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

town together for at least a year, some of these noontime speculators surmised, until finally the girl could stand it no more, and broke the romance off spitefully by posting naked pictures of her paramour on every Monroeville telephone pole she could find. This plunged the school janitor into such depths of despondency it seemed the only way out was with a rope and a chair. Four months later, drowning in regret, the girl had arrived at a similar conclusion, choosing to employ sleeping pills instead.

Whenever this story or another one like it happened to find its way back to Crystal, she went right on being quiet until she could concoct an excuse to leave the conversation in which it had turned up. Once free of the tabloid talk, she would then light a cigarette, happy to give her brain over to increased amounts of dopamine until the next convenient distraction could present itself.

Summer went by in a haze. Never once did Crystal go to the Jackson Farm to see Jarett, nor did he call to inquire as to why she had so suddenly left off their lessons. Chances were he already knew. Still, Crystal found it odd—and a little offensive—that he didn’t at the very least ring to offer his condolences. She wondered if he was still frightened of Lucretia. Either way it didn’t matter. During that summer Crystal felt little desire to do so much as leave her room. Instead she sat in front of the television eating plain meals she could barely taste. At night, she lay under the covers with one favorite old book after the next, never minding the world beyond, never minding anything but the words on the page, and the steady buzz of her electric fan.

She went back to school in September like a girl in a trance. Few of the other students looked at her; even fewer bothered to speak to her. Classes came and went. Trigonometry again; French; College-bound English. October also came, and with it, cheerleader tryouts for JV basketball. Crystal did not report. On the afternoon of registration, she went straight out the school doors without giving the gymnasium so much as a passing glance. She didn’t event think about it. She didn’t care.

The cheerleading coach cared, and wasn’t about to let her most talented girl fade into the shadows without knowing why. On the following morning Crystal closed her locker door to find herself vis-à-vis with Mrs. Trekansky, a plump woman with a butt nearly as wide as the classroom doors that were beginning to click shut up and down the hall. She wasted barely two seconds on the pleasantry of saying hello before doling out a myriad of questions concerning Crystal’s no-show. Why? What was wrong? Had she injured herself recently? If so, why not let the school nurse have a look? Crystal assured the woman that she was not injured—that she was, in fact, feeling quite fit—but that her interest in the sport had weakened, and she no longer felt she could make a proper addition to the squad. Mrs. Trekansky went away flustered, but not without a final plea to Crystal for reconsideration before the weekend. Crystal promised her she would think about it. But it was an empty promise, and they both knew it.

Also empty throughout most of that autumn was the chair beside her during lunch hours. With less reason than ever to eat with the cheering squad now, Crystal had returned to the cafeteria corner where she’d spent so much time the previous school year. Day after day, the smell of bread and Twinkies wafted from her lunch bag, as if trying to cheer her up. And sometimes it worked, only never for very long. On most days, Crystal chewed without tasting a thing, her eyes in constant travel between posters on the walls that changed as the holidays did. In December came the ones for Christmas. A winter dance was scheduled for the night of the sixteenth; a canned food drive would take place on the twenty-second. These along with two or three other activities were advertised in frosty letters above snowy hills and Christmas tree campfires.

In the week before the dance, Crystal sat in her corner thinking: I’m exactly where I was a year ago, only this year it’s worse. This year it’s a friend of mine who’s gone.

“It doesn’t tally,” someone behind her said.

At first Crystal didn’t respond—hoped, in fact, that the speaker would just go away and leave her alone. After all, she didn’t sit in this corner for company. But whoever it was intruding upon her privacy meant to have it regardless.

“She was always so upbeat,” this boy’s voice continued, “cheering me on. Trying to help me forget.”

“Is that Miko?” Crystal asked, without turning around.

“Yeah.”

She looked over her shoulder to find a dark-complexioned boy—a Filipino—dressed in a gray dress shirt and blue jeans. “And I presume,” she told him, “that you’re referring to my friend Lucy?”

He nodded. “Indeed I am. May I sit down?”

“I’d prefer that you didn’t.”

“Okay.”

And then he sat down next to her. “I need a smoke,” he said.

“They frown on tobacco use here,” Crystal replied, showing him her teeth. “Why don’t you try the bike racks?”

“You mean the ones right outside the art room? Yeah, Mrs. Magi will be real cool with that.” He gave her a tap on the shoulder, which irritated her even further until his eyes dropped and she followed them to a pack of Marlboro reds peeking out from inside the pocket of his jeans. “How about the basement instead?”

“The basement? You’re out of your head; we’ll get busted for sure.”

“I know a spot.”

Crystal rolled her eyes. “What’s going on, Miko? Why are you here? Lucy said you hated me. That’s fine. So get lost.”

Miko responded by giving her a long, empty look. “I am lost, Crystal. Believe it.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“My mom wants to send me to a shrink.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Mine wants to have me euthanized.”

He sat up pertly at this. “Does she know about what we did last year?”

“No, but she’s not totally in the dark about what a horrible person I am,” she said, thinking of the night Lucretia had found her bikini, still wet from a pool party with Jarett. The night that had almost been too much for her, and far, far too much for Lucy.

Miko relaxed a little. “Good. You know if I had all that to do over again, the pictures and the printing, there’d be no way I would.”

Crystal wanted to slap him. “What a stupid thing to say! Of course you wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t either!”

“I mean even without…you know…foreknowledge of the suicide thrown in. I wouldn’t have done it.”

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here, Miko,” Crystal grumbled. “Spit it out. The suspense is killing me.”

The Filipino gave his pocket a tap. “First we smoke.”

“What the hell is this, a pow-wow? Forget it.”

But the temptation proved too much to resist. She’d been out of cigarettes for a week and pocket money had been scarce of late. Miko led her to the back of the cafeteria, where a small flight of steps led down to a door Crystal never bothered to wonder about until this very moment.

“It’s the bomb shelter,” she said, taking a stab in the dark.

“Not quite,” Miko replied. His hand reached for the knob. “Anyone looking?”

Crystal glanced over her shoulder. The cafeteria was abuzz with conversation, but no one looked clued-in on what was happening at the back wall.

“Nope,” she told him. “All clear.”

“Then away we go.”

***

They walked down a long, dimly lit hallway made of gigantic stones Crystal suspected were every bit as old as the ones used beneath Jarett’s farm. Ahead was another door, this one wooden, which was so decrepit it almost fell off its hinges when Miko pulled it open to reveal a storage room piled high with junk from another era. Like the door behind them, most of it was made of wood. Broken school desks notched with bygone graffiti. A black chalkboard diseased with moisture ripples. And on the floor, a plethora of cigarette butts.

"Are all of these yours?” Crystal asked, gaping down at the mess once Miko had screwed in a low-watt bulb on the ceiling.

He passed over a cigarette and lit it for her. Crystal dragged in deep, as always appreciating the sensation it provided. All the same, she was suddenly aware that the two of them were alone in a dark place few other people knew about or cared to visit. Perhaps, she told herself while casting a worried glance at Miko, coming here was even dumber than it had at first seemed.

But Miko kept his distance. He made no effort to look threatening as he smoked. He finished one cigarette and immediately lit another. Halfway through that one, his eyes at last moved to where Crystal was standing. Defiant, she stared back, though she was still a little afraid.

“I don’t want to go see a shrink,” Miko said, “but my mom says I’ll have to if things stay the same.”

“What things?” Crystal came back with.

“Never talking to anybody. Spending time alone in my room. Letting my grades tank.”

Crystal dropped her cigarette, crushed it under her boot. “Whoa,” she said. “If you’re coming to me for a lifeline, I’m sorry, but I don’t have one. I’ve got my own problems treading water right now.”

“So why don’t we help each other?”

“I prefer to help myself.”

“Crystal, you’re not doing any better than I am. Don’t bullshit me,” he went on, cutting off her rebuke. “I’ve seen you this year. You sit by yourself during lunch hour. You hardly ever talk in the halls. You quit cheerleading.”

“I lost interest in cheering,” she told him. “So what?”

“But you loved doing it.”

“How the hell would you know what I love, Miko?”

He looked at her for a moment before answering. “Lucy told me.”

“I have to go now,” Crystal said.

She started towards the door—and almost screamed when Miko grabbed her wrist.

“Hey!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, letting her go almost instantly. “But think about it? Please?”

“Think about what, Miko?”

“Helping me. Letting me help you.”

“I told you don’t need help.”

He looked tragic, which made her wait just a moment longer amidst the broken furniture. The fear and anger she’d felt began to recede.

“I wouldn’t know how to help you, Miko. If I tried I’d probably make things worse.”

The tragic expression grew deeper. “You don’t sound like the Crystal that Lucy always used to tell me about.”

“I guess she didn’t know me as well as she thought.”

On that remark, Crystal left the room, half expecting her distressed smoking companion to chase her down in the hallway. Yet again her anxiety proved groundless. Miko let her go without a word. As she reached the door that let back on the cafeteria, Crystal turned around to see him still standing beneath the naked bulb, looking naked himself. Abandoned and lost. Totally alone.

***

They did not speak again for the rest of that year, though sometimes his face materialized by the lockers between classes, like the ghost he had all but become since losing Lucy. On each of these occasions the Filipino would inevitably spot Crystal as well, but rather than look at her for long, his eyes always darted away, as if unable to alight for lack of a warm perch.

Also silent throughout the holidays was Jarett. At first Crystal paid it no mind—after all, she had made no effort to contact him going all the way back to April. Not until the Christmas holiday crept closer was her irritation with him kindled afresh. The fact that she missed his company (at last, she missed his company) went ignored, mostly because to admit such a thing to herself would be just the same as admitting weakness. It would also make her a liar, as she had already told Miko that she preferred to soldier on through these dreary times alone. Yet the happy memories she had of