Crystal Grader - Tag Cavello (reading women .TXT) 📗

she saw it. She’d made a brief stop at the girls’ toilet before lunch, slipping out of line and down a flight of basement steps (at the bottom of which the restroom she preferred to use of late was located) with her eyes on the sneakers of her cheerleading uniform. And five minutes later, as she came back to the hall, there it was: chatter, laughter, clanging silverware. The students were beginning to move on. They were beginning to put what had happened in November behind them.

That wasn’t so easy for some. Crystal sat down with her lunch—mashed potatoes, milk, an apple—in a deep and quiet corner, where a poster that read A nation’s treasure is in its scholars hung on the wall. Neither this proverb nor the food interested her. She’d lost five pounds over the past month, even with Thanksgiving thrown in. What she really wanted was a cigarette. For these her appetite had struck off in the opposite direction, despite Hannah’s tattle-tales and Lucretia’s fists of wrath. She could now get through an entire pack in just five days.

Nibbling on her apple, she watched the school. The lunch counter line had disappeared. Kids now stood in front of the milkshake machine, jabbering about typical things: music, movies, sports. Closer by, the cheerleading table where Crystal used to sit on Fridays was full to brimming with yellow sweaters, with one in particular—Megan Holt’s—at the center of attention. To the surprise of no one, Megan had gone through November without the slightest inkling of condolence for students or staff. Indeed, she seemed to wonder at times (by means of a vacant smile in the halls) where all the sudden, campus-wide sadness had come from.

She seemed to wonder…but of course she knew. Everyone knew.

“Fuck her.”

Crystal jumped in her seat and turned to see that Lucy Sommer had crept up at some point. The glasses she wore rested crookedly on her face, as usual. In her bag, however, was something most unusual: a semester report card showing all Cs.

“Oh my god,” Crystal muttered, after accepting Lucy’s offer to see it. Her fingers plucked it away from the other’s grasp as if it would burst into flames at any moment. “Oh God, Lucy, this isn’t yours. This can’t be yours.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Lucy said, “I’ll rebound.”

“But—“

“Look,” Lucy continued, sweeping a hand over the cafeteria. “It’s happening all over. People are getting on.”

“I noticed that. But Lucy, they’re a little further removed than you and I.”

“I never wanted to hurt anyone, Crystal. And I know you didn’t, either.”

Crystal looked down at her friend’s report card again. C, C, C, C+, C. The last grade was for trigonometry.

“This is totally my fault,” she said. She felt her lip begin to quiver—a tremor before the eruption. “I ruined your grades, Lucy. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop it. At the end of next week we’re on Christmas break. And when we come back, everything will be reset. Don’t cry, Crystal, come on.”

“Lucy,” Crystal said, reaching into her bag for a tissue, “you have got to be the only girl in the world who would tell another girl not to cry.”

“That was kind of silly, wasn’t it?” Lucy laughed. “Anyway, about Megan. I hope you weren’t sitting here trying to figure her out. That’s a waste of time.”

“No. I’ve got too much figuring out about myself to do.”

Lucy stared at the other cheerleader. She was giggling at full tilt about something while another girl leaned on her shoulder. Seeing the contemplative look on Lucy’s face, Crystal began to wonder whether her friend was taking her own advice.

“What about you?” she asked, blinking away the last of her tears. “Are you trying to figure Megan out?”

Lucy shook her head. “No. I’m just wondering what her secret is. How she always manages to have so much fun.”

“That’s called trying to figure someone out, dear.”

“Yeah, well fuck it.” She put the report card back into her bag. “If she wants to bob on the waves like the buoyant little bitch she is, why should I care?”

“You’re sure talking a lot different these days,” Crystal smirked. “I didn’t know you had all those nasty words in your encyclopedia.”

“It’s Miko. He swears all the time. And you, of course.”

Crystal had taken another bite from her apple. Now she stopped chewing. Thoughts of Lucy’s friend from the nerd gallery were scarce since he’d finished printing the pictures from Crystal’s camera. Had he, like Crystal, taken to brooding in quiet corners?

“How is Miko?” she asked, fearing the worst.

But Lucy only shrugged. “Not bad. Not good, mind you, but not bad. He hates you, of course.”

“Of course. Do you think he’ll spill the beans about what we did?”

“No way in hell. Which isn’t to say the police won’t figure it out regardless. They have all the pictures in their possession.”

Crystal felt her stomach tighten. The police, Jesus. And they wouldn’t be curious about stolen cigarettes this time around.

“Thanks a-fucking lot for reminding me of that, Luce.”

“It’s a long shot, Crystal. They’re still wondering why Shit-Shit did what he did.”

“But they have the pictures.”

“None of them show his face clearly. Only the people who knew him could tell it was him.”

“And those people will talk.”

“I suppose they will.”

Crystal slumped back in her seat. Her half-eaten apple rolled off the table and disappeared.

“Jesus did this ever turn out to be a mess. A great big fucking mess.”

“Throw away your camera if you haven’t already,” Lucy advised.

“It’s gone.”

***

Two weeks later the holidays came…and pretty soon they were gone, too. Considering they marked the end of a terrible year, Crystal would have kicked them out the door with a steel-toed boot had it been possible. She didn’t even bother to buy presents for anyone, though Hannah (who had asked for a scrapbook) gave her a new pair of shoelaces and a chain for her sunglasses.

The alone time continued. Crystal allowed it to do so long after the expiration of her sentence, going outside only for school and lessons with Jarett. Part of the blame lay with the weather, which had turned brutally cold after November, leaving the sidewalks icy and the trees around Marsh Field black and bare as frozen skeletons lost to a doomed expedition. Another, far larger component of her solitude owed its origins to the previous summer. That night in June when she and Lucy had walked up the hill to visit Shit-Shit’s pathetic trailer now seemed to lurk behind every memory she had. Crystal supposed it would be that way forever.

She came back from the break with her eyes between her boots, no longer concerned enough with the goings-on of the school to investigate whether or not Lucy’s prediction (everything will be reset) had come to pass. Lectures droned through icy mornings, coughs, and sniffles. She failed a pop quiz in trig on the tenth, and then another in biology on the thirteenth. On lunch periods she sat in her corner like the little boy in the nursery rhyme, sometimes with Lucy, but mostly alone. More and more often it was Miko that her friend dined with, a choice Crystal did not blame her for, though the memories of their once tight friendship were becoming more bittersweet by the day.

Yet for all that went wrong during that autumn of 2005 and into the winter of 2006, there were some nuggets of comfort to be found. For one thing, the police never came knocking. For another, Lucretia had put the cigarette incident behind her, and was now back to her old cavalier self. She talked to Crystal and Hannah at the dinner table the way she’d been doing a year ago—which was to say, with grins and jokes and sarcastic barbs about single parenthood in equal measure. She did not even seem to notice her older daughter’s worsening habit with what had caused all the trouble in the first place, though Crystal scarcely attempted to conceal it.

Another, less surprising bright spot transpired in the form of Jarett. The reason for her sudden detachment from both school and literature, Crystal knew, could not have been lost on him. Yet he never mentioned it during their study sessions, choosing instead to keep a tactful focus on her assignments. As always, his guidance was charming, his touting the same, even if this latter performance looked ludicrous beside the diminishing quality in Crystal’s stories.

Then came February.

***

On the ninth, five days before her thirteenth birthday, she walked straight to the Jackson farm from school. No one—not even Lucy—waved goodbye to her. Only Hannah felt obliged to chase her down at the end of West Street to warn of an approaching snow storm, which had been the talk of the hallways all day. Crystal sent her off with a vacant promise to be home early. At that same moment the first few white flakes began to fall around her boots. Ignoring them, Crystal turned her back on Hannah and walked on.

This soon became cause for regret. She reached the wooden bridge on Jarett’s property in a squall, and by the time she got to his front door, everything behind her was a total white-out. Now shivering with cold, Crystal tried to twist the bell handle, but it had frozen solid over Christmas and would not move. A sudden gust of wind shoved her forward on the step, and as she stumbled, something tremendous—a tree branch perhaps—crashed down in the woods.

“Jarett!” she screamed.

Her fist, tiny and delicate, pounded at the door to zero effect. God, what if he wasn’t home? She turned her head to the right. The view was like a blank movie screen, and eliminated any thoughts she had about making her way around to the back porch. One miscalculation would lead her off into the woods, or down into the fields.

“Jarett!” she cried again.

Still no answer.

Desperate, she gave the bell handle a hard kick. A ding! sound from the other side provided hope that the ice had broken free, and sure enough, when she twisted the handle this time, it responded (cling!cling!cling!) as it had been doing for over a hundred years. Seconds later the door came unlocked, and was yanked open to reveal an appalled Jarett Powell on the threshold. But before he could even open his mouth to ask what she thought she was doing outside in weather like this, Crystal fell into his arms, with a command to close the door and lock it until springtime, if necessary.

His chiding was almost sweet as he led her into the kitchen for a mug of hot chocolate. Had she lost her mind? Didn’t she watch the news, or even listen to the radio? A blizzard was coming down, the worst since 1978. Of course the lesson was cancelled for the day—or should have been. She was lucky, damned lucky. And stupid.

Crystal listened to all of this as she sipped her cocoa, and then listened to it again, this time from Lucretia, after Jarett called her mother’s cell phone. There was an “I told you so” from Hannah in the background mere moments before the power went out, giving the world over to gray and black. Crystal let out a scream, almost dropping the phone. And when she next put it to her ear the signal was dead.

“That’s that,” she said to Jarett. “We’re snowed in.”

***

Half an hour later he had a fire going in the living room. Crystal sat on the couch with one of Jarett’s shirts buttoned around her like a nightgown. In her bare lap lay the head of a very nervous dog. Every gust of wind against the living room’s frosty window—and there were many all that night and into the next morning—made Chubby jump as if bitten by a flea. Crystal stroked his fur, telling him not to worry, that it was only a storm.

When he calmed down well enough to be left alone, she used Jarett’s kerosene heater to warm up some leftovers from the refrigerator, then set the table for a