Eleanor & Park Chapter 46 Summary

Eleanor

  • When Eleanor gets home, Richie's truck is in the driveway, but everything seems quiet. Which is good; Eleanor feels "radioactive" (46.1).
  • In the end, she and Park had "gone a whole lot farther than she'd been prepared for" (46.2), which Eleanor blames her mom for, thinking that she wouldn't have gone so far if she hadn't felt like it was going to be her only chance. Turns out they went to "second base," but it still felt like a lot to Eleanor—it was also "wonderful" (46.7).
  • Eleanor and Park have another nervous, intense conversation about not wanting to say goodbye to each other, and then Eleanor goes into her house. 
  • When Eleanor gets inside, she hears her mom fighting with Richie. All her siblings are asleep. On her way to bed, she realizes that her fruit crate filled with all of her prized possessions—tapes from Park, makeup, comics—everything is broken and strewn all over the room.
  • On the lid of the box, someone has used one of Eleanor's markers to write a lewd, terrifying message: "do you think you can make a fool of me? this is my house […] i know what you are and it's over" (46.31). 
  • Eleanor immediately knows it's Richie, but worse, she recognizes the handwriting: it's the same handwriting that the lewd messages on her books have been written in all year. This is it. 
  • "Somewhere in the house her mother was crying like she was never going to stop" (46.33).