Stargirl Read Online Free PDF

boy from Yuma. The most riveting moments of the film came not during the contest, but during its aftermath. When the boy arrived back at Yuma High, the whole school mobbed him in the parking lot: banners, cheerleaders, band music, confetti, streamers. Pumping his arms in the air, the returning hero rode their shoulders into school.
    The film ended, the lights went on, and the judges proclaimed Stargirl the winner. She would now go on to the district competition in Red Rock, they said. The state finals would be held in Phoenix in April. Again and again we whooped and whistled.
    Such was the acclamation we gave her in those last weeks of the year. But we also gave something to ourselves.

9
    In the Sonoran Desert there are ponds. You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry. Nor would you know that inches below your feet, frogs are sleeping, their heartbeats down to once or twice per minute. They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves. For many months they sleep like this within the earth. And then the rain comes. And a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and at night a hundred voices call across the moonlit water.
    It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life. For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled. If someone got an A, others celebrated, too. If someone sprained an ankle, others felt the pain. We discovered the color of each other’s eyes.
    It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion
for
rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.
    Kids whose voices had never been heard before spoke up in class. “Letters to the Editor” filled a whole page of the school newspaper’s December edition. More than a hundred students tried out for the Spring Revue. One kid started a camera club. Another wore Hush Puppies instead of sneakers. A plain, timid girl painted her toenails kelly green. A boy showed up with purple hair.
    None of this was publicly acknowledged. There were no PA announcements, no TV coverage, no headlines in the
Mica Times:
    MAHS STUDENTS ASTIR
INDIVIDUALITY ERUPTS
    But it was there; it was happening. I was used to peering through the lens, to framing the picture, and I could see it. I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away. But I didn’t know what to do about it. There was no direction to my liberation. I had no urge to color my hair or trash my sneakers. So I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun “we” itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.
    Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before. It echoed from the rafters in the gym: “GO, ELECTRONS!” It sparkled in the water fountains. At the holiday assembly, the words of the alma mater had wings.
    “It’s a miracle!” I gushed to Archie one day.
    He stood on the edge of his back porch. He did not turn. He pulled the pipe slowly from between his lips. He spoke as if to Señor Saguaro or to the blazing mountains beyond.
    “Best hope it’s not,” he said. “The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long.”
    And the trouble with bad times is, you can’t sleep through them.
    It was a golden age, those few weeks in December and January. How could I know that when the end came, I would be in the middle of it?

10
    All my resistance to putting Stargirl on
Hot Seat
vanished. “Okay,” I said to Kevin, “let’s do it. Schedule her.” He started off. I grabbed his arm. “Wait—ask her first.”
    He