Part 6
Leo is living two lives, and they are tearing him apart. Weekends in the desert with Stargirl are the happiest hours he has ever known; every Monday he walks back into a school that has turned its back on both of them. The shunning bites him less than it bites her, but it bites, and Leo discovers something unwelcome about himself: he needs other people to notice him in order to feel that he exists at all. Stargirl, who barely registers the cold, keeps loving him in public. Then someone posts a bright red heart on the school bulletin board announcing that she loves him, and Leo is dragged into the spotlight he has been dreading. When she playfully sets Cinnamon on his shoulder in the hallway, he brushes the rat off and walks away, leaving her stunned; by the end of the day only Kevin will still speak to him. Stargirl finally corners him and asks what is wrong, and Leo says the thing he cannot take back: she has to change. He tries to teach her the rules — cheer for one side, do not embarrass people, care what the crowd thinks — and she cannot understand why any of it should matter. Days later she reappears at Mica High in jeans, sandals, makeup and hoop earrings, and tells Leo her name is Susan. She studies ordinariness the way other students study for tests, invents an imaginary ordinary girl to copy, laughs less, and waits to be accepted. The school ignores her anyway. Leo watches her cry for the first time, sees her happy wagon down to two lonely stones, and then hears her announce, shining again, that a vision in the desert has shown her winning the state oratorical contest — and that everything will be fine.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Pressure & disguise words: loyalty, conspicuous, recoil, confront, conventional… |
| Literary Elements | Situational irony, Stargirl as a dynamic character, and the motif of names |
| Cross-Curricular | Masking — the psychology of hiding who you are to be accepted |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chapters 23–24 | Caught Between Two Worlds — Leo loves his desert weekends but dreads Monday; a red heart on the bulletin board exposes him, and he brushes Cinnamon off his shoulder and walks away. |
| Chapters 25–26 | Becoming Susan — Stargirl confronts Leo and he tells her to change; she returns as ‘Susan’ in ordinary clothes, is ignored anyway, and pins her hopes on the state oratorical contest. |
Reading “Words of Pressure and Disguise” as a word map reveals how the language of Chapters 23–26 follows the part’s turning point. Readers can infer loyalty, used as a noun, to mean faithful support given to a person or group; this scene supplies the clue: Leo was pulled apart by two kinds of loyalty. Readers can infer sabotage, used as a noun, to mean deliberate damage done to spoil something; this scene supplies the clue: The fans treated her kindness as sabotage. Readers can infer conspicuous, used as an adjective, to mean easily noticed; standing out sharply; this scene supplies the clue: The red heart made Leo painfully conspicuous. Readers can infer recoil, used as a verb, to mean to draw back suddenly in shock or dislike; this scene supplies the clue: He recoiled from the rat on his shoulder. Across the episode, the selected language converts conflict into a developing verbal texture.
ⓘ 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.
Careful sequence reading reveals the textual evidence, the structural pivot, and the resulting consequence in Chapters 23–26. Leo is living two lives, and they are tearing him apart. Weekends in the desert with Stargirl are the happiest hours he has ever known; every Monday he walks back into a school that has turned its back on both of them. The shunning bites him less than it bites her, but it bites, and Leo discovers something unwelcome about himself: he needs other people to notice him in order to feel that he exists at all. Stargirl, who barely registers the cold, keeps loving him in public. Then someone posts a bright red heart on the school bulletin board announcing that she loves him, and Leo is dragged into the spotlight he has been dreading. Reading evidence around the pivot turns “The Girl Who Tried to Disappear” into meaningful convergence.
- She returns as ‘Susan’ in ordinary clothes and makeup.
- He brushes Cinnamon off his shoulder and walks away.
- Leo grows torn between happy weekends and cold Mondays.
- Stargirl corners him and he tells her she must change.
- A red heart on the bulletin board exposes his romance.
The pressure of Chapters 23–26 is crafted through irony, character, and names working in combination. Part 6 turns on situational irony — when what happens is the sharp opposite of what a reader would reasonably expect. Consider who asks Stargirl to change. Not Hillari, who despises her; not the crowd that shunned her. It is Leo, the one person who loved her precisely because she was unlike anyone else, who tells her she must become like everyone else. Then a second irony lands on top of the first. Stargirl obeys. She erases the very qualities the school punished her for — and the school still will not have her. The makeover buys nothing. Spinelli builds these reversals on purpose, because they make an argument no speech could make: the crowd was never actually offended by her strangeness, and Leo never actually wanted the ordinary girl he asked for. That authorial design makes “The Irony at the Heart of the Book” a lesson in deliberate perspective.
Historical or scientific grounding matters here because masking, hiding, and psychology change how the conflict can be judged. When Stargirl puts on jeans, hoop earrings and a plainer name, she is doing something psychologists study closely: masking , sometimes called covering — playing down a real part of yourself so that a group will accept you. It is far more common than most people realize. The sociologist Erving Goffman described everyday social life as a kind of performance in which each of us manages the impression we give off, and the legal scholar Kenji Yoshino later gave the name ‘covering’ to the quieter version of this: not lying about who you are, simply turning the volume down. People shorten difficult names, flatten an accent, hide a hobby that would draw teasing, laugh less loudly, dress like everyone in the hallway. This context turns Part 6 from a private adventure into a broader question of empathy.
Picture a hallway that has learned to look through two people at once. The boy has spent his weekend somewhere wide and quiet and honest, and now he is back among lockers, feeling every eye that refuses to meet his. Then the girl he loves comes bounding up and sets a small warm rat on his shoulder, the way she has a hundred times, and something in him snaps: he sweeps it off and keeps walking, and does not look back at her face. Days later she finds him and asks, simply, what is wrong. He tells her. And the next time he sees her she is wearing jeans and hoop earrings and a name that belongs to nobody in particular, practicing ordinariness like a subject she can pass. She has done exactly what he asked. The hallway looks through her anyway.
When Stargirl walks into school as Susan — ordinary clothes, ordinary name, ordinary laugh — she is doing something sociologists call masking, or covering. Covering is not the same as lying about who you are. It is the quieter act of turning the volume down on a real part of yourself so a group will find you easier to accept. The sociologist Erving Goffman argued that social life works like a stage performance, in which each of us manages the impression we give off. Most of us do it without thinking, choosing which stories to tell and which to keep back.
Covering takes countless small forms: a student shortens a name teachers stumble over, softens an accent, or stops mentioning a hobby that once drew teasing. Each adjustment seems harmless — so small that the person may not notice it as a loss. The difficulty is that these adjustments do not stay small or occasional. To keep the performance running, a person must suppress her natural reactions all day, checking every word and gesture against an imagined rulebook of what is normal. Researchers find this genuinely tiring, as any task requiring constant self-monitoring is.
There is a lonelier cost as well. A person who covers successfully may be surrounded by people who like her and still feel unknown, because the self they like is carefully edited. Worse, covering does not reliably deliver what it promises: a group that rejected someone for being different will often go on rejecting her, because the difference was only ever an excuse. When that happens the cost has been paid for nothing: the authentic self was set aside, and the acceptance never arrived. This is what Susan Caraway discovers: she becomes everything the school seemed to want, and the hallway looks through her anyway.
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 6 “Turning the Volume Down”
Susan hides the parts of herself the school punished, and it still is not enough. Write about a time you played down something real about yourself — an interest, an opinion, a way of speaking — to fit in. What did you hide, who were you hiding it from, and how did it feel? 6–10 sentences. End with what you would tell someone facing that same choice now.
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 6 Complete!
You finished Chapters 23–26 of Stargirl.
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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.