[Part 3] "Stargirl" by Jerry Spinelli
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CHAPTER XVIII.
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We were alone.
We were the only ones in school.
At least that’s how it seemed in the following days.
As I went about my day, I felt her going about hers.
I sensed her movement, her presence in distant parts of the building.
Walking the halls between classes, I didn’t have to see her, I knew she was there: unseen in the mob heading my way, about to turn a corner five classroom doors down.
I homed in on the beacon of her smile.
As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other’s eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.
And then one day I began to discover that we were more alone than I had dreamed.
It was a Thursday.
Normally on that day, after third period, Stargirl and I would pass each other on the second floor around the teachers’ lounge.
We would smile and say hi and continue on our way to our separate classes.
On this day, impulsively, I fell in alongside her.
“How about an escort?” I said.
She grinned slyly.
“Anybody in mind?”
We touched little fingers and walked on.
Her next class was on the first floor, so we went down the nearest stairway.
We were walking side by side.
That’s when I noticed.
No one spoke to us.
No one nodded to us.
No one smiled at us.
No one looked at us.
A crowded stairway, and no shoulder, no sleeve brushed us.
Students climbing the steps veered to the railing or wall.
Except for Stargirl jabbering in my ear, the usual raucous chatter was absent.
Mostly what I noticed were the eyes.
Faces turned up from the steps below, but the eyes never connected with us.
They went right on through us as if they were gamma rays.
Or they nipped our ears and rattled off among the walls and other eyes.
I had an urge to look down at myself, to make sure I was there.
At lunch I said to Kevin, “Nobody looks at me.”
He was staring at his sandwich.
“Kevin!” I snapped.
“Now you’re doing it.”
He came up laughing.
He looked me square in the eyes.
“Sorry.”
Usually there were others at the table.
Today there was only us.
I leaned across my lunch.
“Kevin, what’s going on?”
He looked off, then back to me.
“I was wondering when you’d notice.
Kinda hoping you wouldn’t.”
“Notice what?”
He stalled by taking a bite of tuna salad sandwich.
He took his time chewing.
He drank orangeade from a straw.
“First of all, it’s not you.”
I pulled back.
I held out my hands.
“It’s not me.
What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s who you’re with.”
I sat there, blinking, staring at him.
“Stargirl?”
He nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
“So?”
He stared at me some more, chewed, swallowed, sipped, looked away, looked back.
“They’re not talking to her.”
The words didn’t stick.
“What do you mean?
Who’s ‘they’?”
He cocked his head at the sea of tables and eaters.
“Them.”
“Who them?” I said, too unhinged to laugh at my grammar.
He wet his lips.
“All of them.”
He shrugged.
“Well, almost.”
His eyes drifted over my shoulder.
“There’re still two girls sitting with her.”
I glanced back.
At the height of Stargirl’s popularity, kids had been pulling chairs from other tables to squeeze around hers.
Now it was just Stargirl, Dori Dilson, and a ninth-grader.
“So,” I said, “exactly what is going on?”
He sipped from his straw.
“The silent treatment is going on.
Nobody’s talking to her.”
It still wasn’t sticking.
“What do you mean, ‘nobody’s talking to her’?
What, did everybody have a meeting in the gym and vote on it?”
“It wasn’t that official.
It just happened.
Got up steam.”
I gaped at him.
“When?
When did it start?
How?
Why?”
I was beginning to screech.
“I don’t know exactly.
After the basketball stuff, I guess.
That really ticked off a lot of people.”
“The basketball stuff.”
He nodded.
“The basketball stuff,” I repeated dumbly.
He put down his sandwich.
“Leo, don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Cheering for the other team?
What did you think, people thought that was cute?”
“It was her, Kevin.
It was harmless.
Weird maybe, but harmless.
It was her.”
He nodded slowly.
“Yeah, well, I guess that’s what I’m saying.
It’s not just one thing she did.
It’s everything.
Don’t tell me you never noticed.
Remember a certain tomato?”
“Kevin, a couple of months ago everybody stood and cheered in the auditorium when she won the oratorical contest.”
“Hey”—he gestured defensively—“tell them.”
“One person threw the tomato.
One.”
Kevin snickered.
“Yeah, and a thousand wanted to.
Did you notice the cheers when it happened?
People blame her.
For the team losing.
For our undefeated season going down the toilet.”
I wasn’t sure Kevin was still talking about “them.”
“Kevin—” I felt myself pleading.
“She was only a cheerleader.”
“Leo”—he was pointing—“you asked me what was going on, I told you.”
He stood up and took his tray to the belt.
I stared at his empty chair until he returned.
“Kevin…the Happy Birthday songs, the Valentine cards, all the nice things she does for people…doesn’t that count for something?”
The bell rang.
He got up.
He gathered his books.
He shrugged.
“I guess not.”
For the rest of the day, and the next and the next, I grew increasingly paranoid.
Walking with her in and around the school, I was intensely aware that the nature of our aloneness had changed.
It was no longer a cozy, tunnel-of-love sweetness, but a chilling isolation.
We never had to veer, never had to make way for someone else; everyone made way for us.
Hallway crowds fell away from us.
Except for Hillari Kimble.
Whenever we passed her, she tilted toward us with a gloating smirk on her face.
As for Stargirl, she didn’t seem to notice.
She jabbered constantly in my ear.
While I smiled and nodded to her, frost formed on the back of my neck.
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CHAPTER XIX.
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“The Amish in Pennsylvania have a word for it.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Shunning.”
I was at Archie’s.
I had to talk to someone.
“Well, that’s what’s happening.”
“The shunnee, so to speak, has gotten himself in dutch with the church, so he’s excommunicated.
The whole community is in on it.
Unless he repents, nobody speaks to him for the rest of his life.
Not even his family.”
“What?!”
“That’s right.
Not even his family.”
“What about his wife?”
“Wife.
Kids.
Everybody.”
His pipe had gone out.
He relit it with a stick match.
“I believe the idea is to drive him away.
But some stay, continue working the farm, having dinner.
If he passes the salt to his wife, she ignores it.
If the bishop had his way, the pigs and chickens would ignore him.
It’s as if he doesn’t exist.”
I nodded.
“I know the feeling.”
We were on the back porch.
I stared out at Señor Saguaro.
He said, “Does it happen to you when you’re not with her?”
“No,” I said.
“At least I don’t think so.
But when I’m with her, I feel like it’s aimed at me, too.”
A small pipe cloud left the corner of his mouth.
He smiled sadly.
“Poor dolphin.
Caught in a tuna net.”
I picked up Barney, the Paleocene rodent skull.
I wondered if someone would be holding Cinnamon’s head 60 million years from now.
“So, what should I do?”
Archie waved his hand.
“Oh, well, that’s the easy part.
Stay away from her: your problem’s kaput.”
I sneered.
“Great advice.
You know it’s not that easy.”
He did know, of course, but he wanted me to say it.
I told him about the valentine, the night in her driveway, the walk in the desert.
The question that came to mind then sounded silly, but it persisted: “Do you believe in enchanted places?”
He took the pipe from his mouth and looked straight at me.
“Absolutely.”
I was confused.
“But you’re a scientist.
A man of science.”
“A man of bones.
You can’t be up to your eyeballs in bones and not believe in enchanted places.”
I looked at Barney.
I ran my fingertip along the hard line of his two-inch jaw, rough like a cat’s tongue.
Sixty million years in my hands.
I looked at Archie.
“Why can’t she be…”
He finished for me: “…like everybody else?”
He stood up and stepped down from the porch onto the desert—for his back yard, except for the shed where he kept his digging tools, was the desert.
Nature did the landscaping.
I put down Barney and joined him.
We ambled toward Señor Saguaro.
“Not like everybody else,” I said.
“Not exactly.
Not totally.
But… Archie…”
I stopped.
He stopped.
I turned full-face to him.
My thoughts and feelings were a wild, conflicting jumble.
After staring stupidly at him for a long time, I blurted, “She cheers for the other team!”
Archie pulled the pipe from his mouth, as if to better digest my words.
He raised one finger in the air.
He nodded solemnly.
“Ahh, yes.”
We resumed walking.
We walked on past the toolshed, past Señor Saguaro.
Occasionally I picked up a stone and flung it toward the purple Maricopas.
Archie said, almost in a whisper, “She’s not easy to put into words, is she?”
I shook my head.
“An unusual girl,” he said.
“Could see that from the first.
And her parents, as ordinary, in a nice way, as could be.
How did this girl come to be?
I used to ask myself.
Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me.
She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing.”
He looked at me.
“Hm?”
I nodded.
He turned the mahogany bowl of his pipe upside down and rapped it with his knuckle.
A small stream of ash spilled onto a thicket of dead mesquite.
He pointed the pipe stem at me.
“You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s in the morning, for most of us.
It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet.
For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become.
We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us.
For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized.
We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard.
We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly.
We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.
And then…”
He pulled out his pouch and repacked his pipe.
Cherryscent flew.
He struck a match.
The pipe bowl, like some predator, or seducer, drew down the flame.
“…and then—ah—we open our eyes and the day is before us, and”—he snapped his fingers—“we become ourselves.”
Like so many of Archie’s words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.
We walked in silence.
Yellow blooms had appeared on a cactus, and for some reason that made me incredibly sad.
The purple of the mountains flowed like watercolor.
“They hate her,” I said.
He stopped.
He looked intently at me.
He turned me around and we headed back.
He put his arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s consult Señor Saguaro.”
Shortly we were standing before the derelict giant.
I never understood how the Señor managed to convey a sense of dignity, majesty even, considering his stick-rickety, see-through skeleton and the ridiculous, leathery crumple of hide about his foot, his fallen britches.
Archie always spoke to him with respectful formality, as to a judge or visiting dignitary.
“Good day, Señor Saguaro,” he began.
“I believe you know my friend and charter member of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone, Mr. Borlock.”
He whispered an aside to me: “I’m a little rusty, but I think I’ll use Spanish now.
He prefers it on delicate matters.”
He turned back to the cactus.
“Parece, Señor Borlock aquí es la víctima de un ‘shunning’ de sus compañeros estudiantes en el liceo.
El objeto principal del ‘shunning’ es la enamorada del Señor Borlock, nuestra propia Señorita Niña Estrella.
El está en búsqueda de preguntas.”
As Archie spoke, he looked up toward the elf owl hole.
Now he turned back to me and whispered, “I asked for questions.”
“Questions?” I whispered.
“What about answers?”
But he was turning from me, tilting his head toward the great cactus, his finger on his lips—“Shh”—his eyes closed.
I waited.
At last he nodded and turned back to me.
“The esteemed Señor says there is only one question.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“He says it all boils down to this—if I’m translating correctly: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’?
The Señor says everything will follow from that.”
I wasn’t sure I understood the Señor any more than I understood Archie half the time, but I said nothing, and I went home.
In bed that night, as the moonlight reached high tide under my chin, I realized that in fact I understood the question perfectly.
I just didn’t want to answer it.
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CHAPTER XX.
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Twice a week the results of the state basketball tournament were posted on the plywood roadrunner in the courtyard.
The surviving teams were into the sectionals now; then would come the regionals; then, with only two teams left, the big show, the Arizona state championship.
Glendale, the team we had lost to, got bitter, masochistic attention on the roadrunner with scores in foot-high numerals, as they continued to win and move through the tournament.
Meanwhile, Stargirl was involved in a tournament of her own, the oratorical contest.
As Mica High’s winner, she qualified for the district “talk-off,” as the Times called it.
It took place in the auditorium of Red Rock High School, and lo and behold, Stargirl won that, too.
Next stop was the state finals in Phoenix on the third Friday in April.
In my homeroom, when the announcement came over the PA about Stargirl winning the district title, I was about to let out a cheer, but I caught myself.
Several people booed.
Getting ready for the finals, Stargirl practiced on me.
Most often we went into the desert.
She did not use notes, nor did her words seem memorized.
Each time she gave the speech, it was different.
She seemed to insert new material as it popped into her head.
She matched her words so perfectly that the speech was not a speech at all, but one creature’s voice in the wild, as natural as a raven’s caw or a coyote’s howl at midnight.
I sat cross-legged on the ground, Cinnamon sat on me.
We listened in rapture, and so, I half believed, did the tumbleweed and cacti, the desert, the mountains, all listening to the girl in the longfalling skirt.
What a shame, I thought, to pack her performance into a schedule and present it to rows of plush-back seats in an auditorium.
Once, incredibly, an elf owl landed atop a saguaro not ten feet from where she was speaking.
It paused for a full minute before ducking into its hole.
Of course, we did other things, too.
We walked.
We talked.
We rode bikes.
Though I had my driver’s license, I bought a cheap secondhand bicycle so I could ride with her.
Sometimes she led the way, sometimes I did.
Whenever we could, we rode side by side.
She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.
She taught me to revel.
She taught me to wonder.
She taught me to laugh.
My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else’s; but timid, introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler.
In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.
She saw things.
I had not known there was so much to see.
She was forever tugging my arm and saying, “Look!”
I would look around, seeing nothing.
“Where?”
She would point.
“There.”
In the beginning I still could not see.
She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky.
But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as “nothing.”
I walked in a gray world of nothings.
So she would stop and point out that the front door of the house we were passing was blue.
And that the last time we had passed it, it had been green.
And that as near as she could tell, someone who lived in that house painted the front door a different color several times a year.
Or she would whisper to me that the old man sitting alone on the bench at the Tudor Village shopping center was holding his hearing aid in his hand, and he was smiling, and he wore a coat and tie as if he were going somewhere special, and pinned onto his lapel was a tiny American flag.
Or she would kneel down and pull me down with her and show me the ants, two of them, lugging the lopped leg of a beetle twenty times their size across the sidewalk, as might two men, were they strong as ants, carry a full-grown tree from one end of town to the other.
After a while I began to see better.
When she said “Look!” and I followed her pointing finger, I saw.
Eventually it became a contest: who would see first?
When I finally did it—said “Look!” and pointed and tugged her sleeve—I was as proud as a first-grader with a star on his paper.
And there was more to her seeing than that.
What she saw, she felt.
Her eyes went straight to her heart.
The old man on the bench, for example, made her cry.
The lumberjack ants made her laugh.
The door of many colors put her in such a snit of curiosity that I had to drag her away; she felt she could not proceed with her life until she knocked on such a door.
She told me how she would run the Mica Times if she were the editor.
Crime would be on page 10, ants and old men and painted doors on page 1.
She made up headlines:
ANTS HAUL MONSTER LOAD
ACROSS VAST, BARREN WALK
MYSTERY SMILE: OLD MAN
NODS OFF AT TUDOR VILLAGE
DOOR BEGS: KNOCK ME!
I told her I wanted to be a TV director.
She said she wanted to be a silver-lunch-truck driver.
“Huh?” I said.
“You know,” she said, “people work all morning and then it’s twelve o’clock.
The secretaries in the offices walk out the door, the construction workers put down their hard hats and hammers, and everybody’s hungry, and they look up and there I am!
No matter where they are, no matter where they work, I’m there.
I have a whole fleet of silver lunch trucks.
They go everywhere.
‘Let Lunch Come to You!’
That’s my slogan.
Just seeing my silver lunch truck makes them happy.”
She described how she would roll up the side panels and everyone would practically faint at the cloud of wonderful smells.
Hot food, cold food, Chinese, Italian, you name it.
Even a salad bar.
“They can’t believe how much food I fit into my truck.
No matter where you are—out in the desert, the mountains, even down in the mines—if you want my silver lunch service, I get it to you.
I find a way.”
I tagged along on missions.
One day she bought a small plant, an African violet in a plastic pot on sale for ninety-nine cents at a drugstore.
“Who’s it for?” I asked her.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said.
“I just know that someone at an address on Marion Drive is in the hospital for surgery, so I thought whoever’s back home could use a little cheering up.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I said.
She gave me a mischievous grin.
“I have my ways.”
We went to the house on Marion Drive.
She reached into the saddle pack behind her bicycle seat.
She pulled out a handful of ribbons.
She chose a pale violet one that matched the color of the tiny blossoms and stuffed the remaining ribbons back into the seat pack.
She tied the violet ribbon around the pot.
I held her bike while she set the plant by the front door.
Riding away, I said, “Why don’t you leave a card or something with your name on it?”
The question surprised her.
“Why should I?”
Her question surprised me.
“Well, I don’t know, it’s just the way people do things.
They expect it.
They get a gift, they expect to know where it came from.”
“Is that important?”
“Yeah, I guess—”
I never finished that thought.
My tires shuddered as I slammed my bike to a halt.
She stopped ahead of me.
She backed up.
She stared.
“Leo, what is it?”
I wagged my head.
I grinned.
I pointed to her.
“It was you.”
“Me what?”
“Two years ago.
My birthday.
I found a package on my front step.
A porcupine necktie.
I never found out who gave it to me.”
She walked her bike alongside mine.
She grinned.
“A mystery.”
“Where did you find it?” I said.
“I didn’t.
I had my mother make it.”
She didn’t seem to want to dwell on the subject.
She started pedaling and we continued on our way.
“Where were we?” she said.
“Getting credit,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s nice to get credit.”
The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt.
She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago.
She turned her wide eyes on me.
“Is it?” she said.
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CHAPTER XXI.
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On weekends and after dinner, we delivered many potted violets.
And
CONGRATULATIONS!
balloons.
And cards of many sentiments.
She made her own cards.
She wasn’t a great artist.
Her people were stick figures.
The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails.
You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt.
They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful.
She never left her name.
But finally, after much pestering from me, she did tell me how she knew what was going on in people’s lives.
It was simple, she said.
She read the daily paper.
Not the headlines or the front page or the sports page or the comics or the TV listings or the Hollywood gossip.
What she read were the parts that most people ignored, the parts without headlines and pictures, the boondocks of the paper: the hospital admissions, the death notices, the birthday and wedding announcements, the police blotter, the coming events calendar.
Most of all, she read the fillers.
“I love fillers!” she exclaimed.
“What are fillers?” I said.
She explained that fillers are little items that are not considered important enough to be a story or to have a headline.
They’re never more than one column wide, never more than an inch or two deep.
They are most commonly found at the bottoms of inside pages, where the eye seldom travels.
If the editors had their way, they would never use fillers.
But sometimes a reporter doesn’t write quite enough words, and the story doesn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the page.
The paper can’t have a blank space there, so the editor dumps in a filler.
A filler doesn’t need to be “news.”
It doesn’t need to be important.
It doesn’t even need to be read.
All it’s asked to do is take up space.
A filler might come from anywhere and be about anything.
It might tell how many pounds of rice a typical Chinese person eats in a lifetime.
Or say something about beetles in Sumatra.
Or the filler might come from down the street.
It might mention that so-and-so’s cat is missing.
Or that so-and-so has a collection of antique marbles.
“I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,” she said.
“So that’s it?” I said.
“You read the papers?”
“No,” she said, “that’s not all.
There’s also the place where I get my hair cut.
I always overhear good stuff there.
And of course there’re bulletin boards.
Do you know how many bulletin boards there are in town?”
“Sure,” I said facetiously, “I count them every day.”
“So do I,” she said, not kidding.
“So far, I’m up to forty-one.”
Offhand, I couldn’t think of one, except the plywood roadrunner.
“What do you learn from bulletin boards?”
“Oh…somebody just opened a business.
Somebody lost a dog.
Somebody needs a companion.”
“Who advertises for a companion?” I said.
“Who needs one that bad?”
“Lonely people,” she said.
“Old people.
Just somebody to sit with them for a while.”
I pictured Stargirl sitting in a dark room with an old woman.
I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing.
Sometimes she seemed so far from me.
We were passing Pisa Pizza.
“There’s a bulletin board in there,” she said.
It was just inside the door.
It was smothered with business cards and notices.
I pointed to one that said “Odd Jobs—Ask for Mike,” call this number.
“So what’s that tell you?” I said, with more challenge in my voice than I intended.
She read it.
“Well, it could be that Mike lost his regular job and can’t find another, so he’s hiring himself out.
Or even if he has a regular job, it’s not enough to make ends meet.
He’s either not very neat, or he can’t afford a whole piece of paper.
This is just a scrap.”
“So what would you do for him?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know.
My parents might have an odd job they need done.
Or maybe I do.
Or maybe I could just send him a card.”
“What kind of card would he get?”
“A Keep-your-chin-up card.”
She poked me.
“Hey, want to play a card game?”
I had a feeling she wasn’t talking about poker.
“Sure,” I said.
She said she invented it.
“All you need is your eyes and one other person.
I pick somebody on the street, the mall, a store, wherever, and I follow them.
Say it’s a her.
I follow her for fifteen minutes, not a minute more.
I time myself.
The game is, after fifteen minutes of watching her, I have to guess what kind of card she needs.”
“But how can you get it to her?” I said.
“You don’t know where she lives.”
“True.
That’s as far as it goes.
That’s why it’s just a game.
It’s just for fun.”
She snuggled into me.
She whispered in my ear, “Let’s play.”
I said sure.
She said we needed a mall.
I usually steered us away from the Mica Mall —too many silent-treatment MAHS kids hanging around there.
We drove ten miles to the Redstone Mall.
It was a Saturday afternoon.
We picked out a woman.
Lime-green skort.
White sandals.
We guessed her age was early forties.
She was buying a soft pretzel—regular, salted —at Auntie Anne’s.
She carried the pretzel in a little white paper bag.
We followed her into Suncoast Video.
We overheard her ask for When Harry Met Sally.
They didn’t have it.
She passed Sonoma, then came back and went in.
She wandered about, touching pottery with one fingertip, feeling surfaces.
She stopped before the dinner plates.
She lifted one with a French café painted on it.
“Van Gogh,” Stargirl whispered.
The lady seemed to think about the plate, even closed her eyes, holding it to her chest with both hands, as if feeling vibrations.
But then she put it back and walked out.
On to Sears.
Lingerie.
Bedclothes.
I was uneasy, spying from behind a rack of frilly somethings.
She was flipping through nightshirts when time ran out.
Stargirl and I conferred in the corridor.
“Okay,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I think I feel like a stalker,” I said.
“A good stalker,” she said.
“You first,” I said.
“Well, she’s divorced and lonely.
No wedding ring.
Wants somebody in her life.
A home life.
She wishes she were Sally and her Harry would come along.
She would make him dinner and snuggle with him at night.
She tries to eat low-fat foods.
She works for a travel agency.
She took a free cruise last year, but all she met on the boat were creeps.
Her name is Clarissa, she played the clarinet in high school, and her favorite soap is Irish Spring.”
I boggled.
“How do you know all that?”
She laughed.
“I don’t.
I’m guessing.
That’s what makes it fun.”
“So what card would you send her?”
She put her finger to her lips.
“Hmm…to Clarissa I would send a Whileyou’re-waiting-for-Harry-be-good-to-yourself card.
How about you?”
“I would send a”—I mulled over the phrasing—“a Don’t-let-Harrycatch-you-flicking card.”
Now it was her turn to boggle.
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you see her pick her nose?” I said.
“In Suncoast?”
“Not really.
I saw her hand go to her nose, like she was scratching it or something.”
“Yeah, or something.
She was picking, that’s what.
She was quick and sneaky.
A real pro.”
She gave me a playful shove.
“You’re kidding.”
I held up my hands.
“I’m serious.
She was standing in front of the comedies.
Her finger went in and when it came out there was something on it.
She carried it around for about a minute.
And then, just as she was leaving Suncoast, when she thought nobody was looking, she flicked.
I didn’t see where it landed.”
She stared at me.
I raised my right hand and put my left over my heart.
“No lie.”
She broke out laughing, so loudly I was embarrassed.
She grabbed my arm with both hands to keep from collapsing.
Mallwalkers stared.
We carded two others that day: a woman who spent her whole fifteen minutes feeling leather jackets—we called her Betty—and a man we called Adam because of his huge Adam’s apple, which we renamed Adam’s pumpkin.
No more pick-’n’-flickers.
And I did have fun.
Whether it came from the game or simply from being with her, I don’t know.
I do know I was surprised at how close I felt to Clarissa and Betty and Adam after watching them for only fifteen minutes.
Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money.
She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there.
Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench.
Even quarters.
“I hate change,” she said.
“It’s so…jangly.”
“Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?” I said.
“Did you ever see a little kid’s face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?” she said.
When her change purse was empty, we drove back to Mica.
Along the way she invited me to dinner at her house.
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CHAPTER XXII.
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Archie had claimed the Caraways were normal folks, but I still couldn’t imagine Stargirl coming from an ordinary home.
I think I expected a leftover hippie scene from the 1960s.
Make love, not war.
Her mother in a long skirt with a flower in her hair.
Her father’s face framed in muttonchop sideburns, saying “Groovy!” and “Right on!” a lot.
Grateful Dead posters.
Psychedelic lampshades.
So I was surprised.
Her mother wore shorts and a tank top as she worked the pedal of a sewing machine with her bare foot.
She was making a Russian peasant costume for a play to be presented in Denver.
Mr. Caraway was on a stepladder outside, painting windowsills.
No muttonchops; in fact, not much hair at all.
The house itself could have been anyone’s.
Glossy bentwood furniture, throw rugs over hardwood floors, Southwest accents: an Anasazi-style wedding vase here, a Georgia O’Keeffe print there.
Nothing to proclaim, “You see?
She came from here.”
Same with her room.
Except for Cinnamon’s blue and yellow plywood apartment in one corner, it might have belonged to any high school girl.
I stood in the doorway.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m surprised,” I said.
“At what?”
“I thought your room would be different.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know.
More…you.”
She grinned.
“Stacks of fillers?
A card-making operation?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s my office,” she said.
She let Cinnamon out.
He scurried under her bed.
“This is my room.”
“You have an office?”
“Yep.”
She stuck her foot under the bed.
When it came out, Cinnamon was aboard.
“I wanted to have a place all my own where I could go to work.
So I got one.”
Cinnamon scampered out of the room.
“Where is it?” I said.
She put her finger to her lips.
“Secret.”
“Bet I know one person who knows,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Archie.”
She smiled.
“He was talking about you,” I said.
“He likes you.”
“He means the world to me,” she said.
“I think of him as my grandfather.”
My inspection yielded two curious items.
One was a wooden bowl half filled with sand-colored hair.
“Yours?” I said.
She nodded.
“For birds looking for nest materials.
I put it out in the spring.
Been doing it since I was a little girl.
I got more business up north than here.”
The other item was on a bookshelf.
It was a tiny wagon about the size of my fist.
It was made of wood and looked like it might have been an antique toy.
It was piled high with pebbles.
Several other pebbles lay about the wagon wheels.
I pointed to it.
“You collecting stones, or what?”
“It’s my happy wagon,” she said.
“Actually, it could just as well be called an unhappy wagon, but I prefer happy.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“It’s about how I feel.
When something makes me happy, I put a pebble in the wagon.
If I’m unhappy, I take a pebble out.
There are twenty pebbles in all.”
I counted three on the shelf.
“So there’re seventeen in the wagon now, right?”
“Right.”
“So that means, what, you’re pretty happy?”
“Right again.”
“What’s the biggest number of pebbles ever in the wagon?”
She gave me a sly smile.
“You’re looking at it.”
It didn’t seem like just a pile of pebbles anymore.
“Usually,” she said, “it’s more balanced.
It hangs around ten, a couple to one side or the other.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Like life.”
“How close to empty did the wagon ever get?” I said.
“Oh…” She turned her face to the ceiling, closed her eyes.
“Once, down to three.”
I was shocked.
“Really?
You?”
She stared.
“Why not me?”
“You don’t seem the type.”
“What type is that?”
“I don’t know…” I groped for the right words.
“The three-pebble type?” she offered.
I shrugged.
She picked up a pebble from the shelf and, with a grin, dropped it into the wagon.
“Well, call me Miss Unpredictable.”
I joined the family for dinner.
Three of us had meatloaf.
The fourth— guess who—was a strict vegetarian.
She had tofu loaf.
Her parents called her “Stargirl” and “Star” as casually as if she were a Jennifer.
After dinner we sat on her front step.
She had brought her camera out.
Three little kids, two girls and a boy, were playing in a driveway across the street.
She took several pictures of them.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked her.
“See the little boy in the red cap?” she said.
“His name is Peter Sinkowitz.
He’s five years old.
I’m doing his biography, sort of.”
For the tenth time that day she had caught me off guard.
“Biography?”
Peter Sinkowitz was coasting down his driveway in a four-wheeled plastic banana; the two little girls were running, screaming after him.
“Why would you want to do that?”
She snapped a picture.
“Don’t you wish somebody came up to you today and gave you a scrapbook called ‘The Life of Leo Borlock’?
And it’s a record, like a journal, of what you did on such-and-such a date when you were little.
From the days you can’t remember anymore.
And there’s pictures, and even stuff that you dropped or threw away, like a candy wrapper.
And it was all done by some neighbor across the street, and you didn’t even know she was doing it.
Don’t you think when you’re fifty or sixty you’d give a fortune to have such a thing?”
I thought about it.
It was ten years since I had been six.
It seemed like a century.
She was right about one thing: I didn’t remember much about those days.
But I didn’t really care either.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.
And anyway, don’t you think his parents are doing that?
Family albums and all?”
One of the little girls managed to wrest the banana roadster away from Peter Sinkowitz.
Peter started howling.
“I’m sure they are,” she said, snapping another picture.
“But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling.
They’re not as real as this.
Someday he’s going to love this picture of himself bawling while a little girl rides off on his toy.
I don’t follow him around like we did Clarissa.
I just keep an eye out for him, and a couple of times a week I jot down what I saw him doing that day.
I’ll do it for a few more years, then I’ll give it to his parents to give to him when he’s older and ready to appreciate it.”
A puzzled look came over her face.
She poked me with her elbow.
“What?”
“Huh?” I said.
“You’re staring at me really funny.
What is it?”
I blurted, “Are you running for saint?”
I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips.
She just looked at me, hurt in her eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to sound nasty.”
“How did you mean to sound?”
“Amazed, I guess.”
“At what?”
I laughed.
“What do you think?
You.”
I laughed again.
I stood before the steps, facing her.
“Look at you.
It’s Saturday.
I’ve been with you all day, and you’ve spent the whole day doing stuff for other people.
Or paying attention to other people.
Or following other people.
Or taking pictures of other people.”
She looked up at me.
The hurt was gone from her eyes, but not the puzzlement.
She blinked.
“So?”
“So…I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like you’re saying I’m obsessed with other people.
Is that it?”
Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn’s eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever.
I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them.
“You’re different,” I said, “that’s for sure.”
She batted her eyelids and gave me a flirty grin.
“Don’t you like different?”
“Sure I do,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
A look of sudden discovery brightened her face.
She reached out with her foot and tapped my sneaker.
“I know what your problem is.”
“Really?” I said.
“What?”
“You’re jealous.
You’re upset because I’m paying all this attention to other people and not enough to you.”
“Right,” I sniffed.
“I’m jealous of Peter Sinkowitz.”
She stood.
“You just want me all to yourself, don’t you?”
She stepped into my space.
The tips of our noses were touching.
“Don’t you, Mr. Leo?”
Her arms were around my neck.
We were on the sidewalk in front of her house, in full view.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m giving you some attention,” she cooed.
“Don’t you want some attention?”
I was losing my battle for balance.
“I don’t know,” I heard myself say.
“You’re really dumb,” she whispered in my ear.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.
Why do you think there’re eighteen pebbles in my wagon?”
And then the last remaining space between our lips was gone and I was falling headlong into her eyes, right there on Palo Verde after dinner.
And I can tell you, that was no saint kissing me.
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CHAPTER XXIII.
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Those were the best times, when we were alone, together, out of school.
We took long walks around town and into the desert, to her enchanted place.
We sat on park benches and people-watched.
I introduced her to strawberry-banana smoothies.
I borrowed the pickup and drove us to Red Rock and Glendale.
On weekends we went to Archie’s.
On his back porch, we talked of a thousand things and laughed and swooned in pipesmoke and ate pizza.
She presented her oratorical contest speech to Señor Saguaro.
We never spoke of the shunning.
I loved weekends.
But Mondays always followed Sundays.
And the shunning—it was clear now—had come to me.
It was less absolute for me than for her, but it was there.
I saw it in the eyes that shifted away from mine, the shoulders that turned, the chatter that seemed less loud around me now than before.
I fought it.
I tested its limits.
In the courtyard, between classes, in the lunchroom, I called out to others just to see if they would respond.
When someone turned and nodded, I felt grateful.
If someone spoke to me, especially if I had not spoken first, I wanted to cry.
I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.
I told myself that the shunning was more painful for me than for Stargirl.
I told myself that she was too busy being herself to notice that she was being ignored—and in fact, she continued to give birthday people a ukulele serenade and to decorate her desk and to distribute assorted kindnesses.
I told myself that even if she did notice, she wouldn’t care.
I understood why this was happening to me.
In the eyes of the student body, she was part of my identity.
I was “her boyfriend.”
I was Mr. Stargirl.
Students said things.
Not to me, not directly, but tuned for me to overhear even as they pretended I was nowhere near.
They said she was a self-centered spotlight hogger.
They said she thought she was some kind of saint—I cringed at that—and that she was better than the rest of us.
They said she wanted everyone else to feel guilty for not being as nice and wonderful as she was.
They said she was a phony.
Most of all, they said she was the reason why the Mica Electrons were not soon to become Arizona state basketball champions.
Kevin had been right: when she started cheering for other teams, she did something bad to her own team.
To see one of their own priming the opposition did something to the team’s morale that hours of practice could not overcome.
And the last straw—everyone seemed to agree—was the Sun Valley game, when Stargirl rushed across the court to aid Kovac, the Sun Valley star.
All of this was affirmed by our own star, Ardsley himself, who said that when he saw a Mica cheerleader giving comfort to the enemy, the heart went out of him.
She was why they lost the next game so miserably to Red Rock.
They hated her for it, and they would never forgive.
Unlike Stargirl, I was aware of the constant anger of our schoolmates, seething like snakes under a porch.
In fact, I was not only aware of it, but at times I also understood their point of view.
There were even moments when something small and huddled within me agreed with it.
But then I would see her smile and take a swan dive into her eyes, and the bad moment would be gone.
I saw.
I heard.
I understood.
I suffered.
But whose sake was I suffering for?
I kept thinking of Señor Saguaro’s question: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’?
I became angry.
I resented having to choose.
I refused to choose.
I imagined my life without her and without them, and I didn’t like it either way.
I pretended it would not always be like this.
In the magical moonlight of my bed at night, I pretended she would become more like them and they would become more like her, and in the end I would have it all.
Then she did something that made pretending impossible.
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CHAPTER XXIV.
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“Roadrunner.”
No one said the word to me directly, but I kept hearing it since I arrived at school one day, several days after the kiss on the sidewalk.
It seemed more dropped behind than spoken, so that I kept walking into it: “Roadrunner.”
Was there something on the plywood roadrunner that I should read?
I had study hall coming up third period; I’d look into it then.
In the meantime, I had second-period Spanish.
As I headed for my seat, I looked out the window, which faced the courtyard.
There was something written on the roadrunner, all right, but I wouldn’t have to go outside to read it.
I could read it from here.
I could have read it from a low-flying airplane.
White paper—no, it was a bedsheet—covered the whole bird.
Painted on the sheet in broad red brush strokes was a Valentine heart enclosing the words:
STARGIRL
LOVES
LEO
My first impulse was to drag the Spanish teacher to the window and say, “Look!
She loves me!”
My second impulse was to run outside and rip the sign away.
Until now, I had never been the target of her public extravagance.
I felt a sudden, strange kinship with Hillari Kimble: I understood why she had commanded Stargirl not to sing to her.
I felt spotlighted on a bare stage.
I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork or anything else.
I was a mess.
At lunch that day, I was afraid to look at her.
I counted one blessing: I had not yet worked up the nerve to sit with her each day.
I kept stoking my conversation with Kevin.
I felt her presence, her eyes, three tables to my left.
I knew she was sitting there with Dori Dilson, the only friend who had not deserted her.
I felt the faint tug of her gaze on the back of my neck.
Ignoring my wishes, my head turned on its own and there she was: smiling to beat the band, waving grandly, and—horrors!—blowing me a kiss.
I snapped my head back and dragged Kevin out of the lunchroom.
When I finally dared to look again at the courtyard, I found that someone had torn the sign away.
Thumbtacks at the corners pinned four white scraps of bedsheet to the plywood.
I managed to avoid her by taking different routes between classes, but she found me after school, came shouting after me as I tried to slink away: “Leo!
Leo!”
She ran up to me, breathless, bursting, her eyes sparkling in the sun.
“Did you see it?”
I nodded.
I kept walking.
“Well?”
She was hopping beside me, punching my shoulder.
“Wha’d you think?”
What could I say?
I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
I just shrugged.
“Wow.
That impressed, huh?”
She was mocking me.
She reached into her bag and pulled out her rat.
“Maybe he’s shy, Cinnamon.
Maybe he’ll tell you how thrilled he was to see the sign.”
She set him on my shoulder.
I yelped.
I swept the rat off and sent him flying to the ground.
She scooped him up and stroked him, all the while staring at me dumbstruck.
I could not face her.
I turned and walked on alone.
She called, “I guess you don’t want to hear me practice my speech, huh?”
I did not answer.
I did not look back.
The next day I faced the full impact of the sign.
I thought I had truly suffered from the spillover of Stargirl’s shunning, but that was nothing now that the full torrent was turned on me.
Of course Kevin—thankfully—talked to me; so did a few other friends.
But the rest was silence, a second desert imposed upon the one I already lived in, where “Hi” was as rare as rain.
I came to the courtyard in the morning before opening bell, and all I saw were backs of heads.
People shouldered past me, calling others.
Doors closed in my face.
There was laughter, there was fun, but it skipped over me like a flat stone on water.
One morning as I was running a teacher’s errand, I saw someone named Renshaw walking across the courtyard.
I barely knew the kid, but we were the only two in the courtyard at that moment, and I had to, so to speak, touch the stove that I knew was hot.
“Renshaw!” I called.
There was no other voice but mine.
“Renshaw!”
He never turned, never wavered, never slowed down.
He kept walking away from me, opened a door, and was gone.
So what?
I kept telling myself.
What do you care?
You never speak to each other.
What’s Renshaw to you?
But I did care.
I couldn’t help myself from caring.
At that moment, there was nothing more I wanted in the world than a nod from Renshaw.
I prayed that the door would burst open and he would be there saying, “Sorry, Borlock, I wasn’t listening.
What did you want?”
But the door stayed closed, and I knew what it felt like to be invisible.
“I’m invisible,” I said to Kevin at lunch.
“Nobody hears me.
Nobody sees me.
I’m the friggin’ invisible man.”
Kevin just looked at his lunch and wagged his head.
“How long’s it going to go on?” I demanded.
He shrugged.
“What did I do?”
My voice was louder than I intended.
He chewed.
He stared.
At last he said, “You know what you did.”
I stared at him like he was crazy.
I badgered him some more.
But of course he was perfectly right.
I knew exactly what I had done.
I had linked myself to an unpopular person.
That was my crime.
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CHAPTER XXV.
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Days passed.
I continued to avoid Stargirl.
I wanted her.
I wanted them.
It seemed I could not have both, so I did nothing.
I ran and hid.
But she did not give up on me.
She hunted me down.
She found me in the TV studio after school one day.
I felt fingers slipping down the back of my neck, grabbing my collar, pulling me backward.
The crew was staring.
“Mr. Borlock,” I heard her say, “we need to talk.”
Her voice told me she was not smiling.
She released my collar.
I followed her out of the room.
In the courtyard a couple cooing on the bench beneath the palmetto saw us coming and bolted, so that’s where we sat.
“So,” she said, “are we breaking up already?”
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“So why are you hiding from me?”
Forced to face her, forced to talk, I felt my gumption rising.
“Something’s gotta change,” I said.
“That’s all I know.”
“You mean like change clothes?
Or change a tire?
Should I change a tire on my bike?
Would that do it?”
“You’re not funny.
You know what I mean.”
She saw I was upset.
Her face got serious.
“People aren’t talking to me,” I said.
I stared at her.
I wanted it to sink in.
“People I’ve known ever since we moved here.
They don’t talk to me.
They don’t see me.”
She reached out and lightly rubbed the back of my hand with her fingertip.
Her eyes were sad.
“I’m sorry people don’t see you.
It’s no fun not being seen, is it?”
I pulled my hand away.
“Well, you tell me what it’s like.
Doesn’t it bother you that nobody talks to you?”
It was the first time I had openly mentioned the shunning to her.
She smiled.
“Dori talks to me.
You talk to me.
Archie talks to me.
My family talks to me.
Cinnamon talks to me.
Señor Saguaro talks to me.
I talk to me.”
She cocked her head and stared at me, waiting for a responding smile.
I didn’t give it.
“Are you going to stop talking to me?”
“That’s not the question,” I said.
“What is the question?”
“The question is”—I tried to read her face but I could not—“what makes you tick?”
“Now I’m a clock!”
I turned away.
“See, I can’t talk to you.
It’s all just a big joke.”
She put my face between her hands and turned me to her.
I hoped people were not watching from the windows.
“Okay, serious now.
Go ahead, ask me the tick question again.
Or any other, any question at all.”
I shook my head.
“You just don’t care, do you?”
That stumped her.
“Care?
Leo, how can you say I don’t care?
You’ve gone with me to places.
We’ve delivered cards and flowers.
How can you say—”
“That’s not what I mean.
I mean you don’t care what people think.”
“I care what you think.
I care—”
“I know—you care what Cinnamon and Señor Saguaro think.
I’m talking about the school, the town.
I’m talking about everybody.”
She sniffed around the word.
“Everybody?”
“Right.
You don’t seem to care what everybody thinks.
You don’t seem to know what everybody thinks.
You—”
She broke in: “Do you?”
I thought for a moment.
I nodded sharply.
“Yeah.
Yeah, I think I do know.
I’m in touch with everybody.
I’m one of them.
How could I not know?”
“And it matters?”
“Sure, it matters.
Look”—I waved my arm at the school around us —“look what’s happening.
Nobody talks to us.
You can’t just not give a crap what anybody thinks.
You can’t just cheer for the other team and expect your own school to love you for it.”
Words that I had been thinking for weeks rolled off my tongue now.
“Kovac—Kovac, for God’s sake.
What was that all about?”
She was baffled.
“Who’s Kovac?”
“Kovac.
The guy from Sun Valley.
The basketball star.
The guy who broke his ankle.”
She was still baffled.
“What about him?”
“What about him?
What about you?
What were you doing out there on the floor with him with his head in your lap?”
“He was in pain.”
“He was the enemy, Stargirl!
Susan.
Whatever.
The enemy!”
She stared dumbly back at me.
She had blinked at “Susan.”
“There were a thousand Sun Valley people there.
He had his own people to take care of him, his own coaches, his own teammates, his own cheerleaders’ laps.
And you had your own team to worry about.”
I was screeching.
I got up and walked away.
I came back, leaned into her.
“Why?” I said.
“Why didn’t you just let him be taken care of by his own people?”
She looked at me for a long time, as if in my face she could find herself explained.
“I don’t know,” she said dimly at last.
“I didn’t think.
I just did.”
I pulled back.
I was tempted to say, Well, I hope you’re satisfied, because they hate you for what you did, but I didn’t have the heart.
Now I was feeling sorry for her.
I sat back down beside her.
I took her hand.
I smiled.
I spoke as gently as I could.
“Stargirl, you just can’t do things the way you do.
If you weren’t stuck in a homeschool all your life, you’d understand.
You can’t just wake up in the morning and say you don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.”
Her eyes were wide, her voice peepy like a little girl’s.
“You can’t?”
“Not unless you want to be a hermit.”
She flicked the hem of her skirt at my sneaker, dusting it.
“But how do you keep track of the rest of the world?
Sometimes I can hardly keep track of myself.”
“It’s not something you even have to think about,” I said.
“You just know.
Because you’re connected.”
On the ground her bag shifted slightly: Cinnamon was stirring.
Stargirl’s face went through a series of expressions, ending with a pout and a sudden sobby outburst: “I’m not connected!”
She reached out to me and we hugged on the bench in the courtyard and walked home together.
We continued this conversation for the next couple of days.
I explained the ways of people to her.
I said you can’t cheer for everybody.
She said why not?
I said a person belongs to a group, you can’t belong to everyone.
She said why not?
I said you can’t just barge into the funeral of a perfect stranger.
She said why not?
I said you just can’t.
She said why?
I said because.
I said you have to respect other people’s privacy, there’s such a thing as not being welcome.
I said not everybody likes having somebody with a ukulele sing “Happy Birthday” to them.
They don’t? she said.
This group thing, I said, it’s very strong.
It’s probably an instinct.
You find it everywhere, from little groups like families to big ones like a town or school, to really big ones like a whole country.
How about really, really big ones, she said, like a planet?
Whatever, I said.
The point is, in a group everybody acts pretty much the same, that’s kind of how the group holds itself together.
Everybody? she said.
Well, mostly, I said.
That’s what jails and mental hospitals are for, to keep it that way.
You think I should be in jail? she said.
I think you should try to be more like the rest of us, I said.
Why? she said.
Because, I said.
Tell me, she said.
It’s hard, I said.
Say it, she said.
Because nobody likes you, I said.
That’s why.
Nobody likes you.
Nobody? she said.
Her eyes covered me like the sky.
Nobody?
I tried to play dumb, but that wasn’t working.
Hey, I said, don’t look at me.
We’re talking about them.
Them.
If it was up to me, I wouldn’t change a thing.
You’re fine with me the way you are.
But we’re not alone, are we?
We live in a world of them, like it or not.
That’s where I tried to keep it, on them.
I didn’t mention myself.
I didn’t say do it for me.
I didn’t say if you don’t change you can forget about me.
I never said that.
Two days later Stargirl vanished.