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

“It’s green!” Crystal shouted, staring up at the nearest traffic light. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Fuck it.”

She gunned the motor just as the light went yellow and the car in front of her crossed. Immediately a Filipino traffic officer dressed in blue stepped in front of the Getz with his hand raised. Crystal’s foot hit the brake, but it was too late. The cop was motioning for her to pull over.

“Goddammit!”

Spinning the wheel, Crystal got the car over to the curb and lowered the window.

“Your license please, Miss,” the cop said.

“The light was yellow.”

“Your license please, Miss,” the cop demanded.

She handed it to him. He looked it over, then showed her a sheet with a list of violations on it. A gloved finger hovered over one—reckless operation by a red girl—before tapping the two thousand peso fine typed next to it.

“I don’t think so,” Crystal told him.

“Yes ma’am. I will confiscate your license and you can pay this fine at the Gilmore traffic center.”

“Or,” Crystal tempted, “I can just give you one hundred pesos right now and we can forget this ever happened.” She let the smile on her face widen. “What do you say?”

The cop smiled back. “Two hundred, ma’am.”

Crystal reached into her bag. She knew that the man might have taken fifty had she offered it straight away, but in Manila it was best (and this she had learned after three years living here) for foreigners to spread the butter a little more thickly when it came time to pass out sandwiches to anyone carrying a badge. The cop told her to wait for a moment, shielded the window with his body, then took the money.

After this his voice lost all officiousness.

“Salamat!” he called out. The license went back into Crystal’s hand. “Drive safe, ma’am! Ingat!”

“Walang anuman!” Crystal said back, waving. But once the window was rolled up and the car was moving again: “Now go fuck yourself!”

***

Nobody at the call center noticed that she was late.

Except her boss.

Crystal hurried into the wing of her account, where rows of computer monitors flickered in front of the talking heads of myriad tech support agents. The whole area was drab and cheerless, decorated with the ugliest color scheme Crystal had ever been nauseated by. Blue carpet lay underfoot; fluffy orange partitions divided the cubicles. Her own computer was located in the quality assurance section. Here, too, sat several busy people, most female. Some were coaching agents on their conduct, while others worked on quarterly reports, or spread-sheets, or presentations for new ideas that would likely never see the light of day. Fresh method did not whisk often amongst the throng.

Still, faces smiled up at her as she passed. All but one in fact.

“Crystal, may I see you in my office after your class?”

Of course the account manager, a tall individual who had changed his name from Robert to Roberta after deciding he liked life better as a woman than as a man, just happened to be idling in the exact wrong place today—which was to say, right next to Crystal’s cubicle.

“Sure, no problem,” Crystal told him—her—trying to sound cheerful.

Nothing by any stretch stood further from the truth. She stooped to turn on her computer, then hit her head on the desk while standing back up. Pencils rolled, coffee cups jingled.

Cries of Oy! Oy! Oy! rang out from all around.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Crystal had to assure them, rubbing the back of her skull.

“Late for class again is not fine,” Roberta put in curtly, but turned on his heel and pranced off without waiting for an excuse.

Now all of the faces which had been smiling earlier looked sympathetic. Even DoDo Garcia, who sometimes went out drinking with Roberta, provided a commiserative furl of the brow.

“Go,” she pleaded. “They’re waiting for you.”

Crystal went.

Five minutes later she was in front of her class in training room Alaska. That name fit it well, as the air conditioner at the back pumped out weather that made her want to put on a snow suit and go skiing. Goose-pimples rose on her arms as she greeted everyone. Thirty pairs of Filipino eyes followed her across the room. Their contempt was near palpable. This particular batch for English grammar had not been going well so far. At only three sessions in, it was clear to Crystal that they did not care for their instructor. Snickers were always coming from the back row, whispers, pointing fingers, as if a button were missing from Crystal’s blouse, or her hair had a dead bug in it.

Today was no different. One of the girls, a beach-ball belly who went by the name of Maribeth Dominguez, sneered without greeting her back. Somebody else gave a mock sneeze—ah-shit!—which made good for a few titters up and down the rows. The grammar here at Benton, Asia, Incorporated might not be so good, Crystal thought, but the western culture in it seemed to be going just fine.

“All right,” she said, dropping her bag, “yesterday we left off with the quiz on prepositions. Today we’ll grade them—“

“Can’t we do an icebreaker first?” one of the other girls wanted to know.

“Um…”

Sammy Senen’s hand went up next. “How about charades?”

“Bakla!” Tim Alvarez shouted from the other end of the room.

Laughter erupted from everyone else. Sammy grinned and raised his middle finger at Alvarez.

“Not charades again,” the girl implored. “Something different. Maybe a story game, like Truth or Dare?”

“Spin the bottle!” a man’s voice called from the back row.

“No!”

More laughing. More middle fingers. Seconds later seat-mates resumed chatting, they way they’d been when Crystal had first arrived. And just like that no one, not even the more respectful students like Gretchen Furlong and Dennis Jambrich, felt obligated to pay the class the slightest bit of attention.

Once more Crystal’s temper began to heat up. Despite evidence to the contrary, these people were not children—they were twenty-something call center agents who needed work on their grammar skills for writing email. Trouble was, they didn’t seem to care. Worse, she didn’t know how to make them care.

“Hey!” she yelled. “SHUT UP, EVERYONE!”

The room froze. Everyone—everything—stopped.

“Better,” Crystal nodded. “If you guys want to play games you can go to Tom’s World at the mall and drop tokens into the kiddie cars. In this room you learn. Beth,” she said to the girl with the fat belly, who hadn’t stopped grinning, “’I live on this street or I live in this street’. Which is it?”

“I don’t care,” Beth answered right back.

Crystal pointed at the door. “Then get the hell out of here!”

Stunned gasps from the others. Petrified faces. Crystal could feel her own face turning red, but her gaze remained fixed on Beth. To let it drop now, she knew, would be like giving an apology, and she was damned if she owed any of these obnoxious laggards one of those.

“I will not waste my time,” she promised, “on people who don’t care. I would rather look at an empty seat than do that.”

“So you really want me to leave?” Beth replied.

To Crystal the inquiry, spoken in a tone of bravado that had doubtless been manufactured as a showpiece for the rest of the class, sounded like a threat, which infuriated her beyond the breaking point.

“What are you, deaf as well as fat?”

“Oh my god,” someone whispered.

“Yes! Get out! NOW!”

Beth rose from her seat like an old woman. She picked up her bag and lumbered towards the door. Her body bounced and jiggled. Seeing it disgusted Crystal even further, and an evil pleasure swelled in her heart as she noticed that the big girl had begun to cry.

The door clicked open, clicked closed. Beth was gone. Drama over.

Almost over, anyway. For the rest of that session, no one spoke unless spoken to. A few of the girls wept quietly, their hands shaking as they read aloud from test papers answered during lunch breaks, or in between mock support calls. The men all looked like they were plotting murder.

Like Beth, Crystal didn’t care. She wanted a cigarette and maybe a glass of whiskey to go with it. Not a single one of the students said goodbye after class. Once she was alone Crystal turned off her computer, picked up her bag, and went to face the music with Roberta.

***

“Please,” the transvestite said, “sit.”

Man that he was, he towered over everything in the office. Making it even worse were the high-heeled dress shoes on his feet; it hurt Crystal’s neck to look at him. She put herself down in one of the two chairs in front of his desk. On the blotter was something she hadn’t seen in here before—a smiling ceramic frog with the words Hop to it! swirled into a caption underneath.

Where the hell did you get that stupid thing? Crystal wanted to ask.

She decided that it had to be gift from a very close friend, for it wasn’t like Roberta at all to even pretend to be cute. Plain white walls decorated with achievement certificates surrounded the desk. Gray cabinets. Stacked files. The occasional broken Cisco router. As usual, Crystal found it all very austere. Even the green dress that Roberta had on looked like something brought up from the basement.

“So what happened today?” he asked, taking a seat behind the desk.

Crystal cleared her throat before answering. “The traffic in front of Greenhills was terrible. I—“

Roberta’s head shook. “No, no, don’t worry about that anymore. In class I mean. Beth was in here a few minutes ago. She was crying,” he added, as if such a thing were beyond the comprehension of account managers.

It startled Crystal for a moment and she cleared her throat again. But then she expected to come clean about the incident eventually. Now was as good of time as any.

“She wasn’t crying yesterday,” Crystal rejoined, “when I asked her for the assignment I gave and she didn’t have it. She didn’t do it at all.”

“So you attacked her like a dog?”

“She told me she didn’t care, so I told her to leave. I told her I don’t have time for people who don’t care.”

“She cares, Crystal. She’s a good agent.”

Crystal blinked. The statement was as ludicrous as it was ignorant. “How can you know that? She’s never taken a single live call on her own.”

“She’s from a good school. It’s on her resume.”

“And that makes her a good agent?”

“It means she has potential.”

“The only potential I see in Beth is for a lot of open tickets and disgruntled dropped calls.”

“You’re not giving her a chance.”

“She needs to try before I can do that.”

“Did you call her fat?”

A grimace spread over Crystal’s face. Calling Beth fat…yes, that had been bad. A moment to regret for a long time to come. The stuff of fourth-grade playgrounds.

“I’m afraid I did,” she had to admit, keeping her eyes on Roberta’s by the sheerest willpower. “That part of the incident I wish I could take back. But not the rest.”

It did not have the effect she’d been going for. The account manager’s face remained stern, stony. Her heavy dark eye-shadow made Crystal think of assassins in the wings of black parapets.

“To judge someone by his or her personal appearance,” she intoned, “is very unwise. Especially in my domain.”

“It wasn’t spoken from the heart.”

“I hope not. But either way I can’t let this one rest, Crystal. I’m going to meet with—“

The phone rang, cutting her off. It left Crystal alone with the frog for a few minutes while Roberta handled whatever it was that needed handling.

Hop to it! it told her again.

Beth had to dislike it too, only for a different reason: the message. Crystal was certain that girls like Beth did not hop to anything except Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with extra cheese.

Roberta put down the phone. “Okay then. Where were we?”

Crystal saw no reason not to