Eleanor put her hand to her head self-consciously.
‘I have something to show you,’ her mom said, covering the soup, ‘but I didn’t want to do it in front of the little kids. Here, come on.’
Eleanor followed her into the kids’ bedroom. Her mom opened the closet and took out a stack of towels and a laundry basket full of socks.
‘I couldn’t bring all your things when we moved,’ she said.
‘Obviously we don’t have as much room here as we had in the old house …’ She reached into the closet and pulled out a black plastic garbage bag. ‘But I packed as much as I could.’
She handed Eleanor the bag and said, ‘I’m sorry about the rest.’
Eleanor had assumed that Richie threw all her stuff in the trash a year ago, ten seconds after he’d kicked her out. She took the bag in her arms. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’
Her mom reached out and touched Eleanor’s shoulder, just for a second. ‘The little kids will be home in twenty minutes or so,’
she said, ‘and we’ll eat dinner around 4:30. I like to have everything settled before Richie comes home.’
Eleanor nodded. She opened the bag as soon as her mom left the room. She wanted to see what was still hers …
The first thing she recognized were the paper dolls. They were loose in the bag and wrinkled; a few were marked with crayons. It had been years since Eleanor had played with them, but she was still happy to see them there. She pressed them flat and laid them in a pile.
Under the dolls were books, a dozen or so that her mother must have grabbed at random; she wouldn’t have known which were Eleanor’s favorites. Eleanor was glad to see Garp and Watership Down. It sucked that Oliver’s Story had made the cut, but Love Story hadn’t. And Little Men was there, but not Little Women or Jo’s Boys.
There was a bunch more papers in the bag. She’d had a file cabinet in her old room, and it looked like her mom had grabbed most of the folders. Eleanor tried to get everything into a neat stack, all the report cards and school pictures and letters from pen pals.
She wondered where the rest of the stuff from the old house had ended up. Not just her stuff, but
everybody’s.
Like
the
furniture and the toys, and all of her mom’s plants and paintings.
Her grandma’s Danish wedding plates … The little red ‘Uff da!’
horse that always used to hang above the sink.
Maybe it was packed away somewhere. Maybe her mom was hoping the cave-troll house was just temporary.
Eleanor was still hoping that Richie was just temporary.
At the bottom of the black trash bag was a box. Her heart jumped a little when she saw it.
Her uncle in Minnesota used to send her family a Fruit of the Month Club membership every Christmas, and Eleanor and her brothers and sister would always fight over the boxes that the fruit came in. It was stupid, but they were good boxes – solid, with nice lids. This one was a grapefruit box, soft from wear at the edges.
Eleanor opened it carefully.
Nothing inside had been touched.
There was her stationery, her colored
pencils
and
her
Prismacolor
markers
(another
Christmas
present
from
her
uncle). There was a stack of promotional cards from the mall that still smelled like expensive perfumes. And there was her Walkman.
Untouched.
Un—
batteried, too, but nevertheless, there. And where there was a Walkman,
there
was
the
possibility of music.
Eleanor let her head fall over the box. It smelled like Chanel No.
5 and pencil shavings. She sighed.
There wasn’t anything to do with her recovered belongings once she’d sorted through them – there wasn’t even room in the dresser for Eleanor’s clothes. So she set aside the box and the books,
and
carefully
put
everything else back in the garbage bag. Then she pushed the bag back as far as she could on the highest shelf in the closet, behind
the
towels
and
a
humidifier.
She climbed onto her bunk and found a scraggly old cat napping there. ‘Shoo,’ Eleanor said, shoving him. The cat leaped to the floor and out the bedroom door.
CHAPTER 5
Park
Mr Stessman was making them all memorize a poem, whatever poem they wanted. Well, whatever poem they picked.
‘You’re
going
to
forget
everything else I teach you,’ Mr Stessman
said,
petting
his
mustache. ‘Everything. Maybe you’ll remember that Beowulf fought a monster. Maybe you’ll remember that “To be or not to be” is Hamlet, not Macbeth …
‘But everything else? Forget about it.’
He was slowly walking up and down each aisle. Mr Stessman loved this kind of stuff – theater in the round. He stopped next to Park’s desk and leaned in casually with his hand on the back of Park’s
chair.
Park
stopped
drawing and sat up straight. He couldn’t draw anyway.