Eleanor and Park: Chapter 30 Summary & Analysis

At lunch, Cal tells Park that he and Kim are going out. Cal is grateful that Kim has given up her crush on Park and developed one on him instead. Cal invites Park to come to a basketball game with the two of them, and Park says he’ll think about it. Privately, he thinks that he doesn’t want to go anywhere without Eleanor—and he has a feeling she wouldn’t like going to a ball game.

In the locker room after gym class, Eleanor fields a similar invitation from DeNice and Beebi, who invite her to come dancing with them on Thursday. They tell her she can bring Park along—but Eleanor has a hard time imagining the two of them going out together in public and leaving their insular bubble behind.

Eleanor begins spending every afternoon over at Park’s house, and Mindy pressures both of them to get their homework done while they’re together. They study at the kitchen table, exchanging flirty laughs and glances—until the horrified Park notices a new message scrawled on Eleanor’s textbook cover, the lewdest one yet: “i know you’re a slut,” it reads; “you smell like cum.” Park asks Eleanor why she wouldn’t have told him the messages were still appearing—she retorts that she didn’t want to burden him with something so “gross and embarrassing.” The two of them try to figure out who could be writing the letters, and Eleanor says that though she’s noticed they usually appear on gym days, she can’t narrow it down—everyone in gym class but DeNice and Beebi seems to hate her.

Eleanor expresses her suspicion that Tina is leaving the notes—Park says Tina would never do anything so cruel, and explains that they used to be friends, and even dated in sixth grade. Eleanor is shocked and horrified, and demands to know more about their relationship. Park keeps trying to insist that “None of [it] matters,” but he can tell that with each question he shrugs off, Eleanor is looking at him more and more like he’s a “stranger.” Park asks Eleanor point-blank if she has written the messages herself. Eleanor’s face goes ghost-white, and after a moment, she starts packing up her books to leave. Eleanor storms out of the kitchen just as Mindy walks in to say hello to the two of them, and Park is embarrassed all over again.

That night, Park reflects on the disastrous confrontation with Eleanor—and his history with Tina. Though he’s not interested in her romantically she has come onto him several times over the last couple of years, and he knows that any residual popularity he has is because of her. Park resents himself for still “finding new pockets of shallow inside himself,” and for betraying Eleanor even when he doesn’t mean to.