The Next Great Paulie Fink

In an interview, Sam recalls Paulie as seeming “ordinary” in his jeans and T-shirt when he arrived at Mitchell School in the fourth grade. As in the role-playing game Underlair, one cannot judge a creature by their appearance. Sam describes a humorous incident between Paulie and Glebus in which he stuck pencils in his ears and nose and told her that he was an alien. 

Caitlyn watches an episode of Megastar over breakfast on the second day of school. She cries, saying she’ll need to “learn a new set of rules” but still preserve her identity (64). 

In Gabby’s interview, she says that personality types emerge in Megastar: a fighter, which is like Fiona; an archenemy, which is like Diego, except he also serves as her sidekick; an authority figure, like Ms. Glebus; and a disruptor, like Jadelicious or Paulie, who doesn’t follow rules or norms and doesn’t care about being well liked.

The students theorize about whether Paulie was an alien. Diego enters Mags’s classroom wearing a neon green T-shirt—the same shirt Paulie wore last year in the Devlinshire soccer game. Diego dumps out Paulie’s bag, which he found with the T-shirt in the school’s lost and found, and he reads printed emails from Glebus to Paulie’s parents.