Richie’s truck was in the driveway, but the whole house was dark, thank God. Eleanor was sure that something would give her away. Her hair. Her shirt. Her mouth. She felt radioactive.
She and Park had been sitting in the alley for a while, in the front seat, just holding hands and feeling whiplashed. At least, that’s how Eleanor felt. It wasn’t that she and Park had gone too far, necessarily – but they’d gone a whole lot farther than she’d been prepared for. She’d never expected to have a love scene straight out of a Judy Blume book.
Park must be feeling strange, too. He sat through two Bon Jovi songs without even touching the radio. Eleanor had left a mark on his shoulder, but you couldn’t see it anymore.
This was her mom’s fault.
If Eleanor were allowed to have normal relationships with boys, she wouldn’t have felt like she had to hit a home run the very first time she ended up in the back seat of a car – she wouldn’t have felt like it might be her only time at bat. (And she wouldn’t be making these stupid baseball metaphors.)
It hadn’t been a home run, anyway. They’d stopped at second base. (At least, she thought it was second base. She’d heard conflicting definitions for the bases.) Still …
It was wonderful.
So wonderful that she wasn’t sure how they’d survive never doing it again.
‘I should go in,’ she said to Park, after they’d been sitting in the car a half-hour or more. ‘I’m usually home by now.’
He nodded but didn’t look up or let go of her hand. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We’re … okay, right?’
He looked up then. His hair had flattened out, and it fell in his eyes. He looked concerned. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Oh. Yeah. I’m just …’
She waited.
He closed his eyes and shook his head, like he was embarrassed. ‘I … just really don’t want to say goodbye to you, Eleanor. Ever.’
He opened his eyes and looked straight into her. Maybe this was third base.
She swallowed. ‘You don’t have to say goodbye to me ever,’ she said. ‘Just tonight.’
Park smiled. Then he raised an eyebrow. Eleanor wished she could do that.
‘Tonight …’ he said, ‘but not ever?’
She rolled her eyes. She was talking like him now. Like an idiot. She hoped it was too dark in the alley for him to see her blush.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ She opened the door to the Impala; it weighed as much as a horse. Then she stopped and looked back at him. ‘But we’re okay, right?’
‘We’re perfect,’ he said, leaning forward quickly and kissing her cheek. ‘I’ll wait for you to get in.’
As soon as Eleanor slipped in the house, she could hear them fighting.
Richie was yelling about something, and her mom was crying. Eleanor moved toward her bedroom as quietly as she could.
All the little kids were on the floor, even Maisie. They were sleeping through the chaos. I wonder how often I sleep through it. Eleanor thought. She managed to swing onto her bed without stepping on anybody, but she landed on the cat. He squawked, and she pulled him up and onto her lap. ‘Shhh,’ she breathed, scratching his neck.
Richie shouted again – ‘my house’– and Eleanor and the cat both jumped. Something crunched beneath her.
She reached under her leg and pulled out a badly crumpled comic book. An X-Men annual. Damn it, Ben. She tried to smooth the comic out on her lap, but it was covered in some goop. The blanket felt wet, too, it was lotion or something … No, liquid makeup. With little bits of broken glass. Eleanor carefully picked a shard out of the cat’s tail and set it aside, then wiped her wet fingers on his fur. A length of oily-brown cassette tape was wrapped around his leg. Eleanor pulled it free. She looked down the bed and blinked until her eyes adjusted to the dark …
Torn comic book pages.
Powder.
Little pools of green eyeshadow …
Miles of cassette tape.
Her headphones were snapped in half and hanging from the edge of the bunk. Her grapefruit box was at the end of the bed, and Eleanor knew before she reached for it that it would be light as air. Empty. The lid was ripped almost in half, and someone had written on it in bold black marker – with one of Eleanor’s markers.
do you think you can make a fool of me? this is my house do you think you can hore around my neighborhood right under my nose and i’m not going to find out is that what you think? i know what you are and its over’
Eleanor stared at the lid and struggled to make the letters into words – but she couldn’t get past the familiar spill of lowercase letters.
Somewhere in the house her mother was crying like she was never going to stop.
