Stargirl (6 page)

14

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:

15

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.

16

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.