Read Online Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli - Free Book Online Page A

is mucho in love.”
    “She’s goofy, that’s all.”
    The bell rang. We gathered our stuff and left.
    I wobbled through the rest of the day. A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? So why did this one feel like the first?
    After school my feet carried me toward her homeroom. I was trembling. My stomach had flies. I had no idea what I was going to do if I saw her. I only knew I couldn’t
not
go.
    She wasn’t there. I hurried through the hallways. I ran outside. The buses were loading. Cars were revving. Hundreds of kids were scattering. For months she had been everywhere, now she was nowhere.
    I heard her name.
Her name
. The same two syllables, the same eight letters that I had been hearing all year, and suddenly the sound struck my ear with a
ping
of pure silver. I drifted sideways to overhear. A group of girls was chattering toward a bus.
    “When?”
    “Today. After school. Just now!”
    “I don’t believe it!”
    “I don’t believe it took so long.”
    “Kicked off? Are they allowed?”
    “Sure. Why not? It’s not
her
school.”
    “I would’ve kicked her off long ago. It was treason.”
    “Good riddance.”
    I knew what they were talking about. It had been rumored for days. Stargirl had been kicked off the cheerleading squad.
    “Hi, Leo!”
    A chorus of girl voices calling my name. I turned. They were in front of the sun. I shaded my eyes. They sang in unison: “Starboy!” They laughed. I waved and hurried home. I could never have admitted it, but I was thrilled.
    Her house was two miles from mine, behind a little ten-store shopping center. Archie had told me where. I walked. I didn’t want to ride. I wanted to be slow about it. I wanted to feel myself getting closer step by step, feel the tension rising like fizz in a soda bottle.
    I did not know what I would do if I saw her. I knew only that I was nervous, afraid. I was more comfortable with her as history than as person. Suddenly, intensely, I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to see her baby pictures. I wanted to watch her eating breakfast, wrapping a gift, sleeping. Since September she had been a performer—unique and outrageous—on the high school stage. She was the opposite of cool; she held nothing back. From her decorated desk to her oratorical speech to her performance on the football field, she was there for all to see. And yet now I felt I had not been paying attention. I felt I had missed something, something important.
    She lived on Palo Verde. For a person so different, her house was surprisingly ordinary, at least by Arizona standards. Single story. Pale adobe. Clay-red pipetile roof. Not a blade of grass in the small front yard, but rather barrel and prickly pear cacti and clusters of stones.
    It was dark, as I had intended, when I got there. I walked up and down the other side of the street. It occurred to me I might be mistaken for a prowler, so I walked around the block. I stopped into Roma Delite for a slice of pizza. Gulped down only half of it, hurried back out, couldn’t relax when her house was not in sight. Couldn’t relax when it was.
    At first it was enough just to see the house. Then I began to wonder if she was inside. I wondered what she could be doing. Light came from every window I could see. There was a car in the driveway. The longer I hung around, the closer I wanted to be. I crossed the street and practically dashed past the house. As I went by, I scooped up a stone from the yard. I went up the street, turned, and looked at her house in the distance.
    I whispered to the salt-sprinkled sky, “That’s where Stargirl Caraway lives. She likes me.”
    I headed back toward the house. The street, the sidewalks were deserted. The stone was warm in my hand. This time I walked slowly as I approached. I felt strange. My eyes fixed on a triangle of light in a curtained window. I saw a shadow on a