Songs Eleanor might like.’
Park thought she’d written those awful things on her books herself.
And he’d taken Tina’s side against hers. Tina’s.
She closed her eyes again and remembered the first time that he kissed her … How she’d let her neck bend back, how she’d opened her mouth. How she’d believed him when he said she was special.
Park A week into break, his dad asked Park if he and Eleanor had broken up.
‘Sort of,’ Park said.
‘That’s too bad,’ his dad said.
‘It is?’
‘Well, it must be. You’re acting like a four-year-old lost at Kmart …
Park sighed.
‘Can’t you get her back?’ his dad asked
‘I can’t even get her to talk to me.’
‘It’s too bad you can’t talk to your mother about this. The only way I know how to land a girl is to look sharp in a uniform.’
Eleanor A week into break, Eleanor’s mom woke her up before sunrise.
‘Do you want to walk to the store with me?’
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
‘Come on, I could use the extra hands.’
Her mom walked fast, and she had long legs. Eleanor had to take extra steps just to keep up. ‘It’s cold,’ she said.
‘I told you to wear a hat.’ Her mom had told her to wear socks, too, but they looked ridiculous with Eleanor’s Vans.
It was a forty-minute walk.
When they got to the grocery store, her mom bought them each a day-old cream horn and a cup of twenty-five-cent coffee. Eleanor dumped Coffee-Mate and Sweet’N
Low in hers, and followed her mom to the bargain bin. Her mom had this thing about being the first person to go through all the smashed cereal boxes and dented cans …
Afterward, they walked to the Goodwill, and Eleanor found a stack of old Analog magazines and settled in on the least disgusting couch in the furniture section.
When it was time to go, her mom came up from behind her with an incredibly ugly stocking cap and pulled it over her head.
‘Great,’ Eleanor said, ‘now I have lice.’
She felt better on the way home. (Which was probably the point of this whole field trip.) It was still cold, but the sun was shining, and her mom was humming that Joni Mitchell song about clouds and circuses.
Eleanor
almost
told
her
everything.
About Park and Tina and the bus and the fight, about the place between his grandparents’ house and the RV.
She felt it all right at the back of her throat, like a bomb – or a tiger – sitting on the base of her tongue. Keeping it in made her eyes water.
The plastic shopping bags were cutting into her palms.
Eleanor shook her head and swallowed.
Park Park rode his bike by her house over and over one day until her stepdad’s truck was gone and one of the other kids came outside to play in the snow.
It was the older boy, Park couldn’t remember his name. The kid scuttled up the steps nervously when Park stopped in front of the house.
‘Hey, wait,’ Park said, ‘please, hey … is your sister home?’
‘Maisie?’
‘No, Eleanor …’
‘I’m not telling you,’ the boy said, running into the house.
Park jerked his bike forward and pedaled away.
CHAPTER 32
Eleanor
The box of pineapple arrived on Christmas
Eve.
You’d
have
thought Santa Claus had shown up in person with a bag of toys for each of them.
Maisie and Ben were already fighting over the box. Maisie wanted it for her Barbies. Ben didn’t have anything to put in it, but Eleanor still hoped he’d win.
Ben had just turned twelve, and Richie said he was too old to share a room with girls and babies. Richie had brought home a mattress and put it in the basement, and now Ben had to sleep down there with the dog and Richie’s free weights.
In their old house, Ben wouldn’t even go down to the basement to put clothes in the wash – and that basement had at least been dry and mostly finished.
Ben was scared of mice and bats and spiders and anything that started moving when the lights went out. Richie had already yelled at him, twice, for trying to sleep at the top of the stairs.
The pineapple came with a letter from their uncle and his wife. Eleanor’s mom read it first, and it made her get all teary. ‘Oh, Eleanor,’
she
said
excitedly,
‘Geoff wants you to come up for the summer. He says there’s a program at his university, a camp for gifted high school students …’
Before Eleanor could even think about what that meant – St Paul, a camp where nobody knew her, where nobody was Park – Richie was shooting it down.
‘You can’t send her up to Minnesota by herself.’
‘My brother’s there.’
‘What does he know about teenage girls?’
‘You know I lived with him in high school.’
‘Yeah, and he let you get pregnant …’
Ben was lying solidly on top of the pineapple box, and Maisie was kicking him in the back. They were both shouting.
‘It’s just a fucking box,’ Richie yelled. ‘If I knew that you wanted boxes for Christmas, I would have saved myself some money.’
That
silenced