‘Help how?’ She shoved the book toward him. ‘Do you want to kick it?’
He clenched his teeth. She took the book back and put it in her bag.
‘Do you know who’s doing it?’ he asked.
‘Are you going to kick them?’
‘Maybe …’
‘Well …’ she said, ‘I’ve narrowed it down to people who don’t like me …’
‘It couldn’t be just anyone. It would have to be somebody who co could get to your books without you knowing about it.’
Ten seconds ago, Eleanor had looked mean as a cat. Now she looked resigned, slumped over the table with her fingertips at her temples.
‘I don’t know …’ She shook her head. ‘It seems like it always happens on gym days.’
‘Do you leave your books in the locker room?’
She rubbed her eyes with both hands. ‘I feel like now you’re intentionally asking me stupid questions. You’re like the worst detective ever.’
‘Who doesn’t like you in gym class?’
‘Ha.’ She was still covering her face. ‘Who doesn’t like me in gym class.’
‘You need to take this seriously,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said firmly, squeezing her hands in-to fists, ‘this is exactly the sort of thing I shouldn’t take seriously. That’s exactly what Tina and her henchgirls want me to do. If they think they’re getting to me? They’ll never leave me alone.’
‘What does Tina have to do with this?’
‘Tina is the queen of the people in my gym class who don’t like me.’
‘Tina would never do anything this bad.’
Eleanor looked hard at him. ‘Are you kidding? Tina’s a monster. She’s what would happen if the devil married the wicked witch, and they rolled their baby in a bowl of chopped evil.’
Park thought of the Tina who sold him out in the garage and made fun of people on the bus …
But then he thought of all the times that Steve had gone after Park, and Tina had pulled him back.
‘I’ve known Tina since we were kids,’ he said. ‘She’s not that bad. We used to be friends.’
‘You don’t act like friends.’
‘Well, she’s dating Steve now.’
‘Why does that matter?’
Park couldn’t think of how to answer.
‘Why does it matter?’ Eleanor’s eyes were dark slits in her face. If he lied to her about this, she’d never forgive him.
‘None of it matters now,’ he said. ‘It’s stupid
… Tina and I went together in the sixth grade.
Not that we ever went anywhere or did anything.’
‘Tina? You went with Tina?’
‘It was the sixth grade. It was nothing.’
‘But you were boyfriend and girlfriend? Did you hold hands?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Did you kiss her?’
‘None of this matters.’
But it did. Because it was making Eleanor look at him like he was a stranger. It was making him feel like a stranger. He knew that Tina had a mean streak, but he also knew that she wouldn’t go this far.
What did he know about Eleanor? Not much.
It was like she didn’t want him to know her better. He felt everything for Eleanor, but what did he really know?
‘You always write in lowercase letters …’
Saying this out loud seemed like a good idea only for as long as the words were on his tongue, but he kept talking. ‘Did you write those things yourself?’
Eleanor paled from pale to ashen. It was like all the blood in her body rushed to her heart, all at once. Her speckled lips hung open.
Then she snapped out of it. She started stack-ing her books.
‘If I were going to write a note to myself, calling myself a dirty slut,’ she said it matter-of-factly, ‘you’re right, I might not use capital letters. But I would definitely use an apostrophe …
and probably a period. I’m a huge fan of punctuation.’
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
She shook her head and stood up. He couldn’t for the life of him think of how to stop her.
‘I don’t know who’s been writing on my books,’ she said coolly. ‘But I think we just solved the mystery of why Tina hates me so much.’
‘Eleanor …’
‘No,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘I don’t want to talk anymore.’
She walked out of the kitchen, just as Park’s mom was coming in from garage. His mom looked at Park with a face he was beginning to recognize. What do you see in this weird white girl?
Park
That night, Park lay in bed thinking about Eleanor thinking about him, writing his name on her book.
She’d probably already scribbled that out, too.
He tried to think about why he’d defended Tina.
Why did it matter to him whether Tina was good or bad? Eleanor was right, he and Tina weren’t friends. They weren’t anything like friends.
They hadn’t even been friends in the sixth grade.
Tina had asked Park to go with her, and Park had said yes – because everybody knew that Tina was the most popular girl in class. Going with Tina was such powerful social currency, Park was still spending it.
Being Tina’s first boyfriend kept Park out of the lowest neighborhood caste. Even though they all thought Park was weird and yellow, even though he had never fit in … They couldn’t call him a freak or a chink or a fag because – well first, because his dad was a giant and a veteran and from the neighborhood. But second, because what would that say about Tina?
And Tina had never turned on Park or pretended he didn’t happen. In fact … Well. There were times when he thought she wanted something to happen between them again.
Like, a few times, she’d come over to Park’s house on the wrong day for her hair appointment
– and ended up in Park’s room, trying to find something for them to talk about.
On homecoming night, when she came over to have her hair put up, she’d stopped in Park’s room to ask what he thought of her strapless blue dress. She’d had him untangle her necklace from the hair at the back of her neck.
Park always let these opportunities pass like he didn’t see them.
Steve would kill him if he hooked up with Tina.
Plus, Park didn’t want to hook up with Tina.
They didn’t have anything in common – like, nothing – and it wasn’t the kind of nothing that can be exotic and exciting. It was just boring.
He didn’t even think Tina really liked him, deep down. It was more like she didn’t want him to get over her. And not-so-deep down, Park didn’t want Tina to get over him.
It was nice to have the most popular girl in the neighborhood offering herself to him every now and then.
Park rolled onto his stomach and pushed his face into his pillow. He’d thought he was over caring what people thought about him. He’d thought that loving Eleanor proved that.
But he kept finding new pockets of shallow inside himself. He kept finding new ways to betray her.
CHAPTER 31
Eleanor
There was just one more day of school left before Christmas vacation. Eleanor didn’t go. She told her mother she was sick.
Park
When he got to the bus stop Friday morning, Park was ready to apologize. But Eleanor didn’t show up. Which made him feel a lot less like apologizing …
‘What now?’ he said in the direction of her house. Were they supposed to break up over this?
Was she going to go three weeks without talking to him?
He knew it wasn’t Eleanor’s fault that she didn’t have a phone, and that her house was the Fortress of Solitude, but … Jesus. It made it so easy for her to cut herself off whenever she felt like it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at her house, too loudly.
A dog started barking in the yard next to him.
‘Sorry,’ Park muttered to the dog.
The bus turned the corner and heaved to a stop. Park could see Tina in the back window, watching him.
I’m sorry, he thought, not looking back again.
Eleanor
With Richie at work all day, she didn’t have to stay in her room, but she did anyway. Like a dog who won’t leave its kennel.
She ran out of batteries. She ran out of things to read …
She lay in bed so much, she actually felt dizzy when she got up Sunday afternoon to eat dinner. (Her mom said Eleanor had to come out of her crypt if she was hungry.) Eleanor sat on the living room floor next to Mouse.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asked. He was holding a bean burrito and it was dripping onto his T-shirt and the floor.
‘I’m not,’ she said.
Mouse held the burrito over his head and tried to catch the leak with his mouth. ‘Yeh oo are.’
Maisie looked up at Eleanor, then back at the TV.
‘Is it because you hate Dad?’ Mouse asked.
‘Yes,’ Eleanor said.
‘ Eleanor,’ her mother said, walking out of the kitchen.
‘No,’ Eleanor said to Mouse, shaking her head. ‘I told you, I’m not crying.’ She went back to her room and climbed into bed, rubbing her face in the pillow.
Nobody followed her to see what was wrong.
Maybe her mom realized that she’d pretty much forfeited the right to ask questions for all eternity when she dumped Eleanor at somebody’s house for a year.
Or maybe just she didn’t care.
Eleanor rolled onto her back and picked up her dead Walkman. She took out the tape and held it up to the light, turning the reels with her fingertip and looking at Park’s handwriting on the label.
‘Never mind the Sex Pistols … Songs Eleanor might like.’
Park thought she’d written those awful things on her books herself.
And he’d taken Tina’s side against hers.
Tina’s.
She closed her eyes again and remembered the first time that he kissed her … How she’d let her neck bend back, how she’d opened her mouth. How she’d believed him when he said she was special.
Park
A week into break, his dad asked Park if he and Eleanor had broken up.
‘Sort of,’ Park said.
‘That’s too bad,’ his dad said.
‘It is?’
‘Well, it must be. You’re acting like a four-year-old lost at Kmart …
Park sighed.
‘Can’t you get her back?’ his dad asked
‘I can’t even get her to talk to me.’
‘It’s too bad you can’t talk to your mother about this. The only way I know how to land a girl is to look sharp in a uniform.’
Eleanor
A week into break, Eleanor’s mom woke her up before sunrise. ‘Do you want to walk to the store with me?’
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
‘Come on, I could use the extra hands.’
Her mom walked fast, and she had long legs.
Eleanor had to take extra steps just to keep up.
‘It’s cold,’ she said.
‘I told you to wear a hat.’ Her mom had told her to wear socks, too, but they looked ridiculous with Eleanor’s Vans.
It was a forty-minute walk.
When they got to the grocery store, her mom bought them each a day-old cream horn and a cup of twenty-five-cent coffee. Eleanor dumped Coffee-Mate and Sweet’N Low in hers, and followed her mom to the bargain bin. Her mom had this thing about being the first person to go through all the smashed cereal boxes and dented cans …
Afterward, they walked to the Goodwill, and Eleanor found a stack of old Analog magazines and settled in on the least disgusting couch in the furniture section.
When it was time to go, her mom came up from behind her with an incredibly ugly stocking cap and pulled it over her head.
‘Great,’ Eleanor said, ‘now I have lice.’
She felt better on the way home. (Which was probably the point of this whole field trip.) It was still cold, but the sun was shining, and her mom was humming that Joni Mitchell song about clouds and circuses.
Eleanor almost told her everything.
About Park and Tina and the bus and the fight, about the place between his grandparents’
house and the RV.
She felt it all right at the back of her throat, like a bomb – or a tiger – sitting on the base of her tongue. Keeping it in made her eyes water.
The plastic shopping bags were cutting into her palms. Eleanor shook her head and swallowed.
Park
Park rode his bike by her house over and over one day until her stepdad’s truck was gone and one of the other kids came outside to play in the snow.
It was the older boy, Park couldn’t remember his name. The kid scuttled up the steps nervously when Park stopped in front of the house.
‘Hey, wait,’ Park said, ‘please, hey … is your sister home?’
‘Maisie?’
‘No, Eleanor …’
‘I’m not telling you,’ the boy said, running into the house.
Park jerked his bike forward and pedaled away.
CHAPTER 32
Eleanor
The box of pineapple arrived on Christmas Eve.
You’d have thought Santa Claus had shown up in person with a bag of toys for each of them.
Maisie and Ben were already fighting over the box. Maisie wanted it for her Barbies. Ben didn’t have anything to put in it, but Eleanor still hoped he’d win.
Ben had just turned twelve, and Richie said he was too old to share a room with girls and babies. Richie had brought home a mattress and put it in the basement, and now Ben had to sleep down there with the dog and Richie’s free weights.
In their old house, Ben wouldn’t even go down to the basement to put clothes in the wash –
and that basement had at least been dry and mostly finished. Ben was scared of mice and bats and spiders and anything that started moving when the lights went out. Richie had already yelled at him, twice, for trying to sleep at the top of the stairs.