Part 2
Stargirl joins the school cheerleading squad, and immediately does the unthinkable: she cheers wildly for BOTH teams, leaping up to celebrate a good play no matter which side makes it. To Mica’s fans, loyalty means rooting only for your own team, and her open-hearted delight in everyone’s success baffles and irritates them even as it draws their eyes. Leo, watching from behind the camera of his student show ‘Hot Seat,’ finds himself more and more captivated by her — unable to look away, half-afraid of how much he wants to understand her. His friend and co-host Kevin is fascinated too, and begins pushing to book Stargirl as a guest on the show, sensing she would be television gold. Not everyone is charmed. Hillari Kimble, a sharp-tongued, popular girl, despises Stargirl on sight and declares loudly that the newcomer is a phony putting on an act. Wayne Parr, the boy the whole school quietly admires for being effortlessly cool, drifts through it all supremely indifferent. As Stargirl keeps being exactly herself — cheering, singing, caring — the school splits between fascination and hostility, and Leo is pulled steadily deeper into her strange orbit.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Crowd & conflict words: fascinate, hostile, loathe, defy, scrutiny… |
| Literary Elements | Hillari as a foil, the ukulele as symbol, and person-versus-society conflict |
| Cross-Curricular | Peer pressure — how the group bends the way we act and even see |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapters 5–6 | Cheering for Everyone — Stargirl joins the squad and cheers for both teams, baffling Mica’s fans; Leo, watching, grows more and more captivated by her. |
| Chapters 7–8 | Fans and Foes — Kevin pushes to book Stargirl on ‘Hot Seat’; Hillari Kimble loudly calls her a phony, while cool Wayne Parr looks on with indifference. |
The word choices in Chapters 5–8 trace the movement suggested by “Words of Fascination and Spite,” not merely a list of definitions. As a verb, fascinate identifies to attract and hold someone’s interest; its part-specific use appears in this line: Stargirl’s strangeness began to fascinate Leo. As a verb, captivate identifies to charm and hold attention completely; its part-specific use appears in this line: Her open joy captivated the whole gym. As an adjective, hostile identifies unfriendly and full of dislike; its part-specific use appears in this line: Hillari grew hostile the moment she arrived. As a verb, loathe identifies to feel strong hatred for; its part-specific use appears in this line: Hillari came to loathe the cheerful newcomer. As a noun, spectator identifies a person who watches an event; its part-specific use appears in this line: Every spectator noticed her cheering for both teams. This word field sharpens the dangers and decisions of Part 2, giving them lexical resonance.
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
The events of Chapters 5–8 become clearer when readers separate a character’s motive from the obstacle encountered and the response that follows. Stargirl joins the school cheerleading squad, and immediately does the unthinkable: she cheers wildly for BOTH teams, leaping up to celebrate a good play no matter which side makes it. To Mica’s fans, loyalty means rooting only for your own team, and her open-hearted delight in everyone’s success baffles and irritates them even as it draws their eyes. Leo, watching from behind the camera of his student show ‘Hot Seat,’ finds himself more and more captivated by her — unable to look away, half-afraid of how much he wants to understand her. His friend and co-host Kevin is fascinated too, and begins pushing to book Stargirl as a guest on the show, sensing she would be television gold. Following motive through response reveals why “Cheering for the Other Side” forms a consequential sequence.
- She cheers for both teams, baffling the fans.
- Stargirl joins the Mica High cheerleading squad.
- Hillari Kimble loudly declares her a phony.
- Leo grows more and more captivated by her.
- Kevin pushes to book her on ‘Hot Seat.’
The craft of Part 2 works through foil, symbol, and society, each shaping how readers judge the new conflict. Hillari Kimble is built to be Stargirl’s foil — a character whose sharp contrast throws the other into relief. Where Stargirl gives without keeping score, Hillari calculates; where Stargirl delights in strangers, Hillari guards her status and stokes suspicion; where Stargirl seems free of the crowd’s pull, Hillari lives by it, ruling and being ruled by what is popular. Her instant hatred is telling. Stargirl has done nothing to Hillari, yet Hillari loathes her, because a person who does not need the crowd’s approval quietly exposes how much Hillari does. Watch how Spinelli uses this contrast to measure both girls at once: Hillari’s cruelty makes Stargirl’s kindness shine brighter, and Stargirl’s freedom makes Hillari’s need for control look small and frightened. That authorial design makes “Hillari Kimble, the Opposite” a lesson in deliberate suspense.
To evaluate Part 2, place its conflict beside three contextual anchors: power, peer, and pressure. Stargirl cheering for the other team is a small act that lands like a scandal, and the reason lies in peer pressure — the force a group exerts to make its members think and act alike. Peer pressure is not usually a loud command; more often it is a quiet, invisible current. We watch what the people around us do, and we adjust — laughing when they laugh, booing when they boo, wanting what they want — frequently without noticing we are doing it. In a famous set of experiments, the psychologist Solomon Asch showed volunteers lines of obviously different lengths and asked which matched. When actors in the room deliberately gave the same wrong answer aloud, many real volunteers went along and gave the wrong answer too — not because they could not see the truth, but because it felt unbearable to be the lone person who disagreed. This context turns Part 2 from a private adventure into a broader question of context.
Picture a packed gym, everyone leaning the same way, cheering when their side scores and groaning when it does not, all of them moving together like a single body. Then a girl in the middle of it leaps up to celebrate a beautiful play made by the OTHER team — not to provoke anyone, but because it was beautiful, and joy, to her, does not check which jersey you are wearing. The cheering falters. Faces turn. You can feel the crowd deciding, all at once, that something is wrong with her, though no one can quite say what. Leo feels it too, and feels something else underneath it: a pull toward this girl who seems to have never learned the rule that everyone else obeys without thinking.
When Stargirl cheers for the other team, she breaks a rule no one wrote down, and the crowd’s reaction reveals something deep about human nature: our urge to go along with the group. Psychologists call this conformity, and the most famous study of it was run in the 1950s by Solomon Asch. His experiment was simple: he gathered volunteers into a room, showed them a line, and asked which of three other lines matched it in length. The answer was obvious — a child could see it.
The trick was that only one person in each room was a real volunteer; the others were actors following a plan. On certain rounds, every actor gave the same clearly wrong answer out loud, one after another, before the volunteer’s turn. Now the volunteer faced a strange pressure: trust his own eyes, or agree with the group. About a third of the time, volunteers denied what they could plainly see and gave the same wrong answer as the group. Many later admitted they had known the true answer but could not bear to be the only one who disagreed; the fear of standing alone was stronger than the evidence before them.
Asch’s findings help explain the world of Mica High. Most students there are not cruel or foolish; they are simply caught in the same current the volunteers felt. Going along with the crowd feels safe, while breaking away feels dangerous, even when the crowd is wrong. This is why Stargirl’s behavior is so disturbing to them: she does not seem to feel the pressure. By cheerfully ignoring a rule everyone else obeys, she becomes living proof that the current can be resisted — and that freedom makes the conformists uneasy, because it shows them a choice they had forgotten.
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 2 “Going Along With the Group”
Asch’s volunteers denied what they could see rather than stand alone. Write about a time you felt pressure to go along with a group — or a time you chose to disagree. What did the group want, what did you do, and why? 6–10 sentences. End with what the moment taught you about following the crowd.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 2 Complete!
You finished Chapters 5–8 of Stargirl.
Here are your auto-graded results:
Your writing was checked automatically for length, spelling, grammar, and whether you included the key parts of the scene. Scroll back to Part 5 anytime to read your feedback and improve your work.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Jerry Spinelli. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Jerry Spinelli’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.