Transcription
Well, hello Stargirl chapter 3 viewers. We are back for another amazing chapter from author Jerry Spinelli. Let's dive right into this. I hope you enjoyed chapter 2, and, uh, let's find out what the legacy of Stargirl is from this chapter.
We fought daily. Kevin and I. My main job as a producer was to recruit people for the hot seat. After I signed someone up, I began researching the person, getting his questions ready. Every day, he asked me, "Did you sign her up?" Every day, I answered, "No." He got frustrated. "What do you mean, no? Don't you want to sign her up?" I told him I wasn't sure. His eyes bugged out. "Not sure? How can you not be sure? We high-fived in the lunchroom weeks ago. We were thinking Stargirl miniseries. Even this is a hot seat from heaven." I shrugged. "Well, that was then. Now I'm not sure." He looked at me like I had three years. "What's there not to be sure about?" I shrugged. "Well, then," he said, "I'll sign her up." He walked away. "You'll have to find another director then," I said. He stopped. I could almost see the steam rising from his shoulders. He turned and pointed. "Leo, you could be a real jerk sometimes." He walked off.
It was uncomfortable. Kevin Quinland and I usually agreed on everything. We've been best friends since arriving in Arizona the same week, four years before. We both thought that the prickly pear cactus looked like ping pong paddles with whiskers, and its saguaros looked like dinosaur mittens. We both loved strawberry banana smoothies. We both wanted to go into television. Kevin often said he wanted to be a sleazy talk show host, and he wasn't kidding. I wanted to be a sports announcer or a news anchor. We conceived "Hot Seat" together and convinced the faculty to let us do it. It was an instant hit. It quickly became the most popular thing in school. So why was I balking? I didn't know. I had some vague feelings, but the only one I could identify was a warning: leave her alone.
In time, Hillary's hypothesis, so-called by Kevin about Stargirl's origins, gave way to other theories. She was trying to get herself discovered for the movies. She was sniffing fumes. She was homeschooled. Game mock. She was an alien. 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. She lived in a ghost town in the desert. She lived in a bus. Her parents were circus acrobats. Her parents were witches. Her parents were brain-dead vegetables in a hospital in Yuma.
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. We saw her stretch out a three-inch clear glass vase and drop it into a white and yellow daisy. She did this and undid this in class, every class she attended, six times a day. Only Monday mornings was the daisy fresh. By last period, the petals were drooping. By Wednesday, the petals began to fall. The stem to sag. By Friday, the flower hung over in the of the waterless vase, its dead stump of a head shedding yellow dust in the pencil grove. We joined her as she sang "Happy Birthday" to us in the lunchroom. We heard her greet us in the hallways and classrooms, and we wondered how she knew our names and our birthdays. Her cotton headlights eyes gave her a look of perpetual astonishment, so much that we found ourselves turning and looking back over our shoulders, wondering what we were missing. She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school. In her answers in class, she often spoke of seahorses and stars, but she did not know what a football was. She said there was no television in her house. She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds, we tried to pin her in a cup, in a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.
Kevin wasn't the only one. Other kids pestered me, "Put her on the hot seat." I lied. I said I was only a 10th grader, and you had to be at least a junior to be on "Hot Seat." Meanwhile, I kept my distance. I observed her. If she were a bird in an aviary. One day, I turned a corner and there she was, coming right at me. The long skirt softly rustling, looking straight at me, surrounding me with those eyes. I turned and trotted off the other way, seating myself on my next class. I felt warm, shaky. I wondered if my foolishness showed. Was I myself becoming goofy? The feeling I had when I saw her around the corner and did something like a panic.
Then one day, after school, I followed her. I kept a safe distance. Since she was not known to take the bus, I expected her walk to be short. It wasn't. We tracked over Micah, past hundreds of grassless stone and cactus front yards, through the Torrey shopping center, skirting the electronics business park around which the city had been invented a mere 15 years before. 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. Abruptly, she turned up a driveway, went in the front door, and left something in the mailbox. I waited for her to move off. I looked around. No one on the street. I went to the mailbox, pulled out a card, opened it. Each tall letter was a different painted color. The card said, "Congratulations." It was unsigned.
I resumed following her. Cars pulled into driveways. It was dinner time. My parents would be wondering. She took the rat from her bag and put it on her shoulder, riding there. The rat faced backward, its tiny trying to her face, peeping out of her s-colored hair. I could not see its beady black eyes, but I guessed it was looking at me. I fancied it was telling her what it saw. I fell farther back. Shadows across 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 next golf course in the next town. We passed the welcome mic a sign. We were walking westward. There was us and the highway and the desert and the sun blazing above the Maricopa Mountains. I wish I had my sunglasses.
After a while, she veered off from the highway. I hesitated, then followed. She was walking directly into the setting sun, now a great orange perch on top the crest mountain crests. For a minute, the mountains were the same dusky lavender as their sand skimming skirt. With every step, the silence grew, as did the sense of what she knew, had known all along, that she was being followed, or more, that she was leading me. She never looked back. She strummed her ukulele. She sang. I could no longer see the rat. I imagined it was riding, it was dozing in the curtain of her hair. I imagined it was singing along. The sun lay down behind the mountains. Where was she going? In the gathering dusk, the saguaros flung shadows of giants across the pebbled earth. The air was cool on my face. The desert smelled of apples. I heard something. A coyote. I thought of rattlesnakes and scorpions. I stopped. I watched her walk on. I stifled an impulse to call after her, to warn her of what. I turned and walked, and then ran back to the highway.
All right, so how many people are, uh, ready to call Leo stalker boy after that one? That was quite the, uh, the scene there, Leo. Anyone ever been stalked home from school? Uh, I hope not. Uh, rather creepy. I, I think that Leo is just infatuated with Stargirl. What do you all think? Do you think that, uh, that he's going to put her on the hot seat? Do you think Hillary Kimball's going to have the last word here? She wasn't really mentioning much in that chapter other than, uh, the lies that she's spreading there. Well, hey, tune in to the next amazing chapter of Stargirl. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this amazing chapter on YouTube. God bless.