Eleanor and Park: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

The following morning, Eleanor boards the bus to find a stack of comics on her seat. Park is already deep in his reading. Eleanor picks up the comics and holds them in her arms, but doesn’t start to read—to do so, she feels, would be too much like “admitting something.” All day, Eleanor feels the books burning a hole in her bag, and as soon as she’s home she devours them. Long after her siblings have fallen asleep, she continues to read in the room’s dim light. She is startled when Richie suddenly jerks the door open and grunts at her to turn the light off. Eleanor does so, haunted by Richie’s rat-like face, and then continues to read by the light of the moon coming in from the window.

Park is amazed by how fast Eleanor reads—he has to keep bringing her new comics when she hands the old ones to him wordlessly, but as if she’s handling “something precious.” All of the comics Park lends Eleanor come back smelling “like roses.” As the weeks go by, Eleanor speeds through volumes and volumes of Park’s comics—but still the two of them don’t exchange a word.

One morning, on the bus, Park, having slept in and left home in a hurry, has no comics for Eleanor to read. He tells himself he’ll have to speak to her to explain why he has nothing for her, but when the moment comes and she hands him the old comics, he merely shrugs. The two of them sit awkwardly in silence for a moment until Park asks Eleanor if she likes the Smiths’ music. He has noticed some lyrics to one of their songs written on her paper textbook cover. Eleanor looks at him, surprised. She tells Park she isn’t sure—she’s never heard them. Park asks her if she just wants people to think she likes the Smiths, and immediately feels the air between them turn “sour.”

In English class, Park and Eleanor’s class is discussing Romeo and Juliet. Most of the class is unresponsive and disinterested, so Mr. Stessman calls on the fiery Eleanor to ask what she thinks. She says she isn’t affected by the deaths of the star-crossed lovers—she doesn’t see their story as a tragedy, but rather as one in which Shakespeare pokes fun at young love. Mr. Stessman asks someone else in the class to explain why, then, Romeo and Juliet has survived and endured for 400 years. Park answers the question, saying that “people what to remember what it’s like to be young […] and in love.”

That afternoon, on the bus, Park sidles in next to Eleanor, nervous that she won’t talk to him. Once he’s settled in, though, she says quietly that the lyrics she has written on her textbook are “like a wish list”—songs she’d like to hear. That night, Park makes Eleanor a mixtape, loading the tape up with New Wave music he thinks Eleanor might like. Before he goes to sleep, he puts the tape—and five more volumes of comics—into his bag to bring to her.