Eleanor and Park: Chapter 42 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, Park’s whole family is going on an outing to the boat show, lunch, and the mall—but Park doesn’t feel like going. He asks if he can stay home and invite Eleanor over instead, and his mother says it’s fine as long as Park keeps up with his chores.

Eleanor is walking through the neighborhood when she passes Park’s house and sees that the Sheridans’ car isn’t in the driveway. She goes up to the door and rings the bell—Park opens the door and pulls her inside, and the door isn’t even closed before he puts his arms around her and begins kissing her. As Park starts “touching her [in] all the places she [is] afraid to be touched,” Eleanor doesn’t feel even a little bit embarrassed.

The narrative alternates quickly between Eleanor and Park’s points of view as they hungrily kiss and touch one another, pushing back against their own respective internal monologues of shyness and anxiety and exploring one another’s bodies freely for the first time. Both of them are worried they won’t have another chance to touch each other like this again—or at least for a long time—and as they fall onto the couch, they let their desires take over. Though they don’t have sex, they spend the afternoon talking, touching, and kissing, and Eleanor and Park are both surprised to find that they feel no shame or insecurity with one another any longer.  

As it starts to get dark out, Eleanor and Park straighten themselves up in case the Sheridans come home from their day out. As the two of them slowly make their way back to reality, Park asks Eleanor about the day before—about why she was walking through the halls in her gym suit. Eleanor explains that someone in gym class took her clothes, but says she doesn’t want to talk about the incident in detail. She asks Park if seeing her in her gym suit excited him, and he admits that it did. Eleanor privately rejoices over how “pissed” Tina would be if she knew what stealing Eleanor’s clothes ultimately led to.

Park’s family comes home, and Eleanor has dinner with them all before heading home. It is late when she gets back to her own house—Richie is awake watching TV, and Ben and Maisie are asleep on the couch beside him. Richie stops Eleanor and asks her where she’s been—she tells him, as always, that she’s been at Tina’s. Richie then asks Eleanor what she bought with her Christmas money. Sabrina comes out of the bedroom and tells Eleanor to go to bed. Eleanor looks Richie in the eye and tells him she bought a necklace.