of course, but it was a way of keeping them neatly in place, one eraser per ice place.
One time she was trying to earn some money to buy Underwater Barbie. Underwater Barbie, as many may know, kicked her legs in the bathtub. It was pretty good when she got it although the problem with it was that its motor made a massive amount of noise, so you couldn’t tell a story about something that happened to Underwater Barbie while you had her kicking gently along under the water, which was what ahead of time Nory expected she would be doing. But she was really desperate for Underwater Barbie, and she had almost enough, and to earn the last bit of money she did a lot of different things. One of them was to set up a poster-making store with different styles of lettering for sale and different kinds of pictures to go along with them, but the customers, who were of course Nory’s mother and father, mainly, chose what they wanted it to be a poster of. Nory’s father asked for a poster of five important sayings or mottoes, which could be sayings or mottoes that other people had said or sayings that Nory herself said. So Nory wrote a poster titled ‘Things to Rem.’ She ran out of space for the rest of Remember so she made a thought-cloud and had the Rem remembering the ember part as if it was a contented memory. She only charged for ten headline letters because of that mess-up—three cents for each letter. The sayings were:
A Home Made Gift is Worth More than a Pot of Gold
Things May Not Be How You Rember Them
Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure
Some Thing That you Think is Good
Another pearson Will think is bad
She only did four sayings, not five, because she was almost out of room and couldn’t think of any more, but Nory’s father liked the poster and wanted to pay extra for the border design but Nory said that was included free, and the total was 84 cents for the sayings at 2 cents per word and 30 cents for the headline, which came to $1.14. The saying Nory liked best was ‘Things That You Take for Granted others May Treasure’ because that might be true of something like her eraser collection or her ruler collection, especially her ruler collection, which even she took for granted up to now and didn’t even bother to think of as a collection except that now at the Junior School she only had this one plain red ruler that said, ‘Helix.’ Rulers were useful for drawing the cubicles of a cartoon properly.
Nory drew a face on her fingernail and then smeared it away, trying to figure out how you would draw a cartoon picture of a girl thinking about clouds. You’d have to draw the thought-cloud with the usual three puffs leading promptly down from it to the girl’s head, and then in the cloud you’d draw a cloud, and you’d have to shade the background of the thought-cloud with a different color, maybe, to draw the clear distinction between it and the real cloud that the girl was thinking about—but anything’s possible with a pencil and paper, just about. Nory had in general two favorite types of clouds. One was the low flat steamy gray ones that you can walk right up to, and the other kind was the fat puffy ones that seem to have no end.
35. Break
Then the bell rang and Classics was over and Nory went to her break. She had been spending a lot of breaks with Kira, so to balance things out this break she spent with Pamela, who gave her some prawn chips which have a very dry feeling on your tongue, as if they’re pulling out all the water from the tastebobs completely, but being infinitely delicious at the same time. They didn’t have that awful glittery added-salt taste. Kira stopped by where they were sitting, under a conker tree, and said to Nory, ‘Come on, let’s go.’
‘Take a seat and join us, Kira,’ said Nory. ‘We’re having our break here.’
Kira said, ‘I’ll be back in a bit.’ That was what she said when she wanted to go away but didn’t want to say so. She didn’t want kids to see her near Pamela. Pamela was quiet. Pamela didn’t like Kira, because Kira didn’t like Pamela, and Kira didn’t like Pamela because nobody else liked Pamela.
Colin Sharings came up and said to Pamela, ‘Have you ever gone bungee jumping?’
‘No,’ Pamela said.
‘Good,’ said Colin, ‘because you’d probably break the cord and make a mess on the rocks.’
‘That is an idiotic, nitwitted, dumb, and very stupid thing to say,’ said Nory.
‘Are you friends with Pamela?’ Colin asked, pretending to be amazed.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Nory. ‘And you are quite attractive. For a dead monkfish.’
‘Oh, thank you, little American girl,’ said Colin, who had a curly little mouth. ‘Little Americayan. Take care that your friend Pamela doesn’t get on any boats. They’ll sink to the bottom as soon as she goes aboard. And as you may know, we dead monkfishes are quite hungry.’ Having finished up with his insults for the day, he walked off with his nose aimed high.
‘Colin Sharings is just awful,’ said Nory.
‘With a knob of butter and some parsley on his head,’ said Pamela, ‘he would look quite fishy.’ She held out the bag of prawn chips for Nory to have another.
‘These are infinitely delicious prawn chips,’ said Nory. ‘Where do you get them?’
‘My mum gets them from Tesco,’ said Pamela.
‘We go to Tesco, too,’ said Nory.
‘It’s quite a popular place to shop,’ said Pamela. ‘I think we probably should go in now.’
36. A Bird Problem
After break it was on to the next event, because each school day was packed with tons and tons and tons of events—good events, bad events, mezzo-mezzo events, confusing events, alarming events. The next event was LT., where the class was trying to land their airplanes on an island. Nory mostly taxied around the airport, which was quite enjoyable. Finally she got her plane to take off down the runway, but then she started having some trouble. She pressed on one of the arrow keys, and if you held on to it for too long (which she was desperately doing to steer her plane back in a straighter direction) the plane went into an acute turn, which is the opposite of an obtuse turn, and would not ever turn back, it would just crash. So she crashed, as usual, but this time she not only crashed her own plane, she somehow curled persistently all the way around and crashed the plane that was following along behind her. Mr. Stone, the teacher, shook his head and said: ‘Millions of pounds of expensive technology, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.’
Mr. Stone was a very nice teacher and probably the only teacher Nory had who hadn’t yet said shutup to the class. All the teachers said shutup, even Mr. Blithrenner, the history teacher, who was a delight and knew every strange fact you could imagine. No grownup would have said shutup at the International Chinese Montessori School, but here, boy oh boy, the word was all over the place. Mr. Blithrenner was explaining, half jokingly, that there simply had to be bloodshed in the Aztec religion each and every day because the sunsets and sunrises were much redder and darker in America, and the Aztec religion was a religion of the sun. So blood had to be shed every day or the sun would become angry and simply refuse to rise, which would be a disaster. That explained the confusion. But two of the boys were being very disruptive and chitter-chatting about human sacrifices, and finally Mr. Blithrenner reached his limit and said, ‘Colin, Jacob! Just—shut—up!’ And they did.