Eleanor & Park Read online

  ‘suck me off,’ it said, in ugly blue letters.

  She grabbed Park’s pen and started scribbling it out.

  ‘Why would you write that?’ he asked. ‘Is that a song?’

  ‘I didn’t write it,’ she said. She could feel patches of red creep up her neck.

  ‘Then who did?’

  She gave him the meanest look she was capable of. (It was hard to look at him with anything other than gooey eyes.)

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Why would anyone write that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled her books against her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  Eleanor ignored him and looked out the window. She couldn’t believe she’d let him see that on her book. It was one thing to let him see her crazy life a little bit at a time … So, yeah, I have a terrible stepdad, and I don’t have a phone, and sometimes when we’re out of dish soap I wash my hair with flea and tick shampoo …

  It was another thing to remind him that she was that girl. She may as well invite him to gym class. She might as well give him an alphabetical list of all the names they called her.

  A – Ass, Fat

  B – Bitch, Red-Headed

  He’d probably try to ask her why she was that girl.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  It wouldn’t do any good to tell him that she hadn’t been that girl at her old school. Yeah, she’d been made fun of before. There were always mean boys – and there were always, always mean girls – but she’d had friends at her old school. She’d had people to eat lunch with and pass notes to. People used to pick her to be on their team in gym class just because they thought she was nice and funny.

  ‘Eleanor …’ he said.

  But there was no one like Park at her old school.

  There was no one like Park anywhere.

  ‘What,’ she said to the window.

  ‘How’re you going to call me if you don’t have my number?’

  ‘Who said I was going to call you?’ She hugged her books.

  He leaned against her, pressing his shoulder into hers.

  ‘Don’t be mad at me,’ he said, sighing. ‘It makes me crazy.’

  ‘I’m never mad at you,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You must just be mad near me a lot.’

  She pushed her shoulder against his and smiled despite herself.

  ‘I’m babysitting at my dad’s house Friday night,’ she said, ‘and he said I could use the phone.’

  Park turned his face eagerly. It was painfully close to hers. She could kiss him – or head-butt him – before he’d ever have a chance to pull away. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, smiling. ‘But you won’t let me write down my number?’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘I’ll memorize it.’

  ‘Let me write it down.’

  ‘I’ll memorize it to the tune of a song, so that I don’t forget.’

  He started singing his number to the tune of ‘867-5309,’ which cracked her right up.

  Park

  Park tried to remember the first time he saw her.

  Because he could remember, on that day, seeing what everybody else saw. He could remember thinking that she was asking for it …

  That it was bad enough to have curly red hair. That it was bad enough to have a face shaped like a box of chocolates.

  No, he hadn’t thought exactly that. He’d thought …

  That it was bad enough to have a million freckles and chubby baby cheeks.

  God, she had adorable cheeks. Dimples on top of freckles, which shouldn’t even be allowed, and round as crabapples. It was kind of amazing that more people didn’t try to pinch her cheeks. His grandma was definitely going to pinch her when they met.

  But Park hadn’t thought that either, the first time he saw Eleanor on the bus. He remembered thinking that it was bad enough that she looked the way she did …

  Did she have to dress like that? And act like that? Did she have to try so hard to be different?

  He remembered feeling embarrassed for her.

  And now …

  Now, he felt the fight rising up in his throat whenever he thought of people making fun of her.

  When he thought of someone writing that ugly thing on her book … it made him feel like Bill Bixby just before he turned into the Hulk.

  It had been so hard, on the bus, to pretend that it didn’t bother him. He didn’t want to make anything worse for her – he’d put his hands in his pockets and pressed them into fists, and held them that way all morning long.

  All morning long, he’d wanted to punch something. Or kick something. Park had gym class right after lunch, and he ran so hard during drills, he’d started to retch up his fish sandwich.

  Mr Koenig, his gym teacher, made him leave class early and take a shower. ‘Hit the bricks, Sheridan. Now. This isn’t Chariots of Fuckin’ Fire.’

  Park wished it was only righteous anger that he felt. He wished that he could feel defensive and protective of Eleanor without feeling … everything else.

  Without feeling like they were making fun of him, too.

  There were moments – not just today, moments every day since they’d met – when Eleanor made him self-conscious, when he saw people talking and he was sure they were talking about them. Raucous moments on the bus when he was sure that everyone was laughing at them.

  And in those moments, Park thought about pulling back from her.

  Not breaking up with her. That phrase didn’t even seem to apply here. Just … easing away. Recovering the six inches between them.

  He’d roll the thought over in his head until the next time he saw her.

  In class, at her desk. On the bus, waiting for him. Reading alone in the cafeteria.

  Whenever he saw Eleanor, he couldn’t think about pulling away. He couldn’t think about anything at all.

  Except touching her.

  Except doing whatever he could or had to, to make her happy.

  ‘What do you mean you’re not coming tonight?’ Cal said.

  They were in study hall, and Cal was eating a Snack Pack butterscotch pudding. Park tried to keep his voice down. ‘Something came up.’

  ‘Something?’ Cal said, slamming his spoon into his pudding. ‘Like you being completely lame – is that what came up? Because that comes up a lot lately.’

  ‘No. Something. Like, a girl something.’

  Cal leaned in. ‘You’ve got a girl something?’

  Park felt himself blush. ‘Sort of. Yeah. I can’t really talk about it.’

  ‘But we had a plan,’ Cal said.

  ‘You had a plan,’ Park said, ‘and it was terrible.’

  ‘Worst friend in the world,’ Cal said.

  Eleanor

  She was so nervous, she couldn’t even touch her lunch. She gave DeNice her creamed turkey and Beebi her fruit cocktail.

  Park made her practice his phone number all the way home.

  And then he wrote it on her book anyway. He hid it in song titles.

  ‘Forever Young.’

  ‘That’s a four,’ he said. ‘Will you remember?’

  ‘I won’t have to,’ she said, ‘I already know your number by heart.’

  ‘And this is just a five,’ he said, ‘because I can’t think of any five songs, and this one’ – ‘Summer of ’69’ – ‘With this one, remember the six, but forget the nine.’

  ‘I hate that song.’

  ‘God, I know … Hey, I can’t think of any two songs.’

  “‘Two of Us,”’ she said.

  ‘Two of us?’

  ‘It’s a Beatles song.’

  ‘Oh … that’s why I don’t know it.’ He wrote it down.

  ‘I know your number by heart,’ she said.

  ‘I’m just afraid you’re going to forget it,’ he said qui
etly. He pushed her hair out of her eyes with his pen.

  ‘I’m not going to forget it,’ she said. Ever. She’d probably scream out Park’s number on her deathbed. Or have it tattooed over her heart when he finally got sick of her. ‘I’m good with numbers.’

  ‘If you don’t call me Friday night,’ he said, ‘because you can’t remember my number …’

  ‘How about this, I’ll give you my dad’s number, and if I haven’t called you by nine, you can call me.’

  ‘That’s an excellent idea,’ he said, ‘seriously.’

  ‘But you can’t call it any other time.’

  ‘I feel like …’ He started laughing and looked away.

  ‘What?’ she asked. She elbowed him.

  ‘I feel like we have a date,’ he said. ‘Is that stupid?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Even though we’re together every day …’

  ‘We’re never really together,’ she said.

  ‘It’s like we have fifty chaperones.’

  ‘Hostile chaperones,’ Eleanor whispered.

  ‘Yeah,’ Park said.

  He put his pen in his pocket, then took her hand and held it to his chest for a minute.

  It was the nicest thing she could imagine. It made her want to have his babies and give him both of her kidneys.

  ‘A date,’ he said.

  ‘Practically.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Eleanor

  When she woke up that morning, she felt like it was her birthday – like she used to feel on her birthday, back when there was a shot in hell of ice cream.

  Maybe her dad would have ice cream … If he did, he’d probably throw it away before Eleanor got there. He was always dropping hints about her weight. Well, he used to, anyway. Maybe when he stopped caring about her altogether, he’d stopped caring about that, too.

  Eleanor put on an old striped men’s shirt and had her mom tie one of her ties – like knot it, for real – around her neck.

  Her mom actually kissed Eleanor goodbye at the door and told her to have fun, and to call the neighbors if things got weird with her dad.

  Right, Eleanor thought, I’ll be sure to call you if Dad’s fiancée calls me a bitch and then makes me use a bathroom without a door. Oh wait …

  She was a little nervous. It had been a year, at least, since she’d seen her dad, and a while before that. He hadn’t called at all when she lived with the Hickmans. Maybe he didn’t know she was there. She never told him.

  When Richie first started coming around, Ben used to get really angry and say he was going to move in with their dad – which was an empty effing promise, and everyone knew it. Even Mouse, who was just a toddler.

  Their dad couldn’t stand having them even for a few days. He used to pick them up from their mom’s house, then drop them off at his mom’s house while he went off and did whatever it was that he did on the weekend. (Presumably, lots and lots of marijuana.)

  Park cracked up when he saw Eleanor’s tie. That was even better than making him smile.

  ‘I didn’t know we were getting dressed up,’ he said when she sat down next to him.

  ‘I’m expecting you to take me someplace nice,’ she said softly.

  ‘I will …’ he said. He took the tie in both hands and straightened it. ‘Someday.’

  He was a lot more likely to say stuff like that on the way to school than he was on the way home. Sometimes she wondered if he was fully awake.

  He turned practically sideways in his seat. ‘So you’re leaving right after school?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you’ll call me as soon as you get there …’

  ‘No, I’ll call you as soon as the kid settles down. I really do have to babysit.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you a lot of personal questions,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I have a list.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of your list.’

  ‘It’s extremely long,’ he said, ‘and extremely personal.’

  ‘I hope you’re not expecting answers …’

  He sat back in the seat and looked over at her. ‘I wish you’d go away,’ he whispered, ‘so that we could finally talk.’

  Eleanor stood on the front steps after school. She’d hoped to catch Park before he got on the bus, but she must have missed him.

  She wasn’t sure what kind of car to watch for; her dad was always buying classic cars, then selling them when money got tight.

  She was starting to worry that he wasn’t coming at all – he could’ve gone to the wrong high school or changed his mind – when he honked for her.

  He pulled up in an old Karmann Ghia convertible. It looked like the car James Dean died in. Her dad’s arm was hanging over the door, holding a cigarette. ‘Eleanor!’ he shouted.

  She walked to the car and got in. There weren’t any seat belts.

  ‘Is that all you brought?’ he asked, looking at her school bag.

  ‘It’s just one night.’ She shrugged.

  ‘All right,’ he said, backing out of the parking space too fast. She’d forgotten what a crappy driver he was. He did everything too fast and one-handed.

  Eleanor braced herself on the dashboard. It was cold out, and once they were driving, it got colder. ‘Can we put the top up?’ she shouted.

  ‘Haven’t fixed it yet,’ her dad said, and laughed.

  He still lived in the same duplex he’d lived in since her parents split up. It was solid and brick, and about a ten-minute drive from Eleanor’s school.

  When they got inside, he took a better look at her.

  ‘Is that what all the cool kids are wearing these days?’ he asked. She looked down at her giant white shirt, her fat paisley tie and her half-dead purple corduroys.

  ‘Yup,’ she said flatly. ‘This is pretty much our uniform.’

  Her dad’s girlfriend – fiancée – Donna, didn’t get off work until five, and after that she had to pick her kid up from daycare. In the meantime, Eleanor and her dad sat on the couch and watched ESPN.

  He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and sipped Scotch out of a short glass. Every once in a while the phone would ring, and he’d have a long, laughy conversation with somebody about a car or a deal or a bet. You’d think that every single person who called was his best friend in the whole world. Her dad had baby blond hair and a round, boyish face. When he smiled, which was constantly, his whole face lit up like a billboard. If Eleanor paid too much attention, she hated him.

  His duplex had changed since the last time she’d been here, and it was more than just the box of Fisher Price toys in the living room and the makeup in the bathroom.

  When they’d first started visiting him here – after the divorce, but before Richie – their dad’s duplex had been a bare-bones bachelor pad. He didn’t even have enough bowls for them all to have soup. He’d served Eleanor clam chowder once in a highball glass. And he only had two towels. ‘One wet,’ he’d said, ‘one dry.’

  Now Eleanor fixated on all the small luxuries strewn and tucked around the house. Packs of cigarettes, newspapers, magazines … Brand-name cereal and quilted toilet paper. His refrigerator was full of things you tossed into the cart without thinking about it just because they sounded good. Custard-style yogurt. Grapefruit juice. Little round cheeses individually wrapped in red wax.

  She couldn’t wait for her dad to leave so that she could start eating everything. There were stacks of Coca-Cola cans in the pantry. She was going to drink Coke like water all night, she might even wash her face with it. And she was going to order a pizza. Unless the pizza came out of her babysitting money. (That would be just like her dad. He’d take you to the cleaners with fine print.) Eleanor didn’t care if eating all his food pissed him off or if it freaked out Donna. She might never see either of them again anyway.

  Now she wished she had brought an overnight bag. She could have snuck home cans of Chef Boyardee and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for the little kids. She would have felt like Santa Claus when she cam
e home …

  She didn’t want to think about the little kids right now. Or Christmas.

  She tried to turn the station to MTV, but her dad frowned at her. He was on the phone again.

  ‘Can I listen to records?’ she whispered.

  He nodded.

  She had an old mix tape in her pocket, and she was going to dub over it to make a tape for Park. But there was a whole packet of empty Maxell tapes sitting on her dad’s stereo. Eleanor held a cassette up to her dad, and he nodded, flicking his cigarette into an ashtray shaped like a naked African woman.

  Eleanor sat down in front of the crates full of record albums.

  These used to be both of her parents’ records, not just his. Her mom must not have wanted any of them. Or maybe her dad just took them without asking.

  Her mom had loved this Bonnie Raitt album. Eleanor wondered if her dad ever listened to it.

  She felt seven years old, flipping through their records.

  Before she was allowed to take the albums out of their sleeves, Eleanor used to lay them out on the floor and stare at the artwork. When she was old enough, her dad taught her how to dust the records with a wood-handled velvet brush.

  She could remember her mother lighting incense and putting on her favorite records – Judee Sill and Judy Collins and Crosby, Stills and Nash – while she cleaned the house.

  She could remember her dad putting on records – Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple and Jethro Tull – when his friends came over and stayed late into the night.

  Eleanor could remember lying on her stomach on an old Persian rug, drinking grape juice out of a jelly jar, being extra quiet because her baby brother was asleep in the next room – and studying each record, one by one. Turning their names over and over in her mouth. Cream. Vanilla Fudge. Canned Heat.

  The records smelled exactly like they always had. Like her dad’s bedroom. Like Richie’s coat. Like pot, Eleanor realized. Duh. She flipped through the records more matter-of-factly now, on a mission. Looking for Rubber Soul and Revolver.

  Sometimes it seemed as if she would never be able to give Park anything like what he’d given her. It was like he dumped all this treasure on her every morning without even thinking about it, without any sense of what it was worth.

  She couldn’t repay him. She couldn’t even appropriately thank him. How can you thank someone for The Cure? Or the X-Men? Sometimes it felt like she’d always be in his debt.