Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

what?”
    “Two years ago. My birthday. I found a package on my front step. A porcupine necktie. I never found out who gave it to me.”
    She walked her bike alongside mine. She grinned. “A mystery.”
    “Where did you find it?” I said.
    “I didn’t. I had my mother make it.”
    She didn’t seem to want to dwell on the subject. She started pedaling and we continued on our way.
    “Where were we?” she said.
    “Getting credit,” I said.
    “What about it?”
    “Well, it’s nice to get credit.”
    The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. “Is it?” she said.

21
    On weekends and after dinner, we delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. She made her own cards. She wasn’t a great artist. Her people were stick figures. The girls all had triangle skirts and pigtails. You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild’s homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name.
    But finally, after much pestering from me, she did tell me how she knew what was going on in people’s lives. It was simple, she said. She read the daily paper. Not the headlines or the front page or the sports page or the comics or the TV listings or the Hollywood gossip. What she read were the parts that most people ignored, the parts without headlines and pictures, the boondocks of the paper: the hospital admissions, the death notices, the birthday and wedding announcements, the police blotter, the coming events calendar.
    Most of all, she read the fillers.
    “I
love
fillers!” she exclaimed.
    “What are fillers?” I said.
    She explained that fillers are little items that are not considered important enough to be a story or to have a headline. They’re never more than one column wide, never more than an inch or two deep. They are most commonly found at the bottoms of inside pages, where the eye seldom travels. If the editors had their way, they would never use fillers. But sometimes a reporter doesn’t write quite enough words, and the story doesn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the page. The paper can’t have a blank space there, so the editor dumps in a filler. A filler doesn’t need to be “news.” It doesn’t need to be important. It doesn’t even need to be read. All it’s asked to do is take up space.
    A filler might come from anywhere and be about anything. It might tell how many pounds of rice a typical Chinese person eats in a lifetime. Or say something about beetles in Sumatra. Or the filler might come from down the street. It might mention that so-and-so’s cat is missing. Or that so-and-so has a collection of antique marbles.
    “I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,” she said.
    “So that’s it?” I said. “You read the papers?”
    “No,” she said, “that’s not all. There’s also the place where I get my hair cut. I always overhear good stuff there. And of course there’re bulletin boards. Do you know how many bulletin boards there are in town?”
    “Sure,” I said facetiously, “I count them every day.”
    “So do I,” she said, not kidding. “So far, I’m up to forty-one.”
    Offhand, I couldn’t think of one, except the plywood roadrunner. “What do you learn from bulletin boards?”
    “Oh…somebody just opened a business. Somebody lost a dog. Somebody needs a companion.”
    “Who advertises for a companion?” I said. “Who needs one that bad?”
    “Lonely people,” she said. “Old people. Just somebody to sit with them for a while.”
    I pictured Stargirl sitting in a dark room with an old woman. I couldn’t picture myself doing the same thing. Sometimes she seemed so far from me.
    We were passing Pisa Pizza. “There’s a bulletin board in there,” she said.
    It was just