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She stopped at their seat and looked down at the pile of stuff he’d left for her (Where were her schoolbooks? He wondered) Then she picked everything up, careful as ever, and sat down

Park wanted to look at her face, but he couldn’t He stared at her wrists instead She picked up the cassette He’d written ‘How Soon is Now and More’ on the thin white sticker

She held it out to hi he’d never heard her say before ‘But I can’t’

He didn’t take it

‘It’s for you, take it,’ he whispered He looked up from her hands to her dropped chin

‘No,’ she said, ‘I ive him the tape, but he didn’t take it Why did she have toso hard?

‘I don’t want it,’ he said

She clenched her teeth and glared She really must hate him

‘No,’ she said, practically loud enough for other people to hear ‘I mean, I can’t I don’t have any way to listen to it God, just take it back’

He took it She covered her face The kid in the seat across from the

Park frowned at Junior until he turned away

Then Park turned back to the girl …

He took his Walkman out of the pocket of his trench coat and popped out his Dead Kennedys tape 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

He could hear the swa ‘I am the son …

and the heir …’

She lifted her head a little but didn’t look at hiot to school, she took the headphones off and gave theether Which eird Usually, they broke away from each other as soon as they hit the sidewalk That’s what seeht; they walked the same way every day, her locker was just down the hall froo their separate ways every ot to her locker He didn’t step close to her, but he stopped She stopped, too

‘Well,’ he said, looking down the hall, ‘now you’ve heard the Shed

Eleanor

She should have just taken the tape

She didn’t need to be telling everybody what she had and didn’t have She didn’t need to be telling weird Asian kids anything

Weird Asian kid

She was pretty sure he was Asian It was hard to tell He had green eyes And skin the color of sunshine through honey

Maybe he was Filipino Was that in Asia?

Probably Asia’s out-of-control huge

Eleanor had only known one Asian person in her life – Paul, as in her math class at her old school Paul was Chinese His parents had overnment (Which seelobe and said,

‘Yup That’s as far away as possible’) Paul was the one who’d taught Eleanor to say

‘Asian’ and not ‘oriental’ ‘Oriental’s for food,’

he’d said

‘Whatever, LaChoy Boy,’ she’d said back

Eleanor couldn’t figure out what an Asian person was doing in the Flats anyway Everybody else here was seriously white Like, white by choice Eleanor had never even heard the n-word said out loud until she moved here, but the kids on her bus used it like it was the only way to indicate that somebody was black Like there was no other word or phrase that would work

Eleanor stayed away froh that, thanks to Richie’s influence, she went aroundeveryone she met a ‘motherfucker’ (Irony) There were three or four other Asian kids at their school Cousins One of theee from Laos

And then there was Ol’ Green Eyes

Who she was apparently going to tell her whole life story to Maybe on the way hoabout telling her counselor Mrs Dunne had sat Eleanor down on her first day of school and given a little speech about how Eleanor could tell her anything All through the speech, she kept squeezing the fattest part of Eleanor’s ar – about Richie, her– Eleanor didn’t knoould happen

But if she told Mrs Dunne about the toothbrush … et her one And then Eleanor could stop sneaking into the bathroom after lunch to rub her teeth with salt (She’d seen that in a Western once It probably didn’t even work)

The bell rang 10:12

Just two lish She wondered if he’d talk to her in class Maybe that’s what they did now

She could still hear that voice in her head –

not his – the singer’s Froing

He sounded like he was crying out

‘I am the sun …

And the air …’

Eleanor didn’t notice at first how un-horrible everyone was being in gy volleyball today, and once Tina said, ‘Your serve, bitch,’ but that was it, and that was practically jocular, all-things-Tina considered

When Eleanor got to the locker room, she realized why Tina had been so low-key; she was just waiting Tina and her friends – and the black girls, too, everybody wanted a piece of this –

were standing at the end of Eleanor’s roaiting for her to walk to her locker

It was covered with Kotex pads A whole box, it looked like

At first Eleanor thought the pads were actually bloody, but when she got closer she could see that it was just redRed’ on a few of the pads, but they were the expensive kind, so the ink was already starting to absorb

If Eleanor’s clothes weren’t in that locker, if she earing 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 e, 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, cru a pad into a ball Her narade She was stails

Eleanor shook her head, but didn’t say anything

‘Those girls are trifling,’ DeNice said

‘They’re so insignificant, God can hardly see thereed Eleanor was pretty sure her nairl’

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 Whichso bad about her own body … And which also irl in the class

They threw the pads in the trash and pushed them under some wet paper towels so that nobody would find the there, Eleanor ht have kept so on them because, God, what a waste