Eleanor & Park

Maybe he was Filipino. Was that in Asia? Probably. Asia’s out-of-control huge.

Eleanor had only known one Asian person in her life – Paul, who was in her math class at her old school. Paul was Chinese. His parents had moved to Omaha to get away from the Chinese government. (Which seemed like an extreme choice. Like they’d looked at the globe and said, ‘Yup. That’s as far away as possible.’)

Paul was the one who’d taught Eleanor to say ‘Asian’ and not ‘oriental.’ ‘Oriental’s for food,’

he’d said.

‘Whatever,

LaChoy

Boy,’

she’d said back.

Eleanor couldn’t figure out what an Asian person was doing in the Flats anyway. Everybody else here was seriously white.

Like, white by choice. Eleanor had never even heard the n-word said out loud until she moved here, but the kids on her bus used it like it was the only way to indicate that somebody was black. Like there was no other word or phrase that would work.

Eleanor stayed away from the n-word even in her head. It was bad enough that, thanks to Richie’s influence, she went around mentally calling everyone she met a ‘motherfucker.’ (Irony.) There were three or four other Asian kids at their school.

Cousins. One of them had written an essay about being a refugee from Laos.

And then there was Ol’ Green Eyes.

Who she was apparently going to tell her whole life story to.

Maybe on the way home, she’d tell him that she didn’t have a phone or a washing machine or a toothbrush.

That last thing, she was thinking

about

telling

her

counselor. Mrs Dunne had sat Eleanor down on her first day of school and given a little speech about how Eleanor could tell her anything. All through the speech, she kept squeezing the fattest part of Eleanor’s arm.

If Eleanor told Mrs Dunne everything – about Richie, her mom, everything – Eleanor didn’t know what would happen.

But if she told Mrs Dunne about the toothbrush … maybe Mrs Dunne would just get her one.

And then Eleanor could stop sneaking into the bathroom after lunch to rub her teeth with salt.

(She’d seen that in a Western once. It probably didn’t even work.)

The bell rang. 10:12.

Just two more periods until English. She wondered if he’d talk to her in class. Maybe that’s what they did now.

She could still hear that voice in her head – not his – the singer’s. From the Smiths. You could hear his accent, even when he was singing. He sounded like he was crying out.

‘I am the sun …

And the air …’

Eleanor didn’t notice at first how un-horrible everyone was being in gym. (Her head was still on the bus.) They were playing volleyball today, and once Tina said, ‘Your serve, bitch,’ but that was it, and that was practically jocular, all-things-Tina considered.

When Eleanor got to the locker room, she realized why Tina had been so low-key; she was just waiting. Tina and her friends – and the black girls, too, everybody wanted a piece of this – were standing at the end of Eleanor’s row, waiting for her to walk to her locker.

It was covered with Kotex pads. A whole box, it looked like.

At first Eleanor thought the pads were actually bloody, but when she got closer she could see that it was just red magic marker.

Somebody had written ‘Raghead’

and ‘Big Red’ on a few of the pads, but they were the expensive kind, so the ink was already starting to absorb.

If Eleanor’s clothes weren’t in that locker, if she was wearing anything other than this gymsuit, she would have just walked away.

Instead she walked past the girls, with her chin as high as she could manage, and methodically peeled the pads off her locker.

There were even some inside, stuck to her clothes.

Eleanor cried a little bit, she couldn’t help it, but she kept her back to everybody so there wouldn’t be a show. It was all over in a few minutes anyway because nobody wanted to be late to lunch. Most of the girls still had to change and redo their hair.

After everyone else walked away, two black girls stayed. They walked over to Eleanor and started pulling pads off the wall. ‘Ain’t no thing,’ one of the girls whispered, crumpling a pad into a ball. Her name was DeNice, and she looked too young to be in the tenth grade.

She was small, and she wore her hair in two braided pigtails.

Eleanor shook her head, but didn’t say anything.

‘Those girls are trifling,’

DeNice

said.

‘They’re

so

insignificant, God can hardly see them.’

‘Hmm-hmm,’ the other girl agreed. Eleanor was pretty sure her name was Beebi. Beebi was what Eleanor’s mom would call ‘a big girl.’ Much bigger than Eleanor. Beebi’s gymsuit was even a different color than everybody else’s, like they’d had to special order it for her. Which made Eleanor feel bad about feeling so bad about her own body … And which also made her wonder why she was the official fat girl in the class.

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