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

Meanwhile the study partner in question maintained her odd silence. And though Crystal considered herself an excellent talker, every so often she needed to stop and catch her breath. These instances were met with no help from the other side of the table. Crystal would finish one of her sentences, raise her brow over at Lucy…and get nothing but a nod, or a shrug of the shoulders.

Nevertheless, she did a good enough job of just being there for her parents to let them escape for awhile, this so they could shop for antiques downtown without having two bored girls underfoot. After agreeing to meet up in front of the restaurant in one hour, the two pairs parted ways. Crystal took Lucy across the street under cold, cloudy skies, where a row of flags in front of the courthouse flapped in the wind. Above them, a broken clock tower with quiet hands gave the incorrect time.

“This isn’t spring,” Lucy muttered, pulling at the zipper on her coat.

Crystal led her to a narrow, sloping street behind the courthouse that consisted of a bowling alley, a bar, and several parking lots. A green sign on the corner—SEMINARY STREET—told her they were in the right place.

“What right place?” Lucy asked, after Crystal spoke it aloud.

“The place I told you about at the house while your dad was trying to find his car keys.”

Lucy’s brown hair whipped at her shoulders as she first looked down-street, towards a closed sporting goods store, and then back at the bowling alley.

“I don’t see anything that looks remotely like a video arcade,” she said.

They walked to the sporting goods store, where cracked, empty windows sagged within frames of curled paint. On the other side of it was another parking lot, this one even more empty than the rest. Weeds sprouted from broken concrete. Shards of glass shimmered along the curb. The lot looked to have been paved for a one level building the color of watered out brown. Crystal pointed her finger at one of its black windows.

“There,” she said.

Her friend regarded it without speaking.

“Well?” Crystal asked, irritated.

Lucy gave her a look. “Well what? If you say that’s the place, then fine.”

Snorting, Crystal stormed off across the lot. The window got bigger and bigger yet remained dark. Determined to know its secrets, she cupped her hands on the glass and peered inside. A gloomy veil of grayness showed nothing at first. Then, bit by bit, the mess. Overturned furniture. Broken light fixtures. Dust. Crystal’s eyes moved back and forth, hoping the desolation would yield up a clue to reinforce her hypothesis.

And then she found it.

A poster on the wall, its color all but completely faded, that read: We’ve Got To Stop Eating Like This. Above those words were four ghosts, one of them captured in the process of being devoured by…

“Pac-Man,” Crystal said.

“Come again?”

Her backward glance lasted only a moment before she struck off down an alley on the side of the building. Spewing protests, Lucy followed. Her words were incredulous despite the fact that Crystal had provided a full outline of what she intended to do. Are you crazy? she kept asking. You’re not really going to break into this old building just to poke around for plot points to a novel.

Finally Crystal could stand it no more. She told Lucy to shut up, her eyes narrowing over the plywood nailed across one window, the rusty screen wedged inside of another.

“Dammit.”

“What if the police come?” Lucy said, chastened.

“I’ll just tell them we’re doing a school project about the eighties.”

“Yeah but it’s still trespassing.”

“Let’s try the back door.”

The suggestion brought a groan from her friend, but she followed Crystal down to a second alley, this one wide enough to drive a car through. Here they found a small, white door hidden behind a stack of milk crates. Crystal kicked the crates over, and was just reaching to try the knob when Lucy said:

“I still can’t handle it.”

Crystal’s hand froze. Later, she had to admit to herself that her reply was a kind of feigned ignorance. She’d known immediately what Lucy meant, but still told her:

“Well if you don’t want to come inside, wait here and keep a lookout.”

“Is that all you ever want me around for, Crystal? Fun and games?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. But you don’t seem very good at it anymore.”

“You’re right,” Lucy nodded. “I kind of lost my appetite after the last time we played it got somebody killed.”

Crystal felt her chest swell with anger. She didn’t need reminding about what had happened to Shit-Shit, not when she was so close to putting it in the past for good. And now here was Lucy, still dragging his corpse around, even after all that talk about the school getting on, getting healed. What horseshit.

“That wasn’t our fault!” she snapped.

“It wasn’t my fault,” the other said. “Or maybe it was, a little, for not trying to talk you out of what you did.”

“I don’t get this, Lucy. Just a few weeks ago you were preaching to me about letting go. What’s going on? You been watching Cold Case episodes on CBS?”

“I know what I should do, Crystal. That’s easy. But you know what’s hard?”

“I do,” Crystal answered, “I really do.”

Lucy looked down at her shoes. “What? Tell me.”

“What’s hard are the things that you make hard for yourself.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

“But it’s true.”

“Sometimes. And sometimes,” the friend went on, “sometimes things are just…hard to do. You can talk about doing them all you want, but…”

Her words died off, and when she blinked, Crystal saw a tear run down her cheek.

Rolling her eyes, she told Lucy that she didn’t have time for this. Then, as if to demonstrate that doing things was in fact very simple, she took hold the doorknob.

“It won’t open,” Lucy sniffed.

“Wanna bet?”

Crystal turned the knob…

And the door squeaked open.

“There!” she cried, looking back at her teary-eyed friend. “That, Lucy, is called doing.”

21

At this point in the story there is the need to take a brief diversion into territories more elucidative of the landscape upon which our characters dwell. For many readers, such diversions are a boon, as their intention is to fortify his or her knowledge of either the characters, the characters’ interests, or, as in this case, the setting. These three things by no means define the limits of what may benefit the reader, but they do seem to be the most commonly addressed.

The northern Ohio counties of Ashland, Erie, Huron, and Ottawa are known universally as the Firelands. The name Firelands was given to this 500,000 acre tract of land (originally as the Fire Lands) by the Connecticut legislature in the year 1792 as an act of restitution for certain Connecticut residents whose homes had been burned by the British during the American Revolutionary War. The largest portion of this restitution—and the one in which the towns of Monroeville and Norwalk lie—is Huron county.

Norwalk is today the county seat, where one can still find structures—houses, business blocks—dating back to its inception in the early part of the 19th century. This too in Monroeville, though it has not grown as ambitiously as its neighbor to the east. As of today its population consists of 1,400 people, compared to 17,000 in Norwalk.

Having lived in both towns for a number of years, I would contest that Monroeville is the happier of the two places. The great difference in their populations has mostly to do with this (unless, of course, the gentle reader prefers a noisier, more chaotic lifestyle); however, a number of other factors need to be addressed, and shall be within the following paragraphs.

To my knowledge there are at least eight establishments in Norwalk linked to the purchase and consumption of spirits. Bars, if you will. Two of them are located at the bottom of Benedict Avenue, in an area known as The Flats by those old enough to remember the name, or, by those even older still, Brooklyn. Two more bars are located directly to the east of this area, but close enough to contribute to the unpleasantness in this small valley of dirty water and abandoned buildings. Knives, guns, and even the occasional murder have all played roles in the grotesquery of the place. A drunken man was once decapitated by a passing train. Another man, also drunk, was shot in the chest over a duel for the affection of a so-called lady. Police presence is a nightly thing in The Flats, and with good reason: We, the human race, are not responsible with our leisure.

To my increasing dread, Norwalk has also become more and more cavalier of late with its own history. That is not to say your walk along Main Street, should you chance to visit the town, won’t be a pleasant one. Majestic homes of many popular nineteenth century styles line the tree-shaded walks. Greek revival, Georgian, Queen Anne, Victorian—all of these architectural voices and more await your analysis. I also do not wish to impart the opinion that these structures are not well cared for. The wealthiest settlers of the original Norwalk plat (approved by a common pleas court in 1819) built their homes along Main Street, and most of them still stand today.

But I bid you take note of these recent events from other parts of the town: A one hundred and thirty year-old house on State Street was razed in the late ‘90s for the expansion of a church parking lot; another house of the same age, this one on South Pleasant, came down for the necessity (really?) of expanding parking at an elementary school; during this same time period, East Seminary Street lost one of its fine old homes to a fire set by unsupervised teenagers at a party, while across the way on West Seminary, a beautiful Queen Anne mansion, once the Norwalk public library, burned to the ground in an electrical fire. Little by little you see, the legacy is slipping away.

Nor are fires and wrecking balls the only culprits to blame. At some places it is mere neglect. My own childhood home on West Main, erected around 1860, has recently fallen into severe disrepair, and alas, I cannot see it as being much longer for this world. Other such homes can be found on West Elm Street, North Pleasant Street, and Minard Place.*

One final thing which I find irksome about Norwalk is the stories that appear in its newspaper on an almost weekly basis concerning drug trafficking. It seems that a number of Maple City residents are now at trade on the black market. And what is the drug in question? It appalls me to type the word: heroin. Indeed, I was even motivated (out of disbelief) to phone friends and family back home for confirmation on the stories. My brother sniffed and said that the problem was nowhere near as bad as the press illustrated it to be. All else told me things were every bit that bad and more.

Can you even begin to imagine a small town of 17,000 people having a problem with heroin? Lord!

Most theories for the drug’s existence can be traced back to a perfectly legal painkiller, prescribed by doctors in Huron County for years, called Oxycontin. Oxycontin is a synthetic form of heroin. Abuse of the drug rose to a point where doctors decided to cut back their prescriptions, forcing patients to turn elsewhere to obtain a proper fix.

It should be noted before I abandon this subject that heroin in any form is highly addictive, especially