Stargirl Chapters 1-5 (English Audiobook)

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hello, my name is Maggie, and I am going to be reading Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli.

[00:00:07]This is an interesting coming-of-age book about a girl who is new at a new school, and she's very different. So, this book has an interesting reflection on difference, fitting in, and it's a really good coming-of-age novel and a great intermediate read if you're practicing your English. Feel free to comment any questions that you have. Um, and this will be the first part. I'll just read the first five chapters. If you're interested, please like and comment, and I'm happy to make more content like this and maybe read uh the rest of the book. So, if you want the next chapters, let me know.

[00:00:53]All right, without further ado, here is Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli.

[00:00:59]Porcupine Necktie When I was little, my Uncle Pete had a necktie with a porcupine painted on it.

[00:01:07]I thought that necktie was just about the neatest thing in the world.

[00:01:11]Uncle Pete would stand patiently before me while I ran my fingers over the silky surface, half expecting to be stuck by one of the quills.

[00:01:21]Once, he let me wear it. I kept looking for one of my own, but I could never find one.

[00:01:28]I was 12 when we moved from Pennsylvania to Arizona.

[00:01:33]When Uncle Pete came to say goodbye, he was wearing the tie.

[00:01:37]I thought he did so to give me one last look at it, and I was grateful.

[00:01:43]But then, with a dramatic flourish, he whipped off the tie and draped it around my neck. "It's yours," he said.

[00:01:51]"Going-away present."

[00:01:54]I loved that porcupine tie so much that I decided to start a collection.

[00:01:59]Two years after we settled in Arizona, the number of ties in my collection was still one.

[00:02:06]Where do you find a porcupine necktie in Mica, Arizona, or anywhere else for that matter?

[00:02:14]On my 14th birthday, I read about myself in the local newspaper.

[00:02:19]The family section ran a regular feature about kids on their birthdays, and my mother had called in some info.

[00:02:28]The last sentence read, "As a hobby, Leo Borlock collects porcupine neckties."

[00:02:35]Several days later, coming home from school, I found a plastic bag on our front step.

[00:02:42]Inside was a gift-wrapped package tied with yellow ribbon.

[00:02:47]The bag said, "Happy birthday."

[00:02:50]I opened the package. It was a porcupine necktie.

[00:02:55]Two porcupines were tossing darts with their quills, while a third was picking its teeth.

[00:03:02]I inspected the box, the tag, the paper.

[00:03:06]Nowhere could I find the giver's name.

[00:03:09]I asked my parents. I asked my friends.

[00:03:13]I called my Uncle Pete.

[00:03:15]Everyone denied knowing anything about it.

[00:03:18]At the time, I simply considered the episode a mystery.

[00:03:22]It did not occur to me that I was being watched. We were all being watched.

[00:03:30]Chapter 1 Did you see her?

[00:03:34]That was the first thing Kevin said to me on the first day of school, 11th grade.

[00:03:39]We were waiting for the bell to ring.

[00:03:41]"See who?" I said.

[00:03:43]"Ha." He craned his neck, scanning the mob. He had witnessed something remarkable.

[00:03:49]It showed on his face.

[00:03:51]He grinned, still scanning. "You'll know."

[00:03:55]There were hundreds of us milling about, calling names, pointing to summer-tanned faces we hadn't seen since June.

[00:04:04]Our interest in each other was never keener than during the 15 minutes before the first bell of the first day.

[00:04:12]I punched his arm. "Who?"

[00:04:14]The bell rang. We poured inside.

[00:04:18]I heard it again in homeroom, a whispered voice behind me as we said the pledge of allegiance.

[00:04:24]"You see her?"

[00:04:26]I heard it in the hallways. I heard it in English and geometry.

[00:04:31]"Did you see her?"

[00:04:32]Who could it be? A new student? A spectacular blonde from California?

[00:04:38]Or from back east, where many of us came from?

[00:04:42]Or one of those summer makeovers?

[00:04:44]Someone who leaves in June looking like a little girl and returns in September as a full-bodied woman, a 10-week miracle?

[00:04:54]And then, in Earth Sciences, I heard the name, Stargirl.

[00:04:59]I turned to the senior slouching behind me. "Stargirl?" I said. "What kind of name is that?"

[00:05:06]"That's it. Stargirl Caraway. She said it in homeroom."

[00:05:10]"Stargirl?"

[00:05:12]"Yeah."

[00:05:13]And then I saw her at lunch. She wore an off-white dress so long it covered her shoes.

[00:05:20]It had ruffles around the neck and cuffs and looked like it could have been her great-grandmother's wedding gown.

[00:05:28]Her hair was the color of sand.

[00:05:30]It fell to her shoulders.

[00:05:32]Something was strapped across her back, but it wasn't a book bag.

[00:05:37]At first I thought it was a miniature guitar. I found out later it was a ukulele.

[00:05:43]She did not carry a lunch tray.

[00:05:46]She did carry a large canvas bag with a life-size sunflower painted on it.

[00:05:52]The lunch room was dead silent as she walked by.

[00:05:56]She stopped at an empty table, laid down her bag, slung the instrument strap over her chair, and sat down.

[00:06:04]She pulled a sandwich from the bag and started to eat.

[00:06:08]Half the lunch room kept staring.

[00:06:11]Half started buzzing.

[00:06:13]Kevin was grinning. What I tell you?

[00:06:16]I nodded.

[00:06:18]She's in 10th grade, he said. I hear she's been homeschooled till now.

[00:06:23]Maybe that explains it, I said.

[00:06:26]Her back was to us, so I couldn't see her face. No one sat with her, but at the tables next to hers, kids were cramming two to a seat. She didn't seem to notice.

[00:06:37]She seemed marooned in a sea of staring, buzzing faces.

[00:06:42]Kevin was grinning again. You know what I'm thinking? He said. I grinned back. I nodded. Hot seat.

[00:06:51]Hot seat was our in-school TV show. We had started it the year before.

[00:06:57]I was producer/director.

[00:07:00]Kevin was on-camera host.

[00:07:03]Each month he interviewed a student. So far, most of them had been honor student types, athletes, model citizens, noteworthy in the usual ways, but not especially interesting.

[00:07:15]Suddenly, Kevin's eyes boggled. The girl was picking up her ukulele, and now she was singing, strumming away, bobbing her head and shoulders, singing, "I'm looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before."

[00:07:32]Stone silence all around.

[00:07:35]And then came the sound of a single person clapping. I looked. It was the lunch line cashier.

[00:07:42]And now the girl was standing, slinging her bag over one shoulder and twirling.

[00:07:47]Heads swung, eyes followed her, mouths hung open, disbelief. When she came by our table, I got my first good look at her face.

[00:07:57]She wasn't gorgeous, wasn't ugly. A sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose.

[00:08:03]Mostly she looked like a hundred other girls in the school, except for two things.

[00:08:09]She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen.

[00:08:14]Like deer's eyes caught in the headlights.

[00:08:17]She twirled as she went past, her flaring skirt brushing my pant leg, and then she marched out of the lunch room.

[00:08:25]From among the tables came three slow claps. Someone whistled. Someone yelped.

[00:08:31]Kevin and I gawked at each other.

[00:08:34]Kevin held up his hands and framed a marquee in the air. Hot seat, coming attractions, star girl.

[00:08:41]I slapped the table. Yes. We slammed hands.

[00:08:45]Chapter two.

[00:08:47]When we got to school the next day, Hillary Kimball was holding court at the door.

[00:08:52]"She's not real." Hillary said. She was sneering. "She's an actress. It's a scam."

[00:08:59]Someone called out, "Who's scamming us?"

[00:09:03]"The administration. The principal. Who else? Who cares?"

[00:09:08]Hillary wagged her head at the absurdity of the question.

[00:09:13]A hand flashed in the air. "Why?"

[00:09:16]"School spirit." She spat back.

[00:09:19]"They think this place was too dead last year. They think if they plant some nutcase in with the students, like they plant narcs in schools."

[00:09:30]Someone else shouted. Hillary glared at the speaker, then continued.

[00:09:35]"Some nutcase who stirs things up, then maybe all the little students will go to a game once in a while or join a club.

[00:09:46]"Instead of making out in the library."

[00:09:49]chimed another voice, and everybody laughed and the bell rang and we went in.

[00:09:54]Hillary Kimball's theory spread through the school and was widely accepted.

[00:09:59]"You think Hillary's right?" Kevin asked me. "Stargirl is a plant?"

[00:10:04]I snickered. "Listen to yourself."

[00:10:08]He spread his arms. "What?"

[00:10:10]"This is Mica Area High School." I reminded him. "It's not a CIA operation."

[00:10:16]"Maybe not." he said, "but I hope Hillary's right."

[00:10:20]"Why would you hope that? If she's not a real student, we can't have her on Hot Seat."

[00:10:25]Kevin wagged his head and grinned. "As usual, Mr. Director, you failed to see the whole picture.

[00:10:32]We could use the show to expose her."

[00:10:35]"Can't you see it?" He did the marquee thing with his hands. "Hot Seat Uncovers Faculty Hoax."

[00:10:42]I stared at him. "You want her to be a fake, don't you?"

[00:10:46]He grinned ear to ear.

[00:10:48]"Absolutely. Our ratings will go sky high."

[00:10:52]I had to admit, the more I saw of her, the easier it was to believe she was a plant, a joke, anything but real.

[00:11:02]On that second day, she wore bright red baggy shorts with a bib and shoulder straps, overall shorts.

[00:11:12]Her sandy hair was pulled back into twin plated pigtails, each tied with a bright red ribbon.

[00:11:19]A rouge smudge dappled each cheek, and she had even dabbed some oversized freckles on her face.

[00:11:26]She looked like Heidi or Bo Peep.

[00:11:30]At lunch, she was alone again at her table. As before, when she finished eating, she took up her ukulele. But this time, she didn't play. She got up and started walking among the tables.

[00:11:43]She stared at us. She stared at one face, then another, and another.

[00:11:49]The kind of bold, I'm looking at you stare. You almost never get from people, especially strangers.

[00:11:58]She appeared to be looking for someone, and the whole lunch room had become very uncomfortable.

[00:12:05]She approached our table.

[00:12:07]I thought, "What if she's looking for me?"

[00:12:11]That thought terrified me, so I turned from her. I looked at Kevin. I watched him grin goofily up at her. He wiggled his fingers at her and whispered, "Hi Stargirl." I didn't hear an answer. I was intensely aware of her passing behind my chair.

[00:12:28]She stopped two tables away. She was smiling at putting bodied senior named Alan Ferko.

[00:12:35]The lunch room was dead silent. She started strumming the uke and singing.

[00:12:41]It was happy birthday. When she came to his name, she didn't just sing his first name, but his full name.

[00:12:48]Happy birthday, dear Alan Ferko.

[00:12:53]Alan Ferko's face turned red as Bo Peep's pigtail ribbons.

[00:12:58]There was a flurry of whistles and hoots, more for Alan Ferko's sake I think than hers.

[00:13:04]As Stargirl marched out, I could see Hillary Kimball across the lunch room rising from her seat, pointing, saying something I could not hear.

[00:13:14]"I'll tell you one thing." Kevin said as we joined the mob in the hallways. "She better be fake."

[00:13:21]I asked him what he meant.

[00:13:23]"I mean, if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think someone who's really like that is going to last around here?

[00:13:32]Good question.

[00:13:35]Mica Area High School, MAHS, was not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity.

[00:13:41]There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits. We all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music.

[00:13:54]Even our dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them.

[00:14:00]If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place like rubber bands.

[00:14:07]Kevin was right. It was unthinkable that Stargirl could survive, or at least survive unchanged, among us.

[00:14:15]But it was also clear that Hillary Kimball was at least half right. This person calling herself Stargirl may or may not have been a faculty plant for school spirit. But whatever she was, she was not real. She couldn't be.

[00:14:32]Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous.

[00:14:39]A 1920s flapper dress, an Indian buckskin, a kimono.

[00:14:46]One day she wore a denim mini skirt with green stockings, and crawling up one leg was a parade of enamel ladybug and butterfly pins.

[00:14:57]Normal for her were long floor-brushing pioneer dresses and skirts.

[00:15:03]Every few days in the lunchroom, she serenaded someone new with Happy Birthday.

[00:15:10]I was glad my birthday was in the summer.

[00:15:13]In the hallways, she said hello to perfect strangers.

[00:15:17]The seniors couldn't believe it. They had never seen a 10th grader so bold.

[00:15:23]In class, she was always flapping her hand in the air asking questions, though the question often had nothing to do with the subject. One day she asked a question about trolls in US history class.

[00:15:37]She made up a song about isosceles triangles.

[00:15:41]She sang it to her plane geometry class. It was called "Three sides have I, but only two are equal."

[00:15:49]She joined the cross country team.

[00:15:51]Our home meets were held on the Mica Country Club golf course.

[00:15:56]Red flags showed the runners the way to go.

[00:15:59]In her first meet, out in the middle of the course, she turned a left while everyone else turned right. They waited for her at the finish line.

[00:16:09]She never showed up.

[00:16:10]She was dismissed from the team.

[00:16:14]One day a girl screamed in the hallway.

[00:16:17]She had seen a tiny brown face pop up from Stargirl's sunflower canvas bag.

[00:16:23]It was her pet rat.

[00:16:25]It rode to school in the bag every day.

[00:16:28]One morning, we had a rare rainfall. It came during her gym class. The teacher told everyone to come in.

[00:16:36]On the way to the next class, they looked out the window.

[00:16:40]Stargirl was still outside in the rain dancing.

[00:16:45]We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past weird and strange and goofy. Her ways knocked us off balance.

[00:16:56]A single word seemed to hover in the cloudless sky over the school. Huh?

[00:17:02]Everything she did seemed to echo Hillary Kimball. She's not real. She's not real.

[00:17:09]And each night in bed, I thought of her as the moon came through my window.

[00:17:14]I I have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did.

[00:17:20]In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things.

[00:17:26]I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but it's underside. It's private side.

[00:17:35]When the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat coming from the desert. It was during one of these night moon times that it came to me that Hillary Kimball was wrong. Stargirl was real. Chapter 3 We fought daily, Kevin and I. My main job as producer was to recruit people for the hot seat.

[00:17:57]After I signed someone up, Kevin began researching the person, getting his questions ready.

[00:18:04]Every day he asked me, "Did you sign her up?"

[00:18:07]Every day I answered, "No."

[00:18:10]He got frustrated. "What do you mean, no? Don't you want to sign her up?"

[00:18:15]I told him I wasn't sure.

[00:18:17]His eyes bugged out. "Not sure? How can you not be sure?

[00:18:22]We high-fived in the lunchroom weeks ago. We were thinking Stargirl mini-series, even.

[00:18:29]This is a hot seat from heaven."

[00:18:32]I shrugged. "That was then. Now, I'm not sure."

[00:18:37]He looked at me like I had three ears.

[00:18:40]"What's there to be not sure about?"

[00:18:43]I shrugged.

[00:18:45]"Well, then," he said, "I'll sign her up." And walked away.

[00:18:50]"You'll have to find a new director, then." I said.

[00:18:54]He stopped. I could almost see the steam rising from his shoulders. He turned, pointed. "Leo, you can be a real jerk sometimes." He walked off.

[00:19:07]It was uncomfortable. Kevin Quinlan and I usually agreed on everything.

[00:19:12]We had been best friends since arriving in Arizona the same week four years before.

[00:19:18]We both thought the prickly pear cactus looked like ping pong paddles with whiskers and that the saguaros looked like dinosaur mittens.

[00:19:28]We both loved strawberry banana smoothies. We both wanted to go into television.

[00:19:35]Kevin often said he wanted to be a sleazy talk show host and he wasn't kidding.

[00:19:41]I wanted to be a sports announcer or news anchor.

[00:19:44]We conceived hot seat together and convinced the faculty to let us do it.

[00:19:50]It was an instant hit.

[00:19:52]It quickly became the most popular thing in school.

[00:19:57]So why was I balking?

[00:19:59]I didn't know. I had some vague feelings, but the only one I could identify was a warning. Leave her alone.

[00:20:08]In time, Hillary's hypothesis, so-called by Kevin, about Stargirl's origins gave way to other theories.

[00:20:18]She was trying to get herself discovered for the movies. She was sniffing fumes.

[00:20:23]She was homeschooling gone amok.

[00:20:26]She was an alien.

[00:20:28]The rat she brought to school was only the tip of the iceberg. She had hundreds of them at home, some as big as cats.

[00:20:37]She lived in a ghost town in the desert.

[00:20:40]She lived in a bus.

[00:20:42]Her parents were circus acrobats.

[00:20:45]Her parents were witches.

[00:20:48]Her parents were brain dead vegetables in a hospital in Yuma.

[00:20:53]We watched her sit down in class and pull from her canvas bag a blue and yellow ruffled curtain that she draped over three sides of her desk.

[00:21:03]We saw her set out a 3-in clear glass vase and drop into it a white and yellow daisy.

[00:21:10]She did and undid this in every class she attended six times a day.

[00:21:16]Only on Monday mornings was the daisy fresh. By last period, the petals were drooping.

[00:21:23]By Wednesday, the petals began to fall.

[00:21:26]The stem began to sag.

[00:21:28]By Friday, the flower hung down over the rim of the waterless vase, its dead stump of a head shedding yellow dust in the pencil groove.

[00:21:39]We joined her as she sang happy birthday to us in the lunchroom.

[00:21:43]We heard her greet us in the hallways and classrooms, and we wondered how she knew our names and birthdays.

[00:21:49]Her caught-in-headlights eyes gave her a look of perpetual astonishment, so that we found ourselves turning and looking back over our shoulders, wondering what we were missing.

[00:22:01]She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music.

[00:22:06]She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in the school.

[00:22:11]In her answers in class, she often spoke of seahorses and stars, but she did not know what a football was.

[00:22:19]She said there was no television in her house.

[00:22:22]She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower.

[00:22:30]The flitting shadow of an elf owl.

[00:22:33]We did not know what to make of her.

[00:22:36]In our minds, we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

[00:22:45]Kevin wasn't the only one. Other kids pestered me.

[00:22:49]"Put her on the hot seat."

[00:22:51]I lied. I said she was only a 10th grader and you had to be at least a junior to be on hot seat.

[00:22:59]Meanwhile, I kept my distance. I observed her as if she were a bird in an aviary.

[00:23:05]One day I turned a corner and there she was, coming right at me, the long skirt softly rustling, looking straight at me.

[00:23:14]Surrounding me with those eyes, I turned and trotted off the other way. Seating myself in my next class, I felt warm, shaken. I wondered if my foolishness showed. Was I myself becoming goofy? The feeling I had had when I saw her around the corner had been something like panic.

[00:23:35]Then one day after school I followed her. I kept at a safe distance. Since she was known not to take a bus, I expected the walk to be short. It wasn't. We trekked all over Mica, past hundreds of grassless, stone, and cactus front yards, through the Tudorized shopping center, skirting the electronics business park around which the city had been invented a mere 15 years before.

[00:24:03]At one point she pulled a piece of paper from her bag. She consulted it. She seemed to be reading house numbers as she walked along.

[00:24:12]Abruptly, she turned up a driveway, went to the front door, and left something in the mailbox.

[00:24:19]I waited for her to move off. I looked around, no one in the street. I went to the mailbox, pulled out a homemade card, opened it. Each tall letter was a different painted color.

[00:24:32]The card said, "Congratulations."

[00:24:35]It was unsigned.

[00:24:37]I resumed following her. Cars pulled into driveways. It was dinner time. My parents would be wondering. She took the rat from the bag and put it on her shoulder. Riding there, the rat faced backward, its tiny triangular face peeping out of her sand-colored hair.

[00:24:55]I could not see its beady black eyes, but I guessed it was looking at me.

[00:25:00]I fancied it was telling her what it saw. I fell further back.

[00:25:04]Shadows crossed the streets. We passed the car wash and the bike shop. We passed the country club golf course, the biggest spread of green grass until the golf course in the next town.

[00:25:16]We passed the welcome to Mica sign. We were walking westward.

[00:25:21]There was us and the highway and the desert and the sun blazing above the Maricopa Mountains. I wished I had my sunglasses.

[00:25:31]After a while she veered from the highway. I hesitated, then followed.

[00:25:35]She was walking directly into the setting sun, now a great orange perched atop the mountain crests.

[00:25:42]For a minute the mountains were the same dusky lavender as her sand-skimming skirt.

[00:25:48]With every step the silence grew, as did my sense that she knew, had known all along, that she was being followed.

[00:25:55]Or more, that she was leading me.

[00:25:58]She never looked back.

[00:26:01]She strummed her ukulele. She sang. I could no longer see the rat. I imagined it was dozing in the curtain of her hair.

[00:26:10]I imagined it was singing along. The sun laid down behind the mountains.

[00:26:15]Where was she going?

[00:26:17]In the gathering dusk, the saguaros flung shadows of giants across the pebbled earth.

[00:26:23]The air was cool on my face. The desert smelled of apples.

[00:26:28]I heard something. A coyote?

[00:26:31]I thought of rattlesnakes and scorpions.

[00:26:34]I stopped. I watched her walk on. I stifled an impulse to call after her, to warn her of what?

[00:26:43]I turned and walked, then ran back to the highway.

[00:26:48]Chapter 4.

[00:26:49]At Mica Area High School, Hillary Kimball was famous for three things: her mouth, the hoax, and Wayne Parr.

[00:26:58]Her mouth spoke for itself, most often to complain.

[00:27:03]The episode that became known as Hillary's hoax took place in her sophomore year when she tried out for cheerleading.

[00:27:11]Her face and hair and figure were right enough, and she surely had the mouth.

[00:27:16]She made the squad easily.

[00:27:19]And then she stunned everyone by turning it down.

[00:27:22]She said she just wanted to prove that she could do it.

[00:27:25]She said she had no intention of yammering and bouncing in front of empty bleachers, which was usually the case.

[00:27:33]And anyway, she hated sports.

[00:27:36]As for Wayne Parr, he was her boyfriend.

[00:27:39]Mouth-wise, he was her opposite. He seldom opened his. He didn't have to.

[00:27:45]All he had to do was appear. That was his job, appear.

[00:27:49]By both girls' and boys' standards, Wayne Parr was gorgeous.

[00:27:54]But he was more and less than that.

[00:27:56]In terms of achievement, Wayne Parr seemed to be nobody.

[00:28:01]He played on no sports team, joined no organization, won no awards, earned no A's. He was elected to nothing, honored for nothing.

[00:28:12]And yet, though I did not realize this until years later, he was grand marshal of our daily parade.

[00:28:20]We did not wake up in the morning and ask ourselves, "What will Wayne Parr wear today?" or "How will Wayne Parr act today?" At least not consciously.

[00:28:31]But on some level below awareness, that is exactly what we did.

[00:28:36]Wayne Parr did not go to football and basketball games, and by and large, neither did we. Wayne Parr did not ask questions in class or get worked up over teachers or pep rallies, and neither did we.

[00:28:50]Wayne Parr did not much care. Neither did we.

[00:28:55]Did Parr create us, or was he simply a reflection of us?

[00:28:59]I didn't know.

[00:29:01]I knew only that if you peeled off one by one all the layers of the student body, you would have found at the core not the spirit of the school, but Wayne Parr.

[00:29:13]That's why in our sophomore year I had recruited Parr for the hot seat.

[00:29:18]Kevin was surprised.

[00:29:20]"Why him?" Kevin said, "What's he ever done?"

[00:29:25]What could I say that Parr was a worthy subject precisely because he did nothing? Because he was so monumentally good at doing nothing?

[00:29:35]I had only a vague insight, not the words. I just shrugged.

[00:29:39]The highlight of that hot seat came when Kevin asked Parr who was his hero, his role model.

[00:29:46]It was one of Kevin's standard questions.

[00:29:50]Parr answered, "GQ."

[00:29:53]In the control room I did a double take.

[00:29:56]Was the sound working right?

[00:29:59]"GQ?" Kevin repeated dumbly.

[00:30:02]"Gentlemen's Quarterly? The magazine?"

[00:30:05]Parr did not look at Kevin. He looked straight at the camera. He nodded smugly and went on to say he wanted to become a male model.

[00:30:14]His ultimate ambition was to be on the cover of GQ.

[00:30:18]And right there he posed for the camera.

[00:30:21]He had that disdainful model look down pat. And suddenly I could see it. The jaw square as the corner of a cover, the chiseled cheeks, the perfect teeth and hair.

[00:30:33]That, as I say, took place toward the end of our sophomore year.

[00:30:38]I thought then that Wayne Parr would always reign as our grand marshal.

[00:30:43]How could I have known that he would soon be challenged by a freckle-nosed homeschooler?

[00:30:51]Chapter 5 The call came from Kevin on a Friday night. He was at the football game.

[00:30:57]"Quick! Hurry! Drop whatever you're doing. Now!"

[00:31:01]Kevin was one of the few who went to games. The school kept threatening to drop football because of low attendance.

[00:31:09]They said ticket receipts were barely enough to pay for electricity to light the field.

[00:31:15]But Kevin was screaming on the phone. I jumped in the family pickup and raced to the stadium.

[00:31:22]I bolted from the truck. Kevin was at the gate windmilling his arms. "Hurry!"

[00:31:28]I threw the $2 admission at the ticket window and we raced for the field.

[00:31:35]"See better up here," he said, yanking me into the stands. It was halftime. The band was on the field, all 14 of them.

[00:31:43]Among the students it was known as the world's smallest standing band. There weren't enough of them to form recognizable letters or shapes except for a capital I.

[00:31:53]So, they didn't march much at halftimes of games. They mostly stood in two rows of seven each plus the student conductor.

[00:32:03]No majorettes, no color guard, no flag and rifle girls.

[00:32:08]Except this night. This night Stargirl Caraway was on the field with them.

[00:32:15]As they played, rooted in their places, she pranced around the grass in her bare feet and long lemon yellow dress.

[00:32:24]She roamed from goalpost to goalpost.

[00:32:27]She swirled like a dust devil. She marched stiffly like a wooden soldier.

[00:32:32]She toodled an imaginary flute. She pogoed into the air and knocked her bare heels together. The cheerleaders gaped from the sidelines.

[00:32:42]A few people in the stands whistled.

[00:32:45]The rest, they barely outnumbered the band, sat there with what is this on their faces?

[00:32:53]The band stopped playing and marched off the field. Stargirl stayed. She was twirling down the 40-yard line when the players returned.

[00:33:01]They did a minute of warm-up exercises.

[00:33:04]She joined in. Jumping jacks, belly womps. The teams lined up for the second half kickoff. The ball perched on the kicking tee.

[00:33:14]She was still on the field. The referee blew his whistle, pointed to her. He flapped his hand for her to go away.

[00:33:21]Instead, she dashed for the ball. She plucked it off the tee and danced with it, spinning and hugging it and hoisting it into the air.

[00:33:30]The players looked at their coaches. The coaches looked at the officials. The officials blew their whistles and began converging on her.

[00:33:38]The sole policeman on duty headed for the field. She punted the ball over the visiting team's bench and ran from the field and out of the stadium.

[00:33:49]Everyone cheered.

[00:33:50]The spectators, the cheerleaders, the band, the players, the officials, the parents running the hot dog stand, the policeman, me.

[00:34:01]The cheerleaders stared up in delighted surprise. For the first time, they were hearing something come back from the stands.

[00:34:09]They did cartwheels and backflips and even a three-tier pyramid.

[00:34:14]Old-timers, or as old as timers got in a city as young as Mica, said they had never heard such a racket.

[00:34:24]For the next home game, more than a thousand people showed up.

[00:34:28]Everyone but Wayne Parr and Hillary Kimble.

[00:34:31]There was a line at the ticket window.

[00:34:33]The refreshment stand ran out of hot dogs. A second policeman was called in.

[00:34:39]The cheerleaders were in their glory.

[00:34:42]They screamed up at the bleachers, "Give me an E!" The bleachers screamed back, "E!"

[00:34:48]We were the Electrons, in honor of the town's electronics heritage.

[00:34:54]The cheerleaders ran through all their routines before the first quarter was over.

[00:34:59]The band was loud and peppy.

[00:35:01]The football team even scored a touchdown. In the stands, heads kept swinging to the edges of the field, to the entrance, to the street lamp-lighted darkness behind the stadium.

[00:35:13]The sense of expectation grew as the first half came to a close.

[00:35:18]The band marched smartly onto the field.

[00:35:21]Even they were looking around.

[00:35:23]The musicians did their program.

[00:35:26]They even formed a small lopsided circle. They seemed to linger on the field, drawing out their notes, waiting.

[00:35:33]Finally, reluctantly, they marched to the sideline.

[00:35:38]The players returned. They kept glancing around as they did their warm-ups.

[00:35:43]When the referee raised his arm and blew his whistle for the second half to begin, a sense of disappointment fell over the stadium.

[00:35:51]The cheerleader's shoulders sagged.

[00:35:54]She wasn't coming.

[00:35:56]On the following Monday, we got a shock in the lunchroom.

[00:35:59]Bleach blonde and beautiful Mallory Stillwell, captain of the cheerleaders, was sitting with Stargirl.

[00:36:07]She sat with her, ate with her, talked with her, walked out with her.

[00:36:13]By sixth period, the whole school knew.

[00:36:16]Stargirl had been invited to become a cheerleader and had said, "Yes."

[00:36:23]People in Phoenix must have heard us buzzing.

[00:36:27]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?

[00:36:40]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.

[00:36:52]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.

[00:37:04]She looked just like the rest of them.

[00:37:06]Still, to us she was not truly a cheerleader, but Stargirl dressed like one.

[00:37:13]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.

[00:37:24]When Halloween arrived, everyone in her homeroom found a candy pumpkin on his or her desk.

[00:37:31]No one had to ask who did it.

[00:37:33]By then most of us had decided that we liked having her around.

[00:37:38]We found ourselves looking forward to coming to school, to seeing what bizarre antics she'd be up to.

[00:37:44]She gave us something to talk about. She was entertaining.

[00:37:49]At the same time, we held back because she was different.

[00:37:54]Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory, unsafe.

[00:38:05]We were afraid to get too close.

[00:38:08]Also, I think we were all waiting to see the outcome of an event that loomed larger and larger with every passing day.

[00:38:16]The next birthday coming up was Hillary Kimble's.