Letters, postcards, packages that rattled like loaded cassette tapes. None of them opened, none of them read.
‘Dear Park,’ she wrote on a clean sheet of stationery. ‘Dear Park,’ she tried to explain.
But the explanations fell apart in her hands. Everything true was too hard to write – he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wrote, then crossed it out. ‘It’s just …’ she tried again.
She threw the half-written letters away. She threw the unopened envelopes in the bottom drawer.
‘Dear Park,’ she whispered, her forehead hanging over the dresser, ‘just stop.’
Park
His dad said Park needed a summer job to pay for gas.
Neither of them mentioned that Park never went anywhere. Or that he’d started putting eyeliner on with his thumb. Blacking out his own eyes.
He looked just wrecked enough to get a job at Drastic Plastic. The girl who hired him had two rows of holes in each ear.
His mom stopped bringing in the mail. He knew it was because she hated telling him that nothing had come for him. Park brought in the mail himself now every night when he got home from work. Every night praying for rain.
He had an endless supply and an insatiable appetite for punk music. ‘I can’t hear myself think in here,’ his dad said, coming into Park’s room for the third night in a row to turn down the stereo.
Duh, Eleanor would have said.
Eleanor didn’t start school in the fall. Not with Park anyway.
She didn’t celebrate the fact that juniors don’t have to take gym. She didn’t say, ‘Unholy union, Batman,’ when Steve and Tina eloped over Labor Day.
Park had written her a letter all about it. He’d told her everything that happened, and everything that didn’t, every day since she’d left.
He kept writing her letters months after he stopped sending them. On New Year’s Day, he wrote that he hoped she’d get everything she ever wished for. Then he tossed the letter into a box under his bed.
