“Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters. "I hate change," she said. "It's so . . . jangly.""Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said."Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?”

“As we meandered, she said my name three times:"Stargirl?""Yes?""That was better than TV.""It was.""Stargirl?""Yes?""Does the sun do that everyday?""Yes.""Stargirl?""Yes?""Everyday is sun day.”

“He stared at me. "She liked you, boy." The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink."Yes," I said."She did it for you, you know.""What?""Gave up her self, for a while there. She loved you that much. What an incredibly lucky kid you were."I could not look at him. "I know."He shook his head with a wistful sadness. "No, you don't. You can't know yet. Maybe someday..."I knew he was tempted to say more. Probably to tell me how stupid I was, how cowardly, that I blew the bestchance I would ever have. But his smile returned, and his eyes were tender again, and nothing harsherthan cherry smoke came out of his mouth.”

“I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins.”

“It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.”

“She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.'Maybe that explains it,' I said.”

“Happy". I had not heard that word since Mr. Milgrom spoke it at the last Hanukkah. I asked him the question that had been on my mind since then. "Tata, what is happy?"He looked at me and at the ceiling and back to me."Did you ever taste an orange?" he said. ”