Stargirl

  Stargirl left.

  Danny Pike was nine years old. He loved to ride the bicycle he had gotten for his birthday. One day after school he lost control and plowed into a mailbox. He broke his leg, but that wasn’t the worst of it. A blood clot developed. He was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in Phoenix, where he was operated on. For a while it was touch and go, but within a week he was on his way back home.

  All this was reported in the Mica Times. As was the celebration when Danny arrived at his home on Piñon Lane. The five-column photo in the Times showed Danny on his father’s shoulders, surrounded by a mob of neighbors. In the foreground was a new bike, and a big sign that read:

  WELCOME HOME, DANNY

  It wasn’t until days later that the front-page photo appeared on the plywood roadrunner. We gathered around to see something we hadn’t noticed before. An arrow from a thick red felt-tip marker pointed at one of the tiny faces crowded into the frame. It was the face of a girl, beaming as if Danny Pike were her little brother back from the dead. It was Stargirl.

  And then there was the bike.

  The various members of the Pike family—parents, grandparents, et al.—each thought someone else had bought Danny the new bicycle. Several days went by before they discovered to their great surprise that none of them had.

  So where did the bike come from? High-schoolers who heard the story and saw the picture had a pretty good idea. Apparently the Pikes did not. The bike became the focus of a family squabble. Mr. Pike was mad because nobody he asked would admit to buying the bike—and probably because he hadn’t done it himself. Mrs. Pike was mad because no way, not for at least one year, would she allow Danny back on wheels.

  One night the new, still-unridden bike wound up at the Pikes’ front curb with the trash cans. By the time the trash collector came the next day, it was gone. Danny got a BB gun instead.

  The Pledge of Allegiance, the Grisdale funeral, the Danny Pike affair—these things were noted, but they had no immediate impact on Stargirl’s popularity at school. Not so with cheerleading and the boys’ basketball season.

  11

  During the first quarter of each home game, Stargirl went over to the visitors’ section and gave them a cheer. She began with an exaggerated ball-bouncing motion:

  Dribble, Dribble!

  Sis Boom Bibble!

  We don’t bite!

  We don’t nibble!

  We just say—

  (sweeping wave)

  “Howwww-dee, friends!”

  (two thumbs pointing to her chest)

  “We’re the Electrons!”

  (points to them)

  “Who—are—YYYYYYOU?”

  (turns head to side, cups ear)

  A couple of visiting cheerleaders, maybe a fan or two would call back: “Wildcats!” or “Cougars!” or whatever, but most of them just gaped at her as if to say, Who is this? Some of her fellow cheerleaders were amused, some were mortified.

  At that point the only crime Stargirl could have been accused of would be corniness. But she didn’t stop there. She cheered whenever the ball went in the basket, regardless of which team shot it. It was the strangest sight: the other team scores, the MAHS crowd sits glumly on their hands while Stargirl, alone, pops up cheering.

  At first the other cheerleaders tried to suppress her; it was like trying to calm down a puppy. When they gave her the pleated skirt, they made a cheerleader they never imagined. She did not limit herself to basketball games. She cheered anyone, anything, anytime. She cheered the big things—honors, election winners—but she gave most of her attention to little things.

  You never knew when it would happen. Maybe you were a little ninth-grade nobody named Eddie. As you’re walking down the hall you see a candy wrapper on the floor. You pick it up and throw it in the nearest trash can—and suddenly there she is in front of you, pumping her arms, her honey hair and freckles flying, swallowing you whole with those enormous eyes, belting out a cheer she’s making up on the spot, something about Eddie, Eddie and the trash can teaming up to wipe out litter. A mob is gathering, clapping hands in rhythm, more eyes on you than all the previous days of your life combined. You feel foolish, exposed, stupid. You want to follow the candy wrapper into the trash can. It’s the most painful thing that’s ever happened to you. Your brain keeps squirting out a single thought: I’m going to die…I’m going to die…

  And so, when she finally finishes and her freckles settle back onto the bridge of her nose, why don’t you? Why don’t you just die?

  Because they’re clapping for you, that’s why, and whoever heard of dying while they’re clapping for you? And they’re smiling at you. People who never even saw you before are smiling at you and slapping your back and pumping your hand, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is calling your name, and you’re feeling so good you pretty much just float on home from school. And when you go to bed that night, the last thing you see before you zonk out are those eyes, and the last thing on your face is a smile.

  Or maybe you showed up at school with really unusual earrings. Or you aced a test. Or broke your arm. Or got your braces off. Or maybe you weren’t even a person. Maybe you were a charcoal drawing on the wall done by an art whiz. Or a really neat-looking bug out by the bike rack.

  We wagged our heads and agreed what a goofy girl this was, maybe even officially crazy, but we walked away smiling and maybe not saying but all thinking the same thing: it felt good to get credit.

  And if this had been any other year, things might have just gone on and on like that. But this was the year something unbelievable was happening on the basketball court. This was the year the team was winning. Only winning.

  And that changed everything.

  Early in the season no one noticed. Except for girls’ tennis, we had never had good teams in anything. We expected to lose. We were comfortable with losing. In fact, most of us were oblivious to it, since we didn’t even attend the games.

  The year before, the basketball Electrons had won only five of twenty-six games. This year, they won their fifth game before Christmas. By early January they had won the tenth, and people began to notice that there was still a zero in the loss column.

  “UNDEFEATED!” blared a sign on the plywood roadrunner. Some said we were winning by accident. Some said the other teams were simply more rotten than we were. Some thought the sign was a joke. One thing was certain: attendance went up. By the start of February the winning streak had reached sixteen, and there wasn’t an empty seat in the gym.

  But something even more interesting was happening. Suddenly we were no longer comfortable with losing. In fact, we forgot how to lose. The transformation was stunning in its speed. There was no apprenticeship period, no learning curve. No one had to teach us how to be winners. One day we were bored, indifferent, satisfied losers; the next we were rabid fanatics, stomping in the grandstand, painting our faces green and white, doing the wave as if we had been perfecting it for years.

  We fell in love with our team. When we spoke of it, we used the word “we” instead of “they.” The leading scorer, Brent Ardsley, seemed to have a golden glow about him as he moved through the school. And the more we loved our team, the more we hated the opposition. We used to envy them. We even applauded them to spite our own hapless teams. Now we detested the opposition and everything about them. We hated their uniforms. We hated their coaches and their fans. We hated them because they were trying to spoil our perfect season. We resented every point scored against us. And how dare they celebrate!

  We began to boo. It was our first experience as booers, but you’d have thought we were veterans. We booed the other team, we booed the other coach, we booed the other fans, the referees—whatever threatened our perfect season, we booed it.

  We even booed the scoreboard. We hated games that went down to the wire. We hated suspense. We loved games that were decided in the first five minutes. We wanted more than victories, we wanted massacres. The only score we would have been totally
happy with would have been 100 to 0.

  And right there in the middle of it all, in the midst of this perfect season mania, was Stargirl, popping up whenever the ball went through the net, no matter which team scored, cheering everything and everybody. It was sometime in January when calls started flying from the stands: “Siddown!” Then came the boos. She didn’t seem to notice.

  She did not seem to notice.

  Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her. If we were hurt, if we were unhappy or otherwise victimized by life, she seemed to know about it, and to care, as soon as we did. But bad things falling on her—unkind words, nasty stares, foot blisters—she seemed unaware of. I never saw her look in a mirror, never heard her complain. All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego.

  The nineteenth game of the basketball season was played at Red Rock. In previous years cheerleaders had outnumbered Mica fans at away games. Not now. The convoy rolling across the desert that evening stretched for a couple of miles. By the time we were seated, there was barely room for the home-team fans.

  It was the worst slaughter of the year. Red Rock was helpless. By the start of the fourth quarter we were ahead, 78 to 29. The coach put in the subs. We booed. We smelled a hundred points. We wanted blood. The coach put the starters back in. As we howled and thundered in the stands, Stargirl got up and walked from the gym. Those of us who noticed assumed she was going to the rest room. I kept glancing toward the exit. She never returned. With five seconds left in the game, the Electrons scored the hundredth point. We went nuts.

  Stargirl had been outside the whole time, chatting with the bus driver. The other cheerleaders asked her why she left. She said she felt sorry for the Red Rock players. She felt her cheering was only making the massacre worse. Such games were no fun, she said. Your job isn’t to have fun, they told her, your job is to cheer for Mica High no matter what. She just stared at them.

  The team and the cheerleaders rode the same bus. When the players came out from the locker room, the cheerleaders told them what had happened. They devised a trick. They told Stargirl that someone had forgotten something in the gym, and would she please go get it. With Stargirl gone, they told the bus driver everyone was aboard, and the bus made the two-hour return trip without her.

  A Red Rock custodian drove her home that night. Next day in school, the cheerleaders told her it was all a big misunderstanding and acted as if they were sorry. She believed them.

  The next day was February thirteenth. The Hot Seat.

  12

  This is how Hot Seat went.

  It took place in the communications center studio. There were two chairs on stage: the infamous Hot Seat itself—painted red with flames running up the legs—and an ordinary chair for the host, Kevin. Off to the side were two rows of six chairs each, the second row higher than the first. This was where the jury sat.

  It was a jury in name only. The twelve members did not vote or render a verdict. Their job was to ask questions, to give the Hot Seat its heat: ticklish questions, embarrassing questions, nosy questions. But not mean or hurtful questions. The idea was to make the subject squirm, not roast.

  In the spirit of mock inquisition, we called the subject the “victim.” And why would anyone want to be the victim? The lure of TV. The chance to confess—or lie— before a camera and before peers instead of parents. But I doubted the usual reasons applied to Stargirl.

  There were three cameras: one for the stage, one for the jury, and Chico. Chico was the handheld close-up camera. According to Mr. Robineau, our faculty advisor, a student named Chico once begged him to be a close-up camera kid. Mr. Robineau gave him a tryout, but Chico was so skinny he practically collapsed under the camera. The job went to someone else and Chico went to the weight room. By the following year Chico had muscles, and the camera was like nothing on his shoulder. He got the job, and he was brilliant at it. He gave the camera his own name. “We are one,” he said. When he graduated, his name stayed behind, and from then on the close-up camera and its operator were a unit called Chico.

  The host and the victim were each fitted with a thimble-size clip-on mike; the jury passed around a hand mike. Opposite the stage was the glassed-in control room, sound-insulated from the rest of the studio. That’s where I worked, wearing my headset, watching the monitors, directing the shots. I stood at the shoulder of the technical director, or TD. He sat at a rack of buttons, punching up the shots I ordered. Also in the control room were the graphics and audio people. Mr. Robineau was there as faculty overseer, but basically the students worked everything.

  Kevin’s job was to get things started: intro the victim, ask a few opening questions, stir things up if the jury was slow. Usually the jury was on the ball. Typical questions: “Does it bother you that you’re so short?” “Is it true that you like so-and-so?” “Do you wish you were good-looking?” “How often do you take a shower?”

  It almost always added up to entertainment. At the end of the half hour, as we cued credits and music, there was always a good feeling in the air, and everyone—victim, jury members, studio crew—mingled and became students again.

  We filmed the shows after school, then broadcast them that night—prime time—on local cable. About ten thousand homes. Our own surveys said at least fifty percent of the student body watched any given show. We outdrew most of the hot sitcoms. We expected to top ninety percent for the Stargirl show.

  But I had a secret: I wished no one would watch.

  In the month since we had scheduled the show, Stargirl’s popularity had dropped out of sight. Gone were ukuleles from the lunchroom. More and more kids saw her cheerleading behavior as undermining the basketball team and its perfect record. I was afraid the boos for her might spread from the court to the studio. I was afraid the show might turn ugly.

  When Stargirl came in that day after school, Kevin gave her the usual briefing while Mr. Robineau and I checked out the equipment. As the jury members straggled in, they were not clowning around or tap-dancing on the stage as jurors usually did. They went right to their seats. Stargirl was the one tap-dancing. And mugging for the cameras with Cinnamon the rat licking her nose. Kevin was cracking up, but the faces of the jurors were grim. One of them was Hillari Kimble. My bad feeling got worse.

  I retreated to the control room and shut the door. I checked communications with the cameras. We were ready. Kevin and Stargirl took their seats. I took one last look through the plate glass that separated the set from the control room. For the next half hour I would see the world through four monitors. “Okay, everybody,” I announced, “here we go.” I cut the studio mike. I looked over my control-room mates. “We all set?” Everyone nodded.

  Just then Stargirl lifted one of Cinnamon’s front paws and waved it at the control room and said in a squeaky voice, “Hi, Leo.”

  I froze. I came unraveled. I didn’t know she knew my name. I just stood there like a dummy. Finally I waggled my fingers at the rat and mouthed the words “Hi, Cinnamon,” although they couldn’t hear me on the other side of the glass.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay, ready music, ready intro.” I paused. “Music, intro.”

  This was the moment I lived for, launching the show. I was the director, the maestro, I called the shots. On the monitors before me I watched the program unfold according to my commands. But on this day the thrill was missing. I felt only a dark dread snaking along the cables.

  “Greetings…and welcome to Hot Seat…”

  Kevin went through the opening spiel. Kevin loved to be on camera. He was ideal for a show like this, which made good use of his smirky grin and arching, Did-I-really-hear-you-say-that? eyebrows.

  He turned to Stargirl. Then, impromptu, he reached out and stroked the nose of Cinnamon, who was perched on Stargirl’s shoulder. “Want to hold him?” she said.

  Kevin gav
e the camera a Should-I look. “Sure,” he said.

  “Ready, Chico, rat,” I said into my headset mike.

  “Ready” was always first in the command sequence.

  Chico zoomed in.

  “Chico.”

  TD punched up Chico. The camera followed Cinnamon from Stargirl’s hands to Kevin’s. No sooner was the rat in Kevin’s lap than it scampered up his chest and darted between two buttons into his shirt. Kevin yipped and squirmed. “It scratches!”

  “He has fingernails,” Stargirl said calmly. “He won’t hurt you.”

  Chico nailed Cinnamon poking his head out from between the two buttons. Mr. Robineau stuck a thumbs-up in front of my face.

  Kevin gave the camera his Ain’t-I-something face. He turned again to Stargirl. “You know, ever since you showed up at school this year, we’ve been wanting to put you on the Hot Seat.”

  Stargirl stared at him. She turned to the live camera. Her eyes were growing wider…

  Something was happening.

  …and wider…

  “Chico!” I barked.

  Chico moved in, crouching, giving it a little upshot. Terrific. “Closer, closer,” I said.

  Stargirl’s wonderstruck eyes practically filled the screen. I checked the long-shot monitor. She was frozen, rigid, as if electrified to the chair.

  Someone smacked my shoulder. I turned. Mr. Robineau was laughing, saying something. I lifted one earphone. “She’s joking,” he repeated. And suddenly I saw. She was taking “Hot Seat” literally. She was milking it for all it was worth, and judging from the blank stares of Kevin and the jury, Mr. Robineau and I were the only ones who got the joke.

  Stargirl’s hands were rising now from the arms of the Hot Seat…

  “Ready one,” I called. “One!”

  Camera One, not there at first but getting it now, the long shot, nailing her as her hands came off the chair arms, fingers spread wide, you could almost see her fingertips smoking…

  Hold it, I prayed, hold it…