If Eleanor’s clothes weren’t in that locker, if she was wearing anything other than this gymsuit, she would have just walked away.

Instead she walked past the girls, with her chin as high as she could manage, and methodically peeled the pads off her locker.

There were even some inside, stuck to her clothes.

Eleanor cried a little bit, she couldn’t help it, but she kept her back to everybody so there wouldn’t be a show. It was all over in a few minutes anyway because nobody wanted to be late to lunch. Most of the girls still had to change and redo their hair.

After everyone else walked away, two black girls stayed. They walked over to Eleanor and started pulling pads off the wall. ‘Ain’t no thing,’

one of the girls whispered, crumpling a pad into a ball. Her name was DeNice, and she looked too young to be in the tenth grade. She was small, and she wore her hair in two braided pigtails.

Eleanor shook her head, but didn’t say anything.

‘Those girls are trifling,’ DeNice said.

‘They’re so insignificant, God can hardly see them.’

‘Hmm-hmm,’ the other girl agreed. Eleanor was pretty sure her name was Beebi. Beebi was what Eleanor’s mom would call ‘a big girl.’

Much bigger than Eleanor. Beebi’s gymsuit was even a different color than everybody else’s, like they’d had to special order it for her. Which made Eleanor feel bad about feeling so bad about her own body … And which also made her wonder why she was the official fat girl in the class.

They threw the pads in the trash and pushed them under some wet paper towels so that nobody would find them.

If DeNice and Beebi hadn’t been standing there, Eleanor might have kept some of the pads, the ones that didn’t have any writing on them because, God, what a waste.

She was late to lunch, then late to English.

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

Because even after everything that had happened in the last forty-five minutes – and everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours – all Eleanor could think about was seeing Park. Park

When they got back on the bus, she took his Walkman without arguing. And without making him put it on for her. At the stop before hers, she handed it back.

‘You can borrow it,’ he said quietly. ‘Listen to the rest of the tape.’

‘I don’t want to break it,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to break it.’

‘I don’t want to use up the batteries.’

‘I don’t care about the batteries.’

She looked up at him then, in the eye, maybe for the first time ever. Her hair looked even crazi-er than it had this morning – more frizzy than curly, like she was working on a big red afro. But her eyes were dead serious, cold sober. Any cliché you’ve ever heard used to describe Clint Eastwood, those were Eleanor’s eyes.

‘Really,’ she said. ‘You don’t care.’

‘They’re just batteries,’ he said.

She emptied the batteries and the tape from Park’s Walkman, handed it back to him, then got off the bus without looking back.

God, she was weird. Eleanor

The batteries started to die at 1:00 a.m., but Eleanor kept listening for another hour until the voices slowed to a stop.

CHAPTER 13 Eleanor

She remembered her books today, and she was wearing fresh clothes. She’d had to wash her jeans out in the bathtub last night, so they were still kind of damp … But altogether, Eleanor felt a thousand times better than she had yesterday.

Even her hair was halfway cooperating. She’d clumped it up into a bun and wrapped it with a rubber band. It was going to hurt like crazy trying to tear the rubber band out, but at least it was staying for now.

Best of all, she had Park’s songs in her head –

and in her chest, somehow.

There was something about the music on that tape. It felt different. Like, it set her lungs and her stomach on edge. There was something exciting about it, and something nervous. It made Eleanor feel like everything, like the world, wasn’t what she’d thought it was. And that was a good thing. That was the greatest thing.

When she got on the bus that morning, she immediately lifted her head to find Park. He was looking up too, like he was waiting for her. She couldn’t help it, she grinned. Just for a second.

As soon as she sat down, Eleanor slunk low in the seat, so the back-of-the-bus ruffians wouldn’t be able to see from the top of her head how happy she felt.

She could feel Park sitting next to her, even though he was at least six inches away.

She handed him yesterday’s comics, then tugged nervously at the green ribbon wound round her wrist. She couldn’t think of what to say. She started to worry that maybe she wouldn’t say anything, that she wouldn’t even thank him …

Park’s hands were perfectly still in his lap.

And perfectly perfect. Honey-colored with clean, pink fingernails. Everything about him was strong and slender. Every time he moved he had a reason.

They were almost to school when he broke the silence.

‘Did you listen?’

She nodded, letting her eyes climb as high as his shoulders.

‘Did you like it?’ he asked.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh my God. It was …

just, like …’ – she spread out all her fingers – ‘so awesome.’

‘Are you being sarcastic? I can’t tell.’

She looked up at his face, even though she knew how that was going to feel, like someone was hooking her insides out through her chest.

‘No. It was awesome. I didn’t want to stop listening. That one song – is it “Love Will Tear Us Apart”?’

‘Yeah, Joy Division.’

‘Oh my God, that’s the best beginning to a song ever.’

He imitated the guitar and the drums.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to listen to those three seconds over and over.’

‘You could have.’ His eyes were smiling, his mouth only sort of.

‘I didn’t want to waste the batteries,’ she said.

He shook his head, like she was dumb.

‘Plus,’ she said, ‘I love the rest of it just as much, like the high part, the melody, the dahhh, dah-de-dah-dah, de-dahh, de dahhh.’

He nodded.

‘And his voice at the end,’ she said, ‘when he goes just a little bit too high … And then the very end, where it sounds like the drums are fighting it, like they don’t want the song to be over …’

Park made drum noises with his mouth: ‘ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch.’

‘I just want to break that song into pieces,’

she said, ‘and love them all to death.’

That made him laugh.

‘What about the Smiths?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t know who was who,’ she said.

‘I’ll write it down for you.’

‘I liked it all.’

‘Good,’ he said.

‘I loved it.’

He smiled, but turned away to look out the window. She looked down.

They were pulling into the parking lot. Eleanor didn’t want this new talking thing – like, really talking, back and forth and smiling at each other

– to stop.

‘And …’ she said quickly, ‘I love the X-Men.

But I hate Cyclops.’

He whipped his head back.

‘You can’t hate Cyclops. He’s team captain.’

‘He’s boring. He’s worse than Batman.’

‘What? You hate Batman?’

‘God. So boring. I can’t even make myself read it. Whenever you bring Batman, I catch myself listening to Steve, or staring out the window, wishing I was in hypersleep.’ The bus came to a stop.

‘Huh,’ Park said, standing up. He said it really judgmentally.

‘What?’

‘Now I know what you’re thinking when you stare out the window.’

‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘I mix it up.’

Everybody else was pushing down the aisle past them. Eleanor stood up, too.

‘I’m bringing you The Dark Knight Returns,’

he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Only the least boring Batman story ever.’

‘The least boring Batman story ever, huh?

Does Batman raise both eyebrows?’