Eleanor & Park

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

And Eleanor disintegrated. Park

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. He rubbed his thumb through her palm and up her fingers, and was aware of her every breath.

Park had held hands with girls before. Girls at Skateland. A girl at the ninth-grade dance last year. (They’d kissed while they waited for her dad to pick them up.) He’d even held Tina’s hand, back when they ‘went’ together in the sixth grade.

And always, before, it had been fine. Not much different from holding Josh’s hand when they were little kids crossing the street. Or holding his grandma’s hand when she took him to church. Maybe a little sweatier, a little more awkward.

When he’d kissed that girl last year, with his mouth dry and his eyes mostly open, Park had wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him.

He’d even wondered – seriously, while he was kissing her, he’d wondered this – whether he might be gay. Except he didn’t feel like kissing any guys either. And if he thought about She-Hulk or Storm (instead of this girl, Dawn) the kissing got a lot better.

Maybe I’m not attracted to real girls, he’d thought at the time. Maybe I’m some sort of perverted cartoon-sexual.

Or maybe, he thought now, he just didn’t recognize all those other girls. The way a computer drive will spit out a disk if it doesn’t recognize the formatting.

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

Eleanor

Disintegrated.

Like something had gone wrong beaming her onto the Starship Enterprise.

If you’ve ever wondered what that feels like, it’s a lot like melting – but more violent.

Even in a million different pieces, Eleanor could still feel Park holding her hand. Could still feel his thumb exploring her palm. She sat completely still because she didn’t have any other option. She tried to remember what kind of animals paralyzed their prey before they ate them …

Maybe Park had paralyzed her with his ninja magic, his Vulcan handhold, and now he was going to eat her.

That would be awesome. Park

They broke apart when the bus stopped. A flood of reality rushed through Park, and he looked around nervously to see if anyone had been watching them. Then he looked nervously at Eleanor to see if she’d noticed him looking.

She was still staring at the floor, even as she picked up her books and stood in the aisle.

If someone had been watching, what would they have seen? Park couldn’t imagine what his face had looked like when he touched Eleanor.

Like somebody taking the first drink in a Diet Pepsi commercial. Over-the-top bliss.

He stood behind her in the aisle. She was just about his height. Her hair was pulled up, and her neck was flushed and splotchy. He resisted the urge to lay his cheek against it.

He walked with her all the way to her locker, and leaned against the wall as she opened it. She didn’t say anything, just shifted some books onto the shelf and took down a few others.

As the buzz of touching her faded, he was starting to realize that Eleanor hadn’t actually done anything to touch him back. She hadn’t bent her fingers around his. She hadn’t even looked at him. She still hadn’t looked at him. Jesus.

He knocked gently on her locker door.

‘Hey,’ he said.

She shut the door. ‘Hey, what?’

‘Okay?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘I’ll see you in English?’ he asked.

She nodded and walked away.

Jesus. Eleanor

All through first and second and third hour, Eleanor rubbed her palm.

Nothing happened.

How could it be possible that there were that many nerve endings all in one place?

And were they always there, or did they just flip on whenever they felt like it? Because, if they were always there, how did she manage to turn doorknobs without fainting?

Maybe this was why so many people said it felt better to drive a stick shift. Park

Jesus. Was it possible to rape somebody’s hand?

Eleanor wouldn’t look at Park during English and history. He went to her locker after school, but she wasn’t there.

When he got on the bus, she was already sitting in their seat – but sitting in his spot, against the wall. He was too embarrassed to say anything. He sat down next to her and let his hands hang between his knees …

Which meant she really had to reach for his wrist, to pull his hand into hers. She wrapped her fingers around his and touched his palm with her thumb.

Her fingers were trembling.

Park shifted in his seat and turned his back to the aisle.

‘Okay?’ she whispered.

He nodded, taking a deep breath. They both stared down at their hands.

Jesus.

CHAPTER 16 Eleanor

Saturdays were the worst.

On Sundays, Eleanor could think all day about how close it was to Monday. But Saturdays were ten years long.

She’d already finished her homework. Some creep had written ‘do i make you wet?’ on her geography book, so she spent a really long time covering it up with a black ink pen. She tried to turn it into some kind of flower.

She watched cartoons with the little kids until golf came on, then played double solitaire with Maisie until they were both bored stupid.

Later, she’d listen to music. 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 five tapes from him now – which meant, if her batteries lasted, she had four hundred and fifty minutes to spend with Park in her head, holding his hand.

Maybe it was stupid, but that’s what she did with him, even in her fantasies – even where anything was possible. As far as Eleanor was concerned, that just showed how wonderful it was to hold Park’s hand.

(Besides they didn’t just hold hands. Park touched her hands like they were something rare and precious, like her fingers were intimately co

The only bad thing about their new bus routine was that it had seriously cut back on their conversations. She could hardly look at Park when he was touching her. And Park seemed to have a hard time finishing his sentences. (Which meant he liked her. Ha.)

Yesterday, on the way home from school, their bus had to take a fifteen-minute detour because of a busted sewer pipe. Steve had started cussing about how he needed to get to his new job at the gas station. And Park had said, ‘Wow.’

‘What?’ Eleanor sat by the wall now, because it made her feel safer, less exposed. She could almost pretend that they had the bus to themselves.

‘I can actually burst sewers with my mind,’

Park said.

‘That’s a very limited mutation,’ she said.

‘What do they call you?’

‘They call me … um …’ And then he’d started laughing and pulled at one of her curls. (That was a new, awesome development – the hair touching. Sometimes he’d come up behind her after school, and tug at her ponytail or tap the top of her bun.)

‘I … don’t know what they call me,’ he said.

‘Maybe the Public Works,’ she said, laying her hand on top of his, finger to finger. Her fingertips came to his last knuckle. It might be the only part of her that was smaller than him.

‘You’re like a little girl,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your hands. They just look …’ He took her hand in both of his. ‘I don’t know … vulnerable.’

‘Pipemaster,’ she whispered.

‘What?’

‘That’s your superhero name. No, wait – the Piper. Like, “Time to pay the Piper!”’

He laughed and pulled at another curl.