Park didn’t know if Eleanor even had any girl’s clothes – and he didn’t care. He kind of liked that she didn’t. Maybe that was another gay thing about him, but he didn’t think so, because Eleanor wouldn’t look like a guy even if you cut off her hair and gave her a mustache. All the men’s clothes she wore just called attention to how much of a girl she was.
He wasn’t going to tell her about his mom. And he wasn’t going to tell her to smile. But if she bit him again, he was going to lose something.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, when she was still smiling in English class.
‘Ask anybody,’ she said.
Eleanor In Spanish class today, they were supposed to write a letter in Spanish to a friend. Se?ora Bouzon put on an episode of Qué Pasa, USA? while they worked on it.
Eleanor tried to write a letter to Park. She didn’t get very far.
Estimado Se?or Sheridan, Mi gusta comer su cara.
Besos,
Leonor
For the rest of the day, whenever Eleanor felt nervous or scared, she told herself to be happy instead.
(It didn’t really make her feel better, but it kept her from feeling worse …) She told herself that Park’s family must be decent people because they’d raised a person like Park. Never mind that this principle didn’t hold true in her own family. It wasn’t like she had to face his family alone. Park would be there. That was the whole point. Was there any place so horrible that she wouldn’t go there to be with Park?
She saw him after seventh hour in a place she’d never seen him before, carrying a microscope down the hall on the third floor. It was at least twice as nice as seeing him somewhere she expected him to be.
CHAPTER 28
Park
He called his mom during lunch to tell her that Eleanor was coming over. His counselor let him use her phone. (Mrs Dunne loved the opportunity to be good in a crisis, so all Park had to do was imply that it was an emergency.) ‘I just wanted to tell you that Eleanor is coming over after school,’ he told his mom. ‘Dad said it was all right.’
‘Fine,’ his mother said, not even pretending that she was okay with it. ‘Is she staying for dinner?’
‘I don’t know,’ Park said.
‘Probably not.’
His mother sighed.
‘You have to be nice to her, you know.’
‘I’m nice to everybody,’ his mom said. ‘You know that.’
He could tell Eleanor was nervous on the bus. She was quiet, and she kept running her bottom lip through her teeth, making it go white, so that you could see that her lips had freckles, too.
Park tried to get her to talk about Watchmen; they’d just read the fourth chapter. ‘What do you think of the pirate story?’ he asked.
‘What pirate story?’
‘You
know,
there’s
that
character who’s always reading a comic book about pirates, the story within the story, the pirate story.’
‘I always skip that part,’ she said.
‘You skip it?’
‘It’s boring. Blah, blah, blah – pirates! – blah, blah, blah.’
‘Nothing Alan Moore writes can be blah-blah-blahed,’ Park said solemnly.
Eleanor shrugged and bit her lip.
‘I’m beginning to think you shouldn’t have started reading comics
with
a
book
that
completely deconstructs the last fifty years of the genre,’ he said.
‘All I’m hearing is blah, blah, blah, genre.’
The
bus
stopped
near
Eleanor’s house. She looked at him.
‘We may as well get off at my stop,’ Park said, ‘right?’
Eleanor shrugged again.
They got off at his stop, along with Steve and Tina and most of the people who sat at the back of the bus. All the back-of-the-bus kids hung out in Steve’s garage when he wasn’t at work, even in winter.
Park
and
Eleanor
trailed
behind them.
‘I’m sorry I look so stupid today,’ she said.
‘You look like you always do,’
he said. Her bag was hanging at the end of her arm. He tried to take it, but she pulled away.
‘I always look stupid?’
‘That’s not what I meant …’
‘It’s what you said,’ she muttered.
He wanted to ask her not to be mad right now. Like, anytime but now. She could be mad at him for no reason all day tomorrow, if she wanted to.
‘You really know how to make a girl feel special,’ Eleanor said.
‘I’ve never pretended to know anything
about
girls,’
he
answered.
‘That’s not what I heard,’ she said. ‘I heard you were allowed to have girl- zzz in your room …’
‘They were there,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t learn anything.’
They both stopped on his porch. He took her bag from her and tried not to look nervous.
Eleanor was looking down the walk, like she might bolt.
‘I meant that you don’t look any different than you usually look,’ he said softly, just in case his mom was standing on the other side of the door. ‘And you always look nice.’
‘I never look nice,’ she said.
Like he was an idiot.
‘I like the way you look,’ he said. It came out more like an argument than a compliment.
‘That doesn’t mean it’s nice.’
She was whispering, too.
‘Fine then, you look like a hobo.’
‘A hobo?’ Her eyes lit.
‘Yeah, a gypsy hobo,’ he said.
‘You look like you just joined the cast of Godspell.’
‘I don’t even know what that is.’