Transcription
Why hello, you are back for Star Girl chapter 2. Probably because chapter one was just so amazing, uh, that you decided to go ahead and read chapter 2. Bravo to you! Let's get started. Uh, Jerry Spinelli. Read to you by the brilliant, yeah, balding people of Daniels Incorporated. If you know Mr. Daniels, you know that I do have a bald head. Uh, very shiny. Chapter 2, here we go. Meeting a new character here. This is kind of the nemesis of the book, the, um, the, uh, antagonist, if you will. Let's read chapter 2.
When we got to school the next day, Hillary Kimbell was holding court at the door. "She's not real," Hillary said, she was sneering. "She's an actress. It's a scam." "Someone called up, who's scamming us?" "The administration." "The P, who else?" "Who cares?" Hillary wagged her head at the absurdity of the question. A hand flashed in the air. "Why, school spirit?" she spat back. "They think this place was too dead last year. Like if they think they plant some nutcakes with the students, like they plant nuts in schools." "Someone else shouted." Hillary glared at the speaker, then continued. "Some nutcase who stirs things up, then maybe all the little, all the little students will go to the game once in a while or join a club instead of making out in the library," chimed another voice. And everyone laughed, and the bell rang, and we went in.
Hillary Kimbell's theory spread throughout the school and was widely accepted. "Do you think Hillary's right?" Kevin asked me. "Star Girl's a plant?" I snickered. "Listen to yourself," he spread his arms. "What, this is Mica Area High School?" I reminded him. "It's not a CIA operation." "Maybe not," he said, "but hope Hill's right." "What would, why would you hope for that?" "If she's not a real St student, we can't have her on the hot seat." Kevin wagged his head and grinned. "As usual, Mr. Director, if you fail to see the whole picture, we could use the show to expose her. Can't you see it?" He did the marquee thing with his hand. "Hot Seat uncovers faculty hooks." I stared at him. "You want her to be a fake, don't you?" He grinned ear to ear. "Absolutely. All ratings will go sky high." I had to admit, the more I saw her, the easier it was to believe she was a plant, a joke, anything but real.
On that second day, she wore bright red, baggy shorts with a bib and shoulder straps, overall shorts. Her sandy hair was pulled into twin plated pigtails, each tied with a bright red ribbon. A rouge smudge applied to each cheek, and she had even dabbed some oversized freckles on her face. She looked like Heidi or Bo Peep, huh? And 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. Then she stared at us. She stared at one face and then another and another. "That's kind of bold," I'm looking at you, St, but almost never get from people, especially strangers. She appeared to be looking for someone, and the whole lunchroom had become very uncomfortable. As she approached our table, I thought, "What if she's looking for me?" The thought terrified me, so I turned from her. I looked at Kevin. I watched him grin goofily up her. He wiggled his fingers in the air and whispered, "Hi, Star Girl." I didn't an, I didn't hear an answer. I was intensely aware of her passing behind my chair. She stopped two tables away. She was smiling at Pudding Body, senior Alan Berko. The lunchroom was dead silence. She started strumming in the uke and singing. It was "Happy Birthday." When she came to the came to the name, she didn't sing his first name, but his full name. "Happy Birthday, dear Alan Ferko." Alan Ferko's face turned red as Bo Peep's pigtail ribbons. There was a flurry of whistles and hoots, more for Alan Ferko's sake, I, I think, than hers. And as Star Girl marched out, I could see Hillary Kimbell across the lunchroom rising from her seat, pointing, saying something that I could not hear.
"I'll tell you one thing," Kevin said as we joined the mob in the hallways. "She'd better be a fake." "I asked him, what he meant?" "Well, I mean, if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who's really like that going to last around here?" "Good question." Mica Area High School, MAHS, was not exactly a hotbed of non-conformity. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits. We wore all the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. Even our dorks and nerds had an MAHS stamp on them. If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands. Kevin was right. It was unthinkable that Star Girl could survive, or at least survive unchanged, among us. But it was also clear that Hillary Kimbell was at least half-right. This person calling herself Star Girl may or may not have been a faculty plant for school spirit, but whatever she was, she was not real. She couldn't be.
Several times in those early weeks of September, she showed up in something outrageous. A 1920s flapper dress, an Indian buckskin, a kimono. 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. Normal for her were long, floor-brushing pioneer dresses and skirts. Every few days in the lunchroom, she serenaded somebody new with "Happy Birthday." I was glad my birthday was in the summer. And in the hallways, she said hello to perfect strangers. The seniors couldn't believe it. They'd never seen a 10th grader so bold. 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 U.S. history class. She made up a song about isosceles triangles. She sang it in her plain geometry class. It was called "Three Sides Have I, But Only Two Are Equal." She joined the cross-country team. Our home meets were held on Mica Country Golf Course Club Golf Course. Red flags showed the the runners the way to go. In her first meet, out in the middle of the course, she turned left when everyone else turned right. They waited for at the finish line. Huh, she never showed up. She was dismissed from the team. One day, a girl screamed in the hallway. She'd seen a tiny brown face pop up from Star Girl's sunflower canvas bag. It was her pet rat. It rode in her school rode to school in the back every day. One morning, we had a rare rainfall. It came during her gym class. The teacher told everyone to come in. On the way to class, they they looked out the windows. Star Girl was still outside in the rain, dancing. We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we couldn't seem to get past weird and strange and goofy. Her ways knocked us off balance. A single word seemed to hover in the cloudless sky over the school. Huh. Everything she did seemed to echo. Huh. Hillary Kimbell, "She's not real. She's not real." And each night in bed, I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlight hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of the day, but its underside, its private side. When the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert, it was during one of those night moon times that it became real to me that Hillary Kimbell was wrong. Star Girl was real, all right.
So, I wonder if anyone knows a, a Star Girl in their school. You know, is Star Girl somebody that, uh, that you know? Maybe somebody that beats to their own tune? Um, quite frankly, I've talked to many, many years of kids about this book, and if, if we refer to them as a Star Girl figure, most kids actually take that as a compliment. What about you? Would you take, uh, someone calling you a Star Girl, or a Star Boy, if you will, uh, would you take that as a compliment or not? Um, well, let's read some more of Star Girl as we, we find out more about this Hillary Kimbell and once she's got up her sleeve to deal with Star World. Thank you so much for listening to chapter 2. Chapter 3 soon to on YouTube. Thanks for listening and God bless.