stargirl (3 page)

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.

6

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."

7

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."