He was going to tell her that she did a good job on her poem.

That would be a giant understatement anyway. She was the only person in class who’d read her poem like it wasn’t an assignment. She recited it like it was a living thing. Like something she was letting out. You couldn’t look away from her as long as she was talking. (Even more than Park’s usual not being able to look away from her.) When she was done, a lot of people clapped and Mr Stessman hugged her. Which was totally against the Code of Conduct.

‘Hey. Nice job. In English.’ That’s what Park was going to say.

Or maybe, ‘I’m in your English class. That poem you read was cool.’ Or, ‘You’re in Mr Stessman’s class, right? Yeah, I thought so.’

Park picked up his comics after taekwando Wednesday night, but he waited until Thursday morning to read them.

Eleanor

That stupid Asian kid totally knew that she was reading his comics. He even looked up at Eleanor sometimes before he turned the page, like he was that polite.

He definitely wasn’t one of them, the bus demons. He didn’t talk to anyone on the bus. (Especially not her.) But he was in with them somehow because, when Eleanor was sitting next to him, they all left her alone. Even Tina. It made Eleanor wish she could sit next to him all day long.

This morning, when she got on the bus, it kind of felt like he was waiting for her. He was holding a comic called Watchmen, and it looked so ugly that Eleanor decided not to bother eavesdropping. Or eavesreading. Whatever.

(She liked it best when he read X-Men, even though she didn’t get everything that was going on there; X-Men was worse than General

Hospital. It took Eleanor a couple weeks to figure out that Scott Summers and Cyclops were the same guy, and she still wasn’t sure what was up with Phoenix.)

But Eleanor didn’t have anything else to do, so her eyes wandered over to the ugly comic … And then she was reading. And then they were at school. Which was totally weird because they weren’t even halfway through with it.

And which totally sucked because it meant he would read the rest of the comic during school, and have something lame like ROM out on the way home.

Except he didn’t.

When Eleanor got on the bus that afternoon, the Asian kid opened up

Watchmen right where they’d left off.

They were still reading it when they got to Eleanor’s stop – there was so much going on, they both stared at every frame for, like, entire minutes – and when she got up to leave, he handed it to her.

Eleanor was so surprised, she tried to hand it back, but he’d already turned away. She shoved the comic between her books like it was something secret, then got off the bus.

She read it three more times that night, lying on the top bunk, petting the scrubby old cat. Then she put it in her grapefruit box overnight, so that nothing would happen to it.

Park

What if she didn’t give it back?

What if he didn’t get to finish the first issue of Watchmen because he’d lent it to a girl who hadn’t asked for it and probably didn’t even know who Alan Moore was.

If she didn’t give it back, they were even. That would cancel out the whole ‘Jesus-fuck-sit-down’ scenario.

Jesus … No, it wouldn’t.

What if she did give it back? What was he supposed to say then?

Thanks?

Eleanor

When she got to their seat, he was looking out the window. She handed him the comic, and he took it.