The Thing About Georgie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, ableism, and death.

Days later, Georgie and Jeanie work in the library on their president projects. Georgie is frustrated with Jeanie, who keeps getting off-topic. Their president is Abraham Lincoln, and Georgie will have to work with Jeanie every Friday for the next six weeks. He’s disappointed that they didn’t get George Washington and even more disappointed that he must spend so much time with Jeanie. Jeanie antagonizes Georgie by calling him names, and she asks if he’s planning to look up books on “shrimp-azoids like you” (88).

Georgie knows that there is a book on people like him in the library called Little in a Big World. He’s certain that the librarian added it to the school collection because of him. The book describes what life is like for people with dwarfism. Georgie has checked the front of the book to see if anyone ever checked it out, but there were never any names. He isn’t sure how he feels about that—he likes that no one sees him as anomalous enough to learn about, but he does feel sad that no one wants to learn about him.