Free Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli Page A

She sees with the eyes of a child. She is happy and forever singing. She lives with an old couple in the forest by a lake, and when a knight named Hans comes by, she thinks he is the most beautiful creature she has ever seen. She wants nothing more than to be his wife and to live happily ever after. But it’s not as simple as that. She has been fished up into a world that does not understand its Ondines. In the end the people reject her and banish her to the waters from which she came. Her beloved Hans dies on the shore. Mercifully, her memory of him is erased, and when she later sees him from the water she is struck anew by his beauty and she cries out: “How I should have loved him!”
    Why was he reading this? Why was he reading at all? How could he be reading a book that, now that I’ve read it too, turns out to be my favorite of all time?
             
    July 9
    I woke up to a frantic phone call from Dootsie: “Hurry! There’s a red slipper in Betty Lou’s window!”
    Ten minutes later we were in her living room. First thing I did was take the red slipper sock from the front window.
    “Sorry,” she said, slumped on the sofa. “I didn’t mean to bother you. Sometimes it just gets to me.”
    “Hey,” I said, “that’s what good friends are for—bad days.”
    Betty Lou was forbidden to work, but she was allowed to give directions, and that’s how Dootsie and I, master pastry chefs, managed to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies. We fed her, combed her hair, massaged her feet, read to her, sang to her, danced for her, and by dinnertime she was dancing along with us.
             
    July 11
    Did I tell you?—I’m a working girl. I call myself the Garden Groomer. I put a sign in Margie’s window and an ad in the
Lenape
classifieds. Mr. Pringle made me some business cards on his computer. My logo is a worm with a baseball cap and a big smile. I’m not a flower expert, so I don’t do anything fancy. Just simple stuff—weed, water, deadhead. And I’m cheap. That’s probably the main reason I get jobs. That and my ultra-cool wheelbarrow. I bought it at the hardware store. I painted my worm on one side and a sunflower on the other.
    Today I was at the house of a family named Klecko. Mrs. Klecko had called me last week. The house is beautiful, gray stone with a wraparound porch and yellow awnings, on a street shaded by sycamores.
    I went right to the back, which is part brick patio, part grass, and the most beautiful garden I’ve worked on so far. The flowers alone would have been enough, but there was more—elegant grasses taller than me, little stone sculptures (a child reading, a garden angel), a white birch and a pair of holly trees, a flagstone path winding through it all. As I’ve told you before, enchanted places cannot be created, they can only be discovered—but the Kleckos’ garden comes pretty close.
    The first thing I did was pick up the plastic toys and toss them onto the grass. Obviously, a little kid lived here—a boy, judging from the army tank and water pistol. Then I started in on the deadheading. (Sounds gruesome, but all it means is snipping off dead flowers, so the plant can direct all of its energy to the living.) I was pulling off some cone-flowers when I heard an agonized scream coming from the house. Then a second scream. Then a voice: “I’ll kill you!” And another voice: “I’ll tell Mommy!”
    I was debating whether to go into the house and thinking that first voice sounded familiar when a brown-haired little boy in nothing but Batman underpants shot out the back door screaming and made a beeline for me. He was followed a second later by none other than…Alvina!
    The boy crashed into me and swung around behind me, hugging me, his ear buried in my rear end, his arms wrapped around my hips. Alvina came up short when she recognized me.
    “What are you doing here?” she snarled.
    “I’m grooming the garden,” I said. “Do you live here?” I realized I