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.
