christmas eve.
Park often fantasized about what it would be like to see Eleanor again. He knew that it couldn’t possibly be healthy to continue to spend so much of his free time clinging to memories must dudes his age would likely forget the second another girl walked by. That’s not how his heart worked. Eleanor meant to much for him to simply jump right into dating again. How do you tell your hands that they’ll be okay if they touch someone else? His hands would feel it, you know? He knew skin that wasn’t Eleanor’s would feel wrong beneath his fingertips, and so he kept his hands to himself, too afraid to accept that she could really be gone forever.
If he kept thinking about her, if he kept on hoping to see her again, then it somehow meant the possibility still existed that she could come back into his life. He had pictured it happening a bunch of different ways. Even if seemed unlikely, he found himself wandering down every aisle of the grocery store every time his mom asked him to go shopping with her, expecting to see red hair somewhere. Maybe Eleanor would be grabbing a box of cereal or what if she really needed some Oreos? It could happen, right?
Eventually he came to grips with the fact that Eleanor wouldn’t want to come back to Nebraska. Why would she? I mean, they had essentially orchestrated some great escape, you know? It would be crazy for her to come back after all the hell she’d been through in Omaha. But every once and awhile, he’d still wish that maybe she loved him enough to face all that again, to come back with her head held up high knowing she’d beat them, she’d made it out and gained the strength to come back for him.
Yes, he knows how fucking stupid that sounds.
Park had never really thought he’d turn into some hopelessly romantic guy who couldn’t stop dreaming of the girl that got away. There had even been that weird period in his life when he had worried that he might be gay or only attracted to the babes in his comic books. ‘Cause he had kissed that one chick after some lame high school dance but didn’t feel a damn thing. When Han and Leia kissed, jesus fuck, that looked incredible, and he had expected to feel something other than relief when it all ended.
Then Eleanor happened. Touching her for the first time, and then finally tasting her later, confirmed that it was very, very possible for him to feel something for a girl. Park knew her instantly, knew that she would be the one to make him stop looking at himself as painfully average. Someone like Eleanor would never fall for someone average. She was too extraordinary for that.
He had changed a lot like since she left Omaha. He didn’t wear black every day and he usually kept his hair longer than he did back then. At least in New York, a Korean kid who looked like he just rolled out of a bed in Brooklyn didn’t seem so out of place. Here, he could easily disappear into a crowd. But in all his fantasies about what would happen if he saw her again, there was never any moment when she didn’t recognize him right away, when she didn’t immediately fit right back into his arms without a second thought. There was never hesitation, never any moment when they stopped to question if there was someone else because they’d just know that there wasn’t.
His silly dreams about seeing Eleanor never focused on small talk or doing that thing where you go over the same lousy questions that everybody asks if you haven’t caught up since high school. Talking about college and relationships and whether or not he wanted to go grab a drink or something… none of that really mattered in his head. It wasn’t that he didn’t care what Eleanor had been up to since they last spoke, which had been so much longer than he wanted to remember right now. It was just that he was so desperate to get onto the next chapter, you know?
It was like getting to the end of an issue of X-Men and suddenly not really caring what the hell Wolverine had done in the previous who knows how many. You just needed to get to what happened next.
If Marc Webb directed this scene, the screen would be split down the middle to show the difference between expectations and reality. On the left, Eleanor would be kissing him, reclaiming him as her own only to realize that he had been hers this whole fucking time. He’d be holding onto her so tight, ignoring the way their bodies swayed when the train started and stopped again and again. They’d lose track of time. It would be the most amazing night of his life.
On the right would be this: Park watching Eleanor tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and he couldn’t help but remember the way he used to twist his own finger through her hair, watching the curls tighten around his skin, the colors contrasting in a way that made him ache with something he couldn’t describe. She seemed so nervous, so much like she had been when she first started sitting next to him on the bus. It scared him to think that this could be it - that he might need to start all over to get back the version of Eleanor that was his.
“I’ve been okay,” Park nodded, feeling like it would be a lie to use the word good the way people so often did in these awkward conversations. Good would imply that he hadn’t been a wreck over her, that he hadn’t gone so many nights questioning what he could’ve done differently to make her see that she deserved him and all the love he so badly wanted to give her if only she’d let him.
Good wasn’t real, and maybe it was time to stop wanting the fantasy.
“I go to NYU,” he went on, assuming she’d jump to how he ended up in the city next. “Art school… pretty predictable, I guess,” he shrugged, smiling at her for a second before turning to look out the window, as if he’d see anything but concrete zipping by. “I do this radio show during the week, so that kind of… keeps me sane. I have the best time slot, the one everybody wants, which probably means I’m awesomet.”
It occurred to him then that he wasn’t cut out for bragging.
“I usually go back home for the summer, hang with the family, but I’m trying to get an internship this year? So, I don’t know, I could be around… available. Here.”
If you’re wondering if he literally just made that decision based on realizing Eleanor would likely be there all summer… then your head’s definitely in the right place.
“Anyway… how’s New York treating you? You look amazing.”
He hoped she would believe that even if he wasn’t technically looking at her when he said it.
Eleanor knew that she had to get out of the Midwest, and she had to get out of the Midwest as fast as possible. Omaha had been a start, admittedly, but Omaha wasn’t a place that she’d ever really wanted to leave – leaving Omaha meant leaving Park, and leaving Park was the one thing that she’d never, ever wanted to do.
She’d had to, though. She hadn’t had much of a choice, because circumstances had prevented most of her choices from really being available to her at all in the first place. So, she’d had to leave Omaha, and she’d had to relocate. Minnesota was out of Omaha and all the way to the top of Iowa, across the border and into a big fucking state a long enough way away from Nebraska.
It had the Mall of America, and she still wasn’t sure if it really had 10,000 lakes. That was as far as she’d ever gotten, and that was as far as she’d ever cared to get.
The last couple years of high school, she threw herself into her studies so hard she was sure there were bruises and indentation left in her wake. She had to do everything she possibly could to make sure that she got a scholarship, to make sure she could get the hell out of there.
She’d considered California, but she’d known that New York was the place where she’d always wanted to be, so that was where most of her focus wound up being zeroed in on, and she was perfectly okay with that. She worked herself to the bones to get a scholarship, full-ride, and she somehow managed to succeed. She still had no fucking idea how, but she hadn’t held back on writing literally the most pathetic, self-deprecating admissions essay in the history of admission essays, and she couldn’t help but wonder if the Dean of Admissions had taken some serious pity on her and accepted her just to help her out.
The full-ride scholarship took her to CUNY, where she started majoring in journalism because that was the only thing that really made sense to her – they also had a killer graduate school for journalism, and it was a major selling point.
To say that she was terrified when she got there would be a vast understatement, and she found herself fitting Park into all of these places where he wasn’t actually at. If she was alone at a coffee shop, she pictured him at the table across from her, the two of them making eyes at each other until one of them would cave in and come and join the other one. She imagined him next to her on the subway, she imagined him in her cramped twin bed in her cramped dorm room.
Everywhere she went, she pretended Park was right there beside her. It was easiest that way.
She had come to New York determined to close herself off from everyone, after all, that was what she did best. That had changed when she met Mallory, however. She was the only friend that she’d ever really made in the city, the only one who she knew she could consider a real friend, and not the kind that she had to check over her shoulder every three seconds to make sure she was, you know legitimately there.
Mallory tried to get her out, tried to get her to go to parties and engage in extracurriculars and meet new people, but it wasn’t Eleanor’s scene and never really had been. Mallory did open her eyes to a few things, however, and one of them was actually trying to give a shit about her appearance.
She’d never really had the money to care about her appearance, admittedly, and she’d never had the means to do so while growing up, but Mallory was the queen of thrift shopping, and she’d very quickly taken Eleanor under her wing until Eleanor was wearing clothes that fit her the way that clothes were supposed to fit her. She started trying to handle her hair so it wasn’t frizzing out in every different direction. She started running, she started eating organic – she detoxed her body from the inside out, getting rid of everything that could weigh her down, everything that she could deem as a negative.
Her family and all the bad blood that had come with them was, of course, the first thing to go, and Mallory had tried to convince her countless times to go on a date and forget about Park as well, but Eleanor made sure to assure Mallory that while there had been a lot of bad shit in her life, Park had been the one good thing. The light. The constant.
Park was everything, and Park was still everything. It didn’t matter how long ago it had been, it didn’t matter that her and Mallory’s friendship had taken them from a dorm room into a small apartment getting the two of them through grad school – Park was still that beacon of light at the end of the tunnel.
She’d gone out on a couple of dates here and there, maybe she’d made out, maybe she’d hooked up and fooled around and had a couple one night stands, but one look at Park made everything that had happened in the past just sort of fade right back out. She had a hard time focusing on anything other than Park.
Park was here. He was right fucking here. He was real, and he was palpable, and she had to pinch herself on the thigh for a moment just to make sure she wasn’t going to wake up in fucking Harlem at three in the morning.
Again.
Art school was the perfect fit for him, of course, and if she could actually continually keep up her eye contact with him, she would make sure to tell him that – or at least give him a smile to let him know that she totally and fully supported his decision. She couldn’t do that, however, and she wondered how long it would take for her to not feel like a totally new person around him when he was the only one who had ever made her feel real in the first place.
Her head did, however, pop up at the mention of an internship, eyebrows raising and head tilting slightly to the side. “Really?” she asked, biting down on her lip slightly and sitting back a little in her seat. “That would be cool… you being available and all, since I don’t really… go anywhere outside of the city ever, so like… if you needed a summer-in-New-York tour guide or whatever, I could definitely be that person.”
God, she shouldn’t be allowed to talk.
Her fingers messed with her hair nervously for a moment or two, Park’s compliment leaving her cheeks painfully red before she realized that she did, in fact, have a question to answer.
“It’s been treating me pretty decent, so I’m not sure I can complain about much more than rent prices,” she said with a sheepish laugh, and she hated being the type of person who laughed about shit like rent prices. It seemed fake, and forced, and those weren’t things she was supposed to be, especially not around him. “I go to CUNY, I’m in their journalism grad program right now, and…I have a cat named Olive, and I still own more ties than any sane person who doesn’t really have a reason to wear ties should own…”
She looked down at her lap. “I think I might’ve, um… caught your show a few times, actually. Now that I think about it. I mean, it’s definitely the awesomest radio show out there, so it’s pretty much a given that it has to be the one you’re in charge of. I’ve put a ton of your stuff on my mixes, so…”
God, she was so bad at this.
“8tracks and iTunes don't exactly have the same feel as a mixtape or a burned CD, but I’ll take what I can get, you know?”
She paused for a moment before continuing. “And… thank you, for the, uh. The other thing.” She hadn’t gotten any better at taking compliments, which really shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. “I could definitely say the same thing about you. I like the hair. And the rest of you, obviously, but… definitely the hair.”
