Authors: Rainbow Rowell
He didn’t ride the bus anymore
because he’d have the whole seat
to himself.
Not that the Impala wasn’t just
as ruined with memories. Some
mornings, if Park got to school
early, he sat in the parking lot with
his head on the steering wheel and
let whatever was left of Eleanor
wash over him until he ran out of
air. Not that school was any better.
She wasn’t at her locker. Or in
class. Mr Stessman said it was
pointless to read
Macbeth
out
loud without Eleanor. ‘Fie, my
Lord, fie,’ he lamented.
She didn’t stay for dinner. She
didn’t lean against him when he
watched TV.
Park spent most nights lying
on his bed because it was the only
place she’d never been.
He lay on his bed and never
turned on the stereo.
Eleanor
She didn’t ride the bus anymore.
She rode to school with her uncle.
He made her go, even though
there were only four weeks left,
and
everybody
was
already
studying for finals.
There weren’t any Asian kids
at her new school. There weren’t
even any black kids.
When her uncle went down to
Omaha, he said she didn’t have to
go. He was gone three days, and
when he came back, he brought
the black trash bag from her
bedroom closet. Eleanor already
had new clothes. And a new
bookcase and a boombox. And a
six-pack of blank cassette tapes.
Park
Eleanor didn’t call that first night.
She hadn’t said that she
would, now that he thought about
it. She hadn’t said that she’d write
either, but Park thought that went
unsaid. He’d thought that was a
given.
After Eleanor got out of the
truck, Park had waited in front of
her uncle’s house.
He was supposed to drive
away as soon as the door opened,
as soon as it was clear that
somebody was home. But he
couldn’t just leave her like that.
He watched the woman who
came to the door give Eleanor a
big hug, and then he watched the
door close behind them. And then
he waited, just in case Eleanor
changed her mind. Just in case she
decided after all that he should
come in.
The door stayed closed. Park
remembered his promise and
drove away.
The sooner I get
home
, he thought,
the sooner I’ll
hear from her again
.
He sent Eleanor a postcard
from
the
first
truck
stop.
‘Welcome to Minnesota, Land of
10,000 Lakes.’
When he got home, his mom ran
to the door to hug him.
‘All right?’ his dad asked.
‘Yeah,’ Park said.
‘How was the truck?’
‘Fine.’
His dad went outside to make
sure.
‘You,’ his mom said, ‘I was so
worried about you.’
‘I’m fine, Mom, just tired.’
‘How’s Eleanor?’ she asked.
‘She okay?’
‘I think so, has she called?’
‘No. Nobody called.’
As soon as his mom would let
go of him, Park went to his room
and wrote Eleanor a letter.
Eleanor
When Aunt Susan opened the
door, Eleanor was already crying.
‘Eleanor,’ Aunt Susan kept
saying.
‘Oh
my
goodness,
Eleanor. What are you doing
here?’
Eleanor tried to tell her that
everything was okay. Which
wasn’t true – she wouldn’t be
there if everything was okay. But
nobody was dead. ‘Nobody’s
dead,’ she said.
‘Oh my God. Geoffrey!’ Aunt
Susan
called.
‘Wait
here,
sweetheart. Geoff …’
Left alone, Eleanor realized
that she shouldn’t have told Park
to leave right away.
She wasn’t ready for him to
leave.
She opened the front door and
ran out to the street. Park was
already gone – she looked both
ways for him.
When she turned around, her
aunt and uncle were standing on
the front porch watching her.
Phone calls. Peppermint tea. Her
aunt and uncle talking in the
kitchen long after she went to bed.
‘Sabrina …’
‘Five of them.’
‘We’ve got to get them out of
there, Geoffrey …’
‘What if she isn’t telling the
truth?’
Eleanor took Park’s photo out
of her back pocket and smoothed
it out on the bedspread. It didn’t
look like him. October was
already a lifetime away. And this
afternoon was another lifetime.
The world was spinning so fast,
she didn’t know where she stood
anymore.
Her aunt had lent her some
pajamas – they wore about the
same size – but Eleanor put Park’s
shirt back on as soon as she got
out of the shower.
It smelled like him. Like his
house, like potpourri. Like soap,
like boy, like happiness.
She fell forward onto the bed,
holding the hole in her stomach.
No one would ever believe
her.
She wrote her mom a letter.
She said everything she’d
wanted to say in the last six
months.
She said she was sorry.
She begged her to think of Ben
and Mouse – and Maisie.
She threatened to call the
police.
Her Aunt Susan gave her a
stamp. ‘They’re in the junk
drawer, Eleanor, take as many as
you need.’
Park
When he got sick of his bedroom,
when there was nothing left in his
life that smelled like vanilla – Park
walked by Eleanor’s house.
Sometimes the truck was
there,
sometimes
it
wasn’t,
sometimes the Rottweiler was
asleep on the porch. But the
broken toys were gone, and there
were never any strawberry-blond
kids playing in the yard.
Josh said that Eleanor’s little
brother had stopped coming to
school. ‘Everybody says they’re
gone. The whole family.’
‘That great news,’ their mother
said. ‘Maybe that pretty mom
wake up to bad situation, you
know? Good for Eleanor.’
Park just nodded.
He wondered if his letters even
got to wherever she was now.
Eleanor
There was a red rotary phone in
the spare bedroom. Her bedroom.
Whenever it rang, Eleanor felt like
picking it up and saying, ‘What is
it, Commissioner Gordon?’
Sometimes, when she was
alone in the house, she took the
phone over to her bed and listened
to the dial tone.
She practiced Park’s number,
her finger sliding across the dial.
Sometimes, after the dial tone
stopped, she pretended he was
whispering in her ear.
‘Have you ever had a boyfriend?’
Dani asked. Dani was in theater
camp, too. They ate lunch
together, sitting on the stage with
their legs dangling in the orchestra
pit.
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
Park wasn’t a boyfriend, he
was a champion.
And they weren’t going to
break up. Or get bored. Or drift
apart. (They weren’t going to
become
another
stupid
high
school romance.) They were just
going to stop.
Eleanor had decided back in
his dad’s truck. She’d decided in
Albert Lea, Minnesota. If they
weren’t going to get married – if it
wasn’t forever – it was only a
matter of time.
They were just going to stop.
Park was never going to love
her more than he did on the day
they said goodbye.
And she couldn’t bear to think
of him loving her less.
Park
When he got sick of himself, Park
went to her old house. Sometimes
the truck was there. Sometimes it
wasn’t. Sometimes, Park stood at
the end of the sidewalk and hated
everything the house stood for.
CHAPTER 56
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, packages that
rattled like loaded cassette tapes.
None of them opened, none of
them read.
‘Dear Park,’ she wrote on a
clean sheet of stationery. ‘Dear
Park,’ she tried to explain.
But the explanations fell apart
in her hands. Everything true was
too hard to write – he was too
much to lose. Everything she felt
for him was too hot to touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wrote, then
crossed it out.
‘It’s just …’ she tried again.
She threw the half-written
letters away. She threw the
unopened envelopes in the bottom
drawer.
‘Dear Park,’ she whispered,
her forehead hanging over the
dresser, ‘just stop.’
Park
His dad said Park needed a
summer job to pay for gas.
Neither of them mentioned
that Park never went anywhere.
Or that he’d started putting
eyeliner on with his thumb.
Blacking out his own eyes.
He
looked
just
wrecked
enough to get a job at Drastic
Plastic. The girl who hired him
had two rows of holes in each ear.
His mom stopped bringing in
the mail. He knew it was because
she hated telling him that nothing
had come for him. Park brought
in the mail himself now every
night when he got home from
work. Every night praying for
rain.
He had an endless supply and
an insatiable appetite for punk
music. ‘I can’t hear myself think
in here,’ his dad said, coming into
Park’s room for the third night in
a row to turn down the stereo.
Duh, Eleanor would have said.
Eleanor didn’t start school in the
fall. Not with Park anyway.
She didn’t celebrate the fact
that juniors don’t have to take
gym. She didn’t say, ‘Unholy
union, Batman,’ when Steve and
Tina eloped over Labor Day.
Park had written her a letter all
about it. He’d told her everything
that happened, and everything that
didn’t, every day since she’d left.
He kept writing her letters
months after he stopped sending
them. On New Year’s Day, he
wrote that he hoped she’d get
everything she ever wished for.
Then he tossed the letter into a
box under his bed.
CHAPTER 57
Park
He’d stopped trying to bring her
back.
She only came back when she
felt like it anyway, in dreams and
lies and broken-down déjà vu.
Like, Park would be driving to
work and he’d see a girl with red
hair standing on the street, and
he’d swear for half an airless
moment that it was her.
Or he’d wake up when it was
still dark, sure that she was
waiting for him outside. Sure that
she needed him.
But he couldn’t summon her.
Sometimes he couldn’t even
remember what she looked like,
even when he was looking at her
picture. (Maybe he’d looked at it
too much.)
He’d stopped trying to bring
her back.
So why did he keep coming
here? To this crappy little house
…
Eleanor wasn’t here, she was
never really here – and she’d been
gone too long. Almost a year now.
Park turned to walk away
from the house, but the little
brown truck whipped too fast into
the driveway, jumping the curb
and nearly clipping him. Park
stopped on the sidewalk and
waited. The driver’s side door
swung open.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe
this
is why I’m here.
Eleanor’s stepdad – Richie –
leaned slowly out of the cab. Park
recognized him from the one time
he’d seen him before, when Park
had brought Eleanor the second
issue
of
Watchmen
, and her
stepdad had answered the door …
The final issue of
Watchmen
came out a few months after
Eleanor left. He wondered if she’d
read it, and whether she thought
Ozymandias was a villain, and