“Well, she’s divorced and lonely. No wedding ring. Wants somebody in her life. A home life. She wishes she were Sally and her Harry would come along. She would make him dinner and snuggle with him at night. She tries to eat low-fat foods. She works for a travel agency. She took a free cruise last year, but all she met on the boat were creeps. Her name is Clarissa, she played the clarinet in high school, and her favorite soap is Irish Spring.”
I boggled. “How do you know all that?”
She laughed. “I don’t. I’m guessing. That’s what makes it fun.”
“So what card would you send her?”
She put her finger to her lips. “Hmm…to Clarissa I would send a While-you’re-waiting-for-Harry-be-good-to-yourself card. How about you?”
“I would send a”—I mulled over the phrasing—“a Don’t-let-Harry-catch-you-flicking card.”
Now it was her turn to boggle. “Huh?”
“Didn’t you see her pick her nose?” I said. “In Suncoast?”
“Not really. I saw her hand go to her nose, like she was scratching it or something.”
“Yeah, or something. She was picking, that’s what. She was quick and sneaky. A real pro.”
She gave me a playful shove. “You’re kidding.”
I held up my hands. “I’m serious. She was standing in front of the comedies. Her finger went in and when it came out there was something on it. She carried it around for about a minute. And then, just as she was leaving Suncoast, when she thought nobody was looking, she flicked. I didn’t see where it landed.” She stared at me. I raised my right hand and put my left over my heart. “No lie.”
She broke out laughing, so loudly I was embarrassed. She grabbed my arm with both hands to keep from collapsing. Mallwalkers stared.
We carded two others that day: a woman who spent her whole fifteen minutes feeling leather jackets—we called her Betty—and a man we called Adam because of his huge Adam’s apple, which we renamed Adam’s pumpkin. No more pick-’n’-flickers.
And I did have fun. Whether it came from the game or simply from being with her, I don’t know. I do know I was surprised at how close I felt to Clarissa and Betty and Adam after watching them for only fifteen minutes.
Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.
“I hate change,” she said. “It’s so…jangly.”
“Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?” I said.
“Did you ever see a little kid’s face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?” she said.
When her change purse was empty, we drove back to Mica. Along the way she invited me to dinner at her house.
22
Archie had claimed the Caraways were normal folks, but I still couldn’t imagine Stargirl coming from an ordinary home. I think I expected a leftover hippie scene from the 1960s. Make love, not war. Her mother in a long skirt with a flower in her hair. Her father’s face framed in muttonchop sideburns, saying “Groovy!” and “Right on!” a lot. Grateful Dead posters. Psychedelic lampshades.
So I was surprised. Her mother wore shorts and a tank top as she worked the pedal of a sewing machine with her bare foot. She was making a Russian peasant costume for a play to be presented in Denver. Mr. Caraway was on a stepladder outside, painting windowsills. No muttonchops; in fact, not much hair at all. The house itself could have been anyone’s. Glossy bentwood furniture, throw rugs over hardwood floors, Southwest accents: an Anasazi-style wedding vase here, a Georgia O’Keeffe print there. Nothing to proclaim, “You see? She came from here.”
Same with her room. Except for Cinnamon’s blue and yellow plywood apartment in one corner, it might have belonged to any high school girl. I stood in the doorway.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m surprised,” I said.
“At what?”
“I thought your room would be different.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. More…you.”
She grinned. “Stacks of fillers? A card-making operation?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s my office,” she said. She let Cinnamon out. He scurried under her bed. “This is my room.”
“You have an office?”
“Yep.” She stuck her foot under the bed. When it came out, Cinnamon was aboard. “I wanted to have a place all my own where I could go to work. So I got one.”
Cinnamon scampered out of the room.
“Where is it?” I said.
She put her finger to her lips. “Secret.”
“Bet I know one person who knows,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Archie.”
She smiled.
“He was talking about you,” I said. “He likes you.”
“He means the world to me,” she said. “I think of him as my grandfather.”
My inspection yielded two curious items. One was a wooden bowl half filled with sand-colored hair.
“Yours?” I said.
She nodded. “For birds looking for nest materials. I put it out in the spring. Been doing it since I was a little girl. I got more business up north than here.”
The other item was on a bookshelf. It was a tiny wagon about the size of my fist. It was made of wood and looked like it might have been an antique toy. It was piled high with pebbles. Several other pebbles lay about the wagon wheels.
I pointed to it. “You collecting stones, or what?”
“It’s my happy wagon,” she said. “Actually, it could just as well be called an unhappy wagon, but I prefer happy.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“It’s about how I feel. When something makes me happy, I put a pebble in the wagon. If I’m unhappy, I take a pebble out. There are twenty pebbles in all.”
I counted three on the shelf. “So there’re seventeen in the wagon now, right?”
“Right.”
“So that means, what, you’re pretty happy?”
“Right again.”
“What’s the biggest number of pebbles ever in the wagon?”
She gave me a sly smile. “You’re looking at it.”
It didn’t seem like just a pile of pebbles anymore.
“Usually,” she said, “it’s more balanced. It hangs around ten, a couple to one side or the other. Back and forth, back and forth. Like life.”
“How close to empty did the wagon ever get?” I said.
“Oh…” She turned her face to the ceiling, closed her eyes. “Once, down to three.”
I was shocked. “Really? You?”
She stared. “Why not me?”
“You don’t seem the type.”
“What type is that?”
“I don’t know…” I groped for the right words.
“The three-pebble type?” she offered.
I shrugged.
She picked up a pebble from the shelf and, with a grin, dropped it into the wagon. “Well, call me Miss Unpredictable.”
I joined the family for dinner. Three of us had meatloaf. The fourth—guess who—was a strict vegetarian. She had tofu loaf.
Her parents called her “Stargirl” and “Star” as casually as if she were a Jennifer.
After dinner we sat on her front step. She had brought her camera out. Three little kids, two girls and a boy, were playing in a driveway across the street. She took several pictures of them.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked her.
“See the little boy in the red cap?” she said. “His name is Peter Sinkowitz. He’s five years old. I’m doing his biography, sort of.”
For the tenth time that day she had caught me off guard. “Biography?” Peter Sinkowitz was coasting down his driveway in a four-wheeled plastic banana; the two little girls were running, screaming after him. “Why would you want to do that?”
She snapped a picture. “Don??
?t you wish somebody came up to you today and gave you a scrapbook called ‘The Life of Leo Borlock’? And it’s a record, like a journal, of what you did on such-and-such a date when you were little. From the days you can’t remember anymore. And there’s pictures, and even stuff that you dropped or threw away, like a candy wrapper. And it was all done by some neighbor across the street, and you didn’t even know she was doing it. Don’t you think when you’re fifty or sixty you’d give a fortune to have such a thing?”
I thought about it. It was ten years since I had been six. It seemed like a century. She was right about one thing: I didn’t remember much about those days. But I didn’t really care either.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. And anyway, don’t you think his parents are doing that? Family albums and all?”
One of the little girls managed to wrest the banana roadster away from Peter Sinkowitz. Peter started howling.
“I’m sure they are,” she said, snapping another picture. “But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling. They’re not as real as this. Someday he’s going to love this picture of himself bawling while a little girl rides off on his toy. I don’t follow him around like we did Clarissa. I just keep an eye out for him, and a couple of times a week I jot down what I saw him doing that day. I’ll do it for a few more years, then I’ll give it to his parents to give to him when he’s older and ready to appreciate it.” A puzzled look came over her face. She poked me with her elbow. “What?”
“Huh?” I said.
“You’re staring at me really funny. What is it?”
I blurted, “Are you running for saint?”
I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips. She just looked at me, hurt in her eyes.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound nasty.”
“How did you mean to sound?”
“Amazed, I guess.”
“At what?”
I laughed. “What do you think? You.” I laughed again. I stood before the steps, facing her. “Look at you. It’s Saturday. I’ve been with you all day, and you’ve spent the whole day doing stuff for other people. Or paying attention to other people. Or following other people. Or taking pictures of other people.”
She looked up at me. The hurt was gone from her eyes, but not the puzzlement. She blinked. “So?”
“So…I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like you’re saying I’m obsessed with other people. Is that it?”
Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn’s eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them. “You’re different,” I said, “that’s for sure.”
She batted her eyelids and gave me a flirty grin. “Don’t you like different?”
“Sure I do,” I said, maybe a little too quickly.
A look of sudden discovery brightened her face. She reached out with her foot and tapped my sneaker. “I know what your problem is.”
“Really?” I said. “What?”
“You’re jealous. You’re upset because I’m paying all this attention to other people and not enough to you.”
“Right,” I sniffed. “I’m jealous of Peter Sinkowitz.”
She stood. “You just want me all to yourself, don’t you?” She stepped into my space. The tips of our noses were touching. “Don’t you, Mr. Leo?” Her arms were around my neck.
We were on the sidewalk in front of her house, in full view. “What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m giving you some attention,” she cooed. “Don’t you want some attention?”
I was losing my battle for balance.
“I don’t know,” I heard myself say.
“You’re really dumb,” she whispered in my ear.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Why do you think there’re eighteen pebbles in my wagon?” And then the last remaining space between our lips was gone and I was falling headlong into her eyes, right there on Palo Verde after dinner. And I can tell you, that was no saint kissing me.
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?”