It was nice to have the most popular girl in the neighborhood offering herself to him every now and then.

Park rolled onto his stomach and pushed his face into his pillow. He’d thought he was over caring what people thought about him. He’d thought that loving Eleanor proved that.

But he kept finding new pockets of shallow inside himself. He kept finding new ways to betray her.

CHAPTER 31

Eleanor

There was just one more day of school left before Christmas vacation. Eleanor didn’t go. She told her mother she was sick.

Park

When he got to the bus stop Friday morning, Park was ready to apologize. But Eleanor didn’t show up. Which made him feel a lot less like apologizing …

‘What now?’ he said in the direction of her house. Were they supposed to break up over this?

Was she going to go three weeks without talking to him?

He knew it wasn’t Eleanor’s fault that she didn’t have a phone, and that her house was the Fortress of Solitude, but … Jesus. It made it so easy for her to cut herself off whenever she felt like it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at her house, too loudly.

A dog started barking in the yard next to him.

‘Sorry,’ Park muttered to the dog.

The bus turned the corner and heaved to a stop. Park could see Tina in the back window, watching him.

I’m sorry, he thought, not looking back again.

Eleanor

With Richie at work all day, she didn’t have to stay in her room, but she did anyway. Like a dog who won’t leave its kennel.

She ran out of batteries. She ran out of things to read …

She lay in bed so much, she actually felt dizzy when she got up Sunday afternoon to eat dinner. (Her mom said Eleanor had to come out of her crypt if she was hungry.) Eleanor sat on the living room floor next to Mouse.

‘Why are you crying?’ he asked. He was holding a bean burrito and it was dripping onto his T-shirt and the floor.

‘I’m not,’ she said.

Mouse held the burrito over his head and tried to catch the leak with his mouth. ‘Yeh oo are.’

Maisie looked up at Eleanor, then back at the TV.

‘Is it because you hate Dad?’ Mouse asked.

‘Yes,’ Eleanor said.

‘ Eleanor,’ her mother said, walking out of the kitchen.

‘No,’ Eleanor said to Mouse, shaking her head. ‘I told you, I’m not crying.’ She went back to her room and climbed into bed, rubbing her face in the pillow.

Nobody followed her to see what was wrong.

Maybe her mom realized that she’d pretty much forfeited the right to ask questions for all eternity when she dumped Eleanor at somebody’s house for a year.

Or maybe just she didn’t care.

Eleanor rolled onto her back and picked up her dead Walkman. She took out the tape and held it up to the light, turning the reels with her fingertip and looking at Park’s handwriting on the label.

‘Never mind the Sex Pistols … 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 shoot-ing 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 f**king box,’ Richie yelled. ‘If I knew that you wanted boxes for Christmas, I would have saved myself some money.’

That silenced everyone. Nobody had expected Richie to buy Christmas presents. ‘I should make you wait until Christmas morning,’ he said,

‘but I’m sick of watching this.’

He put his cigarette in his mouth and put his boots on. They heard the truck door open, and then Richie was back with a big ShopKo bag. He started throwing boxes onto the floor.

‘Mouse,’ he said. A remote-control monster truck.

‘Ben.’ A big racetrack.

‘Maisie … cause you like to sing.’ Richie pulled out a keyboard, an actual electronic keyboard. It was probably some off-brand, but still.

He didn’t drop it on the floor. He handed it to Maisie.

‘And Little Richie … where’s Little Richie?’

‘He’s taking a nap,’ their mom said.

Richie shrugged and threw a teddy bear onto the floor. The bag was empty, and Eleanor felt cold with relief.

Then Richie took out his wallet and pulled out a bill.

‘Here, Eleanor, come get it. Buy yourself some normal clothes.’

She looked at her mother, standing blank-faced in the kitchen doorway, then walked over to take the money. It was a fifty.

‘Thank you.’ Eleanor said it as flatly as possible. Then she went to sit on the couch. The little kids were all opening their presents.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Mouse kept saying. ‘Oh man, thanks, Dad!’

‘Yeah,’ Richie said, ‘you’re welcome. You’re welcome. That’s a real Christmas.’

Richie stayed home all day to watch the little kids play with their toys. Maybe the Broken Rail wasn’t open on Christmas Eve. Eleanor went to her bedroom to get away from him. (And to get away from Maisie’s new keyboard.) She was tired of missing Park. She just wanted to see him. Even if he did think she was a perverted psychopath who wrote herself badly punctuated threats. Even if he had spent his formative years tongue-kissing Tina. None of it was vile enough to make Eleanor stop wanting him. (How vile would that have to be? she wondered.)

Maybe she should just go over to his house right now and pretend that nothing had happened.

Maybe she would, if it wasn’t Christmas Eve.

Why didn’t Jesus ever work with her?

Later, her mom came in to say they were going to the store to buy groceries for Christmas dinner.

‘I’ll come out and watch the kids,’ Eleanor said.

‘Richie wants us all to go,’ her mom said, smiling, ‘as a family.’

‘But, Mom …’

‘None of this, Eleanor,’ she said softly,

‘we’re having a good day.’

‘Mom, come on – he’s been drinking all day.’

Her mom shook her head. ‘Richie’s fine, he never has a problem with driving.’

‘I don’t think the fact that he drinks and drives all the time is a very good argument.’

‘You just can’t stand this, can you?’ her mom said quietly, angrily, stepping into the room and shutting the door behind her.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know that you’re going through …’ She looked at Eleanor, then shook her head again. ‘ Something. But everyone else in this house is having a great day. Everyone else in this house deserves a great day.

‘We’re a family, Eleanor. All of us. Richie, too. And I’m sorry that makes you so unhappy.

I’m sorry that things aren’t perfect here all the time for you … But this is our life now. You can’t keep throwing tantrums about it, you can’t keep trying to undermine this family – I won’t let you.’

Eleanor clenched her jaw.

‘I have to think of everyone,’ her mom said.

‘Do you understand? I have to think of myself. In a few years, you’ll be on your own, but Richie is my husband.’

She almost sounded sane, Eleanor thought. If you didn’t know that she was acting rational on the far side of crazy.

‘Get up,’ her mother said, ‘and put on your coat.’

Eleanor put on her coat and her new hat and followed her brothers and sisters into the back of the Isuzu.

When they got to Food 4 Less, Richie waited in the truck while everybody else went in. As soon as they were inside, Eleanor put the wadded-up fifty in her mother’s hand.

Her mother didn’t thank her.

Park

They were shopping for Christmas dinner, and it was taking forever because it always made Park’s mom nervous to cook for his grandmother.

‘What kind of stuffing Grandma like?’ his mom asked.

‘Pepperidge Farm,’ Park said, standing on the back of the cart and popping a wheelie.

‘Pepperidge Farm original? Or Pepperidge Farm cornbread?’

‘I don’t know, original.’

‘If you don’t know, don’t tell me … Look,’

she said, looking over his shoulder. ‘There’s your Eleanor.’

El-la-no.

Park whipped around and saw Eleanor standing by the meat case with all four of her redheaded brothers and sisters. (Except none of them had red hair standing next to Eleanor. Nobody did.)

A woman walked up to the cart and set down a turkey.

That must be Eleanor’s mom, Park thought, she looked just like her. But sharper and with more shadows. Like Eleanor, but taller. Like Eleanor, but tired. Like Eleanor, after the fall.