Crystal Grader by Tag Cavello (read my book txt) 📕

of trees even older. It was a place that made you dream of winter no matter what the time of year. It was a place of empty streets and empty playgrounds (the children were always inside watching television or eating lunch). Train whistles in the distance. Crooked headstones in the cemeteries. Wood-smoke in the fireplaces.

Crystal missed it. Oh so terribly, she missed every last beautiful, browning leaf in every last little corner she could find in her memory on this windy night.

One day, she told herself, I’m going to go home.

But first the storm. It would be a bad one. The RSMC in Japan had already classified it as a super typhoon. That meant the real winds, when they came, would be blowing at a sustained one hundred and ninety kilometers per hour. Or rather, at least that. And while Crystal wasn’t crazy about losing the electricity in her building for a few days, she knew the real trouble would be for those living in low-lying areas. Valenzuela City, Quezon City. Anywhere along the coast of Manila Bay. In cities like Baguio there’d be landslides. Other places would be without power for a month. There were no short-cuts for these areas. No easy ways around. Whenever a typhoon or a monsoon hit the Philippines, they took it on the chin.

Lately, Crystal could identify. Since moving here, she tended to let unpleasant events—in her marriage, at her job, in her car, wherever—simply have their way when they came. Have their way and then be on to the next place of landfall. Maybe that needed to stop. Maybe she needed to find out what she wanted out of life…then stand up and go after it.

As if to rebuke this idea, the strongest gust of wind yet struck the balcony. The glass door shook in its frame. Her ashtray flipped over, spewing its contents on her face. Crystal went back into the bedroom looking like Al Jolson ready sing another rendition of Mammy.

After washing her face she lay down next to Luke and closed her eyes. The dream returned. Jarett Powell on the Jackson farm. A haunted man living in a haunted place. And that wasn’t just her subconscious talking. Sometimes ghosts really had come to the bedroom door at night. Thing of it was, they were never scary. Rather, they seemed content with their surroundings. At ease with their lot in eternity. That, too, was the way Crystal had felt at the time. She had what she wanted. She’d been happy. Wrong and out of place, but happy.

Every season has its storms, Crystal.

Powell would always tell her that whenever she asked how he felt about their relationship. She hadn’t cared for the analogy. Sometimes it even made her angry, and she would yell at him before stomping out to the back porch to fume while the sun set behind the crops. But then one winter—she must have been fourteen at the time—a surprise blizzard snowed all of northern Ohio indoors for two days. Crystal had watched it white out the world from her reading nook. The wind had been savage, the snow fierce. Dangerous and demanding.

“Crystal! Crystal wake up please!”

Change--God knew she needed it. If it didn’t happen soon she would lose what was left of her mind.

8

 

“Okay, Crystal, you ready? I’m going to throw some basic trig questions at you.”

Crystal looked up from painting her toenails. She was sitting cross-legged on the toilet seat; Lucy was in the shower.

“Right now?” she asked, incredulous.

“Some people sing in the shower, Crys. I think.”

“Yeah, but—“

“SIN0 equals…what?” Lucy challenged over the sound of running water. “Shout it out like a cheerleader.”

“Very funny. How long do I get to answer?”

“How long do you think you’ll have on the quiz before Christmas break?”

“Mr. Emmons will probably rig a time bomb to a giant clock.”

“Yeah. Better hurry up, girl, it’s getting foggy in here.”

In the hallways at school, Lucy spent a lot of time hiding behind her shoulder. Whilst in her element, however, she talked like a leader. One day, Crystal knew, that was precisely what she’d be.

“Side adjacent over hypotenuse,” she said proudly, nodding at this temporary flash of brilliance.

Lucy made a loud, throaty buzzing sound from behind the shower curtain. “Sorry, girl, incorrect.”

“What!”

“Try again.”

“Will you give me a break?”

The water turned off. Crystal’s bathroom had become a tropical jungle. Mist clung to the mirror. Her toothbrush rack dripped. None of it, though, concealed Lucy’s nakedness when she pulled back the shower curtain and stepped out. Like Crystal, she had knees and elbows aplenty. Still, it was hard not to notice some curves coming in. Hard, because Crystal was still waiting for hers.

“Those things are going to be boy magnets when you’re older,” she grinned, pointing at Lucy’s chest.

It was impossible to tell whether the remark made her friend blush, but a towel came off the rack and around her body in a hurry.

“You’re changing the subject,” Lucy said. “I can’t give you a break because Mr. Emmons surely won’t.”

“I know.”

“So try again.”

“Side opposite over hypotenuse.”

Lucy beamed as she began drying her hair. “Bingo!”

“I guessed.”

“Maybe. But now you know the answer.”

“Until I forget it again.”

They spent the next two hours in Crystal’s bedroom cracking the books. Ordinarily this would not be the case on one of Lucy’s sleepovers, but their trigonometry teacher had decided to give his class one last poke in the eye before Christmas break in the form of a thirty question quiz. The quiz would fall on December 17—a real dick move by Emmons if ever there was. One day before the let-out and he wanted to mulch brains.

Not that Lucy seemed to mind. “AC, opposite,” she said, hunched over a diagram at Crystal’s desk, “sixteen units. BC, adjacent. 12 units.”

“Fuck.”

“Shut up and listen. AB, hypotenuse. 20 units.” She looked up from the diagram with a smug grin on her face. “So tell me, Crystal, what is sin ABC?”

“Sin ABC,” Crystal replied from the pink pillows on her bed, “equals two Bayer aspirin, because trig gives me a headache.”

“Try. Write the diagram down just as I described it and put your brain to work.”

After the session it was Crystal’s turn. Gym class: Tips and tricks for the hopelessly inept, with Miss Lucy Sommer as its star pupil. They’d started work on the balance beam during the previous week, and seeing her friend flail her arms like a drunken Olive Oyl playing pin the tail on the donkey had brought Crystal close to tears.

“You’re not keeping your center tight,” she said presently, dabbing red polish on Lucy’s toenail. “By that I mean your hips. Your abdomen. And stop twisting so much when you’re up there.”

“I don’t twist.”

“You do. And it’s throwing off your center of gravity. Stay square and keep your eyes on the end of the beam.”

“No way. I have to look at my feet.”

Crystal gave a disgusted growl. “Listen, kid, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things.” The nailbrush paused. “Speaking of that,” she added, “how are things in the boyfriend department? Got your eye on anyone?”

“No,” Lucy coughed out.

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“Of course!”

“Riggght.”

“I don’t see you chasing guys up and down the hall.”

“That’s because I have Jarett.”

The remark seemed to freeze Lucy in her tracks. Content to wait for a reaction, Crystal went back to painting. A gust of December wind blew past the window. They’d left the radio off for trigonometry, but now Crystal reached over and turned it on. Lose My Breath, by Destiny’s Child came out of the speaker. Lucy snapped it back off.

“Crystal,” she said, “you can’t just go out and get a forty year-old boyfriend. I don’t care how dashing he is or how many books he’s written.”

Crystal flashed her a look. Lucy had preached these practicalities before, of course, but now she sounded serious, which was irritating.

“I don’t care how rich he is,” she went on, ignoring the yellow light in Crystal’s eyes—this was a first, and it really set things off, red alert. “I don’t care how pretty he thinks you are. I don’t care—“

“Shut up.”

Lucy blinked. “What?”

“I said shut up. What are you, deaf?” The nail brush stabbed its way back into the jar and was screwed tight. “I mean I don’t get it. I tell you what I want a hundred times, and you’re still talking to me like you can’t believe your ears.”

“Yeah. Try saying it to yourself once and listen how it sounds.”

“I say it to myself every day.” Bitch, she almost added.

Lucy sprang from the bed as though she’d heard it. “Then you must be nuts!”

She stamped over to the window and looked out. Of course Crystal didn’t need to see her face to picture the expression on it: pouting, defiant.

“It’s not crazy to pursue something that interests you, Lucy,” she said. “It just seems that way to someone who has no idea how.”

“Hey I know how to get things just fine!” the other snapped, whirling around fast enough to make Crystal take a step back. “I want good grades, I study for tests and I get them! I want to buy someone a birthday present, I save my allowance and I buy it! You on the other hand”—she came at Crystal, who stood her ground this time—“seem to think pleated skirts and sparkly pom-poms are the answer to everything!”

“Don’t simplify me, you gangling twerp! I’m good at a lot of things, you’re great at one thing and pretty much suck at all the rest!”

“Mathematicians,” Lucy barked, giving Crystal a shove, “don’t need to be good at anything else!”

Crystal shoved back harder. She was slightly smaller than her friend, but far more wiry, and Lucy reeled, knocking an empty cookie plate off the desk. Shards of glass spewed over the floor, under the bed. Both girls fell silent. Crystal stared at the mess, not knowing what to say, or what was going to happen next. Part of her remained on guard, while another part began to wish the weekend would hurry up and end already.

“Hey!” came a muffled voice from the other side of the wall. “Shut up over there! I’m trying to read!”

“Sorry Hannah!” Lucy immediately replied.

Crystal let out a laugh. She and Lucy looked at each other…and in the next instant they were both doubled over on the bed, laughing almost too hard to breathe.

***

Later that night, when the lights were out, Lucy asked whether or not she’d kissed him yet.

“No,” Crystal answered, listening to the wind, “but we’re close. Really close.”

“Wow. And your mom doesn’t mind?”

“My mom knows he’s tutoring me twice a week and that’s it. Oh and that I pay him by doing chores around the house.” She looked at Lucy’s side of the bed. “You know he gave me the key while he’s on his lecturing tour? I go over and feed Chubby, shovel the walk. Stuff like that.”

The bedroom fell silent for a few moments.

“I guess you’re lucky,” Lucy said, as another gust of wind hit the glass. “Well, I know you’re lucky. But man, Crystal, if he ever kisses you and anyone finds out, he’ll go to jail. Right?”

“Right. But no one’s going to know until I’m eighteen. Then we’ll just tell everyone we fell in love all of a sudden.”

Crystal’s chest swelled. So far things were going just fine with Jarett, never mind that he would be gone until January, first on the lecture tour and then to spend Christmas with his family. The only thing she worried about—the one shadow at the back of her mind—was whether or not he already had a girlfriend. After several November afternoons spent in his company it seemed not (and according to the bio of him on Wikipedia he had never been married), but as Lucy sometimes liked to tell her, it never paid to be certain until all the facts were present. She would have to find out somehow. And if the answer was yes…heads would roll. Everywhere.

“Cool,”