Eleanor and Park

Park notices that Eleanor is acting strangely on the morning bus ride, as she is being completely silent. He decides to wait to invite her over for dinner until she is feeling better. Eleanor, on the other hand, is absorbed by the fact that she has no idea where she would go if things got really bad at Richie’s house; her father is not an option. She thinks back to the events of the day when Richie first kicked her out of his house.

The incident started when Eleanor was typing up the lyrics to a Simon and Garfunkel song on a typewriter for fun. On that particular day, Richie was hungover and in a terrible mood. He told Eleanor’s mom to shut her daughter up, and so she asked her daughter to be quieter. Eleanor continued to type, however, and an enraged Richie stormed upstairs and threw her typewriter so hard that it got stuck in her wall’s plaster. Eleanor’s mother burst into the room and then flung Eleanor down the stairs put of Richie’s path. After that, Eleanor stayed with neighbors until her father could pick her up.