Stargirl

• Highlights
  • we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. Even our dorks and nerds had a MAHS stamp on them.
  • She made up a song about isosceles triangles. She sang it to her Plane Geometry class. It was called “Three Sides Have I, But Only Two Are Equal.”
  • tip of the iceberg.
  • 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.
  • The pronoun “we” itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.
  • “Best hope it’s not,” he said. “The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long.”
  • behind the dazzling talents and differentness, she was far more normal than I had realized.
  • more eyes on you than all the previous days of your life combined. You feel foolish, exposed, stupid. You want to follow the candy wrapper into the trash can. It’s the most painful thing that’s ever happened to you. Your brain keeps squirting out a single thought: I’m going to die…I’m going to die…
  • you’re feeling so good you pretty much just float on home from school.
  • And when you go to bed that night, the last thing you see before you zonk out are those eyes, and the last thing on your face is a smile.
  • “Don’t tell her I said so, but your mother is wrong.” She turned back to the sun. “It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.”
  • inside me it was rush hour in downtown Phoenix.
  • what a beautiful picture it is!
  • It was a territory of peace, of silence. I had never experienced such utter silence before, such stillness.
  • I sensed her movement, her presence in distant parts of the building. Walking the halls between classes, I didn’t have to see her, I knew she was there:
  • As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other’s eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.
  • They went right on through us as if they were gamma rays.
  • I had an urge to look down at myself, to make sure I was there.
  • She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing.”
  • “It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.
  • there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.
  • Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’?
  • Her eyes went straight to her heart.
  • “I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,”
  • I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.
  • “When a Stargirl cries, she does not shed tears, but light.”