Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

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 crazier
    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
    t h e 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