'You are a great warrior, and I am studying to become a great warrior myself. Is there a place in your cave for a little girl who just wants to play?'
'I'll be the judge of who does and doesn't make a warrior,' Dojo said.
'But we are so busy with our drills and exercises,' I said. 'Do we have time to play games with the child, as you promised?'
'What is a game but a drill that's dressed up in colorful clothing?' Dojo said. 'Besides, given that, even without my instruction, you weigh ten tons and have a cavernous mouth filled with teeth like butcher knives, and that all creatures except me flee in abject terror at the mere sound of your footsteps, I do not think that you should begrudge a lonely little girl some play-time.'
At this I felt deeply ashamed, and when we got home, I swept out the cave seven times without even being asked. A couple of days later, when Belle came back to our cave looking lonely and forlorn, we both did our best to make her feel welcome. Dojo began playing some special games with her, which Belle enjoyed so much that she kept coming back, and believe it or not, after a couple of years of this had gone by, Belle was able to flip me over her shoulder just as well as Dojo.
Nell laughed to think of a little girl monkey flipping a great dinosaur over her shoulder. She went back one page and reread the last part more carefully:
A couple of days later, when Belle came back to our cave looking lonely and forlorn, we both did our best to make her feel welcome. Dojo made a special meal in his kitchen out of rice, fish, and vegetables and made sure that she ate every scrap. Then he began playing a special game with her called somersaults.
An illustration materialized on the facing page. Nell recognized the open space in front of the entrance to Dojo's cave. Dojo was sitting up on a high rock giving instructions to Dinosaur and Belle. Dinosaur tried to do a somersault, but his tiny front arms could not support the weight of his massive head, and he fell flat on his face. Then Belle gave it a try and did a perfect somersault.
Nell tried it too. It was confusing at first, because the world kept spinning around her while she did it. She looked at the illustration in the book and saw Belle doing exactly what Nell had done, making all of the same mistakes. Dojo scampered down from his rock and explained how Belle could keep her head and body straight. Nell followed the advice as she gave it another try, and this time it felt better. Before her time was up, she was doing perfect somersaults all over the playground. When she went back to the apartment, Mom wouldn't let her in at first, so she did somersaults up and down the hall for a while. Finally Mom let her in, and when she saw that Nell had gotten sand in her hair and shoes down at the playground, she gave her a spanking and sent her to bed without any food.
But the next morning she went to the M.C. and asked it for the special meal Dojo made for Belle. The M.C. said it couldn't really make fish, but it could make nanosurimi, which was kind of like fish. It could make rice too. Vegetables were a problem. Instead it gave her some green paste she could eat with a spoon. Nell told the M.C. that this was her Belle food and that she was going to have it all the time from now on, and after that the M.C. always knew what she wanted.
Nell didn't call it her magic book anymore, she called it by the name printed plain as day on the title page, which she'd only been able to read recently:
YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER a Prop?deutic Enchiridion in which is told the tale of
The Primer didn't speak to her as often as it used to. She had found that she could often read the words more quickly than the book spoke them, and so she usually ordered it to be silent. She often put it under her pillow and had it read her bedtime stories, though, and sometimes she even woke up in the middle of the night and heard it whispering things to her that she had just been dreaming about.
Tad had long since vanished from their home, though not before giving Mom a broken nose. He'd been replaced by Shemp, who had been replaced by Todd, who had given way to Tony. One day the Shanghai Police had come to arrest Tony, and he had plugged one of them right in the living room with his skull gun, blowing a hole in the guy's stomach so that intestines fell out and trailed down between his legs. The other policemen nailed Tony with a Seven Minute Special and then dragged their wounded comrade out into the hallway, while Tony, bellowing like a cornered, rabid animal, ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife and began hacking at his chest where he thought the Seven Minute Special had gone into his body. By the time the seven minutes had gone by and the policemen burst back into the apartment, he had dug a hole in his pectoral muscle all the way down to his ribs. He menaced the cops with his bloody knife, and the cop in charge punched in some numbers on a little black box in his hand, and Tony buckled and screamed as a single cookie-cutter detonated inside his thigh. He dropped the knife. The cops rushed in and shrink-wrapped him, then stood around his body, mummified in glistening plastic, and kicked him and stomped him for a minute or two, then finally cut a hole in the plastic so Tony could breathe.
They bonded four handles onto the shrink-wrap and then carried him out between them, leaving Nell to clean up the blood in the kitchen and the living room. She wasn't very good at cleaning things up yet and ended up smearing it around. When Mom got home, she screamed and cried for a while and then spanked Nell for making a mess. This made Nell sad, and so she went to her room and picked up the Primer and made up a story of her own, about how the wicked stepmother had made Princess Nell clean up the house and had spanked her for doing it wrong. The Primer made up pictures as she went along. By the time she was finished, she had forgotten about the real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up.
After that, Mom swore off men for a while, but after a couple of months she met a guy named Brad who was actually nice. He had a real job as a blacksmith in the New Atlantis Clave, and one day he took Nell to work with him and showed her how he nailed iron shoes onto the hooves of the horses. This was the first time Nell had actually seen a horse, and so she did not pay much attention to Brad and his hammers and nails. Brad's employers had a giant house with vast green fields, and they had four kids, all bigger than Nell, who would come out in fancy clothes and ride those horses.
But Mom broke up with Brad; she didn't like craftsmen, she said, because they were too much like actual Victorians, always spouting all kinds of crap about how one thing was better than another thing, which eventually led, she explained, to the belief that some people were better than others. She took up with a guy named Burt who eventually moved in with them. Burt explained to Nell and Harv that the house needed discipline and that he intended to provide it, and after that he spanked them all the time, sometimes on the butt and sometimes on the face. He spanked Mom a lot too.
Nell was spending much more time at the playground, where it was easier for her to do all of the exercises that Dojo was teaching to Belle. She also played games with the other kids sometimes. One day she was playing tetherball with a friend of hers and kept beating her every time. Then a boy came up, a boy bigger than either Nell or her friend, and insisted that he be allowed to play. Nell's friend gave up her place, and then Nell played against the boy, whose name was Kevin. Kevin was a big solid boy who was proud of his bulk and his strength, and his philosophy of tetherball was winning through intimidation. He would grab the ball, wind up melodramatically, baring his teeth and getting his face bright red, then smash the ball with a windmill punch, complete with sound effects that always showered the ball with spit. The performance was so impressive that many children just stood and watched it in awe, afraid to get in the way of the tetherball, and after that Kevin would just keep smashing the ball faster and faster on each revolution while vomiting profanity at his opponent. Nell knew that Kevin's mom had lived with a lot of the same guys that Nell's mom had lived with; he frequently sported black eyes that he certainly hadn't gotten on the playground.
Nell had always been afraid of Kevin. But today when he wound up for his big serve, he just looked silly; kind of like Dinosaur did sometimes when sparring with Belle. The ball swung toward her, dewy with spit and not really going all that fast. Kevin was shouting things at her, calling her a cunt and other words, but for some reason Nell didn't hear it and didn'tcare, she just lunged toward the ball and punched it hard, putting her whole body behind her knuckles in a straight line, just as Dojo taught. She hit the ball so hard, she didn't even feel it; it shot up in a wide arc that took it behind and above Kevin's head, and after that all she had to do was give it a few more slaps as it whizzed by, and she'd won the game.
'Two out of three,' Kevin said, and they played again, with the same result. Now all the kids were laughing at Kevin, and he lost his temper, turned bright red, and charged at Nell.
But Nell had watched Kevin use this tactic on other kids, and she knew that it only worked because usually the kids were too scared to move. Dojo had explained to Belle that the best way to fight Dinosaur was
