Stargirl (10 page)

23

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.

24

“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.

25

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.