Love, Stargirl (14 page)

“Who’s the little chick?” said Ponytail.

“Miss Dootsie Pringle,” I said.

“I’m not a little chick,” said Dootsie. “I’m Mrs. Blob.”

Perry gestured toward me. “And this is Stargirl.”

“I thought so,” said Ponytail. “Cool name.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Your parents name you that?”

“I did.”

“And it’s okay with them?”

“Sure.”

“Cool parents. Your mother homeschools you, huh?”

Was there anyone Perry hadn’t blabbed to?

“Yes,” I said.

“Cool. Did you ever go to real school?”

“Homeschool
is
real school,” Perry said.

She stuck her tongue out at Perry, then turned a friendlier face to me. “You know what I mean.”

I nodded. “I know. Yes. I went to a regular high school last year.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Arizona.”

The girls boggled. “Really?” said Stephanie. “What was that like?”

“Hot.”

Zombie snickered. “You mean the guys?”

I thought:
One guy.

I said, “I mean the weather.”

“Didn’t like it?” said Ponytail. “That why you’re back to homeschooling?”

“It didn’t go as well as I had expected,” I said.

Zombie said, “But don’t you miss, like, the people? Other kids?”

“I’m with people a lot,” I said.

“
I’m
a people,” said Dootsie. “I’m a human bean.” She clamped Perry’s nose between her fingers and twisted hard.

Perry yelped: “Oww!”

Dootsie wagged her finger in his face. “Don’t let me catch you kissing any more girls.”

Zombie smirked. “That’ll be the day.”

“Looks like you have a new girlfriend,” said Stephanie. Then she turned to me, but she didn’t speak. She just looked at me. She seemed faintly amused. Finally she said, “So. Stargirl. What do you think?”

Everyone’s eyes were on me.

“Think about what?” I said.

“About joining Perry’s harem?”

I don’t know how long I sat there looking like a doofus before Dootsie finally rescued me. “What’s a harem?” she said.

Ponytail, the only one left standing, reached down and button-pressed Dootsie’s nose. “A harem is when a bunch of girls all like the same guy.”

Zombie stuck her finger in Perry’s ear. “Even if the guy’s a wing nut.”

Ponytail laid a hand on my shoulder. “Little Perry over there doesn’t want to get serious about anybody—”

“—so he’s semi-serious about a bunch of us,” said Stephanie.

“Perry’s a rolling stone,” said Zombie. “He belongs to nobody. Right, Per?”

Perry kept his usual stone face, but I could tell he was enjoying all this. The winky looks I was getting from the girls made me wonder if he had told them about our night on the roof. I hoped not.

Zombie poked him. “Tell her your nickname, Per.”

Perry sniffed. “You tell her.”

She grinned. “Dandy.”

I looked at Perry. “Dandy?”

“As in dandelion,” said Zombie.

“As in flower,” said Ponytail. “As in a flower that attracts lots of honeybees.” She looked at the others, grinning. “And we are—ta-da!” Each of the three girls hoisted a leg onto the table to show nickel-size black and yellow tattoos of honeybees on their ankles. They looked fake, the wash-off type. I hoped they were.

“And Dandy”—Zombie pinched his cheek—“is the flower.”

Ponytail snapped her fingers. “Hey—” She pointed at me. “
Star
girl—” She pointed at herself and the others. “We could be…
Perry
girls!”

Stephanie and Zombie did a drumroll on the tabletop. “Yes!”

Stephanie was staring at me. “She thinks we’re kidding.”

Ponytail studied me. “She thinks we’re lying.”

Zombie poked Perry. “Are we lying, Dandy?”

Perry looked at me. He nodded. “They’re lying.”

“
I
lie,” said Dootsie, but her confession was lost in the laughter and playful battering Perry took from the three girls.

“There’s only one thing about Perry Delloplane that’s a lie,” said Stephanie.

I took the bait. “What’s that?”

“He didn’t really go to boot camp. He went to—” She looked at the others and swept her arms like an orchestra conductor, and on the downbeat they all belted out, “BOOTY CAMP!” and laughed and slapped hands.

Dootsie was fed up with being ignored, and now she saw her opening. She climbed onto the table and stood on the empty aluminum pizza platter. “
I
got a booty!” she proclaimed to everyone, and she hiked up her toga and started to wiggle and a dozen tiny gray Babars shimmied in our faces. Whistles and catcalls flew across the restaurant.

I stood. “Okay. That’s it.” I lifted her from the table. She protested. So did the girls. “It’s past your bedtime,” I told her. “Your parents are going to kill me.”

Patrons applauded as I carried her off. As we went out the door, she called back over my shoulder: “I won!”

On our way up Bridge Street we passed a Laundromat. A lady was sitting inside, reading a magazine. In front of her, two dryers were running. Behind the portholes clothes were tumbling…tumbling…

Like me.

August 25

The mockingbird does not dump me. The mockingbird has no harem. The mockingbird takes nothing, demands nothing. The mockingbird does nothing but give—give its song. After listening to the mockingbird all day, I feel Mockingbird is now my second language. I offer here the world’s first Mockingbird-to-English translation, as recorded late this afternoon:

“Ha ha ho ho hee hee! Wait’ll you hear this one. Beep! Beep! I feel like crooning. Bah bah bah bah boo! Barry Manilow, eat your heart out. Hey hey the gang’s all here! Ha ha ho ho hee hee! Don’tcha just love me? Hey hey the gang’s—hey, where’s the gang? Who needs ’em anyway. Bababababaaaaa bababababooooo. Hey, I just heard a cat-bird the other day. Check this out: meow meow. Nailed it, didn’t I? Carnegie Hall, eat your heart out. Heeheehahahoho. And now, ladies and germs, my impression of a cow-bird: Meowmoo! Meowmoo! Thank you thank you. No need to stand when you applaud. Don’tcha just love me? Hotcha hotcha hotcha!”

August 29

First day of school. I’m now a retired gardener. And Dootsie starts first grade. I hope her teacher got a lot of rest over the summer.

The public school kids will have just a half day. Not this homeschooler. My mother doesn’t believe in half days. “You either have a day or you don’t,” she says. “Is education so scary they feel they have to sneak up on it? Doesn’t it bother anybody to cut time in half?”

I guess all this led her to my first assignment of the new school year…

FIELD TRIP:

THE CLOCK ON THE MORNING LENAPE BUILDING

Must clocks be circles?

Time is not a circle.

Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started

right here, on the sidewalk

in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade

of minutes that followed—each of them, say, one inch long—

headed out that way, down Bridge Street.

Where would
Now
be?
This
minute?

Out past the moon?

Jupiter?

The nearest star?

Who came up with minutes, anyway?

Who needs them?

Name one good thing a minute’s ever done.

They shorten fun and measure misery.

Get rid of them, I say.

Down with minutes!

And while you’re at it—take hours

with you too. Don’t get me started

on them.

Clocks—that’s the problem.

Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.

Clocks strap us into their shape.

Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do

is corkscrew.

Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel

riders of us all, lug us round and round

from number to number,

dice the time of our lives into tiny bits

until the bits are all we know

and the only question we care to ask is

“What time is it?”

As if minutes could tell.

As if Arnold could look up at this clock on

the Lenape Building and read:

15 Minutes till Found.

As if Charlie’s time is not forever stuck

on Half Past Grace.

As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou

to step outside.

As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers

need to know.

My mother raved over it. She put it on the refrigerator. “Wait,” she said, and left. She came back with her wristwatch and a hammer. We went out back. “You want to do it?” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I laid the watch on the bottom step. I hit it with the hammer. The crystal cracked, that was all.

“Here,” she said, taking the hammer from me. She wound up like Paul Bunyan and down came the hammer and to pieces went the watch. Minutes flew off like fleas.

I did the same to my watch. We got a garden trowel and buried the pieces. We took down all the clocks in the house and dumped them in the trash.

“I don’t have to tear down Calendar Hill, do I?” I said.

“No,” she said. “That’s real time.”

August 30

Two more porch lights have joined the Cantellos’ along the way to Calendar Hill. Curious.

September 1

I sliced an orange in half.

In the back of our backyard sits a barbecue pit. It came with the house. We haven’t used it yet. It’s made of brick. The top row of bricks is almost as high as me. That’s where I placed an orange half, sliced side up.

September 3

Margie herself was sweeping the floor today.

“Where’s Alvina?” I asked her.

She leaned on the broom, sighed, wagged her head. “I fired her.”

(Can you be “fired” from a job that pays you in donuts?)

“What happened?” I said.

“Fighting with those boys again. I told her too many times already. Don’t bring that stuff into my shop. One more time and you’re gone. She can’t say I didn’t warn her.”

“She’s a pip,” I said.

“Tell me about it.” She stared at me. “So…you want a job?”

“Not this one.”

“I’d pay you
real
money.
Plus
donuts.”

“I love your donuts too much to be around them all the time,” I told her. “If I worked here, smelling them, eating them every day, they would stop being so special to me. When I walk in your door I want to be thrilled.”

She looked at me as if I were daffy. She shrugged—“Okay, have it your way”—and went on sweeping.

I thought of Betty Lou. Who would bring her donuts every Monday now? I asked Margie.

“Same as always,” she said. “I’d never forget Betty Lou. When I fired the kid, she said she’s still gonna come for Betty Lou’s donuts on Mondays. Fine, I said.”

Good for you, Alvina,
I thought.

“Sounds like she’s not mad at you for firing her,” I said.

“She’s never mad at me,” she said. “She knows I don’t take any guff.”

“So,” I said, “you know Betty Lou?”

“Sure. We graduated together. She was a looker in those days. Dogwood Festival. She was in the Court.”

“She told me.”

“Should have been Queen.”

“Really?”

“Really. Her problem was, she wasn’t flashy enough. Her hair was mousy. Plain clothes. No pizzazz. Shy. Never talked. The best-looking girl in the class, but you had to strain to see it. It’s a wonder she made the Court. Probably got the votes of all the other shy violets.”

Margie was at the counter now, using a marker on a sheet of paper. She held it up to me. It said
HELP WANTED
. She found a roll of tape and fixed it to the shopwindow. She gave the front door a punch. “Doggone that girl. She was a great sweeper.”

September 5

Speaking of Alvina…

I got a phone call today from her mother. She started off saying Alvina “always speaks well” of me and that I seem to be one of the few friends she has these days. She said she appreciated how I handled the Calamity of the Broken Fingernail, and she was very happy with my work in the garden. Which was all very nice, but I wondered what she was getting at. She asked me if I knew Alvina had been “dismissed” from her job at Margie’s. I said yes, I had heard. She said did I know Alvina had been home from school today? I said no. She said, “Well, she was. She was suspended for one day.” Her voice snagged on the word “suspended.”

“Can you guess why?” she said.

“Fighting?” I said, maybe too quickly.

“Yes,” she said. “And the school year is just beginning. I’m afraid to think what lies ahead. She seems to be getting worse.”

I thought of Alvina’s stare down with Dootsie across the table at Margie’s. I thought of her promise to continue delivering Betty Lou’s donuts even after she’d been fired. “Mrs. Klecko,” I said, “I know I don’t have any business saying this to you because you already knew it long before me, but Alvina is a good kid. I think there’s nothing wrong that a little time won’t cure. I think she’s just sort of caught between dolls and boys.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. I got the impression that Mrs. Klecko was composing herself. Finally she said, “Thank you. I think so too. At least I hope so. In the meantime”—she gave a little chuckle—“we’ve all got to live through it, don’t we?”

I chuckled. “That we do.”

“So…I have a big favor to ask of you—and I want to make it clear right up front that we would insist on paying you for this—her father and I were wondering if you would be willing to take Alvina under your wing, so to speak. For a little while. Maybe you can smooth out the rough edges. She likes you.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Wow.”

“Daunting?”

“Yes, I guess so. It’s not how I picture myself, in charge of somebody. I don’t know if I want that much responsibility for another person.”

“It’s not like that. You wouldn’t be ‘in charge of’ her. We’re not asking you to come up with some sort of program. We’re just asking you to be around her. Hang out with her. Take her with you now and then when you go someplace.”

“So you’re not expecting, like, a boot camp?”

She laughed. “Oh please, no. Just be yourself, that’s all. Big sister without the bossiness. Hopefully something will rub off on her.”

Well, I still wasn’t comfortable with the whole idea, but I finally said okay, but only if she promised not to pay me. She agreed. So now I’m Alvina’s—gulp!—big sister.

September 6

Every day so far I’ve been putting an orange half on top of the barbecue. Today I put it three houses down the back alley, on the roof of a toolshed.

September 7

We went to the mall today—my new “little sister” Alvina and me on our bikes, Dootsie in her cart behind me. They had the school day off, I played hooky. Dootsie wanted a Babar the Elephant lunch box. She didn’t want to take her lunch to school in it. She just wanted to carry the lunch box.

She forgot about the lunch box as soon as she spotted Piercing Pagoda. “I wanna nose ring!” she cried, pulling me toward the mid-aisle stall.

“No,” I told her. “You already have your ears pierced. Your mother would not allow it.”

She hugged me. “You’re my boss now. You can say yes.” She turned up the charm.
“Pleeeeease.”

“You’re wasting your adorable face,” I told her. “Besides, they don’t even do noses here.”

She stomped her foot. “Bullpoopy.”

“I want a tattoo,” said Alvina. Just as I was turning to respond, a hand flashed out and slapped the back of her head and three boys went racing by. Alvina screamed, “I’ll kill you!” and started after them, but she jerked to a halt because my hand was tight on the back of her collar. “Oww!” she squawked. “You broke my
neck.
”

“Sorry,” I said. At that moment I was glad she wasn’t my real little sister.

She reached for my hand. “Let
go.
”