Stargirl

  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.

  30

  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:

  Sign Up Here to Join

  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 anyth
ing, 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.

  31

  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 ac
ross 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.”