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

“Did you pull the bell?” he asked.

“I…”

Powell raised his brows, and a thrill shot up Crystal’s back when she realized, by way of a tiny smile at the corner of his mouth, that he did recognize her.

“Yes? No?” One of the brows ticked. “Possibly?”

“I smelled smoke,” Crystal let out.

“Bullshit!”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Powell told the janitor, “you don’t talk to kids like that.”

“I do when they got no disregard for the rules! I work here, Mister!”

“No disregard for the rules? Why then our conflict is over already.”

Crystal no longer felt frightened of the janitor. Standing this close to Powell, nothing frightened her. She turned around (making certain not to abandon her rescuer’s envelopment), and with her head resting on Powell’s chest braved the face of the other man.

“I smelled smoke,” she repeated, “so I did what I thought was right.”

The janitor bared his yellow teeth. “And what did you think was right about sneakin’ away from your class? Eh? Comin’ down to the art wing without no hall pass!”

“Um…”

Oh great, cornered again. Crystal’s mind began to flip through excuses. I heard a noise—no good, too weak; I thought I saw something—still too weak; I had to use the restroom—ridiculous, there were no restrooms at this end of the school. Dammit, she was running out of time.

“Isn’t that a pack of Chesterfield’s in your breast pocket?” Powell asked, pointing.

Shit-Shit blinked. His eyes dropped, and seemed surprised to find that yes, there was indeed a packet of cigarettes protruding from the jump-suit, frayed about the top as if recently consulted.

“I see no reason to think,” Powell went on smoothly, “that the lady is being anything less than truthful in her account. She smelled smoke, she became anxious, and she pulled the fire alarm. Safety first. But if you insist on her going to the principal’s office, then I suppose we can all go together. Sort things out officially.”

“I didn’t light up on the school grounds, Mister,” the janitor came back with, though by his tone it was easy for Crystal to tell he’d been beaten. “That would set off the sprinkler system.”

“I agree. The lady here not only did the right thing by pulling the alarm, she did it in a timely fashion that saved us all from an unexpected shower.” His hand patted her shoulder. “Well done, Miss.”

“Thank you,” Crystal laughed.

“I propose the three of us join the others outside. The fire department will no doubt want to do a thorough inspection of the grounds once it arrives.”

“I’ll need to look around a bit myself first,” Shit-Shit said, looking guilty as Crystal knew she should have felt.

She glanced back at the detention room while being escorted away. Things had not gone according to plan, but there was still time to accomplish the mission. The remedy so far involved play-acting, and Crystal knew enough to stick with a winner when she found one.

“Ow!” she yelped, buckling against Powell.

The writer’s arm came around her waist. “Are you all right?”

“My ankle. I think I twisted it when Sh…when the janitor pushed me.”

She bent her knees some more, letting Powell take all of her weight. Tears—manufactured for the occasion—welled in her eyes.

“Can you walk?” he asked. Then, lower: “That old bastard.”

Crystal shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Well hold on, honey.”

And he scooped her up off the floor like a princess. Crystal barely had time to get her chin on his shoulder before the smile that would have betrayed everything broke over her face. Her arms wrapped around his neck. His arms, hard with muscle, found the soft crooks of her knees, the arc of her back.

“I’m a writer too,” she said next to his ear.

“Really?” he said, keeping a brisk pace. “What do you write?”

“Romance, like you.”

A laugh puffed over the top of her head. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Oh come on. It isn’t the hardest genre in the world.”

“No,” Powell admitted. “I’d maybe put it in the top five. Readers complain you’re not being interesting enough, so you turn up the heat. Now you’re writing porn. You can’t win.”

“Sure you can win. Just don’t fall off the balance beam. Or the tight rope. Or whatever perilous trek it is that writers walk during a story.”

“Yeah.”

Crystal lifted her head. They were getting close to the front door. Soon their interval alone would end. The time was now or never at all.

“Do you tutor, Mister Powell?”

His rhythm shook, or may have been shaken, the tiniest bit.

“Tutor? I used to. But no, not anymore.”

“That’s a shame. The atmosphere around your house seems very conducive for a student’s imagination.”

“A deviant’s too. One might be inspired to throw eggs at the porch.”

“Ha! Now what on earth put a crazy idea like that into your head?”

“I don’t know. It just sort of bubbled up. Like your name. It’s Crystal, right?”

“Genesio, yes.”

Powell stopped. They were now in a pool of sunlight at the door. His hand reached for the handle. Crystal decided to go for broke.

“Will you tutor me, Mister Powell? I can show you my work. We’ll—“

He opened the door. “I don’t think so.”

Crystal fell silent. He’d dismissed her! Closed one door while opening another. Not very nice. Damned rude, in fact. The urge to make him pay—punish him—swelled in her chest once more.

“You don’t do that,” she chided as they stepped outside.

“Don’t do what?”

“Tell me I don’t think so.” Her voice mocked him like he were a baby who didn’t want his Brussels sprouts.

He laughed. Laughed! God, she wanted to slap him now.

“I’m sorry, Crystal, but I just did. I was never a very good teacher anyway.”

“Why not let me decide if you’re good or not?”

Her head tilted. Never in her life had she been afraid to look another in the eye, and Powell—celebrity or no—would not, could not, overcome this gumption.

“I don’t teach anymore, Miss Genesio,” he insisted, maintaining his own steady gaze.

Steady, that was, right up until they were finally interrupted by the world, at which point Crystal saw it falter for the barest of moments—the flicker of a light-bulb during a storm—and in that faltering knew that her prey had been captured.

“Oh my God is she all right?”

Miss Reingold was running at them from the first row of cars. Saying nothing, Crystal tightened her grip around Powell’s neck and flashed the English teacher a crooked smile.

“She turned her ankle,” Powell said, “running down the hall.”

“Did you see any smoke? We can’t find a thing anywhere.”

“None,” Powell replied. Then to Crystal: “What about you?”

“No,” she said, still wearing her shark grin. “I just ran when I heard the alarm.”

Miss Reingold looked from damsel to hero and then back to damsel. Was there jealously in her eyes? Crystal hoped so. Behind her, some of the other students had begun to point. It did not take long for these fingers to spread the news that someone was hurt. In seconds the entire parking lot had its attention on Crystal and Powell. She spotted Lucy in the throng, off to the right about three rows deep. Unlike the others, not a drop of concern showed on her face. Crystal sent her a wave and a wink.

“Fire department’s coming,” Miss Reingold said to Powell.

“That’s fine. Hopefully it’s a false alarm.”

Crystal opened her mouth to tell Powell that it wasn’t a false alarm, that she had smelled smoke, that there was a fire burning…somewhere. Under a hall of gray steel where chained compulsions reposed in a growing heat, there was a fire burning.

But he wouldn’t understand. Not today at least. Safer to talk about such things at night, with the music of cicadas to sweeten the message, and a convincing breeze at the window. In the meantime, let the fire burn. Let it weaken his walls a little further. And before long, she’d be traipsing right into his heart for whatever riches it pleased her to plunder.

4

The school nurse could find nothing wrong with Crystal’s ankle; however, she could find nothing right with it either, and advised her patient to take the rest of the week off from school. Not wanting to miss cheerleading at the basketball game on Friday night, Crystal overruled the precaution, insisting that the pain was mild—indeed, almost non-existent now.

“It may not hurt today, but you’re going to have a miserable night,” the nurse promised.

Crystal slid pertly from the exam table to show how all right she was. No, this was not a very good nurse. She looked more like one of the lunch ladies at the cafeteria—round-bellied, round-headed, and round-opinioned. That she had failed to deduce Crystal’s chicanery was not surprising in the least. She was the kind of woman who would serve you spaghetti with a spoon if a cookbook told her to do it.

Nevertheless she ordered Crystal not to come to school on Wednesday. Here was a more reasonable proposal, to which Crystal agreed, assuring the nurse that she would stay off of her foot and keep it elevated.

***

Thirty minutes later she was in the car with her mom. A day at home of planning on how to change Powell’s mind stretched in front of her. Plenty of time, to judge by that wavering gaze.

“Wow,” the older woman said, cutting across traffic on North Main Street. “Just wow. A fire! I don’t think we’ve had a fire at that school for twenty years.”

Her tone made Crystal laugh. “I guess our losing streak is at an end, Mom.”

“Yeah!”

And then both of them were laughing. Though she seldom thought about it, Crystal knew that she was every bit the daughter of Lucretia Genesio. In addition to passing on her looks (her hair was just as black as Crystal’s, her eyes just as blue) she also enjoyed a good mess every once in awhile—some mayhem in the name of respite. Doubtless she would have considered pulling the school fire alarm for a chance to be alone with a boy an act of pure genius.

They lived in a modest split-level home on Eagle View Drive. It overlooked a valley that often flooded when the weather got bad enough, but Crystal appreciated its proximity to the town park, which sported a swimming pool and a bike trail. Five years ago her father had gone for a very long ride on that trail. To this very day he was yet to come home, leaving the three females of the house—Crystal, her mom, and her younger sister Hannah—to sink or swim on their own. Together, they had chosen the latter, though it had taken time and effort to achieve, especially on the part of Lucretia. Crystal’s role during that time lay mainly with keeping her head above water at school. As far as she knew, she’d been the sole kid in her class without a father, with a mother scrambling to find a job before their money ran out. Scary days. Crystal could remember feeling nauseous at school—too nauseous on many occasions to even touch her lunch, which never amounted to anything more than cheese sandwiches and Kool-Aid.

In fact the only good thing about those times was…well, that they were gone. Like Crystal’s father, they had ridden into the woods and disappeared. It all started with Lucretia getting a job and then a promotion, which moved her from a cubicle on the ground floor of her building to an office on the third floor. At the end of that year there’d been a new bicycle under the Christmas tree for Hannah. By February, Crystal’s birthday month, she had learned how to ride it. Not long after that, Crystal won first prize—one hundred dollars—in a writing contest at school. Then Lucy had come into her life to help with the rest of her classes. Times had gotten better in a hurry. They’d gone into a phase of high fives,