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1-Page Summary of Stargirl
Overall Summary
When Leo Borlock was a boy, he received a porcupine necktie from his uncle. He decided to start collecting them because he had only one at the time. One day, he was featured in a small newspaper article and then received another porcupine tie as a gift. The sender of that tie remains unknown to this day.
Leo is about to start his freshman year of high school. He’s friends with a kid named Kevin, and they’ve started their own TV show together. They meet Stargirl Caraway, who wears different clothes than the other kids do and brings her pet rat to school. The students gossip that she might be a fake or trying to fit in too much, but Leo thinks there’s something special about her because he can’t figure out why she dresses differently from everyone else.
A few months later, Stargirl shows up at the Mica High football games. She dances around the field and amazes everyone in attendance. The head cheerleader invites her to join the squad, which she does a few weeks later. Leo and Kevin talk about whether or not they should tell Archie Brubaker what’s going on with Stargirl because he helps them out when they need advice from time to time. Eventually, they decide that it would be a good idea to ask him for his advice regarding Stargirl since he has been through so much in his life already. He tells them that people will know who you are by your questions rather than your answers because no one is exactly like anyone else in this world. By December of that year, people were drawn towards Stargirl’s kind nature and started expressing themselves more freely as well as supporting their peers more often than before. It was almost like a golden age where students didn’t care about anything other than being happy together while celebrating each others’ individuality during this period of time after Stargirl showed up at school for the first time ever.
Things change for Stargirl when she makes it to the playoffs. She starts cheering for other teams instead of her own, and soon that becomes a problem. When she’s interviewed on Hot Seat (a TV show), which is led by one of her biggest critics, things get out of hand quickly as they start criticizing her name and cheering style. They end up accusing her of only wanting attention and demanding that she be “normal.”
Leo is a character in the book Stargirl. He’s an outsider, and he also plays basketball for his high school team. In one of his notebooks, Leo finds a valentine from Stargirl. The two begin to date secretly, but they’re shunned by the other students because they think that Stargirl caused Mica High to lose in the playoffs. Archie tells Leo that it’s important to figure out which person he values more—Stargirl or everyone else at Mica High School—and then make up his mind about her. Meanwhile, Leo helps Stargirl with her secret missions and learns more about who she really is as a person.
Leo loves spending time with Stargirl, but he also feels like his classmates don’t accept her. He wishes that she would just conform to what everyone else wants instead of being herself. Leo confronts Stargirl about this and they have a big argument. She doesn’t understand why Leo is so concerned about what other people think since they live in a world where there are “them” and “us.” The next day, Stargirl shows up at school wearing normal clothes and calls herself Susan again. Leo is happy because now it’s easier for him to be seen with her in public. But Susan’s attempts to fit in aren’t working as well as she’d hoped, so she decides that if she wins the state oratorical contest then all of her problems will be solved once and for all. Sure enough, when the contest comes around Susan performs wonderfully and receives an overwhelming amount of praise from everyone except two teachers who still call her Stargirl behind closed doors (and Dori Dilson who remains loyal). Afterward, at Mica High School on Monday morning, nobody talks to Susan except for Dori Dilson; even though everybody knows that Susan won the contest by far! In fact none of them even showed up to watch her perform! Later on during class while the students are doing their work assignments one student named Leo tries talking to me but I ignore him because I know he doesn’t want anything more than friendship between us anymore after our fight last week.
