Love, Stargirl (25 page)

I stood before the back panel. Some were still facing away, eastward. “Look this way,” I said. “The hole will squeeze the first light of winter into a beam that will land”—I took a deep breath and pointed—“here.”

Then I stepped aside—and that was all I did. I had decided the night before, after talking with Archie, that there would be no performance, no ceremony. I would not wear special clothes. I would not sing. I would not dance. I had torn up the poem I had written, left the bittersweet wreath and ukulele at home. I would not dress the dog. I would let nature speak for itself.

When I think back on it, I’m not sure which was the highlight for me—the sunrise itself or the moments before. I stood to one side, next to Archie, Betty Lou’s sled in front of me. I would never have guessed that so many people could be so silent. It was more than the absence of sound. It was a presence. An expectation. A reverence. All of us staring at the blank tent wall, the black curtain that would not uncover the show but would become the show itself, staring, waiting, as pure a waiting as I’ve ever known. I never had the sense that it arrived—it was simply
not there,
and then it was
there:
a long thin stem of light the width of Dootsie’s little wrist, a thin golden gift from the sun come 93 million miles to mark a perfect golden circle on the Blackbone panel. Gasps erupted behind me. The circle blurred as tears filled my eyes. Someone sobbed, “Oh my.” Someone cried softly, “Beautiful!” Many of us could have reached out and touched the golden stem. No one did.

I felt a tug. It was Betty Lou. She was reaching back, grabbing my hand, pulling me. I leaned forward. She whispered: “Thank you.” Archie held my other hand.

Someone was moving on the other side of the golden stem. It was Perry. He took a sideways step and held out his new baby sister until her blue blanket sliced the light, intercepting the beam. He moved her until the sunburst button on her blanket fell in line with the sunbeam’s circle, and when they came together they were a perfect match. The baby, wide-eyed at the crowd, seemed to know it was a unique moment. Perry held her like that briefly, looked across at me and smiled and nodded, and took her back to his place.

The beam began to dissipate then, as the sun cleared the horizon and flooded the world with light. Still the people stayed, watching as the golden circle frayed and dissolved across the Blackbone. It reminded me of a movie that is so good the audience just sits there staring at the rolling credits after the lights go on. Suddenly the simple phrase “another day” had new meaning.

In time the people began to stir and head back to their cars and bicycles. There was some whispering among them, but not much. Many were wiping their eyes. Mrs. Huffelmeyer hugged me. So did Charlie, and others. Alvina and Dootsie bickered over the leftover buttons. I spotted Alvina across the snowfield. She was walking behind the blond-haired boy. She reached out….
Oh no!
I thought…and then I smiled, because she didn’t hit him, she merely touched his shoulder and veered away. She was counting coup. The boy turned to look after her but I couldn’t see the expression on his face.

Dootsie called, “Stargirl, look!” She was holding baby Clarissa. Perry looked a bit nervous, but Neva was smiling easily as she held on to Ike’s arm. And then Dootsie was calling, “Your turn!” and running for me. “Stay!” I called. Perry lurched, but I got there first and took the baby. I have never seen a face as filled with gratitude as Perry’s at that moment. I talked with Clarissa and we got to know each other a little and agreed to meet again soon. And then Perry and his family left and Arnold’s mother, Rita, came by to return Cinnamon, and when I turned around again everyone was gone but Archie and my parents and Dootsie.

Nothing is more forlorn, more useless, than an expired calendar. My father was pulling up tent rope stakes, and my mother was coming at me with both arms out, saying, “I’m so proud of you!” She threw her arms around me and I lost it. I burst into tears. I was surprised. I hadn’t felt it coming. I went on and on. Curiously, no one tried to stop me. I left my mother and walked off by myself into the snowfield, crying away. I didn’t get far before a little hand slipped into mine. I’m sure Dootsie was too young to understand what was going on—heck,
I
was too young—and yet I know that she and I were somehow touching the same thing. She didn’t say a word, just walked slowly through the snow with me toward the horizon in the west, where the sun would later bring this day to a close. When we stopped and turned back, the Blackbone sheets were down and the last of the tent poles was falling.

December 24

Archie went home today. He didn’t want Señor Saguaro to be alone for Christmas.

Yesterday we talked late into the night. Somewhere around his third pipe bowl of cherry tobacco he said, “Do you know why you cried the other day?”

“Yes and no,” I said.

“Many reasons, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Hard to give a name to.”

“Yes.”

“But one reason—”

“Yes.”

“—does have a name.”

I looked at him. “Yes.”

He pulled a small folded envelope from his shirt pocket. “He asked me to give this to you. He knew about your Solstice, from me and your friend Dori Dilson. He said to give it to you after it was over. He didn’t want to distract you. Maybe that was a mistake, but”—he shrugged—“I just do what I’m told.” He handed me the envelope.

I was about to rip it open, then feared I might rip the contents too. I got a steak knife from the drawer. I didn’t trust myself. I gave the knife and envelope to Archie. “You open it. Be careful.”

He slit open the envelope and returned it to me. My hands were shaking. It was a single piece of paper, white, small, folded in quarters, the way a little kid folds a letter. Fold by fold I opened it. There was one word, in bold royal blue marker ink, all capital letters:

YES

My heart took flight. You heard me, didn’t you, dear, dear Leo? All those sunrise mornings when I sat on Calendar Hill with my eyes closed, when I turned from the sunrise to face the west, sending you my message, my question:

Will we ever meet again?

And you received it—I knew you would, I
knew
it, I
knew
it—and now you’ve answered.

“Oh no, not again,” Archie was saying, but he was being playful because he could see that my tears were happy ones this time. I laughed and told him all about it as Cinnamon nibbled around the edges of YES.

January 2

Christmas and New Year’s were both kind of lost on me this time around. Wonder why.

I’ve been daydreaming a lot lately, taking long walks, bike rides. I went to Calendar Hill for one last time. It looks so ordinary now, just another field on another hill. I stood in the middle, where the croquet stake had been. I tried to conjure the magic of that morning, but I could not. But I did feel something else, a lingering presence of the people who had been there. And a sudden swelling of affection for them. I see them wearing their sunburst buttons around town. Margie has had some made and gives one to each customer who orders a dozen donuts.

Nothing has really changed, and yet in some hard-to-explain way, everything has. Dootsie begs me five times a day to let her saw me in half. She got a magic kit for Christmas. Alvina has turned twelve. I gave her a doll for her birthday. My mother made two outfits for it: a gown and karate jamas. Arnold shuffles forth daily, waiting to be found. Charlie sits in his red and yellow scarf and talks to Grace.

For the first week after Solstice, Betty Lou came outside only if someone pulled her in a sled or wagon. On New Year’s Day Dootsie and I each took a hand and walked her around the block. This morning she called me, thrilled: “I just walked to the mailbox! By myself!” Perry pushes his new baby sister around town, and sometimes I do too. I’ve become chief babysitter. I am referred to as Aunt Stargirl. Clarissa’s second home has already become Margie’s, where Neva will begin working again next week.

Oh yes—Cinnamon. I got a call from Arnold’s mother, Rita. It seems that Tom, despite the name, is pregnant. Apparently Arnold has a fertile coat pocket. Cinnamon is going to be a daddy!

And my happy wagon is holding steady at seventeen pebbles.

And so the days pass, twelve of them since the sun began its journey back to summer. Ordinary days, ordinary creatures. Ordinary, usual, everyday life—and yet it all seems so special now, the commonest gestures flecked with glitter, as if a sparkle from the golden beam clung to every person who went down from Calendar Hill that morning.

As I stood that final time on the hill, I decided that—yes—I will mail this world’s longest letter to you. I know now that you too were there that morning, as surely as the Lenape maiden and Charlie’s Grace were there. Your answer has been a new sunrise for me, my own personal Solstice, the dawn of a season that I will, as Betty Lou would say, inhabit one day at a time. I will sail into the future on mystery’s wings and I will not look back. Oh yes, I do love Arnold, but I have been too much like him. We Arnolds, our hearts yearn backward. We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home. But I no longer hope to be found, Leo. Do not follow me! Let’s just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I’ll be me, today and today and today, and let’s trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!

Love and Love and Love Again,

JERRY SPINELLI
is the author of many books for young readers, including
Stargirl; Milkweed; Crash; Maniac Magee,
winner of the Newbery Medal;
Wringer,
winner of a Newbery Honor;
Eggs;
and
Knots in My Yo-yo String,
his autobiography. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, poet and author Eileen Spinelli.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Jerry Spinelli

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS
, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spinelli, Jerry.

Love, Stargirl / Jerry Spinelli.—1st ed.

p.         ;         ;         ; cm.

SUMMARY
: Still moping months after being dumped by her Arizona boyfriend Leo, Stargirl, a home-schooled free spirit, writes “the world’s longest letter” to Leo, describing her new life.

[1. Love—Fiction. 2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 3. Home schooling—Fiction. 4. Diaries—Fiction. 5. Letters—Fiction. 6. Pennsylvania—Fiction.] I.Title.

PZ7.S75663Ls 2007

[Fic]—dc22

2007002308

eISBN: 978-0-375-89081-9

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