[Part 1] "Stargirl" by Jerry Spinelli
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CHAPTER I.
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“Did you see her?”
That was the first thing Kevin said to me on the first day of school, eleventh grade.
We were waiting for the bell to ring.
“See who?” I said.
“Hah!”
He craned his neck, scanning the mob.
He had witnessed something remarkable; it showed on his face.
He grinned, still scanning.
“You’ll know.”
There were hundreds of us, milling about, calling names, pointing to summer-tanned faces we hadn’t seen since June.
Our interest in each other was never keener than during the fifteen minutes before the first bell of the first day.
I punched his arm.
“Who?”
The bell rang.
We poured inside.
I heard it again in homeroom, a whispered voice behind me as we said the Pledge of Allegiance:
“You see her?”
I heard it in the hallways.
I heard it in English and Geometry:
“Did you see her?”
Who could it be?
A new student?
A spectacular blonde from California?
Or from back East, where many of us came from?
Or one of those summer makeovers, someone who leaves in June looking like a little girl and returns in September as a full-bodied woman, a ten-week miracle?
And then in Earth Sciences I heard a name: “Stargirl.”
I turned to the senior slouching behind me.
“Stargirl?” I said.
“What kind of name is that?”
“That’s it.
Stargirl Caraway.
She said it in homeroom.”
“Stargirl?”
“Yeah.”
And then I saw her.
At lunch.
She wore an off-white dress so long it covered her shoes.
It had ruffles around the neck and cuffs and looked like it could have been her great-grandmother’s wedding gown.
Her hair was the color of sand.
It fell to her shoulders.
Something was strapped across her back, but it wasn’t a book bag.
At first I thought it was a miniature guitar.
I found out later it was a ukulele.
She did not carry a lunch tray.
She did carry a large canvas bag with a life-size sunflower painted on it.
The lunchroom was dead silent as she walked by.
She stopped at an empty table, laid down her bag, slung the instrument strap over her chair, and sat down.
She pulled a sandwich from the bag and started to eat.
Half the lunchroom kept staring, half started buzzing.
Kevin was grinning.
“Wha’d I tell you?”
I nodded.
“She’s in tenth grade,” he said.
“I hear she’s been homeschooled till now.”
“Maybe that explains it,” I said.
Her back was to us, so I couldn’t see her face.
No one sat with her, but at the tables next to hers kids were cramming two to a seat.
She didn’t seem to notice.
She seemed marooned in a sea of staring, buzzing faces.
Kevin was grinning again.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he said.
I grinned back.
I nodded.
“Hot Seat.”
Hot Seat was our in-school TV show.
We had started it the year before.
I was producer/director, Kevin was on-camera host.
Each month he interviewed a student.
So far, most of them had been honor student types, athletes, model citizens.
Noteworthy in the usual ways, but not especially interesting.
Suddenly Kevin’s eyes boggled.
The girl was picking up her ukulele.
And now she was strumming it.
And now she was singing!
Strumming away, bobbing her head and shoulders, singing, “I’m looking over a fourleaf clover that I overlooked before.”
Stone silence all around.
Then came the sound of a single person clapping.
I looked.
It was the lunchline cashier.
And now the girl was standing, slinging her bag over one shoulder and marching among the tables, strumming and singing and strutting and twirling.
Heads swung, eyes followed her, mouths hung open.
Disbelief.
When she came by our table, I got my first good look at her face.
She wasn’t gorgeous, wasn’t ugly.
A sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose.
Mostly, she looked like a hundred other girls in school, except for two things.
She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer’s eyes caught in headlights.
She twirled as she went past, her flaring skirt brushing my pant leg, and then she marched out of the lunchroom.
From among the tables came three slow claps.
Someone whistled.
Someone yelped.
Kevin and I gawked at each other.
Kevin held up his hands and framed a marquee in the air.
“Hot Seat!
Coming Attraction—Stargirl!”
I slapped the table.
“Yes!”
We slammed hands.
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CHAPTER II.
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When we got to school the next day, Hillari Kimble was holding court at the door.
“She’s not real,” Hillari said.
She was sneering.
“She’s an actress.
It’s a scam.”
Someone called out, “Who’s scamming us?”
“The administration.
The principal.
Who else?
Who cares?”
Hillari wagged her head at the absurdity of the question.
A hand flashed in the air: “Why?”
“School spirit,” she spat back.
“They think this place was too dead last year.
They think if they plant some nutcase in with the students—”
“Like they plant narcs in schools!” someone else shouted.
Hillari glared at the speaker, then continued, “—some nutcase who stirs things up, then maybe all the little students will go to a game once in a while or join a club.”
“Instead of making out in the library!” chimed another voice.
And everybody laughed and the bell rang and we went in.
Hillari Kimble’s theory spread throughout the school and was widely accepted.
“You think Hillari’s right?” Kevin asked me.
“Stargirl’s a plant?”
I snickered.
“Listen to yourself.”
He spread his arms.
“What?”
“This is Mica Area High School,” I reminded him.
“It’s not a CIA operation.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I hope Hillari’s right.”
“Why would you hope that?
If she’s not a real student, we can’t have her on Hot Seat.”
Kevin wagged his head and grinned.
“As usual, Mr. Director, you fail to see the whole picture.
We could use the show to expose her.
Can’t you see it?”
He did the marquee thing with his hands: “Hot Seat Uncovers Faculty Hoax!”
I stared at him.
“You want her to be a fake, don’t you?”
He grinned ear to ear.
“Absolutely.
Our ratings will go sky-high!”
I had to admit, the more I saw of her, the easier it was to believe she was a plant, a joke, anything but real.
On that second day she wore bright-red baggy shorts with a bib and shoulder straps—overall shorts.
Her sandy hair was pulled back into twin plaited pigtails, each tied with a bright-red ribbon.
A rouge smudge appled each cheek, and she had even dabbed some oversized freckles on her face.
She looked like Heidi.
Or Bo Peep.
At lunch she was alone again at her table.
As before, when she finished eating, she took up her ukulele.
But this time she didn’t play.
She got up and started walking among the tables.
She stared at us.
She stared at one face, then another and another.
The kind of bold, I’m-looking-at-you stare you almost never get from people, especially strangers.
She appeared to be looking for someone, and the whole lunchroom had become very uncomfortable.
As she approached our table, I thought: What if she’s looking for me?
The thought terrified me.
So I turned from her.
I looked at Kevin.
I watched him grin goofily up at her.
He wiggled his fingers at her and whispered, “Hi, Stargirl.”
I didn’t hear an answer.
I was intensely aware of her passing behind my chair.
She stopped two tables away.
She was smiling at a pudding-bodied senior named Alan Ferko.
The lunchroom was dead silent.
She started strumming the uke.
And singing.
It was “Happy Birthday.”
When she came to his name she didn’t sing just his first name, but his full name: “Happy Birthday, dear Alan Fer-kooooh”
Alan Ferko’s face turned red as Bo Peep’s pigtail ribbons.
There was a flurry of whistles and hoots, more for Alan Ferko’s sake, I think, than hers.
As Stargirl marched out, I could see Hillari Kimble across the lunchroom rising from her seat, pointing, saying something I could not hear.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Kevin said as we joined the mob in the hallways, “she better be fake.”
I asked him what he meant.
“I mean if she’s real, she’s in big trouble.
How long do you think somebody who’s really like that is going to last around here?”
Good question.
Mica Area High School—MAHS—was not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity.
There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music.
Even our dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them.
If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands.
Kevin was right.
It was unthinkable that Stargirl could survive—or at least survive unchanged—among us.
But it was also clear that Hillari Kimble was at least half right: this person calling herself Stargirl may or may not have been a faculty plant for school spirit, but whatever she was, she was not real.
She couldn’t be.
Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous.
A 1920s flapper dress.
An Indian buckskin.
A kimono.
One day she wore a denim miniskirt with green stockings, and crawling up one leg was a parade of enamel ladybug and butterfly pins.
“Normal” for her were long, floor-brushing pioneer dresses and skirts.
Every few days in the lunchroom she serenaded someone new with “Happy Birthday.”
I was glad my birthday was in the summer.
In the hallways, she said hello to perfect strangers.
The seniors couldn’t believe it.
They had never seen a tenth-grader so bold.
In class she was always flapping her hand in the air, asking questions, though the question often had nothing to do with the subject.
One day she asked a question about trolls—in U.S. History class.
She made up a song about isosceles triangles.
She sang it to her Plane Geometry class.
It was called “Three Sides Have I, But Only Two Are Equal.”
She joined the cross-country team.
Our home meets were held on the Mica Country Club golf course.
Red flags showed the runners the way to go.
In her first meet, out in the middle of the course, she turned left when everyone else turned right.
They waited for her at the finish line.
She never showed up.
She was dismissed from the team.
One day a girl screamed in the hallway.
She had seen a tiny brown face pop up from Stargirl’s sunflower canvas bag.
It was her pet rat.
It rode to school in the bag every day.
One morning we had a rare rainfall.
It came during her gym class.
The teacher told everyone to come in.
On the way to the next class they looked out the windows.
Stargirl was still outside.
In the rain.
Dancing.
We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past “weird” and “strange” and “goofy.”
Her ways knocked us off balance.
A single word seemed to hover in the cloudless sky over the school:
HUH?
Everything she did seemed to echo Hillari Kimble: She’s not real…She’s not real…
And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window.
I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did.
In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things.
I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.
It was during one of these nightmoon times that it came to me that Hillari Kimble was wrong.
Stargirl was real.
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CHAPTER III.
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We fought daily, Kevin and I.
My main job as producer was to recruit people for the Hot Seat.
After I signed someone up, Kevin began researching the person, getting his questions ready.
Every day he asked me, “Did you sign her up?”
Every day I answered no.
He got frustrated.
“What do you mean, no?
Don’t you want to sign her up?”
I told him I wasn’t sure.
His eyes bugged out.
“Not sure?
How can you not be sure?
We highfived in the lunchroom weeks ago.
We were thinking Stargirl mini-series, even.
This is a Hot Seat from heaven.”
I shrugged.
“That was then.
Now I’m not sure.”
He looked at me like I had three ears.
“What’s there to be not sure about?”
I shrugged.
“Well then,” he said, “I’ll sign her up.”
He walked away.
“You’ll have to find another director, then,” I said.
He stopped.
I could almost see the steam rising from his shoulders.
He turned, pointed.
“Leo, you can be a real jerk sometimes.”
He walked off.
It was uncomfortable.
Kevin Quinlan and I usually agreed on everything.
We had been best friends since arriving in Arizona the same week four years before.
We both thought the prickly pear cactus looked like PingPong paddles with whiskers, and that saguaros looked like dinosaur mittens.
We both loved strawberry-banana smoothies.
We both wanted to go into television.
Kevin often said he wanted to be a sleazy talk show host, and he wasn’t kidding.
I wanted to be a sports announcer or news anchor.
We conceived Hot Seat together and convinced the faculty to let us do it.
It was an instant hit.
It quickly became the most popular thing in school.
So why was I balking?
I didn’t know.
I had some vague feelings, but the only one I could identify was a warning: Leave her alone.
In time “Hillari’s Hypothesis” (so called by Kevin) about Stargirl’s origins gave way to other theories.
She was trying to get herself discovered for the movies.
She was sniffing fumes.
She was homeschooling gone amok.
She was an alien.
The rat she brought to school was only the tip of the iceberg.
She had hundreds of them at home, some as big as cats.
She lived in a ghost town in the desert.
She lived in a bus.
Her parents were circus acrobats.
Her parents were witches.
Her parents were brain-dead vegetables in a hospital in Yuma.
We watched her sit down in class and pull from her canvas bag a blue and yellow ruffled curtain that she draped over three sides of her desk.
We saw her set out a three-inch clear glass vase and drop into it a white and yellow daisy.
She did and undid this in every class she attended, six times a day.
Only on Monday mornings was the daisy fresh.
By last period the petals were drooping.
By Wednesday the petals began to fall, the stem to sag.
By Friday the flower hung down over the rim of the waterless vase, its dead stump of a head shedding yellow dust in the pencil groove.
We joined her as she sang “Happy Birthday” to us in the lunchroom.
We heard her greet us in the hallways and classrooms, and we wondered how she knew our names and our birthdays.
Her caught-in-headlights eyes gave her a look of perpetual astonishment, so that we found ourselves turning and looking back over our shoulders, wondering what we were missing.
She laughed when there was no joke.
She danced when there was no music.
She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.
In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was.
She said there was no television in her house.
She was elusive.
She was today.
She was tomorrow.
She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl.
We did not know what to make of her.
In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.
Kevin wasn’t the only one.
Other kids pestered me: “Put her on the Hot Seat!”
I lied.
I said she was only a tenth-grader and you had to be at least a junior to be on Hot Seat.
Meanwhile, I kept my distance.
I observed her as if she were a bird in an aviary.
One day I turned a corner and there she was, coming right at me, the long skirt softly rustling, looking straight at me, surrounding me with those eyes.
I turned and trotted off the other way.
Seating myself in my next class, I felt warm, shaken.
I wondered if my foolishness showed.
Was I myself becoming goofy?
The feeling I had had when I saw her around the corner had been something like panic.
Then one day after school I followed her.
I kept at a safe distance.
Since she was known not to take a bus, I expected the walk to be short.
It wasn’t.
We trekked all over Mica, past hundreds of grassless stone-andcactus front yards, through the Tudorized shopping center, skirting the electronics business park around which the city had been invented a mere fifteen years before.
At one point she pulled a piece of paper from her bag.
She consulted it.
She seemed to be reading house numbers as she walked along.
Abruptly she turned up a driveway, went to the front door, and left something in the mailbox.
I waited for her to move off.
I looked around—no one on the street.
I went to the mailbox, pulled out a homemade card, opened it.
Each tall letter was a different painted color.
The card said:
CONGRATULATIONS!
It was unsigned.
I resumed following her.
Cars pulled into driveways.
It was dinnertime.
My parents would be wondering.
She took the rat from the bag and put it on her shoulder.
Riding there, the rat faced backward, its tiny triangular face peeping out of her sandcolored hair.
I could not see its beady black eyes, but I guessed it was looking at me.
I fancied it was telling her what it saw.
I fell farther back.
Shadows crossed the streets.
We passed the car wash and the bike shop.
We passed the country club golf course, the biggest spread of green grass until the next golf course in the next town.
We passed the “Welcome to Mica” sign.
We were walking westward.
There was us and the highway and the desert and the sun blazing above the Maricopa Mountains.
I wished I had my sunglasses.
After a while she veered from the highway.
I hesitated, then followed.
She was walking directly into the setting sun, now a great orange perched atop the mountain crests.
For a minute the mountains were the same dusky lavender as her sand-skimming skirt.
With every step the silence grew, as did my sense that she knew—had known all along—that she was being followed.
Or more, that she was leading me.
She never looked back.
She strummed her ukulele.
She sang.
I could no longer see the rat.
I imagined it was dozing in the curtain of her hair.
I imagined it was singing along.
The sun lay down behind the mountains.
Where was she going?
In the gathering dusk, the saguaros flung shadows of giants across the pebbled earth.
The air was cool on my face.
The desert smelled of apples.
I heard something—a coyote?
I thought of rattlesnakes and scorpions.
I stopped.
I watched her walk on.
I stifled an impulse to call after her, to warn her…of what?
I turned and walked, then ran, back to the highway.
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CHAPTER IV.
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At Mica Area High School, Hillari Kimble was famous for three things: her mouth, The Hoax, and Wayne Parr.
Her mouth spoke for itself, most often to complain.
The episode that became known as Hillari’s Hoax took place in her sophomore year, when she tried out for cheerleading.
Her face and hair and figure were right enough, and she surely had the mouth—she made the squad easily.
And then she stunned everyone by turning it down.
She said she just wanted to prove that she could do it.
She said she had no intention of yammering and bouncing in front of empty bleachers (which was usually the case).
And anyway, she hated sports.
As for Wayne Parr, he was her boyfriend.
Mouthwise, he was her opposite: he seldom opened his.
He didn’t have to.
All he had to do was appear.
That was his job: appear.
By both girls’ and boys’ standards, Wayne Parr was gorgeous.
But he was more—and less—than that.
In terms of achievement, Wayne Parr seemed to be nobody.
He played on no sports team, joined no organization, won no awards, earned no A’s.
He was elected to nothing, honored for nothing—and yet, though I did not realize this until years later, he was grand marshal of our daily parade.
We did not wake up in the morning and ask ourselves, “What will Wayne Parr wear today?” or “How will Wayne Parr act today?”
At least, not consciously.
But on some level below awareness, that is exactly what we did.
Wayne Parr did not go to football and basketball games, and by and large, neither did we.
Wayne Parr did not ask questions in class or get worked up over teachers or pep rallies, and neither did we.
Wayne Parr did not much care.
Neither did we.
Did Parr create us, or was he simply a reflection of us?
I didn’t know.
I knew only that if you peeled off one by one all the layers of the student body, you would have found at the core not the spirit of the school, but Wayne Parr.
That’s why, in our sophomore year, I had recruited Parr for the Hot Seat.
Kevin was surprised.
“Why him?” Kevin said.
“What’s he ever done?”
What could I say?
That Parr was a worthy subject precisely because he did nothing, because he was so monumentally good at doing nothing?
I had only a vague insight, not the words.
I just shrugged.
The highlight of that Hot Seat came when Kevin asked Parr who was his hero, his role model.
It was one of Kevin’s standard questions.
Parr answered, “GQ.”
In the control room, I did a double take.
Was the sound working right?
“GQ?” Kevin repeated dumbly.
“Gentleman’s Quarterly?
The magazine?”
Parr did not look at Kevin.
He looked straight at the camera.
He nodded smugly.
He went on to say he wanted to become a male model, his ultimate ambition was to be on the cover of GQ.
And right there he posed for the camera—he had that disdainful model look down pat—and suddenly I could see it: the jaw square as the corner of a cover, the chiseled cheeks, the perfect teeth and hair.
That, as I say, took place toward the end of our sophomore year.
I thought then that Wayne Parr would always reign as our grand marshal.
How could I have known that he would soon be challenged by a frecklenosed homeschooler?
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CHAPTER V.
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The call came from Kevin on a Friday night.
He was at the football game.
“Quick!
Hurry!
Drop whatever you’re doing!
Now!”
Kevin was one of the few who went to games.
The school kept threatening to drop football because of low attendance.
They said ticket receipts were barely enough to pay for electricity to light the field.
But Kevin was screaming on the phone.
I jumped in the family pickup and raced to the stadium.
I bolted from the truck.
Kevin was at the gate, windmilling his arm: “Hurry!”
I threw the two-dollar admission at the ticket window and we raced for the field.
“See better up here,” he said, yanking me into the stands.
It was halftime.
The band was on the field, all fourteen of them.
Among the students it was known as “The World’s Smallest Standing Band.”
There weren’t enough of them to form recognizable letters or shapes—except for a capital “I”—so they didn’t march much at halftimes of games.
They mostly stood.
In two rows of seven each, plus the student conductor.
No majorettes.
No color guard.
No flag and rifle girls.
Except this night.
This night Stargirl Caraway was on the field with them.
As they played, rooted in their places, she pranced around the grass in her bare feet and long lemon-yellow dress.
She roamed from goalpost to goalpost.
She swirled like a dust devil.
She marched stiffly like a wooden soldier.
She tootled an imaginary flute.
She pogoed into the air and knocked her bare heels together.
The cheerleaders gaped from the sidelines.
A few people in the stands whistled.
The rest—they barely outnumbered the band—sat there with What is this? on their faces.
The band stopped playing and marched off the field.
Stargirl stayed.
She was twirling down the forty-yard line when the players returned.
They did a minute of warm-up exercises.
She joined in: jumping jacks, belly whomps.
The teams lined up for the second half kickoff.
The ball perched on the kicking tee.
She was still on the field.
The referee blew his whistle, pointed to her.
He flapped his hand for her to go away.
Instead, she dashed for the ball.
She plucked it off the tee and danced with it, spinning and hugging it and hoisting it into the air.
The players looked at their coaches.
The coaches looked at the officials.
The officials blew their whistles and began converging on her.
The sole policeman on duty headed for the field.
She punted the ball over the visiting team’s bench and ran from the field and out of the stadium.
Everyone cheered: the spectators, the cheerleaders, the band, the players, the officials, the parents running the hot dog stand, the policeman, me.
We whistled and stomped our feet on the aluminum bleachers.
The cheerleaders stared up in delighted surprise.
For the first time, they were hearing something come back from the stands.
They did cartwheels and backflips and even a three-tier pyramid.
Old-timers—or as old as timers got in a city as young as Mica—said they had never heard such a racket.
For the next home game more than a thousand people showed up.
Everyone but Wayne Parr and Hillari Kimble.
There was a line at the ticket window.
The refreshment stand ran out of hot dogs.
A second policeman was called in.
The cheerleaders were in their glory.
They screamed up at the bleachers: “GIMME AN E!”
The bleachers screamed back: “EEEE!” (We were the Electrons, in honor of the town’s electronics heritage.)
The cheerleaders ran through all their routines before the first quarter was over.
The band was loud and peppy.
The football team even scored a touchdown.
In the stands heads kept swinging to the edges of the field, to the entrance, to the streetlamp-lighted darkness behind the stadium.
The sense of expectation grew as the first half came to a close.
The band marched smartly onto the field.
Even they were looking around.
The musicians did their program.
They even formed a small, lopsided circle.
They seemed to linger on the field, drawing out their notes, waiting.
Finally, reluctantly, they marched to the sideline.
The players returned.
They kept glancing around as they did their warm-ups.
When the referee raised his arm and blew his whistle for the second half to begin, a sense of disappointment fell over the stadium.
The cheerleaders’ shoulders sagged.
She wasn’t coming.
On the following Monday, we got a shock in the lunchroom.
Bleached blond and beautiful Mallory Stillwell, captain of the cheerleaders, was sitting with Stargirl.
She sat with her, ate with her, talked with her, walked out with her.
By sixth period the whole school knew: Stargirl had been invited to become a cheerleader and had said yes.
People in Phoenix must have heard us buzzing.
Would she wear the usual skirt and sweater like everyone else?
Would she do the usual cheers?
Did all the cheerleaders want this, or was it just the captain’s idea?
Were they jealous?
Cheerleading practice drew a crowd.
At least a hundred of us stood by the parking lot that day, watching her learn the cheers, watching her jump around in her long pioneer dress.
She spent two weeks practicing.
Halfway through the second week she wore her uniform: green-trimmed white V-neck cotton sweater, short green and white pleated skirt.
She looked just like the rest of them.
Still, to us she was not truly a cheerleader, but Stargirl dressed like one.
She continued to strum her ukulele and sing “Happy Birthday” to people.
She still wore long skirts on non-game days and made a home of her school desks.
When Halloween arrived, everyone in her homeroom found a candy pumpkin on his or her desk.
No one had to ask who did it.
By then most of us had decided that we liked having her around.
We found ourselves looking forward to coming to school, to seeing what bizarre antic she’d be up to.
She gave us something to talk about.
She was entertaining.
At the same time, we held back.
Because she was different.
Different.
We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against.
She was unknown territory.
Unsafe.
We were afraid to get too close.
Also, I think we were all waiting to see the outcome of an event that loomed larger and larger with every passing day.
The next birthday coming up was Hillari Kimble’s.
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CHAPTER V.
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Hillari herself set the stage the day before.
In the middle of lunch, she got up from her table and walked over to Stargirl.
For half a minute she just stood behind Stargirl’s chair.
Silence everywhere except for tinklings in the kitchen.
Only Stargirl was still chewing.
Hillari moved around to the side.
“I’m Hillari Kimble,” she said.
Stargirl looked up.
She smiled.
She said, “I know.”
“My birthday is tomorrow.”
“I know.”
Hillari paused.
Her eyes narrowed.
She jabbed her finger in Stargirl’s face.
“Don’t try singing to me, I’m warning you.”
Only those at nearby tables heard Stargirl’s faint reply: “I won’t sing to you.”
Hillari gave a satisfied smirk and walked off.
From the moment we arrived at school the next day, the atmosphere bristled like cactus paddles.
When the buzzer sounded for first lunch, we leaped for the doors.
We swarmed into the food lines.
We raced through our choices and hurried to our seats.
Never had we moved so fast so quietly.
At most, we whispered.
We sat, we ate.
We were afraid to crunch our potato chips, afraid we might miss something.
Hillari was first to enter.
She marched in, leading her girlfriends like an invading general.
In the food line, she smacked items onto her tray.
She glared at the cashier.
While her friends scanned the crowd for Stargirl, Hillari stared ferociously at her sandwich.
Wayne Parr came in and sat several tables away, as if even he was afraid of her on this day.
Stargirl finally came in.
She went straight to the food line, blithely smiling as usual.
Both she and Hillari seemed unaware of each other.
Stargirl ate.
Hillari ate.
We watched.
Only the clock moved.
A kitchen staffer stuck her head out over the conveyor belt and called: “Trays!”
A voice barked back: “Shut up!”
Stargirl finished her lunch.
As usual, she stuffed her wrappings into her paper bag, carried the bag to the paper-only can by the tray return window, and dropped it in.
She returned to her seat.
She picked up the ukulele.
We stopped breathing.
Hillari stared at her sandwich.
Stargirl began strumming and humming.
She stood.
She strolled between the tables, humming, strumming.
Three hundred pairs of eyes followed her.
She came to Hillari Kimble’s table—and kept on walking, right up to the table where Kevin and I sat with the Hot Seat crew.
She stopped and she sang “Happy Birthday.”
It was Hillari’s name at the end of the song, but true to her word of the day before, she did not sing it to Hillari—she sang it to me.
She stood at my shoulder and looked down at me, smiling and singing, and I didn’t know whether to look down at my hands or up at her face, so I did some of each.
My face was burning.
When she finished, the students burst from their silence with wild applause.
Hillari Kimble stomped from the lunchroom.
Kevin looked up at Stargirl and pointed at me and said what everyone must have been thinking: “Why him?”
Stargirl tilted her head, as if studying me.
She grinned mischievously.
She tugged on my earlobe and said, “He’s cute.”
And walked off.
I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear—until Kevin reached over and yanked the same earlobe.
“This keeps getting more interesting,” he said.
“I think it’s time to go see Archie.”
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CHAPTER VII.
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A. H. (Archibald Hapwood) Brubaker lived in a house of bones.
Jawbones, hipbones, femurs.
There were bones in every room, every closet, on the back porch.
Some people have stone cats on their roofs; on his roof Archie Brubaker had a skeleton of Monroe, his deceased Siamese.
Take a seat in his bathroom and you found yourself facing the faintly smirking skull of Doris, a prehistoric creodont.
Open the kitchen cabinet where the peanut butter was kept and you were face to fossil face with an extinct fox.
Archie was not morbid; he was a paleontologist.
The bones were from digs he had done throughout the American West.
Many were rightly his, found in his spare time.
Others he collected for museums but slipped into his own pocket or knapsack instead.
“Better to sit in my refrigerator than disappear in a drawer in some museum basement,” he would say.
When he wasn’t digging up old bones, Archie Brubaker was teaching at universities in the East.
He retired at the age of sixty-five.
When he was sixty-six, his wife, Ada Mae, died.
At sixty-seven he moved himself and his bones west, “to join the other fossils.”
He chose his home for two reasons: (1) its proximity to the high school (he wanted to be near kids; he had none of his own) and (2) “Señor Saguaro.”
Señor Saguaro was a cactus, a thirty-foot-tall giant that towered over the toolshed in the backyard.
It had two arms high on the trunk.
One stuck straight out; the other made a right turn upward, as if waving “adiós!”
The waving arm was green from the elbow up; all else was brown, dead.
Much of the thick, leathery skin along the trunk had come loose and crumpled in a heap about the massive foot: Señor Saguaro had lost his pants.
Only his ribs, thumb-thick vertical timbers, held him up.
Elf owls nested in his chest.
The old professor often talked to Señor Saguaro—and to us.
He was not certified to teach in Arizona, but that did not stop him.
Every Saturday morning his house became a school.
Fourth-graders, twelfth-graders—all were welcome.
No tests, no grades, no attendance record.
Just the best school most of us had ever gone to.
He covered everything from toothpaste to tapeworms and somehow made it all fit together.
He called us the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone.
He gave us homemade necklaces.
The pendant was a small fossil bone strung on rawhide.
Years before, he had told his first class, “Call me Archie.”
He never had to say it again.
After dinner that day, Kevin and I walked over to Archie’s.
Though the official class convened on Saturday morning, kids were welcome anytime.
“My school,” he said, “is everywhere and always in session.”
We found him, as usual, on the back porch, rocking and reading.
The porch, bathed in the red-gold light of sunset, faced the Maricopas.
Archie’s white hair seemed to give off a light of its own.
The moment he saw us, he put down his book.
“Students!
Welcome!”
“Archie,” we said, then turned to greet the great cactus, as visitors were expected to do: “Señor Saguaro.”
We saluted.
We sat on rockers; the porch was full of them.
“So, men,” he said, “business or pleasure?”
“Bafflement,” I said.
“There’s a new girl in school.”
He laughed.
“Stargirl.”
Kevin’s eyes popped.
“You know her?”
“Know her?” he said.
He picked up his pipe and loaded it with cherrysweet tobacco.
He always did this when settling in for a long lecture or conversation.
“Good question.”
He lit the pipe.
“Let’s say she’s been on the porch here quite a few times.”
White smoke puffed like Apache signals from the corner of his mouth.
“I was wondering when you’d start asking questions.”
He chuckled to himself.
“Bafflement… good word.
She is different, isn’t she?”
Kevin and I burst into laughter and nods.
At that moment I realized how much I had been craving Archie’s confirmation.
Kevin exclaimed, “Like another species!”
Archie cocked his head, as if he had just caught the sound of a rare bird.
The pipe stem anchored a wry grin.
A sweet scent filled the air about our rocking chairs.
He stared at Kevin.
“On the contrary, she is one of us.
Most decidedly.
She is us more than we are us.
She is, I think, who we really are.
Or were.”
Archie talked that way sometimes, in riddles.
We didn’t always know what he was saying, but our ears didn’t much care.
We just wanted to hear more.
As the sun dipped below the mountains, it fired a final dart at Archie’s flashing eyebrows.
“She’s homeschooled, you know.
Her mother brought her to me.
I guess she wanted a break from playing teacher.
One day a week.
Four, five— yes, five years now.”
Kevin pointed.
“You created her!”
Archie smiled, puffed.
“No, that was done long before me.”
“Some people are saying she’s some kind of alien sent down here from Alpha Centauri or something,” said Kevin.
He chuckled, but not too convincingly.
He half believed it.
Archie’s pipe had gone out.
He relit it.
“She’s anything but.
She’s an earthling if there ever was one.”
“So it’s not just an act?” said Kevin.
“An act?
No.
If anybody is acting, it’s us.
She’s as real as”—he looked around; he picked up the tiny, wedgelike skull of Barney, a 60-millionyear-old Paleocene rodent, and held it up—“as real as Barney.”
I felt a little jolt of pride at having reached this conclusion myself.
“But the name,” said Kevin, leaning forward.
“Is it real?”
“The name?”
Archie shrugged.
“Every name is real.
That’s the nature of names.
When she first showed up, she called herself Pocket Mouse.
Then Mudpie.
Then—what?—Hullygully, I believe.
Now…”
“Stargirl.”
The word came out whispery; my throat was dry.
Archie looked at me.
“Whatever strikes her fancy.
Maybe that’s how names ought to be, heh?
Why be stuck with just one your whole life?”
“What about her parents?” said Kevin.
“What about them?”
“What do they think?”
Archie shrugged.
“I guess they agree.”
“What do they do?” Kevin said.
“Breathe.
Eat.
Clip their toenails.”
Kevin laughed.
“You know what I mean.
Where do they work?”
“Mrs. Caraway, until a few months ago, was Stargirl’s teacher.
I understand she also makes costumes for movies.”
Kevin poked me.
“The crazy clothes!”
“Her father, Charles, works”—he smiled at us—“where else?”
“MicaTronics,” we said in chorus.
I said it with wonder, for I had imagined something more exotic.
Kevin said, “So where is she from?”
A natural question in a city as young as Mica.
Nearly everybody had been born somewhere else.
Archie’s eyebrows went up.
“Good question.”
He took a long pull on the pipe.
“Some would say Minnesota, but in her case…” He let out the smoke, his face disappearing in a gray cloud.
A sweet haze veiled the sunset: cherries roasting in the Maricopas.
He whispered, “Rara avis.”
“Archie,” said Kevin, “you’re not making a lot of sense.”
Archie laughed, “Do I ever?”
Kevin jumped up.
“I want to put her on Hot Seat.
Dorko Borlock here doesn’t want to.”
Archie studied me through the smoke.
I thought I saw approval, but when he spoke, he merely said, “Work it out, men.”
We talked until dark.
We said “adiós” to Señor Saguaro.
On our way out, Archie said, more to me than to Kevin, I thought: “You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers.
Keep looking at her long enough.
One day you might see someone you know.”
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CHAPTER VIII.
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The change began around Thanksgiving.
By December first, Stargirl Caraway had become the most popular person in school.
How did it happen?
Was it the cheerleading?
The last football game of the season was her first as a cheerleader.
The grandstand was packed: students, parents, alumni.
Never had so many people come to a football game to see a cheerleader.
She did all the regular cheers and routines.
And more.
In fact, she never stopped cheering.
While the other girls were taking breaks, she went on jumping and yelling.
She roamed.
Areas that had always been ignored— the far ends of the grandstand, the spectators behind the goalposts, the snack bar parents—found themselves with their own arm-pumping cheerleader.
She ran straight across the fifty-yard line and joined the other team’s cheerleaders.
We laughed as they stood there with their mouths open.
She cheered in front of the players’ bench and was shooed away by a coach.
At halftime she played her ukulele with the band.
In the second half she got acrobatic.
She did cartwheels and backflips.
At one point the game was stopped and three zebra-shirted officials ran toward one end zone.
She had shinnied up a goalpost, tightrope-walked out to the middle of the crossbar, and was now standing there with her arms raised in a touchdown sign.
She was commanded down, to a standing ovation and flashing cameras.
As we filed out afterward, no one mentioned how boring the game itself had been.
No one cared that the Electrons had lost again.
In his column next day, the sports editor of the Mica Times referred to her as “the best athlete on the field.”
We couldn’t wait for basketball season.
Was it a Hillari Kimble backlash?
Several days after the birthday song, I heard a shout down the hallway: “Don’t!”
I ran.
A crowd was gathered at the top of a stairwell.
They were all staring at something.
I pushed my way through.
Hillari Kimble was standing at the upper landing, grinning.
She was holding Cinnamon the rat, dangling by its tail over the railing, nothing but space between it and the first floor.
Stargirl was on the steps below, looking up.
The scene froze.
The bell for the next class rang.
Nobody moved.
Stargirl said nothing, merely looked.
The eight toes of Cinnamon’s front paws splayed apart.
Its tiny unblinking eyes were bulging, black as cloves.
Again a voice rang out: “Don’t, Hillari!”
Suddenly Hillari dropped it.
Someone screamed, but the rat fell only to the floor at Hillari’s feet.
She sent Stargirl a final sneer and left.
Was it Dori Dilson?
Dori Dilson was a brown-haired ninth-grader who wrote poems in a looseleaf notebook half as big as herself and whose name nobody knew until the day she sat down at Stargirl’s table for lunch.
Next day the table was full.
No longer did Stargirl eat lunch—or walk the hallways or do anything else at school—alone.
Was it us?
Did we change?
Why didn’t Hillari Kimble drop the rat to its death?
Did she see something in our eyes?
Whatever the reason, by the time we returned from Thanksgiving break, it was clear that the change had occurred.
Suddenly Stargirl was not dangerous, and we rushed to embrace her.
Calls of “Stargirl!” flew down the hallways.
We couldn’t say her name often enough.
It tickled us to mention her name to strangers and watch the expressions on their faces.
Girls liked her.
Boys liked her.
And—most remarkable—the attention came from all kinds of kids: shy mice and princesses, jocks and eggheads.
We honored her by imitation.
A chorus of ukuleles strummed in the lunchroom.
Flowers appeared on classroom desks.
One day it rained and a dozen girls ran outside to dance.
The pet shop at the Mica Mall ran out of rats.
The best chance for us to express our admiration came in the first week of December.
We were gathered in the auditorium for the annual oratorical contest.
Sponsored by the Arizona League of Women Voters, the event was open to any high school student who cared to show his or her stuff as a public speaker.
The microphone was yours for seven minutes.
Talk about anything you like.
The winner would move on to the district competition.
Usually only four or five students entered the contest at MAHS.
That year there were thirteen, including Stargirl.
You didn’t have to be a judge to see that she was far and away the best.
She gave an animated speech —a performance, really—titled “Elf Owl, Call Me by My First Name.”
Her gray-brown homesteader’s dress was the color of her subject.
I couldn’t see her freckles from the audience, but I imagined them dancing on her nose as she flicked her head this way and that.
When she finished, we stomped on the floor and whistled and shouted for more.
While the judges went through the charade of conferring, a film was shown.
It was a brief documentary about the previous year’s state finals.
It featured the winner, a boy from Yuma.
The most riveting moments of the film came not during the contest, but during its aftermath.
When the boy arrived back at Yuma High, the whole school mobbed him in the parking lot: banners, cheerleaders, band music, confetti, streamers.
Pumping his arms in the air, the returning hero rode their shoulders into school.
The film ended, the lights went on, and the judges proclaimed Stargirl the winner.
She would now go on to the district competition in Red Rock, they said.
The state finals would be held in Phoenix in April.
Again and again we whooped and whistled.
Such was the acclamation we gave her in those last weeks of the year.
But we also gave something to ourselves.
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CHAPTER IX.
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In the Sonoran Desert there are ponds.
You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry.
Nor would you know that inches below your feet, frogs are sleeping, their heartbeats down to once or twice per minute.
They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves.
For many months they sleep like this within the earth.
And then the rain comes.
And a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and at night a hundred voices call across the moonlit water.
It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around.
We were awash in tiny attentions.
Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life.
For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled.
If someone got an A, others celebrated, too.
If someone sprained an ankle, others felt the pain.
We discovered the color of each other’s eyes.
It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against.
For ourselves.
For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.
Kids whose voices had never been heard before spoke up in class.
“Letters to the Editor” filled a whole page of the school newspaper’s December edition.
More than a hundred students tried out for the Spring Revue.
One kid started a camera club.
Another wore Hush Puppies instead of sneakers.
A plain, timid girl painted her toenails kelly green.
A boy showed up with purple hair.
None of this was publicly acknowledged.
There were no PA announcements, no TV coverage, no headlines in the Mica Times:
MAHS STUDENTS ASTIR
INDIVIDUALITY ERUPTS
But it was there; it was happening.
I was used to peering through the lens, to framing the picture, and I could see it.
I could feel it in myself.
I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away.
But I didn’t know what to do about it.
There was no direction to my liberation.
I had no urge to color my hair or trash my sneakers.
So I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals.
The pronoun “we” itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.
Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before.
It echoed from the rafters in the gym: “GO, ELECTRONS!”
It sparkled in the water fountains.
At the holiday assembly, the words of the alma mater had wings.
“It’s a miracle!” I gushed to Archie one day.
He stood on the edge of his back porch.
He did not turn.
He pulled the pipe slowly from between his lips.
He spoke as if to Señor Saguaro or to the blazing mountains beyond.
“Best hope it’s not,” he said.
“The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long.”
And the trouble with bad times is, you can’t sleep through them.
It was a golden age, those few weeks in December and January.
How could I know that when the end came, I would be in the middle of it?
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CHAPTER X.
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All my resistance to putting Stargirl on Hot Seat vanished.
“Okay,” I said to Kevin, “let’s do it.
Schedule her.”
He started off.
I grabbed his arm.
“Wait—ask her first.”
He laughed.
“Right.
Like she’s gonna say no.”
No one had ever said no to the Hot Seat.
Any reluctance to answering personal or embarrassing questions always yielded to the lure of appearing on TV.
If anyone could resist that lure, I figured it would be Stargirl.
That day after school, Kevin came at me thumbs-up and grinning: “It’s a go!
She said yes!”
First I was surprised.
This didn’t fit my impression of her.
I didn’t know that this was an early glimpse of something I was soon to see much more of: behind the dazzling talents and differentness, she was far more normal than I had realized.
Then I was elated.
We yipped.
We high-fived.
We saw visions of our most popular show ever.
This was mid-January.
We set a date of February thirteenth, the day before Valentine’s.
We wanted a full month for buildup.
With my resistance now gone, I jumped in with both feet.
We planned a promo campaign.
We got art students to do posters.
We jotted down questions for Kevin to ask in case the jury ran out—fat chance of that happening.
We didn’t have to post the usual jury notice: dozens of kids volunteered.
And then things changed again.
In the courtyard of our school stood a five-foot sheet of plywood in the shape of a roadrunner.
It was a bulletin board, strictly for student use, always taped and tacked with messages and announcements.
One day we found the following computer printout taped to the plywood roadrunner: “I pledge allegiance to United Turtles of America and to the fruit bats of Borneo, one planet in the Milky Way, incredible, with justice and black bean burritos for all.”
Handwritten across the bottom were the words: “This is how she says the Pledge of Allegiance.”
No one had to tell us who “she” was.
Apparently, she was overheard in homeroom as we said the Pledge each morning.
As far as I knew, we were not a particularly patriotic bunch.
I didn’t hear people saying they were offended.
Some thought it was funny.
Some giggled and nodded knowingly, as if to say, There she goes again.
On the following mornings, more than one kid was heard reciting the new “pledge.”
Within days a new story wildfired through the student body.
A senior girl, Anna Grisdale, lost her grandfather after a long illness.
The funeral took place on a Saturday morning.
For a while everything seemed routine: the crowd of people at the church, the line of cars with their headlights on, the smaller group clustered around the grave for the final farewell.
After the brief graveside service, the funeral director handed everyone a long-stemmed flower.
Upon leaving, each mourner laid his or her flower over the casket.
This was when Anna Grisdale first noticed Stargirl.
Through her own tears Anna could see that Stargirl was crying also.
She wondered if Stargirl had been at the church as well.
Even more, she wondered why Stargirl was there at all.
Could she have been friends with her grandfather without Anna’s knowing it?
Anna’s mother asked her who the unfamiliar girl was.
Afterward, the mourners were invited to Anna’s house for lunch.
About thirty came.
There was a buffet of cold cuts and salads and cookies.
Stargirl was there, chatting with members of the family but not eating or drinking anything.
Suddenly Anna heard her mother’s voice.
It was no louder than the others, but it was different: “What are you doing here?”
Sudden stillness.
Everyone staring.
They were in front of the picture window.
Anna had never seen her mother so angry.
Mrs. Grisdale had been very close to her father.
They had built an addition to their house so he could live with them.
She glared down at Stargirl.
“Answer me.”
Stargirl gave no reply.
“You didn’t even know him, did you?”
Still Stargirl said nothing.
“Did you?”
And then Anna’s mother was flinging open the front door and pointing, as if banishing her to the desert.
“Leave my house.”
Stargirl left.
Danny Pike was nine years old.
He loved to ride the bicycle he had gotten for his birthday.
One day after school he lost control and plowed into a mailbox.
He broke his leg, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
A blood clot developed.
He was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Phoenix, where he was operated on.
For a while it was touch and go, but within a week he was on his way back home.
All this was reported in the Mica Times.
As was the celebration when Danny arrived at his home on Piñon Lane.
The five-column photo in the Times showed Danny on his father’s shoulders, surrounded by a mob of neighbors.
In the foreground was a new bike, and a big sign that read:
WELCOME HOME, DANNY
It wasn’t until days later that the front-page photo appeared on the plywood roadrunner.
We gathered around to see something we hadn’t noticed before.
An arrow from a thick red felt-tip marker pointed at one of the tiny faces crowded into the frame.
It was the face of a girl, beaming as if Danny Pike were her little brother back from the dead.
It was Stargirl.
And then there was the bike.
The various members of the Pike family—parents, grandparents, et al.— each thought someone else had bought Danny the new bicycle.
Several days went by before they discovered to their great surprise that none of them had.
So where did the bike come from?
High-schoolers who heard the story and saw the picture had a pretty good idea.
Apparently the Pikes did not.
The bike became the focus of a family squabble.
Mr. Pike was mad because nobody he asked would admit to buying the bike—and probably because he hadn’t done it himself.
Mrs. Pike was mad because no way, not for at least one year, would she allow Danny back on wheels.
One night the new, still-unridden bike wound up at the Pikes’ front curb with the trash cans.
By the time the trash collector came the next day, it was gone.
Danny got a BB gun instead.
The Pledge of Allegiance, the Grisdale funeral, the Danny Pike affair— these things were noted, but they had no immediate impact on Stargirl’s popularity at school.
Not so with cheerleading and the boys’ basketball season.