…as her horrified eyes swung down over the side of the chair, the Hot Seat, saw the painted flames…
“EEEEEEEEEEEEYIKES!”
Her scream bent instrument dials like palms in a hurricane. The rat leaped from Kevin’s shirt. The TV image quaked as my Camera One man flinched, but he recovered and caught her standing now on the front edge of the stage, bending over with her rear end in the camera, flapping her hand behind her, fanning her smoking fanny.
Finally Kevin got it. He went nuts.
“One, pull back, get Kevin in it. Ready…One.”
Kevin was doubled up, tipping out of his chair, on his knees on the stage. His laughter flooded the control room. The rat ran over his hands and hopped down the single stage step…
“The rat!” I yelled. “Two, get the rat!”
But Two couldn’t get the rat because the rat was nosing around Two’s feet and Two was bolting from his camera.
“Chico, rat!”
Chico dived. He was flat on the floor, feeding the live screen a brilliant shot of the rat heading over to the jury, the jury members scrambling, taking off, climbing onto their seats.
Forget the “Readys”; things were happening too fast. The cameras were dancing, feeding the monitors. I barked commands. TD was punching his button rack like some hard-rock keyboarder.
Stargirl’s pantomime remains the best I have ever seen. Mr. Robineau kept squeezing my shoulder. As he said later, it was the greatest moment in Hot Seat history.
But because of what followed, no audience would ever see it.
13
In less than a minute, everything returned to normal. Stargirl retrieved Cinnamon and sat back coolly in the Hot Seat as if nothing had happened. Kevin’s eyes twinkled. He was squirming. He couldn’t wait to dig into the interview. Neither could the jury, but their eyes were not twinkling.
Kevin forced himself to look serious. “So, your name. Stargirl. It’s pretty unusual.”
Stargirl gave him a blank look.
Kevin was flustered. “Isn’t it?” he said.
Stargirl shrugged. “Not to me.”
She’s putting him on, I thought. “Chico,” I said into my mike, “stay tight on her face.”
A voice was heard dimly off-camera. Kevin turned. A jury member had spoken. “Jury mike up,” I said. “Ready Two.” The mike was passed to Jennifer St. John. “Two.”
The mike looked like a black ice cream cone before Jennifer’s face. Her voice wasn’t pleasant. “What was wrong with the name your parents gave you?”
Stargirl turned slowly to Jennifer. She smiled. “Nothing. It was a good name.”
“What was it?”
“Susan.”
“So why did you drop it?”
“Because I didn’t feel like Susan anymore.”
“So you just threw out Susan and named yourself Stargirl.”
“No.” Still smiling.
“No?”
“Pocket Mouse.”
Twelve pairs of eyes boggled.
“What?”
“I named myself Pocket Mouse,” Stargirl said breezily. “Then Mudpie. Then Hullygully. Then Stargirl.”
Damon Ricci snatched the mike from Jennifer St. John. “So what’s it gonna be next? Dog Turd?”
Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.
Kevin jumped in. “So…you change your name whenever you get tired of it?”
“Whenever it doesn’t fit anymore. I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.”
“So why Stargirl?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She petted Cinnamon’s nose with her fingertip. “I was walking in the desert one night, looking up at the sky—like,” she chuckled, “how can you not look at the sky!—and it just sort of came to me, fell onto me.”
Kevin looked up from his sheet of prepared questions. “So what do your parents think? Are they sad you didn’t keep Susan?”
“No. It was almost their idea. When I started calling myself Pocket Mouse when I was little, they called me that, too. And we just never went back.”
Another distant voice from the jury.
I tapped the soundman. “Jury mike. And keep all mikes open.” I hated to do it.
It was Mike Ebersole. “I said, do you love your country?”
“Yes,” she answered briskly. “Do you love yours?”
Ebersole ignored her question. “Why don’t you say the Pledge of Allegiance right?”
She smiled. “Sounds right to me.”
“Sounds like you’re a traitor to me.”
Jurors were only supposed to ask questions, not make statements.
A hand reached into the picture and grabbed the mike from Ebersole. Becca Rinaldi’s angry face appeared on Camera Two. “Why do you cheer for the other team?”
Stargirl seemed to be thinking it over. “I guess because I’m a cheerleader.”
“You’re not just a cheerleader, you dumb cluck”—Becca Rinaldi was snarling into the mike—“you’re supposed to be our cheerleader. A Mica cheerleader.”
I glanced at Mr. Robineau. He was turned away from the monitors. He was staring straight at the set through the control room window.
Stargirl was leaning forward, looking earnestly at Becca Rinaldi, her voice small as a little girl’s. “When the other team scores a point and you see how happy it makes all their fans, doesn’t it make you happy, too?”
Becca growled, “No.”
“Doesn’t it make you want to join in?”
“No.”
“Don’t you ever want the other team to be happy, too?”
“No.”
Stargirl seemed genuinely surprised. “You don’t always want to be the winner…do you?”
Becca scowled at her, jutted out her jaw. “Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. I always want to be the winner. That’s what I do. I root for us to win. That’s what we all do.” She swept her arm around the set. “We root for Mica.” She jabbed her finger at the stage. “Who do you root for?”
Stargirl hesitated. She smiled, she threw out her arms. “I root for everybody!”
Kevin—to the rescue, thankfully—clapped his hands. “Hey—how about this? Maybe it should be official. Maybe one person in the whole district should be appointed to be on”—he waved his arm—“everybody’s side!”
Stargirl reached over and slapped Kevin’s knee. “She could wear every school’s letter on her sweater!”
Kevin laughed. “She’d have to be big as a house!”
Stargirl slapped her own knee. “Then no letter at all. That’s even better.” She looked into the camera, she swiped at the space before her. “Out with letters!”
“Cheerleader-at-large!”
“Everybody’s cheerleader!”
Kevin sat at attention, placed his hand over his heart. “With liberty and justice…and a cheerleader for all.”
Ebersole snarled into the jury mike: “And a nut roll for all.”
Kevin wagged his finger. “That’s a no-no,” he scolded. “No statements from the jury. Questions only.”
Renee Bozeman snatched the mike. “Okay, here’s a question. Why did you quit homeschooling?”
Stargirl’s face became serious. “I wanted to make friends.”
“Well, you sure have a funny way of showing it, making the whole school mad at you.”
I wished I had never given in to Hot-Seating Stargirl.
Stargirl just stared. Chico filled the screen with her face.
“Gimme—” It was Jennifer St. John, reaching for the mike. “And out of school, too. You meddle into everybody’s business. You stick your nose in, whether you’re invited or not. Why do you do that?”
Stargirl had no reply. Her usual impish expression was gone. She looked at Jennifer. She looked at the camera, as if trying to find an answer in the lens. Then she was looking away, looking at the control room. I took my eyes from the monitor and for a second I thought they met hers at the control room window.
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I had been wondering when Hillari Kimble would speak up. Now she did. “I’m gonna tell you something, girl. You’re goofy. You’re crazy.” Hillari was standing, jabbing her finger at Stargirl, chewing on the mike. “You must’ve come from Mars or something…” Kevin raised a timid hand. “And don’t you tell me ‘no statements,’ Kevin. Where’d you come from, Mars or something? There, now it’s a question. Why don’t you go back to where you came from? There’s another question.”
Stargirl’s eyes filled the camera. Don’t cry, I prayed.
There was no stopping Hillari. “You want to cheer for other schools? Fine! Go there! Don’t come to my school. Get outta my school!”
Other hands were snatching at the mike.
“I know what your problem is. All this weird stuff you do? It’s just to get attention.”
“It’s to get a boyfriend!”
The jurors laughed. They were a mob. Hands grabbed at the mike. Kevin looked anxiously at me. I could do nothing. With all the buttons and switches at my command, I was helpless to change anything on the other side of the glass.
“I got a simple question for you. What’s the matter with you? Huh? Huh?”
“Why can’t you be normal?”
“Why do you wanna be so different?”
“Yeah—is something wrong with us, you gotta be so different?”
“Why don’t you wear makeup?”
They were all standing now, jabbing, jutting, shouting, whether they had the mike or not.
“You don’t like us, do you? Do you?”
Mr. Robineau flipped the master toggle on the console. “That’s it,” he said.
I flipped the studio sound switch. “That’s it. Show’s over.”
The jury went on shouting.
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.