Stargirl-PDF

Stargirl

Jerry Spinelli

To Eileen,

my Stargirl

And to Loren Eiseley,

who taught us that even as we are,

we are becoming

And to Sonny Liston

PORCUPINE NECKTIE

When I was little, my uncle Pete had a necktie with a porcupine

painted on it. I thought that necktie was just about the neatest thing in

the world. Uncle Pete would stand patiently before me while I ran my

fingers over the silky surface, half expecting to be stuck by one of the

quills. Once, he let me wear it. I kept looking for one of my own, but I

could never find one.

I was twelve when we moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona. When

Uncle Pete came to say good-bye, he was wearing the tie. I thought he

did so to give me one last look at it, and I was grateful. But then, with a

dramatic flourish, he whipped off the tie and draped it around my neck.

“It’s yours,” he said. “Going-away present.”

I loved that porcupine tie so much that I decided to start a collection.

Two years after we settled in Arizona, the number of ties in my

collection was still one. Where do you find a porcupine necktie in Mica,

Arizona-or anywhere else, for that matter?

On my fourteenth birthday, I read about myself in the local

newspaper. The family section ran a regular feature about kids on their

birthdays, and my mother had called in some info. The last sentence

read: “As a hobby, Leo Borlock collects porcupine neckties.”

Several days later, coming home from school, I found a plastic bag on

our front step. Inside was a gift-wrapped package tied with yellow

ribbon. The tag said “Happy Birthday!” I opened the package. It was a

porcupine necktie. Two porcupines were tossing darts with their quills,

while a third was picking its teeth.

I inspected the box, the tag, the paper. Nowhere could I find the

giver’s name. I asked my parents. I asked my friends. I called my uncle

Pete. Everyone denied knowing anything about it.

At the time I simply considered the episode a mystery. It did not occur

to me that I was being watched. We were all being watched.

“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

four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.” Stone silence all around.

Then came the sound of a single person clapping. I looked. It was the

lunch-line 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.

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.

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 high-

fived 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 Ping-Pong 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-and-cactus 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 sand-

colored 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.

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 freckle-nosed homeschooler?

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.

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.”

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-million-

year-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.”

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.

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?

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.

During the first quarter of each home game, Stargirl went over to the

visitors’ section and gave them a cheer. She began with an

exaggerated ball-bouncing motion:

Dribble, Dribble!

Sis Boom Bibble!

We don’t bite!

We don’t nibble!

We just say-

(sweeping wave)

“Howwww-dee, friends!”

(two thumbs pointing to her chest)

“We’re the Electrons!”

(points to them)

“Who-are-YYYYYYOU?”

(turns head to side, cups ear)

A couple of visiting cheerleaders, maybe a fan or two would call back:

“Wildcats!” or “Cougars!” or whatever, but most of them just gaped at

her as if to say, Who is this? Some of her fellow cheerleaders were

amused, some were mortified.

At that point the only crime Stargirl could have been accused of

would be corniness. But she didn’t stop there. She cheered whenever

the ball went in the basket, regardless of which team shot it. It was the

strangest sight: the other team scores, the MAHS crowd sits glumly on

their hands while Stargirl, alone, pops up cheering.

At first the other cheerleaders tried to suppress her; it was like trying

to calm down a puppy. When they gave her the pleated skirt, they

made a cheerleader they never imagined. She did not limit herself to

basketball games. She cheered anyone, anything, anytime. She

cheered the big things-honors, election winners-but she gave most of

her attention to little things.

You never knew when it would happen. Maybe you were a little ninth-

grade nobody named Eddie. As you’re walking down the hall you see a

candy wrapper on the floor. You pick it up and throw it in the nearest

trash can-and suddenly there she is in front of you, pumping her arms,

her honey hair and freckles flying, swallowing you whole with those

enormous eyes, belting out a cheer she’s making up on the spot,

something about Eddie, Eddie and the trash can teaming up to wipe

out litter. A mob is gathering, clapping hands in rhythm, more eyes on

you than all the previous days of your life combined. You feel foolish,

exposed, stupid. You want to follow the candy wrapper into the trash

can. It’s the most painful thing that’s ever happened to you. Your brain

keeps squirting out a single thought: I’m going to die…I’m going to

die…

And so, when she finally finishes and her freckles settle back onto the

bridge of her nose, why don’t you? Why don’t you just die?

Because they’re clapping for you, that’s why, and whoever heard of

dying while they’re clapping for you? And they’re smiling at you.

People who never even saw you before are smiling at you and slapping

your back and pumping your hand, and suddenly it seems like the

whole world is calling your name, and you’re feeling so good you pretty

much just float on home from school. And when you go to bed that

night, the last thing you see before you zonk out are those eyes, and

the last thing on your face is a smile.

Or maybe you showed up at school with really unusual earrings. Or

you aced a test. Or broke your arm. Or got your braces off. Or maybe

you weren’t even a person. Maybe you were a charcoal drawing on the

wall done by an art whiz. Or a really neat-looking bug out by the bike

rack.

We wagged our heads and agreed what a goofy girl this was, maybe

even officially crazy, but we walked away smiling and maybe not

saying but all thinking the same thing: it felt good to get credit.

And if this had been any other year, things might have just gone on

and on like that. But this was the year something unbelievable was

happening on the basketball court. This was the year the team was

winning. Only winning.

And that changed everything.

Early in the season no one noticed. Except for girls’ tennis, we had

never had good teams in anything. We expected to lose. We were

comfortable with losing. In fact, most of us were oblivious to it, since

we didn’t even attend the games.

The year before, the basketball Electrons had won only five of twenty-

six games. This year, they won their fifth game before Christmas. By

early January they had won the tenth, and people began to notice that

there was still a zero in the loss column.

“UNDEFEATED!” blared a sign on the plywood roadrunner. Some said

we were winning by accident. Some said the other teams were simply

more rotten than we were. Some thought the sign was a joke. One

thing was certain: attendance went up. By the start of February the

winning streak had reached sixteen, and there wasn’t an empty seat in

the gym.

But something even more interesting was happening. Suddenly we

were no longer comfortable with losing. In fact, we forgot how to lose.

The transformation was stunning in its speed. There was no

apprenticeship period, no learning curve. No one had to teach us how

to be winners. One day we were bored, indifferent, satisfied losers; the

next we were rabid fanatics, stomping in the grandstand, painting our

faces green and white, doing the wave as if we had been perfecting it

for years.

We fell in love with our team. When we spoke of it, we used the word

“we” instead of “they.” The leading scorer, Brent Ardsley, seemed to

have a golden glow about him as he moved through the school. And

the more we loved our team, the more we hated the opposition. We

used to envy them. We even applauded them to spite our own hapless

teams. Now we detested the opposition and everything about them.

We hated their uniforms. We hated their coaches and their fans. We

hated them because they were trying to spoil our perfect season. We

resented every point scored against us. And how dare they celebrate!

We began to boo. It was our first experience as booers, but you’d

have thought we were veterans. We booed the other team, we booed

the other coach, we booed the other fans, the referees-whatever

threatened our perfect season, we booed it.

We even booed the scoreboard. We hated games that went down to

the wire. We hated suspense. We loved games that were decided in the

first five minutes. We wanted more than victories, we wanted

massacres. The only score we would have been totally happy with

would have been 100 to 0.

And right there in the middle of it all, in the midst of this perfect

season mania, was Stargirl, popping up whenever the ball went

through the net, no matter which team scored, cheering everything

and everybody. It was sometime in January when calls started flying

from the stands: “Siddown!” Then came the boos. She didn’t seem to

notice.

She did not seem to notice.

Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most

remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things

did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her. If we were

hurt, if we were unhappy or otherwise victimized by life, she seemed to

know about it, and to care, as soon as we did. But bad things falling on

her-unkind words, nasty stares, foot blisters-she seemed unaware of. I

never saw her look in a mirror, never heard her complain. All of her

feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego.

The nineteenth game of the basketball season was played at Red

Rock. In previous years cheerleaders had outnumbered Mica fans at

away games. Not now. The convoy rolling across the desert that

evening stretched for a couple of miles. By the time we were seated,

there was barely room for the home-team fans.

It was the worst slaughter of the year. Red Rock was helpless. By the

start of the fourth quarter we were ahead, 78 to 29. The coach put in

the subs. We booed. We smelled a hundred points. We wanted blood.

The coach put the starters back in. As we howled and thundered in the

stands, Stargirl got up and walked from the gym. Those of us who

noticed assumed she was going to the rest room. I kept glancing

toward the exit. She never returned. With five seconds left in the

game, the Electrons scored the hundredth point. We went nuts.

Stargirl had been outside the whole time, chatting with the bus driver.

The other cheerleaders asked her why she left. She said she felt sorry

for the Red Rock players. She felt her cheering was only making the

massacre worse. Such games were no fun, she said. Your job isn’t to

have fun, they told her, your job is to cheer for Mica High no matter

what. She just stared at them.

The team and the cheerleaders rode the same bus. When the players

came out from the locker room, the cheerleaders told them what had

happened. They devised a trick. They told Stargirl that someone had

forgotten something in the gym, and would she please go get it. With

Stargirl gone, they told the bus driver everyone was aboard, and the

bus made the two-hour return trip without her.

A Red Rock custodian drove her home that night. Next day in school,

the cheerleaders told her it was all a big misunderstanding and acted

as if they were sorry. She believed them.

The next day was February thirteenth. The Hot Seat.

This is how Hot Seat went.

It took place in the communications center studio. There were two

chairs on stage: the infamous Hot Seat itself-painted red with flames

running up the legs-and an ordinary chair for the host, Kevin. Off to the

side were two rows of six chairs each, the second row higher than the

first. This was where the jury sat.

It was a jury in name only. The twelve members did not vote or render

a verdict. Their job was to ask questions, to give the Hot Seat its heat:

ticklish questions, embarrassing questions, nosy questions. But not

mean or hurtful questions. The idea was to make the subject squirm,

not roast.

In the spirit of mock inquisition, we called the subject the “victim.”

And why would anyone want to be the victim? The lure of TV. The

chance to confess-or lie- before a camera and before peers instead of

parents. But I doubted the usual reasons applied to Stargirl.

There were three cameras: one for the stage, one for the jury, and

Chico. Chico was the handheld close-up camera. According to Mr.

Robineau, our faculty advisor, a student named Chico once begged him

to be a close-up camera kid. Mr. Robineau gave him a tryout, but Chico

was so skinny he practically collapsed under the camera. The job went

to someone else and Chico went to the weight room. By the following

year Chico had muscles, and the camera was like nothing on his

shoulder. He got the job, and he was brilliant at it. He gave the camera

his own name. “We are one,” he said. When he graduated, his name

stayed behind, and from then on the close-up camera and its operator

were a unit called Chico.

The host and the victim were each fitted with a thimble-size clip-on

mike; the jury passed around a hand mike. Opposite the stage was the

glassed-in control room, sound-insulated from the rest of the studio.

That’s where I worked, wearing my headset, watching the monitors,

directing the shots. I stood at the shoulder of the technical director, or

TD. He sat at a rack of buttons, punching up the shots I ordered. Also in

the control room were the graphics and audio people. Mr. Robineau

was there as faculty overseer, but basically the students worked

everything.

Kevin’s job was to get things started: intro the victim, ask a few

opening questions, stir things up if the jury was slow. Usually the jury

was on the ball. Typical questions: “Does it bother you that you’re so

short?” “Is it true that you like so-and-so?” “Do you wish you were

good-looking?” “How often do you take a shower?”

It almost always added up to entertainment. At the end of the half

hour, as we cued credits and music, there was always a good feeling in

the air, and everyone-victim, jury members, studio crew-mingled and

became students again.

We filmed the shows after school, then broadcast them that night-

prime time-on local cable. About ten thousand homes. Our own

surveys said at least fifty percent of the student body watched any

given show. We outdrew most of the hot sitcoms. We expected to top

ninety percent for the Stargirl show.

But I had a secret: I wished no one would watch.

In the month since we had scheduled the show, Stargirl’s popularity

had dropped out of sight. Gone were ukuleles from the lunchroom.

More and more kids saw her cheerleading behavior as undermining the

basketball team and its perfect record. I was afraid the boos for her

might spread from the court to the studio. I was afraid the show might

turn ugly.

When Stargirl came in that day after school, Kevin gave her the usual

briefing while Mr. Robineau and I checked out the equipment. As the

jury members straggled in, they were not clowning around or tap-

dancing on the stage as jurors usually did. They went right to their

seats. Stargirl was the one tap-dancing. And mugging for the cameras

with Cinnamon the rat licking her nose. Kevin was cracking up, but the

faces of the jurors were grim. One of them was Hillari Kimble. My bad

feeling got worse.

I retreated to the control room and shut the door. I checked

communications with the cameras. We were ready. Kevin and Stargirl

took their seats. I took one last look through the plate glass that

separated the set from the control room. For the next half hour I would

see the world through four monitors. “Okay, everybody,” I announced,

“here we go.” I cut the studio mike. I looked over my control-room

mates. “We all set?” Everyone nodded.

Just then Stargirl lifted one of Cinnamon’s front paws and waved it at

the control room and said in a squeaky voice, “Hi, Leo.”

I froze. I came unraveled. I didn’t know she knew my name. I just

stood there like a dummy. Finally I waggled my fingers at the rat and

mouthed the words “Hi, Cinnamon,” although they couldn’t hear me on

the other side of the glass.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, ready music, ready intro.” I paused.

“Music, intro.”

This was the moment I lived for, launching the show. I was the

director, the maestro, I called the shots. On the monitors before me I

watched the program unfold according to my commands. But on this

day the thrill was missing. I felt only a dark dread snaking along the

cables.

“Greetings…and welcome to Hot Seat…”

Kevin went through the opening spiel. Kevin loved to be on camera.

He was ideal for a show like this, which made good use of his smirky

grin and arching, Did-I-really-hear-you-say-that? eyebrows.

He turned to Stargirl. Then, impromptu, he reached out and stroked

the nose of Cinnamon, who was perched on Stargirl’s shoulder. “Want

to hold him?” she said.

Kevin gave the camera a Should-I look. “Sure,” he said.

“Ready, Chico, rat,” I said into my headset mike.

“Ready” was always first in the command sequence.

Chico zoomed in.

“Chico.”

TD punched up Chico. The camera followed Cinnamon from Stargirl’s

hands to Kevin’s. No sooner was the rat in Kevin’s lap than it

scampered up his chest and darted between two buttons into his shirt.

Kevin yipped and squirmed. “It scratches!”

“He has fingernails,” Stargirl said calmly. “He won’t hurt you.”

Chico nailed Cinnamon poking his head out from between the two

buttons. Mr. Robineau stuck a thumbs-up in front of my face.

Kevin gave the camera his Ain’t-I-something face. He turned again to

Stargirl. “You know, ever since you showed up at school this year,

we’ve been wanting to put you on the Hot Seat.”

Stargirl stared at him. She turned to the live camera. Her eyes were

growing wider…

Something was happening.

…and wider…

“Chico!” I barked.

Chico moved in, crouching, giving it a little upshot. Terrific. “Closer,

closer,” I said.

Stargirl’s wonderstruck eyes practically filled the screen. I checked

the long-shot monitor. She was frozen, rigid, as if electrified to the

chair.

Someone smacked my shoulder. I turned. Mr. Robineau was laughing,

saying something. I lifted one earphone. “She’s joking,” he repeated.

And suddenly I saw. She was taking “Hot Seat” literally. She was

milking it for all it was worth, and judging from the blank stares of

Kevin and the jury, Mr. Robineau and I were the only ones who got the

joke.

Stargirl’s hands were rising now from the arms of the Hot Seat…

“Ready one,” I called. “One!”

Camera One, not there at first but getting it now, the long shot,

nailing her as her hands came off the chair arms, fingers spread wide,

you could almost see her fingertips smoking…

Hold it, I prayed, hold it…

…as her horrified eyes swung down over the side of the chair, the Hot

Seat, saw the painted flames…

“EEEEEEEEEEEEYIKES!”

Her scream bent instrument dials like palms in a hurricane. The rat

leaped from Kevin’s shirt. The TV image quaked as my Camera One

man flinched, but he recovered and caught her standing now on the

front edge of the stage, bending over with her rear end in the camera,

flapping her hand behind her, fanning her smoking fanny.

Finally Kevin got it. He went nuts.

“One, pull back, get Kevin in it. Ready…One.”

Kevin was doubled up, tipping out of his chair, on his knees on the

stage. His laughter flooded the control room. The rat ran over his

hands and hopped down the single stage step…

“The rat!” I yelled. “Two, get the rat!”

But Two couldn’t get the rat because the rat was nosing around Two’s

feet and Two was bolting from his camera.

“Chico, rat!”

Chico dived. He was flat on the floor, feeding the live screen a brilliant

shot of the rat heading over to the jury, the jury members scrambling,

taking off, climbing onto their seats.

Forget the “Readys”; things were happening too fast. The cameras

were dancing, feeding the monitors. I barked commands. TD was

punching his button rack like some hard-rock keyboarder.

Stargirl’s pantomime remains the best I have ever seen. Mr. Robineau

kept squeezing my shoulder. As he said later, it was the greatest

moment in Hot Seat history.

But because of what followed, no audience would ever see it.

In less than a minute, everything returned to normal. Stargirl

retrieved Cinnamon and sat back coolly in the Hot Seat as if nothing

had happened. Kevin’s eyes twinkled. He was squirming. He couldn’t

wait to dig into the interview. Neither could the jury, but their eyes

were not twinkling.

Kevin forced himself to look serious. “So, your name. Stargirl. It’s

pretty unusual.”

Stargirl gave him a blank look.

Kevin was flustered. “Isn’t it?” he said.

Stargirl shrugged. “Not to me.”

She’s putting him on, I thought. “Chico,” I said into my mike, “stay

tight on her face.”

A voice was heard dimly off-camera. Kevin turned. A jury member had

spoken. “Jury mike up,” I said. “Ready Two.” The mike was passed to

Jennifer St. John. “Two.”

The mike looked like a black ice cream cone before Jennifer’s face.

Her voice wasn’t pleasant. “What was wrong with the name your

parents gave you?”

Stargirl turned slowly to Jennifer. She smiled. “Nothing. It was a good

name.”

“What was it?”

“Susan.”

“So why did you drop it?”

“Because I didn’t feel like Susan anymore.”

“So you just threw out Susan and named yourself Stargirl.”

“No.” Still smiling.

“No?”

“Pocket Mouse.”

Twelve pairs of eyes boggled.

“What?”

“I named myself Pocket Mouse,” Stargirl said breezily. “Then Mudpie.

Then Hullygully. Then Stargirl.”

Damon Ricci snatched the mike from Jennifer St. John. “So what’s it

gonna be next? Dog Turd?”

Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.

Kevin jumped in. “So…you change your name whenever you get tired

of it?”

“Whenever it doesn’t fit anymore. I’m not my name. My name is

something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.”

“So why Stargirl?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She petted Cinnamon’s nose with her fingertip. “I

was walking in the desert one night, looking up at the sky-like,” she

chuckled, “how can you not look at the sky!-and it just sort of came to

me, fell onto me.”

Kevin looked up from his sheet of prepared questions. “So what do

your parents think? Are they sad you didn’t keep Susan?”

“No. It was almost their idea. When I started calling myself Pocket

Mouse when I was little, they called me that, too. And we just never

went back.”

Another distant voice from the jury.

I tapped the soundman. “Jury mike. And keep all mikes open.” I hated

to do it.

It was Mike Ebersole. “I said, do you love your country?”

“Yes,” she answered briskly. “Do you love yours?”

Ebersole ignored her question. “Why don’t you say the Pledge of

Allegiance right?”

She smiled. “Sounds right to me.”

“Sounds like you’re a traitor to me.”

Jurors were only supposed to ask questions, not make statements.

A hand reached into the picture and grabbed the mike from Ebersole.

Becca Rinaldi’s angry face appeared on Camera Two. “Why do you

cheer for the other team?”

Stargirl seemed to be thinking it over. “I guess because I’m a

cheerleader.”

“You’re not just a cheerleader, you dumb cluck”-Becca Rinaldi was

snarling into the mike-“you’re supposed to be our cheerleader. A Mica

cheerleader.”

I glanced at Mr. Robineau. He was turned away from the monitors. He

was staring straight at the set through the control room window.

Stargirl was leaning forward, looking earnestly at Becca Rinaldi, her

voice small as a little girl’s. “When the other team scores a point and

you see how happy it makes all their fans, doesn’t it make you happy,

too?”

Becca growled, “No.”

“Doesn’t it make you want to join in?”

“No.”

“Don’t you ever want the other team to be happy, too?”

“No.”

Stargirl seemed genuinely surprised. “You don’t always want to be the

winner…do you?”

Becca scowled at her, jutted out her jaw. “Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. I always

want to be the winner. That’s what I do. I root for us to win. That’s what

we all do.” She swept her arm around the set. “We root for Mica.” She

jabbed her finger at the stage. “Who do you root for?”

Stargirl hesitated. She smiled, she threw out her arms. “I root for

everybody!”

Kevin-to the rescue, thankfully-clapped his hands. “Hey-how about

this? Maybe it should be official. Maybe one person in the whole district

should be appointed to be on”-he waved his arm-“everybody’s side!”

Stargirl reached over and slapped Kevin’s knee. “She could wear

every school’s letter on her sweater!”

Kevin laughed. “She’d have to be big as a house!”

Stargirl slapped her own knee. “Then no letter at all. That’s even

better.” She looked into the camera, she swiped at the space before

her. “Out with letters!”

“Cheerleader-at-large!”

“Everybody’s cheerleader!”

Kevin sat at attention, placed his hand over his heart. “With liberty

and justice…and a cheerleader for all.”

Ebersole snarled into the jury mike: “And a nut roll for all.”

Kevin wagged his finger. “That’s a no-no,” he scolded. “No statements

from the jury. Questions only.”

Renee Bozeman snatched the mike. “Okay, here’s a question. Why

did you quit homeschooling?”

Stargirl’s face became serious. “I wanted to make friends.”

“Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it, making the whole

school mad at you.”

I wished I had never given in to Hot-Seating Stargirl.

Stargirl just stared. Chico filled the screen with her face.

“Gimme-” It was Jennifer St. John, reaching for the mike. “And out of

school, too. You meddle into everybody’s business. You stick your nose

in, whether you’re invited or not. Why do you do that?”

Stargirl had no reply. Her usual impish expression was gone. She

looked at Jennifer. She looked at the camera, as if trying to find an

answer in the lens. Then she was looking away, looking at the control

room. I took my eyes from the monitor and for a second I thought they

met hers at the control room window.

I had been wondering when Hillari Kimble would speak up. Now she

did. “I’m gonna tell you something, girl. You’re goofy. You’re crazy.”

Hillari was standing, jabbing her finger at Stargirl, chewing on the

mike. “You must’ve come from Mars or something…” Kevin raised a

timid hand. “And don’t you tell me ‘no statements,’ Kevin. Where’d you

come from, Mars or something? There, now it’s a question. Why don’t

you go back to where you came from? There’s another question.”

Stargirl’s eyes filled the camera. Don’t cry, I prayed.

There was no stopping Hillari. “You want to cheer for other schools?

Fine! Go there! Don’t come to my school. Get outta my school!”

Other hands were snatching at the mike.

“I know what your problem is. All this weird stuff you do? It’s just to

get attention.”

“It’s to get a boyfriend!”

The jurors laughed. They were a mob. Hands grabbed at the mike.

Kevin looked anxiously at me. I could do nothing. With all the buttons

and switches at my command, I was helpless to change anything on

the other side of the glass.

“I got a simple question for you. What’s the matter with you? Huh?

Huh?”

“Why can’t you be normal?”

“Why do you wanna be so different?”

“Yeah-is something wrong with us, you gotta be so different?”

“Why don’t you wear makeup?”

They were all standing now, jabbing, jutting, shouting, whether they

had the mike or not.

“You don’t like us, do you? Do you?”

Mr. Robineau flipped the master toggle on the console. “That’s it,” he

said.

I flipped the studio sound switch. “That’s it. Show’s over.”

The jury went on shouting.

This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents

seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, feelings become

events. Head and heart are contrary historians.

The Hot Seat session was never aired. Mr. Robineau destroyed the

tape. Of course, that didn’t stop every moment of it from being

reported. In fact, most of the students knew about it by the time school

opened next day.

What I recall then, when the last detail had been spilled, is a period of

whispers and waiting. Tension. What would happen now? Would the

jury’s open hostility spill over into the classrooms? How would Stargirl

react? Answers were expected on the following day, Valentine’s Day.

On previous holidays-Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Groundhog

Day-Stargirl had left a little something on each desk in her homeroom.

Would she do likewise this time?

The answer was yes. Each member of Homeroom 17 found a candy

heart on his or her desk that morning.

There was a basketball game that night; that I do remember. The

biggest game of the year. The Electrons had breezed through the

regular season undefeated, but now the second season was about to

begin: the play-offs. First the districts, then the regionals, and finally

the state tournament. We had never even made it to the districts, but

now visions of championships danced in our heads. The Electrons-

champions of all Arizona! We would settle for nothing less.

First hurdle in our way was Sun Valley, champions of the Pima League.

The game was played Valentine’s night on a neutral court in Casa

Grande. All of Mica, it seemed, emptied out and headed for the game.

Kevin and I went in the pickup.

From the moment the Mica mob entered the gym, our cheers rattled

the rafters. The big green M on Stargirl’s white sweater flounced as she

spun and leaped with the other cheerleaders. I spent as much time

watching her as I did watching the game. She cheered when we

scored. When Sun Valley scored, she did not. Something inside me felt

better.

But not for long. We were losing. For the first time all year, we were

trailing at the end of the first quarter. In fact, we were getting smoked,

21 to 9. The reason was no mystery. While Sun Valley’s team was not

as good as ours, they did have one thing we did not: a superstar. A kid

named Ron Kovac. He stood six-foot-eight and averaged thirty points

per game. Our players looked like five Davids flailing against Goliath.

Sun Valley’s lead had increased to nineteen points midway through

the second quarter. Our once-raucous fans were stunned into silence,

and that’s when it happened. The ball was loose in the middle of the

floor. Several players from each team dived for it. At that moment

Kovac was running past, trying to avoid the divers, and his right foot

came down on a prone player’s sneaker-so it was told in the

newspapers the next day. At the time, it happened so fast no one saw

it, though several people said they heard a sickening crack, like a twig

snapping. All we knew was that suddenly Goliath was on the floor

writhing and screaming, and his right foot looked all wrong, and the

Sun Valley coaches and trainer and players were sprinting across the

floor. But they were not the first. Stargirl, somehow, was already there.

While Kovac’s own cheerleaders sat gaping and stricken on their

bench, Stargirl knelt on the hardwood floor. She held his head in her

lap while the others attended his broken leg. Her hands moved over his

face and forehead. She seemed to be saying things to him. When they

carried him away on a stretcher, she followed. Everyone-both sides-

stood and applauded. The Sun Valley cheerleaders leaped as if he had

just scored two points. Ambulance lights flashed in the high windows.

I knew why I was applauding, but I wondered about some of the other

Mica fans. Were they really standing in tribute, or because they were

happy to see him go?

The game resumed. Stargirl returned to the cheerleaders’ bench.

Without Kovac, Sun Valley was a pushover. By early in the second half

we took the lead and went on to win easily.

Two nights later we lost to Glendale. Again we fell farther and farther

behind as the first half went on. But this time there was no turnaround

in the second half. This time the Electrons faced not one but five

players better than themselves. This time no opponent broke an ankle,

though I’m sure in our desperation some of us secretly wished for it.

We were shocked. We couldn’t believe it. And then, as the seconds of

the fourth quarter ticked by, we did believe. The cheers from across

the gym were like volleys of arrows piercing our grand delusion. How

could we have been so stupid? Did we really think that little Mica,

undefeated in its own third-rate league, could ever stand up to the big-

city powerhouses around the state? We had been lured into great,

foolish expectations. Suckered. We were devastated. It had been so

wonderful to be winners. And so right for us. Winning, we had come to

believe, was our destiny.

And now…

As the Glendale coach sent in the scrubs to mop us up, Mica girls

wept. Boys cursed and booed. Some blamed the officials. Or the nets.

Or the lights. The cheerleaders, to their credit, kept on cheering. They

looked up at us with glistening eyes and mascara tracks on their

cheeks. They pumped their arms and shouted and did everything that

cheerleaders are supposed to do, but their gestures were empty, their

hearts not in it.

Except for Stargirl. As I watched her intently, I could see that she was

different. Her cheeks were dry. There was no crack in her voice, no sag

in her shoulders. From the start of the second half on, she never sat

down. And she never again looked at the game. She turned her back

on the court. She stood and faced us and gave not an ounce of herself

to the jubilation across the gym. We were losing by thirty points with a

minute to go, but she cheered on as if we had a chance. Her eyes

blazed with a ferocity I had never seen before. She shook her fists at

us. She flung her defiance at our gloom.

And then her face was bloody.

A Glendale player had just dunked the ball and Kevin pounded my

knee with his fist and I looked to see Stargirl’s face suddenly a bloody

mask and I was on my feet screaming, “NOOOOO!”

But it wasn’t blood. It was a tomato. Someone had splattered her face

with a perfectly thrown ripe tomato, and as the clock expired and the

Glendale fans poured onto the court, Stargirl just stood there, her great

eyes staring up at us in utter bewilderment through the pulpy red gore.

Spouts of bitter laughter erupted among us, even some applause.

The next morning at home I found the card. It was in a school

notebook that apparently I had not opened for several days. It was a

valentine, one of those little cut-out third-grade sorts, showing a

blushing little boy and a girl with mary jane shoes and a big red heart

between them and the words “I LOVE YOU.” And as third-graders-and

high-schoolers-often do, the sender had signed it in code:

She gave everybody in school a card. That was my first thought.

When I saw Kevin at school, I was about to ask him, but I pulled back.

I waited until lunch. I tried to be casual. I slipped it in with the only

thing that mattered that day. The school was in mourning. The game.

The loss. The tomato. Oh yeah, incidentally, speaking of Stargirl: “Did

you happen to get a card?”

He looked at me funny. “She gave them to her homeroom, I heard.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I heard, too. But was that all? Didn’t she

give them to everybody else?”

He shrugged. “Not to me. Why? You get one?”

He was looking away across the lunchroom, biting into his sandwich,

yet I felt he was grilling me. I shook my head. “Oh no, just wondering.”

Actually, I was sitting on the card. It was in the back pocket of my

jeans. Meanwhile, all eyes in the lunchroom were on Stargirl. I think we

half expected to see traces of red still clinging to her face. She sat at

her usual table with Dori Dilson and several other friends. She seemed

subdued. She did not play her ukulele. She did not play with her rat.

She just ate and talked with the girls at her table.

As the lunch period was ending, she got up but did not head straight

for the exit. Instead she detoured in the direction of my table. I

panicked. I jumped up, grabbed my stuff, blurted “Gotta go,” left Kevin

with his mouth hanging, and took off. Not fast enough. Halfway to the

door I heard her behind me: “Hi, Leo.” My face got warm. I was sure

every eye was turned to me. I was sure they could all see the card in

my pocket. I pretended to look at the clock. I pretended I was late for

something. I ran from the lunchroom.

I lurked in the shadows for the rest of the day. I went straight home

after school. I stayed in my room. I came out only for dinner. I told my

parents I had a project to do. I paced. I lay on my bed and stared at the

ceiling. I stared out the window. I laid the card on my study desk. I

picked it up. I read it. I read it. I read it. I played “Hi, Leo” over and over

in my head. I tossed darts at the corkboard on the back of my door. My

father called in, “What’s your project, darts?” I went out. I drove

around in the pickup. I drove down her street. At the last intersection

before her house, I turned off.

For hours I lay under my sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through

the night, from the light, from the stars.

Hi, Leo.

In the morning-it was a Saturday-Kevin and I went together to Archie’s

for the weekly meeting of the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone. There

were about fifteen of us. We wore our fossil necklaces. Archie wanted

to discuss the Eocene skull he was holding, but all the others could talk

about was the game. When they told Archie about the tomato, his

eyebrows went up, but other than that, his face did not change. I

thought, This is not news to him, he already knows.

Archie spent the whole session that way, nodding and smiling and

raising his eyebrows. We dumped our disappointment on him, the

devastation of the loss. He said very little. When it was over, he looked

down at the skull in his lap and patted it and said, “Well, this fellow

here lost his game, too. He was winning for ten million years or so, but

then the early grasses started growing up around him, and he found

himself in a different league. He hung in there as well as he could. He

scored his points, but he kept falling farther and farther behind. The

opposition was better, quicker, keener. In the championship game, our

boy got annihilated. Not only didn’t he show up for class the next day,

he never showed up, period. They never saw him again.”

Archie lifted the snouted, fox-size skull until it was side by side with

his own face. A good minute passed as he said nothing, inviting us into

our own thoughts. Faces staring at faces staring at faces. Tens of

millions of years of faces in a living room in a place called Arizona.

Monday. Lunch.

This time I stayed put when Stargirl came toward my table on her way

out. My back was to her. I could see Kevin’s eyes following her,

widening as she came closer. And then his eyes stopped, and his

mouth was sliding toward a wicked grin, and it seemed like everything

stopped but the clink of pans in the kitchen, and the back of my neck

was on fire.

“You’re welcome,” I heard her say, almost sing.

I thought, What? but then I knew what. And I knew what I had to do. I

knew I had to turn around and speak to her, and I knew she was going

to stand there until I did. This was silly, this was childish, this being

terrified of her. What was I afraid of, anyway?

I turned. I felt heavy, as if I were moving through water, as if I were

confronting much more than a tenth-grade girl with an unusual name. I

faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag-it looked hand-painted-

and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, “Thanks for the card.”

Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.

Kevin was grinning, wagging his head. “She’s in love.”

“Bull,” I said.

“She is mucho in love.”

“She’s goofy, that’s all.”

The bell rang. We gathered our stuff and left.

I wobbled through the rest of the day. A baseball bat could not have

hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time,

how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? So why did this

one feel like the first?

After school my feet carried me toward her homeroom. I was

trembling. My stomach had flies. I had no idea what I was going to do if

I saw her. I only knew I couldn’t not go.

She wasn’t there. I hurried through the hallways. I ran outside. The

buses were loading. Cars were revving. Hundreds of kids were

scattering. For months she had been everywhere, now she was

nowhere.

I heard her name. Her name. The same two syllables, the same eight

letters that I had been hearing all year, and suddenly the sound struck

my ear with a ping of pure silver. I drifted sideways to overhear. A

group of girls was chattering toward a bus.

“When?”

“Today. After school. Just now!”

“I don’t believe it!”

“I don’t believe it took so long.”

“Kicked off? Are they allowed?”

“Sure. Why not? It’s not her school.”

“I would’ve kicked her off long ago. It was treason.”

“Good riddance.”

I knew what they were talking about. It had been rumored for days.

Stargirl had been kicked off the cheerleading squad.

“Hi, Leo!”

A chorus of girl voices calling my name. I turned. They were in front of

the sun. I shaded my eyes. They sang in unison: “Starboy!” They

laughed. I waved and hurried home. I could never have admitted it, but

I was thrilled.

Her house was two miles from mine, behind a little ten-store shopping

center. Archie had told me where. I walked. I didn’t want to ride. I

wanted to be slow about it. I wanted to feel myself getting closer step

by step, feel the tension rising like fizz in a soda bottle.

I did not know what I would do if I saw her. I knew only that I was

nervous, afraid. I was more comfortable with her as history than as

person. Suddenly, intensely, I wanted to know everything about her. I

wanted to see her baby pictures. I wanted to watch her eating

breakfast, wrapping a gift, sleeping. Since September she had been a

performer-unique and outrageous-on the high school stage. She was

the opposite of cool; she held nothing back. From her decorated desk

to her oratorical speech to her performance on the football field, she

was there for all to see. And yet now I felt I had not been paying

attention. I felt I had missed something, something important.

She lived on Palo Verde. For a person so different, her house was

surprisingly ordinary, at least by Arizona standards. Single story. Pale

adobe. Clay-red pipetile roof. Not a blade of grass in the small front

yard, but rather barrel and prickly pear cacti and clusters of stones.

It was dark, as I had intended, when I got there. I walked up and down

the other side of the street. It occurred to me I might be mistaken for a

prowler, so I walked around the block. I stopped into Roma Delite for a

slice of pizza. Gulped down only half of it, hurried back out, couldn’t

relax when her house was not in sight. Couldn’t relax when it was.

At first it was enough just to see the house. Then I began to wonder if

she was inside. I wondered what she could be doing. Light came from

every window I could see. There was a car in the driveway. The longer I

hung around, the closer I wanted to be. I crossed the street and

practically dashed past the house. As I went by, I scooped up a stone

from the yard. I went up the street, turned, and looked at her house in

the distance.

I whispered to the salt-sprinkled sky, “That’s where Stargirl Caraway

lives. She likes me.”

I headed back toward the house. The street, the sidewalks were

deserted. The stone was warm in my hand. This time I walked slowly as

I approached. I felt strange. My eyes fixed on a triangle of light in a

curtained window. I saw a shadow on a yellow wall. I seemed to be

drifting, footless, into the light.

Suddenly the front door opened. I dived behind the car in the

driveway and crouched by the rear fender. I heard the door close. I

heard steps. The steps matched the movement of a long shadow cast

down the driveway. My breath stopped. The shadow stopped. I felt both

ridiculous and weirdly, perfectly placed, as if crouching by that car was

precisely what life had in store for me at that moment.

Her voice came from beyond the shadow. “Remember when you

followed me into the desert that day after school?”

Absurdly, I debated whether to answer, as if doing so would-what?

Give me away? I leaned into the smooth metal of the fender. It never

occurred to me to stand, to show myself. Hours seemed to pass before

I finally croaked, “Yes.”

“Why did you turn around and go back?”

Her tone was casual, as if she held conversations every night with

people crouching behind the car in the driveway.

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Were you afraid?”

“No,” I lied.

“I wouldn’t have let you get lost, you know.”

“I know.”

A little shadow detached itself from the larger one. It came toward

me, wavering over the pebbled driveway. It had a tail. It wasn’t a

shadow. It was the rat, Cinnamon. Cinnamon stopped at the tip of one

of my sneakers. He stood, looking up at me. He put his front paws on

top of my sneaker and nosed into the laces.

“Are you getting acquainted with Cinnamon?”

“Sort of.”

“Are you lying?”

“Sort of.”

“Are you afraid of rats?”

“Sort of.”

“Do you think I’m cute? If you say sort of, I’ll tell Cinnamon to bite

you.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“I think you’re cute.” I thought of adding “sort of” just to be funny,

but I didn’t.

“Do you think Cinnamon is cute?”

The rat had climbed fully onto my sneaker now. I could feel his

weight. I wanted to shake him off. His tail spilled onto the driveway.

“No comment,” I said.

“Oh my, hear that, Cinnamon? No comment. He doesn’t want people

to know he thinks you’re cute.”

“I think you’re getting a little carried away,” I said.

“I certainly hope so,” she said. “Nothing’s more fun than being carried

away. Would you like to carry Cinnamon away for the night? He loves

sleep-overs.”

“No thank you.”

“Oh.” Her voice was mock-pouty. “Are you sure? He’s no trouble. He

hardly takes up any room. All you have to feed him is a Mini Wheat. Or

two grapes. And he won’t poop on your rug. Will you, Cinnamon? Go

ahead, stand up and tell him you won’t. Stand up, Cinnamon.”

Cinnamon stood on my sneaker. His eyes shone like black pearls.

“Doesn’t he have the cutest ears?”

Who notices a rat’s ears? I looked. She was right. “Yeah,” I said, “I

guess he does.”

“Tickle him behind his ears. He loves that.”

I swallowed hard. I reached down with the tips of my two forefingers

and tickled the tiny, furry spaces behind the rat’s ears. I guessed he

enjoyed it. He didn’t move. And then, surprising myself, I moved one

fingertip in front of his nose, and he licked me. It had never occurred to

me that rats do that. His tongue was half the size of my little fingernail.

I would have guessed it was rough, like a cat’s, but it wasn’t; it was

smooth.

And then he was no longer on my foot-he was on my shoulder. I

yelped. I tried to swat him off, but he dug into my shirt with his

fingernails. Meanwhile, Stargirl was cracking up. I could see the

shadow shaking.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Cinnamon jumped onto your shoulder.”

“You got it,” I said.

“And you’re thinking about how rats are supposed to go for people’s

throats.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, “but now that you mention it…” I clamped my

hands around my neck. I felt something in my ear. Whiskery. I yelped

again. “He’s eating my ear!”

Stargirl laughed some more. “He’s nuzzling you. He likes you.

Especially your ears. He never meets an ear he doesn’t love. By the

time he’s done, that ear of yours will be clean as a whistle. Especially if

there’s some leftover peanut butter in it.”

I could feel the tiny tongue mopping the crevices of my left ear. “It

tickles!” I felt something else. “I feel teeth!”

“He’s just scraping something off for you. You must have something

crusty in there. Have you washed your ears lately?”

“None of your business.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to get personal.”

“I forgive you.”

All was quiet for a while, except for the snuffing in my ear. I could

hear the rat breathing. His tail drooped into my front shirt pocket.

“Do you want to confess now?”

“Confess what?” I said.

“That you’re actually starting to like having a rodent poking around in

your ear.”

I smiled. I nodded, dislodging the rat’s nose for a moment. “I

confess.”

More silence, tiny breathing in my ear.

“Well,” she said at last, “we have to go in now. Say good night,

Cinnamon.”

No, I thought, don’t go.

“I still have another ear,” I said.

“If he does that one, he’ll never want to leave you, and I’ll be jealous.

Come on, Cinnamon. Time for beddy bye.”

Cinnamon went on snuffing.

“He’s not coming, is he?”

“Nope.”

“Then just take hold of him and put him on the ground.”

I did so. As soon as I put the rat down, he scooted under the tailpipe

and out of sight on the other side of the car.

The shadow withdrew. I heard the front door open. Light gushed out.

“’Night, Leo.”

“’Night,” I called.

I didn’t want to leave. I wished I could curl up right there on the

driveway and go to sleep. I had been crouching for a long time. It was

a chore just to stand. I was halfway home before I could walk right.

Just two weeks before, I had found out she knew my name, and now I

was loopy with love. I was floating. I floated up the white light that

washed my sheets and slept on the moon. In school I was a yellow

balloon, smiling and lazy, floating above the classrooms. I felt a faint

tug on my string. Far below, Kevin was calling, “You’re in love, dude!” I

merely smiled and rolled over and drifted dreamily out a window.

This state lasted until lunch, when suddenly I became self-conscious. I

was certain that everyone in school knew. They would be waiting for

me, turning as I entered the lunchroom, staring. I was uncomfortable in

the spotlight, always had been. I was happy to stay behind the camera

and let Kevin take the bows out front.

So I hid for those thirty-five minutes in the gym equipment room. I sat

atop a rolled-up wrestling mat, kicking a volleyball against the opposite

wall. I had nothing to eat-I had intended to buy-but I wasn’t hungry.

After school we found each other, not that we had to look.

She took Cinnamon from her bag and put him on her shoulder. “Shake

paws with Leo, Cinnamon.”

Cinnamon and I shook paws.

“Do you believe in enchanted places?” she said.

“You talking to me or the rat?”

She smiled. She dazzled. “You.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

“I’m going to show you one.”

“What if I don’t want to see it?”

“You think you have a choice?”

She grabbed my hand and almost pulled me off my feet, laughing out

loud, and we flew across the school fields, swinging hands for all the

world to see.

We walked for miles, out past the business park, MicaTronics, the golf

course, into the desert. “Look familiar?” she said.

By now, Cinnamon was riding my shoulder. And I was carrying the

ukulele, strumming nonsense. “It’s where we came that day,” I said.

She gave a snort. “We? I was coming out here, you were half a mile

behind.” She poked my shoulder. “Sneaking after me.” She poked me

again, hard this time, but her eyes were twinkling. “Stalking me.”

I acted horrified, hurt. “Stalking? I was not stalking. I was just lagging

behind a little, that’s all.”

“Following me.”

I shrugged. “So?”

“Why?”

I could feel a million reasons, but there were no words to express

them. “I don’t know.”

“You liked me.”

I smiled.

“You were smitten with me. You were speechless to behold my beauty.

You had never met anyone so fascinating. You thought of me every

waking minute. You dreamed about me. You couldn’t stand it. You

couldn’t let such wonderfulness out of your sight. You had to follow

me.”

I turned to Cinnamon. He licked my nose. “Don’t give yourself so

much credit. It was your rat I was after.”

She laughed, and the desert sang.

To the person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the

Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there’s

no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground

does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won’t sink in. It’s

hard, as if it’s been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with-what else-

mica.

But you don’t notice the ground much. What you notice are the

saguaros. To the newcomer from the East, it’s as simple as that. The

desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only

purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little

by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the

porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti,

buckhorn and staghorn and devil’s fingers, the tall, sky-reaching

tendrils of the ocotillo.

We walked a weaving line around the plant life, up and down washes

and gullies, the Maricopas looming lavender in the distance.

“When you turned and ran that day,” she said, “I called after you.”

“You did?”

“I whispered.”

“Whispered? How’d you expect me to hear?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought you would.”

I strummed the uke. I squared my shoulders. Giving a rat a ride

improves the posture.

“You’re shy, aren’t you?” she said.

“What makes you think that?”

She laughed. “Were you embarrassed when I pulled you along after

school today? All those kids looking?”

“Nah.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yeah.”

She laughed. I seemed to be good at making her laugh.

I glanced back. The highway was out of sight. “Do you have the

time?” I said.

“Nobody has the time,” she said. “The time cannot be owned.” She

threw out her arms and twirled till her multicolored skirt looked like a

pinwheel taffy. “The time is free to everyone!”

“Sorry I asked,” I said.

She hung her sunflower bag on a cactus arm and cartwheeled toward

the Maricopas. Crazily, I felt like joining her. I told myself I couldn’t

because I was loaded down with a ukulele and a rat. I picked up her

bag and followed.

When she decided to walk like a normal human again, I told her she

was goofy.

She stopped, turned to me, and bowed grandly. “Thank you, good sir.”

Then she took my arm as if we were strolling down a promenade and

she said, “Scream, Leo.”

“Huh?”

“Just throw your head back and let it all out. Scream your ears off.

Nobody will hear you.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

She turned her astonished eyes on me. “Why wouldn’t you?”

I pointed to Cinnamon. “If he screams first, then I will.” And I changed

the subject. “Are we ever going to get to this enchanted place?” I felt

silly just saying the words.

“Just a little farther,” she said.

I humored her. “So how do you know an enchanted place when you

come to it?”

“You’ll see,” she said. She squeezed my hand. “Did you know there’s

a country with officially designated ‘enchanted places’?”

“No,” I said. “Where would that be? Oz?”

“Iceland.”

“Imagine that.”

“I’m ignoring your sarcasm. I think it would be neat if we had that

here. You’d be walking or riding along, and there would be this stone

marker with a brass plate: ‘Enchanted Site. U.S. Department of

Interior.’”

“We’d litter it up,” I said.

She stared at me, her smile gone. “Would we?”

I felt bad, as if I had ruined something. “Not really,” I told her. “Not if

there’s a Don’t Be a Litterbug sign.”

A minute later she stopped. “We’re here.”

I looked around. The place couldn’t have been more ordinary. The

only notable presence was a tall, dilapidated saguaro, a bundle of

sticks, in worse shape than Archie’s Señor. The rest was gray

scrub and tumbleweed and a few prickly pears. “I thought it might look

different,” I said.

“Special? Scenic?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It’s a different kind of scenery,” she said. “Shoes off.”

We pulled off our shoes.

“Sit.”

We sat, legs crossed. Cinnamon scampered down my arm and onto

the ground.

Stargirl shrieked, “Stop!” She scooped up the rat and put him in her

bag. “Owls, hawks, snakes. He’d be a tasty meal.”

“So,” I said, “when does the enchantment start?”

We were sitting side by side, facing the mountains.

“It started when the earth was born.” Her eyes were closed. Her face

was golden in the setting sun. “It never stops. It is, always. It’s just

here.”

“So what do we do?”

She smiled. “That’s the secret.” Her cupped hands rested in her lap.

“We do nothing. Or as close to nothing as we can.” Her face turned

slowly to me, though her eyes remained closed. “Have you ever done

nothing?”

I laughed. “My mother thinks I do it all the time.”

“Don’t tell her I said so, but your mother is wrong.” She turned back

to the sun. “It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here,

like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a

whole commotion going on inside us.”

“That’s bad?” I said.

“It’s bad if we want to know what’s going on outside ourselves.”

“Don’t we have eyes and ears for that?”

She nodded. “They’re okay most of the time. But sometimes they just

get in the way. The earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear because

of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase

them, erase our senses. Then-maybe-the earth will touch us. The

universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

The sun was glowing orange now, clipping the mountains’ purple

crests.

“So how do I become this nothing?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “There’s no one answer to that. You have to

find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big

pink soft soap eraser, and it’s going back and forth, back and forth,

and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and

there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my

ankles. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my

eyes, my ears, my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My

thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That’s the hardest,

erasing my thoughts.” She chuckled faintly. “My pumpkin. And then, if

I’ve done a good job, I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the

world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl.”

“And?” I said.

“And…I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my

world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s

no difference anymore between me and the universe. The boundary is

gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain.” She

smiled dreamily. “I like that most of all, being rain.”

“Am I the first one you’ve brought out here?”

She didn’t answer. She faced the mountains, bathed in sun syrup, her

face as still and peaceful as I’ve ever seen a face.

“Stargirl-”

“Shhhh.”

That was the last sound either of us made for a long time. We sat side

by side, lotus style, facing west. I closed my eyes. I tried to be perfectly

still-and promptly found out that she was right. I could immobilize my

arms and legs, but inside me it was rush hour in downtown Phoenix. I

had never been so aware of my breath and my heartbeat, not to

mention other assorted grumblings and gurglings. And my head-it just

wouldn’t close down. Every question, every stray thought from miles

around came wandering into my brain, sniffing about, scratching at my

attention.

But I tried. I tried the eraser, but it wouldn’t even wipe out the first

toe. I tried to imagine I was sawdust blowing away with the wind.

Swallowed by a whale. Dissolving away like Alka-Seltzer. Nothing

worked. I could not make myself disappear.

I peeked. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I did. Clearly, she had

erased herself. She was gone. She was serenity. Her lips faintly smiling.

Her golden skin. The glowing thread-ends of her hair. She seemed to

have been dipped in sunlight and set here to dry. I felt a pang of

jealousy, that she could be sitting next to me and not know it. That she

could be somewhere most wonderful and I could not be there, too.

Then I saw the rat. He had crawled out of the bag. He was sitting on it

much as we were, his front paws-I kept thinking of them as tiny hands,

they were so human-like-dangling before him. He, too, was not moving.

He, too, was facing the sunset, his pelt the color of a new penny. His

peppercorn eyes were fully open.

I knew it must have been a trick she had taught him, or imitative

rodent behavior. Still, I couldn’t help thinking there was more to it, that

the whiskered little fellow was having an experience of his own-which

might include digestion in a critter’s stomach if Stargirl’s fears came

true. As quietly as possible, I reached over and scooped him up. I held

him in both hands. He did not struggle or squirm, but resumed facing

the sunset with his tiny chin resting on my forefinger. In my fingertips I

could feel his heartbeat. I drew him closer to my chest. I dared any

varmint to come near.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for another try at

enchantment. I don’t think I succeeded. I think Cinnamon was a better

eraser than I. I tried. I tried so hard I almost squeaked, but I could not

seem to leave myself, and the cosmos did not visit me. I could not stop

wondering what time it was.

But something did happen. A small thing. I was aware of stepping

over a line, of taking one step into territory new to me. It was a

territory of peace, of silence. I had never experienced such utter

silence before, such stillness. The commotion within me went on, but

at a lower volume, as if someone had turned down my dial. And an

eerie thing happened. While I never did totally lose awareness of

myself, I believe I did, so to speak, lose Cinnamon. I no longer felt his

pulse, his presence, in my hands. It seemed we were no longer

separate, but were one.

When the sun fell behind the mountains, I felt it as a faint coolness on

my face.

I don’t know how long my eyes were closed. When I opened them,

she was gone. Alarmed, I jerked around. She was standing off a ways,

smiling. Evening had come. While my eyes were closed, the mountains’

dusky lavender had drifted over the desert.

We put on our shoes. We headed for the highway. I expected her to

interrogate me, but she did not. One moment the moon was not there,

and then it was, then one bright star. We walked across the desert

hand in hand, saying nothing.

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.

“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.

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.

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

While-you’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-Harry-catch-

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Usually I saw her in the courtyard before school, but that day I didn’t.

Usually I passed her between classes at least once or twice before

lunch. Not that day. In fact, when I looked over to her table at lunch,

there was Dori Dilson, as usual, but someone else was sitting with her.

No Stargirl in sight.

Coming out of the lunchroom, I heard laughter behind me. And then a

voice, Stargirl’s: “What do you have to do to get somebody’s attention

around here?”

I turned, but it wasn’t her. The girl standing, grinning in front of me

wore jeans and sandals, had burnt-red nails and lipstick, painted eyes,

finger rings, toe rings, hoop earrings I could put my hand through,

hair…

I gawked as students swarmed past. She made a clownish grin. She

was beginning to look vaguely familiar. Tentatively I whispered,

“Stargirl?”

She batted her chocolaty eyelashes. “Stargirl? What kind of name is

that? My name is Susan.”

And just like that, Stargirl was gone, replaced by Susan. Susan Julia

Caraway. The girl she might have been all along.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She cradled her books in her arms.

The sunflower canvas bag was gone. The rat was gone. The ukulele

was gone. She turned around slowly for my open-mouthed,

dumbstruck inspection. Nothing goofy, nothing different could I see.

She looked magnificently, wonderfully, gloriously ordinary. She looked

just like a hundred other girls at Mica High. Stargirl had vanished into a

sea of them, and I was thrilled. She slid a stick of chewing gum into her

mouth and chewed away noisily. She winked at me. She reached out

and tweaked my cheek the way my grandmother would and said,

“What’s up, cutie?” I grabbed her, right there outside the lunchroom in

the swarming mob. I didn’t care if others were watching. In fact, I

hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so

happy and so proud in my life.

We sailed through time. We held hands in the hallways, on the stairs,

in the courtyard. In the lunchroom I grabbed her and pulled her over to

our table. I looked to invite Dori Dilson, too, but she was gone. I sat

there grinning while Kevin and Susan gabbed and gossiped over their

sandwiches. They joked about her disastrous appearance on Hot Seat.

Susan suggested that I should go on Hot Seat one of these days, and

Kevin said no, he’s too shy, and I said not anymore, and we all

laughed.

And it was true. I didn’t walk, I strutted. I was Susan Caraway’s

boyfriend. I. Me. Really? That Susan Caraway? The one with the tiny

barrettes and toe rings? Yep, that’s the one, my girlfriend. Call me Mr.

Susan.

I started saying “we” instead of “I,” as in “We’ll meet you there” or

“We like fajitas.”

Whenever I could, I said her name out loud, like blowing bubbles. The

rest of the time I said it to myself.

Susan…Susan…

We did our homework together. We hung out with Kevin. Instead of

following strangers around, we went to the movies and plunged our

hands together into the six-dollar Super Tub of popcorn. Instead of

shopping for African violets, we shopped for Cinnabons and licked icing

from each other’s fingers.

We went into Pisa Pizza. We walked past the bulletin board inside the

door. We shared a pizza: half pepperoni, half anchovies.

“Anchovies, ugh,” I said.

“What’s wrong with anchovies?” she said.

“How can you eat them? Nobody eats anchovies.”

I was sort of kidding, but her face was serious. “Nobody?”

“Nobody I know.”

She picked the anchovies from her slices and dumped them into her

water glass.

I tried to stop her. “Hey-”

She pushed my hand away. She dropped the last anchovy into the

glass. “I don’t want to be like nobody.”

On the way out, we ignored the bulletin board.

She was mad for shopping. It was as if she had just discovered

clothes. She bought shirts and pants and shorts and costume jewelry

and makeup. I began to notice that the items of clothing had one thing

in common: they all had the designer’s name plastered prominently on

them. She seemed to buy not for color or style but for designer label

size.

She constantly quizzed me about what other kids would do, would

buy, would say, would think. She invented a fictitious person whom she

called Evelyn Everybody. “Would Evelyn like this?” “Would Evelyn do

that?”

Sometimes she misfired, as with laughing. For several days she was

on a laughing jag. She didn’t just laugh, she boomed. Heads turned in

the lunchroom. I was trying to work up the nerve to say something

when she looked at Kevin and me and said, “Would Evelyn laugh this

much?” Kevin stared at his sandwich. I sheepishly shook my head. The

laughing stopped, and from that moment on she did a perfect imitation

of a sullen, pout-lipped teenager.

In every way she seemed to be a typical, ordinary, everyday, run-of-

the-mill teenager.

And it wasn’t working.

At first I neither noticed nor much cared that the shunning continued.

I was too busy being happy that she was, as I saw it, now one of us. My

only regret was that we could not play the basketball season over

again. In my mind’s eye, I pictured her aiming her incredible zeal and

energy exclusively at the Electrons. We could have won games on her

cheering alone.

It was she who said it first: “They still don’t like me.” We were

standing outside the TV studio after school. As usual, people were

passing by as if we weren’t there. Her lip quivered. “What am I doing

wrong?” Tears made her eyes even larger.

I squeezed her hand. I told her to give it some time. I pointed out that

the state basketball finals would take place in Phoenix that Saturday,

and that would end the season and clear the way for her cheerleading

crimes to be forgotten.

Her mascara was muddy. I had seen her sad many times before, but

always for someone else. This was different. This was for herself, and I

was powerless to help. I could not find it in me to cheer up the

cheerleader.

That night we did homework together at her house. I ducked into her

room to check out her happy wagon. There were only two stones in it.

When I came to school next day, there was something different about

the buzz in the courtyard. The arriving students were milling about,

some roaming at random, some in clusters, but as I approached, there

seemed to be a distinct clearing around the palmetto. I wandered in

that direction, and through the crowd I could see that someone-Susan-

was seated on the bench. She sat upright and smiling. She was holding

a foot-long stick shaped like a claw on one end. Around her neck,

dangling on a string, was a sign that read: TALK TO ME AND I’LL

SCRATCH YOUR BACK. She was getting no takers. No one was within

twenty feet of her.

Quickly I turned away. I walked back through the crowd. I pretended I

was looking for someone. I pretended I hadn’t seen. And prayed for the

bell to ring.

When I saw her later that morning, the sign was gone. She said

nothing about it. Neither did I.

Next morning she came running at me in the courtyard. Her eyes

were bright for the first time in days. She grabbed me with both hands

and shook me. “It’s going to be okay! It’s going to end! I had a vision!”

She told me about it. She had gone to her enchanted place after

dinner the day before, and that’s where the vision had come to her.

She had seen herself returning in triumph from the Arizona state

oratorical contest. She had won first prize. Best in the state. When she

returned, she got a hero’s welcome. The whole school greeted her in

the parking lot, just like in the assembly film. There were streamers

and confetti and tooting kazoos and horns blaring, and the mayor and

city council were on hand, and they had a parade right then and there,

and she rode high on the back seat of a convertible and held her

winner’s silver plate up for all to see, and the happy faces of her

classmates flashed in the sparkling trophy. She told me this, and she

threw up her arms and shouted, “I’m going to be popular!”

The state contest was a week away. Every day she practiced her

speech. One day she called over little Peter Sinkowitz and his

playmates and presented the speech to us from her front steps. We

applauded and whistled. She bowed grandly, and I, too, began to see

her vision. I saw the streamers flying and I heard the crowd cheering,

and I believed.

“…and our best wishes go with you, Susan Caraway.”

The PA announcement echoed through the school lobby, and we were

off to Phoenix. The driver was Mr. McShane, Mica High’s faculty

representative to the state contest. Susan and I sat in the back.

Susan’s parents were driving their own car and would meet us in

Phoenix.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, she wagged a finger in my face.

“Don’t get a big head, mister. I was allowed to invite two friends along.

You weren’t the only one I asked.”

“So who was the other?” I said.

“Dori.”

“Well, then,” I said, “I think I’ll go for the big head. Dori isn’t another

guy.”

She grinned. “No, she’s not one of those.” Suddenly she unbuckled

her seat belt-we each had a back window. “Mr. McShane,” she

announced, “I’m moving over so I can sit close to Leo. He’s so cute, I

can’t help myself.”

In the rearview mirror, the teacher’s eyes crinkled. “Whatever you

like, Susan. It’s your day.”

She slid over and fastened herself into the middle belt. She jabbed

me. “Hear that? It’s my day. I get whatever I want.”

“So,” I said, “what happened when you asked Dori Dilson?”

“She said no. She’s mad at me.”

“I could tell.”

“Ever since I became Susan. She thinks I betrayed myself. She just

doesn’t understand how important it is to be popular.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I was feeling a little uneasy.

Fortunately, wondering what to say wasn’t much of a problem for me

during that two-hour ride, because Susan chattered away like the old

Stargirl the whole time.

“But I know Dori,” she said, “and I’ll tell you one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“She’ll be in the front of the mob cheering for me when we get back

tomorrow.”

I later found out that after we left the school, the principal had spoken

again on the PA. He announced our expected time of return on

Saturday and suggested that everyone be on hand to meet us, win or

lose.

Losing, as it turned out, never occurred to the contestant herself.

“Would you do a favor for me?” she said.

I told her sure.

“That big silver plate that goes to the winner? I’m such a klutz with

dishes at home. Would you hold it for me when the crowd rushes us?

I’m afraid I’ll drop it.”

I stared at her. “What crowd? What rush?”

“In the school parking lot. When we get back tomorrow. There’s

always a crowd waiting for the returning hero. Remember the film at

school? My vision?” She cocked her head and peered into my eyes. She

rapped my forehead with her knuckle. “Hello in there. Anybody home?”

“Oh,” I said. “That crowd.”

She nodded. “Exactly. Of course, we’ll be safe as long as we’re in the

car. But once we get out, who knows what will happen. Crowds can get

pretty wild. Right, Mr. McShane?”

The teacher nodded. “So I hear.”

She spoke to me as if instructing a first-grader. “Leo, this has never

happened in Mica before, having a winner of the Arizona state

oratorical contest. One of their very own. When they hear about it,

they’re going to go bananas. And when they get a gander at me and

that trophy-” She rolled her eyes and whistled. “I just hope they don’t

get out of hand.”

“The police will keep them in line,” I said. “Maybe they’ll call out the

National Guard.”

She stared wide-eyed. “You think?” She didn’t realize I was kidding.

“Well,” she said, “I’m really not afraid for myself. I won’t mind a little

jostling. Do you think they’ll jostle, Mr. McShane?”

In the mirror his eyes shifted to us. “Never can tell.”

“And if they want to carry me around on their shoulders, that’s okay,

too. But they better not”-she poked me with her finger-“better not

mess with my trophy. That’s why you”-another poke-“are going to hold

it. Tight.”

I wished Mr. McShane would say something. “Susan,” I said, “did you

ever hear of counting your chickens?”

“Before they hatch, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“I hear you’re not supposed to.”

“Exactly.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Never made much sense to me. I mean, if

you know they’re going to hatch, why not count them?”

“Because you can’t know,” I said. “There’re no guarantees. I hate to

break this to you, but you’re not the only person in the contest.

Somebody else could win. You could lose. It’s possible.”

She thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. “Nope.

Not possible. So…” She threw up her arms and smiled hugely. “Why

wait to feel great? Celebrate now, that’s my motto.” She nuzzled into

me. “What’s yours, big boy?”

“Don’t count your chickens,” I said.

She shuddered mockingly. “Ouuu. You’re such a poop, Leo. What’s

your motto, Mr. McShane?”

“Drive carefully,” he said, “you may have a winner in the car.”

That set her off howling.

“Mr. McShane,” I said, “you’re not helping.”

“Sorry,” he lied.

I just looked at her. “You’re going to be in a state contest,” I said.

“Aren’t you just a little bit nervous?”

The smile vanished. “Yes, I am. I’m a lot nervous. I just hope things

don’t get out of hand when we get back to the school. I’ve never been

adored by mobs of people before. I’m not sure how I’m going to react. I

hope I don’t get a big head. Do you think I’m the big-head type, Mr.

McShane?”

I raised my hand. “Can I answer that?”

“I think your head is just fine,” said the teacher.

She jabbed me with her elbow. “Hear that, Mr. Know-it-all?” She gave

me her smug face, which promptly disappeared as she thrust up her

arms and yelped, “They’re going to love me!”

Mr. McShane wagged his head and chuckled. Silently I gave up.

She pointed out the window. “Look, even the desert is celebrating.”

It seemed to be true. The normally dull cacti and scrub were splashed

with April colors, as if a great painter had passed over the landscape

with a brush, dabbing yellow here, red there.

Susan strained against her seat belt. “Mr. McShane, can we stop here,

just for a minute? Please?” When the teacher hesitated, she added,

“You said it’s my day. I get whatever I want.”

The car coasted to a stop along the gravelly roadside. In a moment,

she was out the door and bounding across the desert. She skipped and

whirled and cartwheeled among the prickly natives. She bowed to a

yucca, waltzed with a saguaro. She plucked a red blossom from a

barrel cactus and fixed it in her hair. She practiced her smile and her

nod and her wave-one-hand, two-hand-to the adoring mob at her

hero’s welcome. She snapped a needle from a cactus and with the

slapstick pantomime of a circus clown pretended to pick her teeth with

it.

Mr. McShane and I were leaning on the car, laughing, when suddenly

she stopped, cocked her head, and stared off in another direction. She

stayed like that, stone still, for a good two minutes, then abruptly

turned and came back to the car.

Her face was thoughtful. “Mr. McShane,” she said as the teacher

drove off, “do you know any extinct birds?”

“Passenger pigeon,” he said. “That’s probably the best known. They

say there used to be so many of them they would darken the sky when

they flew over. And the moa.”

“Moa?”

“Huge bird.”

“Like a condor?” I said.

He chuckled. “A condor wouldn’t come up to its knee. Make an ostrich

look small. Twelve, thirteen feet tall. Maybe the biggest bird ever.

Couldn’t fly. Lived in New Zealand. Died out hundreds of years ago.

Killed off by people.”

“Half their size,” said Susan.

Mr. McShane nodded. “Mm. I wrote a report about moas in grade

school. I thought they were the neatest thing.”

Susan’s eyes were glistening. “Did moas have a voice?”

The teacher thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody

knows.”

Susan looked out the window at the passing desert. “I heard a

mockingbird back there. And it made me think of something Archie

said.”

“Mr. Brubaker?” said Mr. McShane.

“Yes. He said he believes mockingbirds may do more than imitate

other birds. I mean, other living birds. He thinks they may also imitate

the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of

extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to

mockingbird.”

“Interesting thought,” said Mr. McShane.

“He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it’s pitching

fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures

we may be hearing out there.”

The words of Archie Brubaker settled over the silence in the car. As if

reading my thoughts, Mr. McShane turned off the air conditioner and

powered down the windows. Hair blew in a faint, smoky scent of

mesquite.

After a while I felt the touch of Susan’s hand. Her fingers wove

through mine.

“Mr. McShane,” she cooed, “we’re holding hands in the back seat.”

“Uh-oh,” he said, “hormonal teenagers.”

“Don’t you think he’s cute, Mr. McShane?”

“I never really thought about it,” said the teacher.

“Well, look,” she said. She grabbed my face in her hand and pulled it

forward. The teacher’s eyes considered me briefly in the rearview

mirror.

“You’re right. He’s adorable.”

Susan released my blushing face. “Told you. Don’t you just love him?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

A minute later: “Mr. McSha-ane…” Now I felt something in my ear.

“I’m putting my finger in his ear…”

This sort of silliness went on until we rounded a mesa and saw the

brown mist on the horizon that announced our approach to the city of

Phoenix.

Her parents met us in the lobby of the hotel where Susan, Mr.

McShane, and I each had a room for the night. After we checked in, the

five of us ate a buffet lunch in the hotel restaurant. Then we watched

Susan board a bus that would take her and eighteen other contestants

to Phoenix West High School. There were thirty-eight contestants;

nineteen had already given their speeches that morning.

By the end of the afternoon, ten finalists would be chosen. The finals

would take place that evening.

To be honest, none of us was surprised that Susan made the cut. She

was incredibly good. The surprise was this: her speech was new. It was

not the one she had given at Mica High. It was not the one she had

been practicing for weeks in front of me and Peter Sinkowitz and

assorted saguaros. It was not the one I had heard just the day before.

But it was wonderful.

There were some elements of the old speech in it, and much that was

as new as that morning. Like a butterfly, her words fluttered from

image to image. She swung from the distant past (Barney, Archie’s

Paleocene rodent skull) to the present (Cinnamon) to the distant future

(the death of the sun). From the most ordinary here (the old man

nodding off on the bench at Tudor Village) to the most extraordinary

there (a newly discovered galaxy ninety percent to the end of the

universe). She touched on silver lunch trucks and designer labels and

enchanted places, and when she said her best friend gave her pet rat a

ride on his shoulder, tears came to my eyes. It was a jumble, it was a

mishmash, and somehow she pulled it all together, somehow she

threaded every different thing through the voice of a solitary

mockingbird singing in the desert. She called her speech “I Might Have

Heard a Moa.”

The auditorium was half full, mostly with small groups of students and

parents from the competing schools. After a contestant finished, his or

her supporters whistled and whooped, as if doing so would influence

the judges. The rest was polite applause.

When Susan finished, the four of us managed a modest cheer, but

that was about it. No whistles, no whoops. I think we were made of

more timid stuff than the speechmaker herself.

Back at the hotel Mr. McShane and I mobbed her, if two can be a mob.

Her parents were more reserved. They were full of smiles and “well

dones,” but they seemed no more surprised at her success than Susan

did.

When the adults went off to the gift shop, I had her to myself. I said,

“Where did that come from?”

She grinned. “Did you like it?”

“Sure, but it’s not what I’ve been hearing for the last month. What

were you doing, practicing a secret speech on the side?”

The grin got wider. “Nope. That was the first time I heard it, too.”

I stared at her. Slowly her words sank in. “Let me get this straight.

You’re saying you just made it up this morning?”

“I’m saying I didn’t even make it up. It was just there. All I did was

open my mouth and let it out.” She held both hands out to me and

snapped her fingers. “Presto!”

I gaped at her. “What are you going to say tonight?”

She threw out her arms: “Who knows?”

The five of us ate an early dinner in the hotel restaurant. Afterward,

we waited in the lobby while Susan changed clothes. She stepped off

the elevator wearing a peach-colored pantsuit. She slinked across the

lobby, modeling for us. She sat on her mother’s lap and said, “My

personal seamstress made it for me.” We applauded lightly and sent

her off on the bus.

The general public was invited to the evening show, and the

auditorium was packed. People stood in back. Down front, a high

school orchestra played rousing music by John Philip Sousa. The ten

contestants sat onstage. Seven were boys. All of the contestants

appeared to be grim and nervous, stiff as manikins, except for Susan,

who was bending the ear of the boy sitting next to her. He nodded

occasionally but kept his eyes and spine at attention and obviously

wished that she would shut up. Susan’s parents chuckled knowingly at

her behavior, while I tried to disguise a stab of jealousy.

One by one the contestants took the long walk to center stage to give

their speeches. The applause was equally hearty for all. A grade school

girl in a frilly white dress handed each contestant a bouquet of roses,

yellow for the girls, red for the boys. While the girls cradled their roses,

the boys looked at them as if they were hand grenades.

Susan was next to last to speak. When her name was called, she

bounced up from her chair and practically ran to the microphone. She

did a sprightly pirouette, a curtsy, waved her hand in a window-washer

motion, and said, “Hi.” Accustomed to seeing stiff, mortified

contestants, the audience responded with uncertain titters. They didn’t

know what to make of this unconventional teenager any more than we

had on the first day of school. Several bold souls said “Hi” and waved

back.

She did not begin, at least not in the usual sense. There was no

ringing preamble. She merely stood there comfortably chatting away

as if we were all on rocking chairs on her front porch. Murmur drifted

toward the ceiling; people were waiting for her to get started. The

murmur subsided as it occurred to them that this was it and they were

missing it. The quiet that then fell over the auditorium was absolute. I

was more tuned in to the audience than to the speaker, and if for the

last five minutes of her talk anyone was breathing, I could not detect it.

When she finished with barely a whisper-“Can you hear it?”-and leaned

with her cupped hand to her ear, fifteen hundred people seemed to

inch forward, straining to hear. There were ten seconds of purest

stillness. Then she turned abruptly and went back to her chair. Still

there was no reaction. What’s going on? I wondered. She sat forward in

her chair, her hands folded primly in her lap. And then it came,

suddenly, explosively, as if everyone had awakened at once. We were

all on our feet, clapping and shouting and whistling. I found myself

sobbing. The cheering was as wild as that of the crowd at a

championship basketball game.

She won. As she had said she would.

The silver plate they gave her twinkled like a starburst in a galaxy of

flashing cameras. Two TV crews washed her in lights and interviewed

her backstage. Strangers mobbed her, citizens of Phoenix gushing,

telling her they had been coming to the contest for years and had

never heard anything like it. Schoolchildren thrust programs in her face

for autographs. Every parent wanted her for a daughter, every teacher

for a student.

She was so happy, she was so proud. She yelped and cried when she

saw us. She hugged each of us in turn, and I thought she would

squeeze the breath out of me.

Back at the hotel everyone already seemed to know: the doorman,

the desk manager, the people in the lobby and elevator. Suddenly she

had this magical, wonderful power; whoever laid eyes on her smiled.

And the English language dwindled to a single word, repeated over and

over: “Congratulations!”

We walked-we floated-around the block to burn off our excess energy.

Back at the hotel we were invited into the nightclub, even though

Susan and I were underage. We drank ginger ales and ordered

jalapeño poppers and we all danced to a country and western

band while Susan’s face beamed on the late news from the TV above

the bar. The dance floor was the only place where she did not carry her

silver plate.

First thing next morning there she was, sliding under the door of my

hotel room: her picture on the front page of the Arizona Republic. I sat

on the edge of the bed and stared at it, pride welling in me. I read the

story. It called her speech “mesmerizing, hypnotic, mysteriously

touching.” I pictured folded morning papers tossed from cars, landing

in driveways all over Mica.

We all met for the breakfast buffet. People stared and nodded and

smiled and silently lip-said “Congratulations” across the restaurant. We

headed for home in a two-car caravan.

For a while, Susan was her usual chatty self. She put the silver plate

on the front seat beside Mr. McShane. She told him it would ride next

to him for ten whole minutes, and he could touch it all he wanted. This

was his reward, she said, for telling her about moas. As soon as the ten

minutes was up, she took back the plate.

As we drew nearer to town, the chatter subsided and finally stopped.

We rode the last miles in silence. She took my hand. The nearer we

came the harder she squeezed. When we hit the outskirts of town, she

turned to me and said, “Do I look okay?”

I told her she looked great.

She didn’t seem to believe me. She held up the silver plate and

studied her reflection.

She turned to me again and looked at me for some time before she

spoke. “I’ve been thinking. This is how I’m going to do it. I’m going to

hold on to the plate myself-okay?”

I nodded.

“…until…until they lift me onto their shoulders. Then I give it to you.

Understand?”

I nodded.

“So stay next to me. Every second. Crowds can separate you, you

know. They do that. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Her hand was hot and sweating.

We drove past a man in his driveway. He was dipping a large,

broomlike brush into a pail and painting the asphalt with black sealer.

He was bent intently to his work in the noonday sun, and somehow I

knew at that moment what would happen, I could see it. I wanted to

shout to Mr. McShane, “No, don’t turn! Don’t go there!”

But he did turn. He turned, and there was the school in front of us,

and never in my life have I seen a place so empty. No banners, no

people, no cars.

“Probably around back,” Mr. McShane said. His voice was hoarse.

“Parking lot.”

We swung around back to the parking lot and-yes-there was a car,

and another car. And people, three of them, shading their eyes in the

sun, watching us. Two of them were teachers. The other was a student,

Dori Dilson. She stood apart from the teachers, alone in the black

shimmering sea of asphalt. As we approached, she held up a sign, a

huge cardboard sign bigger than a basketball backboard. She set the

sign on edge and propped it up, erasing herself. The red painted letters

said:

WAY TO GO,

SUSAN

WE’RE PROUD OF

YOU

The car stopped in front of it. All that was left to see of Dori Dilson

were two sets of fingers holding the sides of the sign. We were close

enough now to see that the sign was trembling, and I knew that behind

it Dori was crying. There was no confetti, no kazoos. Nothing cheered,

not even a mockingbird.

As we idled, stunned and silent in front of Dori Dilson’s sign, Susan’s

parents came and retrieved her from Mr. McShane’s car. As in all

things, they did not appear especially surprised or emotional over what

was happening. Susan seemed in a trance. She sat beside me, staring

vacantly at the sign through the windshield. Her hand was no longer

holding mine. I groped for words but could not find them. When her

parents came, she allowed herself to be led away. As she got out of the

car, the silver plate slid from her lap and rang like a dying bell against

the asphalt. Her father picked it up. I thought he would take it, but

instead he leaned into the back seat where I sat and with a strange

smile gave it to me.

I did not see her for the rest of the weekend. By Monday she was

Stargirl again. Floor-length skirt. Ribbons in her hair. Just like that.

She went from table to table at lunchtime, passing out happy-face

cookies. She even gave one to Hillari Kimble. Hillari took off her shoe

and used it like a hammer to smash the cookie on her table. Stargirl

strolled among us strumming her ukulele, asking for requests.

Cinnamon perched on her shoulder. He was strapped onto a tiny toy

ukulele. She made her voice squeaky and kept her lips from moving

and it was as if Cinnamon were serenading with her. Dori Dilson, bless

her, stood and applauded. She was the only one. I was too stunned to

join her. And too cowardly. And angry. And not wanting to show

approval for her return to Stargirl. Most of the students did not even

look, did not even seem to listen. At the bell, as we left the lunchroom,

I looked back. The tables were littered with cookies.

Walking with her after school that day, I said, “I guess you’re giving

up, huh?”

She looked at me. “Giving up? On what?”

“On being popular. On being…” How could I say it?

She smiled. “Normal?”

I shrugged.

“Yes,” she said firmly.

“Yes?”

“I’m answering your question. The answer is yes. I’m giving up on

trying to be popular and normal.” Her face and body language did not

seem to match her words. She looked cheery, perky. So did Cinnamon,

perched on her shoulder.

“Don’t you think maybe you should back off a little?” I said. “Don’t

come on so strong?”

She smiled at me. She reached out and brushed the tip of my nose

with her fingertip. “Because we live in a world of them, right? You told

me that once.”

We stared at each other. She kissed me on the cheek and walked

away. She turned and said, “I know you’re not going to ask me to the

Ocotillo Ball. It’s okay.” She gave me her smile of infinite kindness and

understanding, the smile I had seen her aim at so many other needy

souls, and in that moment I hated her.

That very night, as if he were playing a scripted role, Kevin called me

and said, “So, who are you taking to the Ocotillo Ball?”

I dodged. “Who are you taking?”

“Don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t either.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Not Stargirl?”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“You trying to tell me something?”

“What would I want to tell you?”

“I thought you were a two. I thought there was no question.”

“So why are you asking?” I said, and hung up.

In bed that night, I became more and more uncomfortable as the

moonlight crept up my sheet. I did something I had never done before.

I pulled down the shade. In my dreams the old man on the mall bench

raised a wobbling head and croaked, “How dare you forgive me.”

Next morning there was a new item on the plywood roadrunner, a

sheet of white paper. At the top it said:

New Musical Group,

THE UKEE DOOKS

No Experience Necessary

There were two numbered columns for names, forty in all. By the end

of the day all forty were filled in, with names such as Minnie Mouse and

Darth Vader and The Swamp Thing. The principal’s name was there,

too. And Wayne Parr. And Dori Dilson.

“Did you see?” said Kevin. “Somebody wrote in Parr’s name.”

We were in the studio control room. It was May and our Hot Seats

were over for the year, but on some days we still gravitated to the

studio after school.

“I saw,” I said.

He stepped up to a blank monitor, studied his reflection. “So, I didn’t

see your name on the list.”

“Nope.”

“You don’t want to be a Ukee Dook?”

“Guess not.”

We fiddled with the equipment for a while. Kevin walked out onto the

stage. He flipped a switch. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear. I held

the soft pad of a headphone against my ear. His voice seemed to come

from another world. “She’s turning goofy again, isn’t she? Worse than

ever.”

I stared at him through the glass. I put down the headphone and

walked out.

I understood what he was doing. He had decided that it was now okay

to say bad things about Stargirl. Permission to do so must have come

from my behavior. Apparently the first to read me was Stargirl herself. I

still felt the sting from her remark about the Ocotillo Ball.

Was I that obvious?

Classrooms, hallways, courtyard, lunchroom-everywhere I went I

heard her disparaged, mocked, slurred. Her attempt to become

popular, to be more like them, had been a total failure. If anything,

they detested her more now. And they were more vocal about it around

me. Or was I just listening better?

She and Dori Dilson, the only Ukee Dooks, did a duet in the courtyard

one day after school. Stargirl strummed the ukulele and they both sang

“Blue Hawaii.” Clearly, they had been practicing. They were very good.

They were also very ignored. By the end of the song, they were the

only two left in the courtyard.

Next day they were there again. This time they wore sombreros. They

sang Mexican songs. “Cielito Lindo.” “Vaya Con Dios, My Darling.” I

stayed inside the school. I was afraid to walk on past them, as if they

weren’t there. I was equally afraid to stand and listen. I peeked from a

window. Stargirl was doing her best imitation of a flamenco; the click of

castanets came through the windowpane.

Students walked past, most of them not even glancing her way. I saw

Wayne Parr and Hillari Kimble go past, Hillari laughing out loud. And

Kevin. And the basketball guys. I realized now that the shunning would

never end. And I knew what I should do. I should go out there and

stand in front of them and applaud. I should show Stargirl and the

world that I wasn’t like the rest of them, that I appreciated her, that I

celebrated her and her insistence on being herself. But I stayed inside.

I waited until the last of the students had left the courtyard, and

Stargirl and Dori were performing for no one. To my surprise they went

on and on. It was too painful to watch. I left school by another door.

As she had predicted, I did not ask her to the Ocotillo Ball. I did not

ask anyone. I did not go.

She did.

The ball took place on a Saturday night in late May on the tennis

courts of the Mica Country Club. When sunset was down to a faintly

glowing ember in the west and the moon rose in the east, I went forth

on my bicycle. I coasted by the club. Festooned with Cantonese

lanterns, the ball in the distance looked like a cruise ship at sea.

I could not identify individuals, only stirrings of color. Much of it was

powder blue. The day after Wayne Parr said he had chosen powder

blue for his dinner jacket, three-quarters of the boys ordered the same

from Tuxedo Junction.

Back and forth I cruised in the night beyond the lights. Music reached

my ears as random peeps. The desert flowers, so abundant in April,

were dying now. I had the notion that they were calling to each other.

I cruised for hours. The moon rose into the sky like a lost balloon.

Somewhere in the dark shapes of the Maricopas, a coyote howled.

In the days and weeks and years that followed, everyone agreed:

they had never seen anything like it.

She arrived in a bicycle sidecar. Just big enough for her to sit in, the

sidecar had a single outboard wheel. The inboard side was braced to

the bike. Everything but the seat of the bike and the sidecar bench was

covered in flowers. A ten-foot blanket of flowers trailed the rear fender

like a bridal train. Palm fronds flared from the handlebars. It looked like

a float in the Rose Parade. Dori Dilson pedaled the bicycle.

Eyewitnesses later filled in what I could not see: parents’ cameras

flashing, floodlights making a second day as the gorgeous couples

disembark from limos and borrowed convertibles and promenade to

the festive courts. Showers of applause. Suddenly the flashing stops,

the floodlights dim, a hush falls over the crowd. As a particularly long

white limo rolls away from the entrance, here comes this three-

wheeled bouquet.

The driver Dori Dilson wears a tailed white tuxedo and tall silk hat,

but it is her passenger who rivets the crowd. Her strapless gown is a

bright, rich yellow, as if pressed from buttercups. There must be one of

those hooped contraptions underneath, for the skirt billows outward

from her waist like an upside-down teacup. Her hair is incredible.

Descriptions clash. Some say it is the color of honey, some say

strawberries. It fluffs like a meringue high upon her head. It’s a wig.

No, it’s all hers. Both sides are certain.

Earrings dangle. They are little silver somethings. But what? They are

partly obscured by falling ringlets. Many answers are offered. The most

popular is Monopoly pieces, but this will prove to be wrong.

From a rawhide string around her neck dangles a white inch-long

banana-shaped fossil identifying her as a member in good standing of

the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone.

While others wear orchids, the corsage on her wrist is a small

sunflower. Or a huge black-eyed Susan. Or some sort of daisy. No one

is sure, except that the colors are yellow and black.

Before proceeding, she turns back to the bicycle and bends over a

small basket hanging from the handlebars. The basket, too, is covered

with flowers. She appears to kiss something in it. She then waves to

Dori Dilson, Dori salutes, and the bicycle pulls away. People nearby

catch a glimpse of tiny cinnamon-colored ears and two peppercorn

eyes peering out of the basket.

“Beautiful.”

“Unusual.”

“Interesting.”

“Different.”

“Regal.”

These words will come later from the parents lining the walk. For now,

there are only stares as she makes her way from the entrance to the

ball. Someone recalls a single camera flashing, but that is all. She is no

one’s child. She is the girl they have heard about. As she passes by she

makes no attempt to avoid their eyes. On the contrary, she looks

directly at them, turning to one side, then the other, looking into their

eyes and smiling as if she knows them, as if they have shared grand

and special things. Some turn aside, uneasy in a way they cannot

account for; others feel suddenly empty when her eyes leave theirs. So

distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize

that she had no escort, she was alone, a parade of one.

Perched on my bike in the distance, I remember looking up and

seeing the torrent of stars we call the Milky Way. I remember

wondering if she could see them, too, or were they lost in the light of

the lanterns?

The dancing took place on the center tennis court, which had been

covered with a portable parquet floor. She did what everyone else did

at the ball: she danced. To the music of Guy Greco and the Serenaders

she danced the slow dances and the fast ones. She spread her arms

wide and threw back her head and closed her eyes and gave every

impression of thoroughly enjoying herself. They did not speak to her, of

course, but they could not help looking over the shoulders of their

dates. She clapped at the end of each number.

She’s alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in

no one’s arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As

the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the

lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids

seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they

were more alone than she was.

Who was the first to crack? No one knows. Did someone brush against

her at the punch table? Pluck a petal from her flower? (One was

missing.) Whisper “Hi”? This much is certain: a boy named Raymond

Studemacher danced with her.

To the student body at large, Raymond Studemacher did not have

enough substance to trigger the opening of a supermarket door. He

belonged to no team or organization. He took part in no school

activities. His grades were ordinary. His clothing was ordinary. His face

was ordinary. He had no detectable personality. Thin as a minute, he

appeared to lack the heft to carry his own name. And in fact, when all

eyes turned to him on the dance floor, those few who came up with a

name for him frowned at his white jacket and whispered, “Raymond

Something.”

And yet there he was, Raymond Something, walking right up to her-it

came out later that his date had suggested it-and speaking to her, and

then they were dancing. Couples steered themselves to get a better

look. At the end of the number, he joined her in clapping and returned

to his date. He told her the silver earrings looked like little trucks.

Tension rose. Boys got antsy. Girls picked at their corsages. The ice

shattered. Several boys broke from their dates. They were heading her

way when she walked up to Guy Greco and said something to him. Guy

Greco turned to the Serenaders, the baton flashed, and out came the

sounds of that old teen dance standard: the bunny hop. Within seconds

a long line was snaking across the dance floor. Stargirl led the way. And

suddenly it was December again, and she had the school in her spell.

Almost every couple joined in. Hillari Kimble and Wayne Parr did not.

The line curled back and forth across the netless tennis courts.

Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe

crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars.

She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the

line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a

vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then a tippy-toed priss.

Every new move brought new laughter from the line.

When Guy Greco ended the music, howls of protest greeted him. He

restruck the downbeat.

To delighted squeals, Stargirl led them off the parquet dance floor

onto the other courts-and then through the chain-link fence and off the

tennis courts altogether. Red carnations and wrist corsages flashed as

the line headed onto the practice putting green of the golf course. The

line doodled around the holes, in and out of sidepools of lantern light.

From the dance floor it seemed to be more than it was: one hundred

couples, two hundred people, four hundred dancing legs seemed to be

a single festive flowery creature, a fabulous millipede. And then there

was less and less to see as the head vanished and the rest curled

through the fringe of the light and followed, like the tail of a powder-

blue dragon, into the darkness.

One girl in chiffon had a tiff with her date and ran off toward the first

tee, calling, “Wait for me!” She looked like a huge mint-green moth.

Their voices came in clearly from the golf course. The laughing and

yelping made a raucous counterpoint to the metronomic tock-tock-tock

of the bunny’s never-ending hop. Once, in the light of the quarter

moon, they appeared in silhouette on a domed, distant green, like

figures dancing in someone’s dream.

And then quite suddenly they were gone, as if the dreamer had

awakened. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Someone called “Hey!”

after them, but that was all.

It was, according to those left behind, like waiting for a diver in water

to return to the surface. Hillari Kimble, for one, did not share that

feeling. “I came here to dance,” she declared. She pulled Wayne Parr

along to the bandstand and demanded “regular music.”

Guy Greco tilted his head to listen, but the baton did not stop and

neither did the band.

In fact, as the minutes went by, the music seemed to become louder.

Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe the band felt a connection to the

dancers. Maybe the farther the line spun into the night, the louder the

band had to play. Maybe the music was a tether. Or a kite string.

Hillari Kimble dragged Wayne Parr out to the middle of the parquet

floor. They slowdanced. They fastdanced. They even tried an old-

fashioned jitterbug. Nothing worked. Nothing went with the triple-

thumping drumbeat but the bunny hop itself. Hillari’s orchid shed

petals as she beat her fist on Wayne Parr’s chest. “Do something!” she

yelled. She ripped sticks of chewing gum from his pocket. She chewed

them furiously. She split the wad and pressed the gum into her ears.

The band played on.

Afterward, there were many different guesses as to how long the

bunny-hoppers were actually gone. Everyone agreed it seemed to be

hours. Students stood under the last line of lanterns, their fingers

curling through the plastic-coated wire of the fence, peering into the

vast blackness, straining for a glimpse, a scrap of sound. All they heard

was the call of a coyote. A boy dashed wildly into the darkness; he

sauntered back, his blue jacket over his shoulder, laughing. A girl with

glitter in her hair shivered. Her bare shoulders shook as if she were

cold. She began to cry.

Hillari Kimble stalked along the fence, clenching and unclenching her

fists. She could not seem to stand still.

When the call finally came-“They’re back!”-it was from a lone watcher

at the far end. A hundred kids-only Hillari Kimble stayed behind-turned

and raced down eight tennis courts, pastel skirts flapping like

stampeding flamingos. The fence buckled outward as they slammed

into it. They strained to see. Light barely trickled over crusted earth

beyond the fence. This was the desert side.

“Where?…Where?”

And then you could hear: whoops and yahoos out there, somewhere,

clashing with the music. And then-there!-a flash of yellow, Stargirl

leaping from the shadows. The rest followed out of the darkness, a

long, powder-blue, many-headed birthing. Hop-hop-hop. They were still

smack on the beat. If anything, they seemed more energized than

before. They were fresh. Their eyes sparkled in the lantern light. Many

of the girls wore browning, half-dead flowers in their hair.

Stargirl led them along the outside of the fence. Those inside got up a

line of their own and hopped along. Guy Greco struck the downbeat

three final times-hop-hop-hop-and the two lines collided at the gate in

a frenzy of hugs and shrieks and kisses.

Shortly after, as the Serenaders gratefully played “Stardust,” Hillari

Kimble walked up to Stargirl and said, “You ruin everything.” And she

slapped her.

The crowd grew instantly still. The two girls stood facing each other

for a long minute. Those nearby saw in Hillari’s shoulders and eyes a

flinching: she was waiting to be struck in reply. And in fact, when

Stargirl finally moved, Hillari winced and shut her eyes. But it was lips

that touched her, not the palm of a hand. Stargirl kissed her gently on

the cheek. She was gone by the time Hillari opened her eyes.

Dori Dilson was waiting. Stargirl seemed to float down the promenade

in her buttercup gown. She climbed into the sidecar, the flowered

bicycle rolled off into the night, and that was the last any of us ever

saw of her.

That was fifteen years ago. Fifteen Valentine’s Days.

I remember that sad summer after the Ocotillo Ball just as clearly as

everything else. One day, feeling needy, empty, I walked over to her

house. A For Sale sign pierced the ground out front. I peered through a

window. Nothing but bare walls and floors.

I went to see Archie. Something in his smile said he had been

expecting me. We sat on the back porch. Everything seemed as usual.

Archie lighting his pipe. The desert golden in the evening sun.

Señor Saguaro losing his pants.

Nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

“Where?” I said.

A corner of his mouth winked open and a silky rumple of smoke

emerged, paused as if to be admired, then drifted off past his ear.

“Midwest. Minnesota.”

“Will I ever see her again?”

He shrugged. “Big country. Small world. Who knows?”

“She didn’t even finish out the school year.”

“No.”

“Just…vamoosed.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It’s only been weeks, but it seems like a dream. Was she really here?

Who was she? Was she real?”

He looked at me for a long time, his smile wry, his eyes twinkling.

Then he shook his head as if coming out of a trance. He deadpanned,

“Oh, you’re waiting for an answer. What were the questions again?”

“Stop being nutty, Archie.”

He looked off to the west. The sun was melting butter over the

Maricopas. “Real? Oh, yes. As real as we get. Don’t ever doubt that.

That’s the good news.” He pointed the pipe stem at me. “And well

named. Stargirl. Though I think she had simpler things in mind. Star

people are rare. You’ll be lucky to meet another.”

“Star people?” I said. “You’re losing me here.”

He chuckled. “That’s okay. I lose myself. It’s just my oddball way of

accounting for someone I don’t really understand any more than you

do.”

“So where do stars come in?”

He pointed the pipe stem. “The perfect question. In the beginning,

that’s where they come in. They supplied the ingredients that became

us, the primordial elements. We are star stuff, yes?” He held up the

skull of Barney, the Paleocene rodent. “Barney too, hm?”

I nodded, along for the ride.

“And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little

more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a

little more in touch with the stuff we’re made of.”

The words seemed to fit her, though I could not grasp their meaning.

He saw the vacant look on my face and laughed. He tossed Barney to

me. He stared at me. “She liked you, boy.”

The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink.

“Yes,” I said.

“She did it for you, you know.”

“What?”

“Gave up her self, for a while there. She loved you that much. What

an incredibly lucky kid you were.”

I could not look at him. “I know.”

He shook his head with a wistful sadness. “No, you don’t. You can’t

know yet. Maybe someday…”

I knew he was tempted to say more. Probably to tell me how stupid I

was, how cowardly, that I blew the best chance I would ever have. But

his smile returned, and his eyes were tender again, and nothing

harsher than cherry smoke came out of his mouth.

I continued to attend Saturday meetings of the Loyal Order of the

Stone Bone. We did not speak of her again until the following summer,

several days before I was to leave for college. Archie had asked me to

come over.

He took me out back, but this time not to the porch. Instead he led

me to the toolshed. He slid back the bolt and opened the door and-it

was not a toolshed afterall. “This was her office,” he said and gestured

for me to enter.

Here it was: all the stuff of her activity that I had expected to see in

her room at home, the “office” whose location she would not reveal. I

saw wheels of ribbon and wrapping paper, stacks of colored

construction paper, cardboard boxes of newspaper clippings,

watercolors and cans of paint, a yellow stack of phone books.

Tacked to one wall was a municipal map of Mica. Hundreds of pins of

a dozen different colors pierced the map. There was no indication what

they stood for. A huge homemade calendar covered the opposite wall.

It had a square for every date in the year. Penciled into the squares

were names. Across the top of the calendar was one word: BIRTHDAYS.

There was one dot of color on the whole thing, a little red heart. It was

next to my name.

Archie handed me a fat family album sort of book. The homemade

title said “The Early Life of Peter Sinkowitz.” I flipped through it. I saw

the pictures she had taken that day: Peter squabbling with the little

girls over his beloved banana roadster.

“I’m to wait five years, then give it to his parents,” said Archie.

He pointed to a filing cabinet in the corner.

It had three drawers. I opened one. There were dozens of red hanging

folders, each with a name tag sticking up. I saw “Borlock.” Me. I pulled

it out, opened it. There was the birthday notice that appeared in the

Mica Times three years before. And a profile of me from the school

paper. And pictures: candid snapshots of me in a parking lot, me

leaving my house, me at the mall. Apparently, Peter Sinkowitz wasn’t

the only target for her camera. And a sheet of paper with two columns:

“Likes” and “Doesn’t Like.” Heading the list of “Likes” was “porcupine

neckties.” Under that was “strawberry-banana smoothies.”

I replaced my folder. I saw other names. Kevin. Dori Dilson. Mr.

McShane. Danny Pike. Anna Grisdale. Even Hillari Kimble and Wayne

Parr.

I stepped back. I was stunned.

“This is…unbelievable. Files. On people. Like she was a spy.”

Archie nodded, smiling. “A lovely treason, hm?”

I could not speak. He led me out into the dazzling light.

Throughout my college years I visited Archie whenever I came home.

And then I got a job back East, and my visits were less frequent. As

Archie grew older, the difference between himself and Señor

Saguaro seemed to become less and less. We sat on the back porch.

He seemed fascinated by my work. I had become a set designer. Only

recently has it occurred to me that I became one on the day Stargirl

took me to her enchanted place.

On my last visit with him, he met me at the front door. He dangled

keys in front of my eyes. “You drive.”

An old tar pail rattled in the bed of his ancient pickup as he pointed

me west to the Maricopas. In his lap he carried a brown paper bag.

Along the way I said, as I always did, “So, have you figured her out

yet?”

It was years since she had gone, yet still we needed no name for her.

We knew who we were talking about.

“I’m working on it,” he said.

“What’s the latest?”

We were following a familiar script.

On this day he stated: “She’s better than bones.” On my previous

visit, he had said, “When a Stargirl cries, she does not shed tears, but

light.” On other days in other years, he had called her “the rabbit in

the hat” and “the universal solvent” and “the recycler of our garbage.”

He said these things with a sly grin, knowing they would confound me

as I mulled them until our next meeting.

We were in the foothills by early afternoon. He directed me to stop on

a stony shoulder of the road. We got out and walked. He brought the

paper bag with him. I brought the pail. He pulled from it a floppy blue

hat, which he mashed onto his head. The sun that had looked warm

and buttery at a distance was blazing hot here.

We didn’t go far, as walking was a chore for him. We stopped at an

outcropping of smooth, pale-gray rock. He pulled a small pick from the

pail and tapped the rock. “This’ll do,” he said.

I held the paper bag while he put pick to rock. The skin on his arms

had become dry and flaky, as if his body were preparing itself to rejoin

the earth. It took him ten minutes to gouge out a hole that he judged

to be right.

He asked for the bag. I was shocked at what he took from it.

“Barney!”

The skull of the Paleocene rodent.

“This is home,” he said. He said he was sorry he did not have the

energy to return Barney to his original stratum in South Dakota. He laid

Barney in the hole, then took from his pocket a scrap of paper. He

crumpled the scrap and stuffed it into the hole with the skull. Then he

pulled a jug of water, a small bag of patching cement, a trowel, and a

plastic tray from the tar pail. He mixed the cement and troweled over

the hole. From a distance you wouldn’t know the rock had been

altered.

Heading back to the pickup, I asked him what was written on the

paper.

“A word,” he said. The way he said it told me I’d get no answer to the

next question.

We rode east down out of the mountains and were home before

sundown.

When I returned next time, someone else was living in Archie’s house.

The shed out back was gone. So was Señor Saguaro.

And a new elementary school now occupies Stargirl’s enchanted

place.

MORE THAN STARS

Since graduating, our class has had a reunion every five years, but I

haven’t yet gone. I stay in touch with Kevin. He never left Mica, has a

family there now. Like me, he did not wind up in television, but he does

make good use of his gift of gab: he’s an insurance salesman.

Kevin says when the class gathers for reunions at the Mica Country

Club, there is much talk of Stargirl and curiosity as to her whereabouts.

He says the most common question these days is “Were you on the

bunny hop?” At the last reunion several classmates, for a lark, lined up,

hands to waists, and hopped around the putting green for a few

minutes, but it wasn’t the same.

No one is quite sure what happened to Wayne Parr, except that he

and Hillari broke up shortly after graduation. The last anyone heard, he

spoke of joining the Coast Guard.

The high school has a new club called the Sunflowers. To join, you

have to sign an agreement promising to do “one nice thing per day for

someone other than myself.”

Today’s Electron marching band is probably the only one in Arizona

with a ukulele.

On the basketball court, the Electrons have never come close to the

success they enjoyed when I was a junior. But something from that

season has resurfaced in recent years that baffles fans from other

schools. At every game, when the opposing team scores its first

basket, a small group of Electrons fans jumps to its feet and cheers.

Each time I visit Mica, I drive past her old house on Palo Verde. On the

most recent visit, I saw a red-haired young man across the street,

fixing water skis to the roof of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. It must

have been Peter Sinkowitz. I wondered if he was as possessive of his

Beetle as he had been of the banana roadster. I wondered if he was old

enough to love his scrapbook.

As for me, I throw myself into my work and keep an eye peeled for

silver lunch trucks, and I remember. I sometimes walk in the rain

without an umbrella. When I see change on the sidewalk, I leave it

there. If no one’s looking, I drop a quarter. I feel guilty when I buy a

card from Hallmark. I listen for mockingbirds.

I read the newspapers. I read them from all over. I skip the front

pages and headlines and go to the pages in back. I read the

community sections and the fillers. I see little acts of kindness

happening from Maine to California. I read of a man in Kansas City who

stands at a busy intersection every morning and waves at the people

driving to work. I read of a little girl in Oregon who sells lemonade in

front of her house for five cents a cup-and offers a free back scratch to

every customer.

When I read about things like these I wonder, Is she there? I wonder

what she calls herself now. I wonder if she’s lost her freckles. I wonder

if I’ll ever get another chance. I wonder, but I don’t despair. Though I

have no family of my own, I do not feel alone. I know that I am being

watched. The echo of her laughter is the second sunrise I awaken to

each day, and at night I feel it is more than stars looking down on me.

Last month, one day before my birthday, I received a gift-wrapped

package in the mail. It was a porcupine necktie.