Eleanor & Park

by Rainbow Rowell

And she was dressed like … like she wanted people to look at her. Or maybe like she didn’t get what a mess she was.

She reminded Park of a scarecrow or one of the trouble dolls his mom kept on her dresser. Like something that wouldn’t survive in the wild.

The girl sat down. She didn’t say anything—thank God, she didn’t thank him—and she left six inches of space on the seat between them.

He’d have to switch seats. That was the only answer. But switch to what seat? He didn’t want to force himself on somebody else.

And he almost hated to think about leaving the weird new girl at the back of the bus by herself. He hated himself for thinking like this.

Where are you manners? she’d say. Is that any way to treat somebody who’s down on her luck?

When she showed up in his English class that afternoon, it felt like she was there to haunt him.…

Park couldn’t think of a way to get rid of her on the bus. Or a way to get rid of himself. So he put his headphones on

You’d look at Eleanor’s mom and think she must be carved into the prow of a Viking ship somewhere or maybe painted on the side of a plane.… Eleanor looked a lot like her. But not enough. Eleanor looked like her mother through a fish tank.

Where her mother was finely drawn, Eleanor was smudged.

Sometimes she looked at his shoes. He had cool shoes. And sometimes she looked to see what he was reading.… Always comic books.

It felt wrong to sit next to somebody every day and not talk to her. Even if she was weird.

Park braced himself every morning before she got on the bus, but you couldn’t brace yourself enough for the sight of her.

She was reading his comics. At first Park thought he was imagining it. He kept getting this feeling that she was looking at him, but whenever he looked over at her, her face was down.

Park didn’t say anything. He just held his comics open wider and turned the pages more slowly.

She recited it like it was a living thing. Like something she was letting out. You couldn’t look away from her as long as she was talking. (Even more than Park’s usual not being able to look away from her.)

He even looked up at Eleanor sometimes before he turned the page, like he was that polite.

It made Eleanor wish she could sit next to him all day long.

When she got to their seat, he was looking out the window. She handed him the comic, and he took it.

And when she handed it back to him the next morning, she always acted as if she were handing him something fragile. Something precious.

“So,” he said, before he knew what to say next. “You like the Smiths?”

That night, while he did his homework, Park made a tape with all his favorite Smiths songs,

Their mother shrieked, two rooms away, and they all five jumped together.

When her alarm went off the next morning, Eleanor couldn’t remember having fallen to sleep. She couldn’t remember when the crying had stopped.

When Park got on the bus, he’d set the comics and Smiths tape on the seat next to him, so they’d just be waiting for her.

He slid the new tape in, pressed Play, then—carefully—put the headphones over her hair. He was so careful, he didn’t even touch her.

They got off the bus together and stayed together.

“Well,” he said, looking down the hall, “now you’ve heard the Smiths.” And she … Eleanor laughed.

if she didn’t know already that she liked that stupid, effing Asian kid, she knew it now.

all Eleanor could think about was seeing Park.

she had Park’s songs in her head—and in her chest, somehow.

“I just want to break that song into pieces,” she said, “and love them all to death.”

He emptied all his handheld video games and Josh’s remote control cars, and called his grandma to tell her that all he wanted for his birthday in November was AA batteries.

So far, they hadn’t stopped talking. Like, literally. They talked every second they were sitting next to each other.

“Have you read it?” she asked. He shook his head. “I thought we could … together.”

When they got to the last page, all Park wanted to do was sit and talk about it. (All he really wanted to do was sit and talk to Eleanor.)

And wanting to cry just made her angry. Because if she was going to cry about something, it was going to be the fact that her life was complete shit—not because some cool, cute guy didn’t like her like that.

Then he slid the silk and his fingers into her open palm. And Eleanor disintegrated.

Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.

As soon as he touched her, he wondered how he’d gone this long without doing it.

When he touched Eleanor’s hand, he recognized her. He knew.

She’d saved the last two batteries Park had given her so that she could listen to her tape player today when she missed him most.

she had 450 minutes to spend with Park in her head, holding his hand.

couldn’t help but smile, so she smiled at the floor and looked up every few seconds to see whether he was still looking at her. He was.

He wanted to make her smile like that constantly.

He liked her. He missed her.

But there was no one like Park at her old school. There was no one like Park anywhere.

“I don’t like you,” he said. “I need you.”

“I miss you, Eleanor. I want to be with you all the time. You’re the smartest girl I’ve ever met, and the funniest, and everything you do surprises me.

“But I think it’s got as much to do with your hair being red and your hands being soft … and the fact that you smell like homemade birthday cake.”