‘That’s what I’m saying, maybe there won’t be one.’
‘Of course there will.’ She put her hands on his chest, so that she could push him away if she had to. ‘I mean … God, of course there will. It’s not like we’re going to get married, Park.’
‘Not now.’
‘Stop.’ She tried to roll her eyes, but it hurt.
‘I’m not proposing,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying
… I love you. And I can’t imagine stopping …’
She shook her head. ‘But you’re twelve.’
‘I’m sixteen …’ he said. ‘Bono was fifteen when he met his wife, and Robert Smith was fourteen …’
‘Romeo, sweet Romeo …’
‘It’s not like that, Eleanor, and you know it.’
Park’s arms were tight around her. All the play-fulness in his voice was gone. ‘There’s no reason to think we’re going to stop loving each other,’
he said. ‘And there’s every reason to think that we won’t.’
I never said I loved you, Eleanor thought.
And even after he kissed her, she kept her hands on his chest.
So. Anyway. Park wanted her to start checking her book covers. Especially after gym class. So now Eleanor waited until almost everybody else had changed and left the locker room, and then she carefully examined her books for anything suspicious.
It was all very clinical.
DeNice and Beebi usually waited with her. It meant that they were late for lunch sometimes, but it also meant that they could all change in relative privacy, which they should have thought of months ago.
There didn’t seem to be anything pervy written on Eleanor’s books today. In fact, Tina had ignored her all through class. Even Tina’s sidekicks (even thuggy Annette) seemed bored with Eleanor.
‘I think they’ve run out of ways to make fun of my hair,’ Eleanor said to DeNice while she looked over her algebra book.
‘They could call you “Ronald McDonald,”’
DeNice said. ‘Have they called you that?’
‘Or “Wendy,”’ Beebi said, lowering her voice and wolfing, ‘Where’s the beef?’
‘Shut up,’ Eleanor said, looking around the locker room. ‘Little pitchers.’
‘They’re
all
gone,’
DeNice
said.
‘Everybody’s gone. They’re all in the cafeteria, eating my Macho Nachos. Hurry up, girl.’
‘You go ahead,’ Eleanor said. ‘Get us a place in line. I still have to change.’
‘All right,’ DeNice said, ‘but stop looking at those books. You said it yourself, there’s nothing there. Come on, Beebi.’
Eleanor started packing up her books. She heard Beebi shout, ‘Where’s the beef?’ from the locker-room door. Dork. Eleanor opened up her locker.
It was empty.
Huh.
She tried the one above it. Nothing. And nothing below. No …
Eleanor started over, opening all the lockers on the wall, then moving on to the next wall, trying not to panic. Maybe they’d just moved her clothes. Ha. Funny. Super-good joke, Tina.
‘What are you doing?’ Mrs Burt asked.
‘Looking for my clothes,’ Eleanor said.
‘You should use the same locker every time, so it’s easy to remember.’
‘No, somebody … I mean, I think somebody took them.’
‘Those little bitches …’ Mrs Burt sighed.
Like she couldn’t imagine a bigger hassle.
Mrs Burt started opening lockers at the other end of the room. Eleanor checked the trash and the showers. Then Mrs Burt called out from the bathroom. ‘Found them!’
Eleanor walked into the bathroom. The floor was wet, and Mrs Burt was standing in a stall.
‘I’ll get a bag,’ Mrs Burt said, pushing past Eleanor.
Eleanor looked down at the toilet. Even though she knew what she was going to see there, it still felt like a wet slap in the face. Her new jeans and her cowboy shirt were in a dark pile in the bowl, and her shoes were crammed under the lip. Somebody had flushed the toilet, and there was water still spilling over the edge. Eleanor watched it run.
‘Here,’ Mrs Burt said, handing Eleanor a yellow Food 4 Less bag. ‘Fish ’em out.’
‘I don’t want them,’ Eleanor said, backing away. She couldn’t wear them anymore anyway.
Everybody would know those were her toilet clothes.
‘Well, you can’t leave them here,’ Mrs Burt said. ‘Fish them out.’ Eleanor stared at her clothes. ‘Come on,’ Mrs Burt said.
Eleanor reached into the toilet and felt tears slipping down her cheeks. Mrs Burt held the bag open. ‘You’ve got to stop letting them get to you, you know,’ she said. ‘You just encourage them.’
Yeah, thanks, Eleanor thought, wringing out her jeans over the toilet. She wanted to wipe her eyes, but her hands were wet.
Mrs Burt handed her the bag. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll write you a pass.’
‘For where?’ Eleanor asked.
‘Your counselor’s office.’
Eleanor took a sharp breath. ‘I can’t walk down the hall like this.’
‘What do you want from me, Eleanor?’ That was obviously a rhetorical question; Mrs Burt wasn’t even looking at her. Eleanor followed her to the coach’s office and waited for the pass.
As soon as she got out to the hallway, the tears came on hard. She couldn’t walk through the school like this – in her gymsuit. In front of boys … And everybody. In front of Tina. God, Tina was probably selling tickets outside the cafeteria. Eleanor couldn’t do it. Not like this.
It wasn’t just that her gymsuit was ugly.
(Polyester. One-piece. Red-and-white stripes with an extra-long white zipper.) It was also extremely tight.
The shorts just barely cleared her underwear, and the fabric was stretched so tight over her chest, the seams were starting to pop under her arms.
She was a tragedy in that gymsuit. A ten-car pileup.
People were already showing up for the next gym class. A few freshman girls looked at Eleanor, then started whispering. Her bag was dripping.
Before she could think it through, Eleanor turned the wrong way down the hall and headed for the door to the football field. She acted like she was supposed to be walking out of the building in the middle of the day, like she was on some kind of weeping/half-dressed/drippy-bag mission.
The door clicked locked behind her, and Eleanor crouched against it, letting herself fall apart. Just for a minute. God. God.
There was a trash can sitting right outside the door, and she got up and hurled the Food 4 Less bag into it. She wiped her eyes with her gymsuit.
Okay, she told herself, taking a deep breath, get it together. Don’t let them get to you. Those were her new jeans in the trash. And her favorite shoes. Her Vans. She walked over to the trash and shook her head, reaching down for the bag.
Fuck you, Tina. Fuck you to the moon.
She took another deep breath and started walking.
There were no classrooms at this end of the school, so at least no one was watching her. She stuck close to the building, and when she turned the corner, she walked under a row of windows.
She thought about walking right home, but that might be worse. It’d definitely be longer.
If she could just get to the front door, the counselor’s offices were right inside. Mrs Dunne would help her. Mrs Dunne wouldn’t tell her not to cry.
The security guard at the front door acted like girls were wandering in and out in their gym clothes all day long. He glanced at Eleanor’s pass and waved her on.
Almost there, Eleanor thought. Don’t run, just a few more doors …
She really should have expected Park to walk through one of them.
Ever since the first day they’d met, Eleanor was always seeing him in unexpected places. It was like their lives were overlapping lines, like they had their own gravity. Usually, that serendipity felt like the nicest thing the universe had ever done for her.
Park walked out of a door on the opposite side of the hallway and stopped as soon as he saw her. She tried to look away, but she didn’t do it soon enough. Park’s face turned red. He stared at her. She pulled down her shorts and stumbled forward, running the last few steps to the counselors’ offices.
‘You don’t have to go back there,’ her mom said after Eleanor had told her the whole story. (Almost the whole story.)
Eleanor thought for a moment about what she’d do if she didn’t go back to school. Stay here all day? And then what?
‘It’s okay,’ she said. Mrs Dunne had driven Eleanor home herself, and she’d promised to bring a padlock for her gym locker.
Eleanor’s mom dumped the yellow plastic bag into the bathtub and started rinsing out the clothes, wrinkling her nose, even though they didn’t smell.
‘Girls are so mean …’ she said. ‘You’re lucky to have one friend you can trust.’
Eleanor must have looked confused.
‘Tina,’ her mom said. ‘You’re lucky to have Tina.’
Eleanor nodded.
She stayed home that night. Even though it was Friday, and Park’s family always watched movies and made popcorn in the air popper on Fridays.
She couldn’t face him.
All she’d see was the look on his face in the hallway. She’d feel like she was still standing there in her gymsuit.
CHAPTER 41
Park
Park went to bed early. His mom kept bothering him about Eleanor. ‘Where’s Eleanor tonight?’
‘She running late?’ ‘You get in fight?’
Every time she said Eleanor’s name, Park felt his face go hot.
‘I can tell that something wrong,’ his mom said at dinner. ‘Did you get in fight? Did you break up again?’
‘No,’ Park said. ‘I think maybe she went home sick. She wasn’t on the bus.’
‘I have a girlfriend now,’ Josh said, ‘can she start coming over?’
‘No girlfriend,’ their mom said, ‘too young.’
‘I’m almost thirteen!’
‘Sure,’ their dad said, ‘your girlfriend can come over. If you’re willing to give up your Nintendo.’
‘What?’ Josh was stricken. ‘Why?’
‘Because I said so,’ his dad said. ‘Is it a deal?’
‘No! No way,’ Josh said. ‘Does Park have to give up Nintendo?’
‘Yep. Is that okay with you, Park?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’m like Billy Jack,’ their dad said, ‘a warri-or and a wise-man.’
It wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was the most his dad had said to Park in weeks.
Maybe his dad had been bracing for the entire neighborhood to swarm the house with torches and pitchforks as soon as they saw Park with eyeliner …
But almost nobody cared. Not even his grandparents. (His grandma said he looked like Rudolph Valentino, and he heard his grandpa tell his dad, ‘You should have seen what kids looked like while you were in Korea.’)
‘I’m going to bed,’ Park said, standing up from the table. ‘I don’t feel well either.’
‘So if Park doesn’t get to play Nintendo anymore,’ Josh asked, ‘can I put it in my room?’
‘Park can play Nintendo whenever he wants,’
their dad said.
‘God,’ Josh said, ‘everything you guys do is unfair.’
Park turned off his light and crawled onto his bed. He lay on his back because he didn’t trust his front. Or his hands, actually. Or his brain.
After he saw Eleanor today, it hadn’t oc-curred to him, not for at least an hour, to wonder why she was walking down the hall in her gymsuit. And it took him another hour to realize he should have said something to her. He could have said, ‘Hey’ or ‘What’s going on?’ or ‘Are you OK?’ Instead he’d stared at her like he’d never seen her before.
He felt like he’d never seen her before.
It’s not like he hadn’t thought about it (a lot)
– Eleanor under her clothes. But he could never fill in any of the details. The only women he could actually picture nak*d were the women in the magazines his dad every once in a while remembered to hide under his bed.
Magazines like that made Eleanor freak. Just mention Hugh Hefner, and she’d be off for half an hour on prostitution and slavery and the Fall of Rome. Park hadn’t told her about his dad’s twenty-year-old Playboy s, but he hadn’t touched them since he met her.
He could fill in some of the details now. He could picture Eleanor. He couldn’t stop picturing her. Why hadn’t he ever noticed how tight those gymsuits were? And how short …
And why hadn’t he expected her to be so grown up? To have so much negative space?
He closed his eyes and saw her again. A stack of freckled heart shapes, a perfectly made Dairy Queen ice cream cone. Like Betty Boop drawn with a heavy hand.
Hey, he thought. What’s going on? Are you okay?
She must not be. She hadn’t been on the bus on the way home. She hadn’t come over after school. And tomorrow was Saturday. What if he didn’t see her all weekend?
How could he even look at her now? He wouldn’t be able to. Not without stripping her down to her gymsuit. Without thinking about that long white zipper.
Jesus.
CHAPTER 42
Park
His family was going to the boat show the next day, then out to lunch, and maybe to the mall …
Park took forever to eat his breakfast and take a shower.
‘Come on, Park,’ his dad said sharply, ‘get dressed and put your makeup on.’
Like he’d wear makeup to the boat show.
‘Come on,’ his mom said, checking her lipstick in the hall mirror, ‘you know your dad hate crowds.’