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.
32
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 flip
ped 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.
33
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.
ALSO BY JERRY SPINELLI
Crash
Knots in My Yo-Yo String:
The Autobiography of a Kid
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2000 by Jerry Spinelli
Jacket illustration copyright © 2000 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
KNOPF, BOR
ZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com/kids
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spinelli, Jerry.
Stargirl / by Jerry Spinelli.
p. cm.
Summary: In this story about the perils of popularity, the courage of nonconformity, and the thrill of first love, an eccentric student named Stargirl changes Mica High
School forever.
[1. Individuality—Fiction. 2. Popularity—Fiction. 3. Eccentrics and eccentricities— Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Arizona—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S75663 St 2000
[Fic]—dc21 99-087944
eISBN: 978-0-375-89002-4
v3.0
Stargirl Page 13