Crystal

by Walter Dean Myers

  “You think I could get a part?” Crystal asked.

  “It’s possible,” Loretta said. “We could map out a campaign. Jerry had drinks with a secretary over at La Femme who promised to get him an interview with the publisher. Everybody shows up with pictures of good-looking girls, so he wants to show up with something different.”

  “Me?”

  “Could be,” Loretta said. “If the idea appeals to you, we can give it a try. Then, if you make La Femme, it’ll be the kind of push we can use for the film people.”

  “Isn’t La Femme sort of…?” Crystal looked at Loretta. “Isn’t that kind of a…you know…magazine?”

  “You don’t have to do it,” Loretta said. “There are a lot of things you can do other than movies. It’s just that with this business you have to make your mind up early. By the time something happens, a print special, a feature video spot hits, you need to have the next thing lined up.”

  “They’re always looking for fresh people,” Susan said. “But Loretta doesn’t want to get involved with them on just any terms.”

  “I don’t really think it’s something that Crystal is interested in,” Loretta said.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t interested,” Crystal said, answering her agent’s comment. “I’m interested; I just thought that La Femme was mostly nude.”

  “You wouldn’t have to pose nude,” Susan said.

  “I wouldn’t put you into anything like that,” Loretta said. “You’re going to have to make a decision, though.”

  “What’s that?” Crystal asked.

  “What you want for yourself,” Loretta said. “And how badly you want it. I guess I have to know that, too.”

  “I think I’d like to get into pictures,” Crystal said.

  “Maybe we can talk about it next week,” Loretta said, smiling. “Jerry wants to do a few more shots this Friday. You free?”

  The limousine dropped Crystal off in front of the school, the driver coming around the back of the car to hold the door for her. Crystal nodded to the woman who sat near the front door. She was used to seeing Crystal come to school at odd hours and began writing a pass for her as she approached the desk. Crystal stopped in the third-floor bathroom to wash her makeup off before going to History.

  “How was the French Revolution different from the American Revolution?” Mrs. Reyes was asking as Crystal walked into the room.

  “Yo! Crystal, is that your limousine?” John Williams asked loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  Crystal slid into her seat and put her books on her desk.

  “I’d like to know, too,” Mrs. Reyes said. “Is that your car? We saw it pull up to the school.”

  “No, my agent hires it for me,” Crystal said.

  “Get bad, mama!” John clapped his hands together.

  “Okay, class, let’s simmer down,” Mrs. Reyes went on. “Crystal, did you do the homework?”

  “I didn’t have time, Mrs. Reyes. I had to go to the Caliper office.”

  “That’s no excuse, Crystal,” said Mrs. Reyes. “You can’t let your modeling career interfere with your school assignments.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “That’s enough!” Mrs. Reyes’ voice sharpened. “Did you do the reading, at least?”

  “Yes,” Crystal said sullenly.

  “Good, then tell us the differences between the French and the American revolutions.”

  Crystal took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Mrs. Reyes always got on her nerves. She glanced at the clock above the side blackboard. It was a quarter to ten, another ten minutes before the end of class.

  “Crystal, do you intend to answer the question?”

  “I don’t know the answer,” Crystal said.

  “You’ll see me after class,” Mrs. Reyes said. “Frank, you want to give us one difference?”

  “The people the French were fighting against, the kings and the royalty, they were right there,” Frank said. “With the American Revolution, the king was across the ocean.”

  “That’s one important difference,” Mrs. Reyes said. “Pat?”

  “The French people were more interested in getting more rights for the different classes while the Americans wanted to have a completely different country.”

  “Very good, Pat,” Mrs. Reyes said. “Perhaps you should spend a little time with your friend Crystal, convincing her that she’s not royalty yet.”

  The rest of the class went quickly, and Mrs. Reyes was surrounded by students picking up test papers when Crystal walked out.

  “Crissie, didn’t Mrs. Reyes say she wanted to see you?” Pat caught up to her in the hallway.

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to do the homework?” Crystal said.

  “I said maybe I wouldn’t,” Pat said. “But I had the time so…”

  “So you figure you’d make me look like a fool!” Crystal said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Have you seen my grades in History?” Pat asked. “Last year I had straight A’s, and this year I’ll be lucky to pull down a B.”

  “Look, Mrs. Reyes doesn’t like me, and you know it,” Crystal said. “She likes making me look stupid, and you’re helping her.”

  “I think she likes you,” Pat said. “Why would she have anything against you?”

  “You heard that bit about the limo,” Crystal said. “I think she’s jealous, that’s all.”

  “Just because you come to school once in a while in a limo?”

  “And maybe because she’s not very pretty,” Crystal said. “Maybe she figures she’ll show me up. How do I know?”

  “People aren’t like that, Crissie. I mean, just because somebody’s not as pretty as you are, that doesn’t mean they’re out to mess over you.”

  “Then why did you do the homework?”

  “Crissie!”

  Crystal watched as Pat turned sharply and walked down the hallway from her. She and Pat had always been close friends, but there wasn’t any question that Pat did a lot better than Crystal in school. What had the guidance counselor said? That Pat was definitely college material. Crystal had been maintaining a C average before she started modeling and was just barely managing that since she had been working.

  It bothered Crystal to hurt Pat. They had been best friends for a long time, but the modeling seemed to get in the way somehow. There were times when she would be so glad to see Pat, to tell her what she had done during the day, and to talk things over with her. But more often than not she didn’t talk to her about what was really on her mind, and sometimes she would find herself saying things that she knew had hurt her friend.

  Pat had been as excited as Crystal when she found out that Crystal would be modeling. And Pat wasn’t the jealous type, that wasn’t it. It was just that modeling wasn’t like she and Pat had thought it would be. The work was harder, more boring, than she ever thought it could be and made more demands on Crystal than she could handle at times. It was, Crystal felt, almost as if she were jealous of Pat for some reason. But she was pretty and she was making a lot of money doing what she was doing. There wasn’t any need to apologize for that.

  Still, Crystal wished that Pat could be with her some of the time. Maybe when she was waiting for a shoot to begin and heard the clients talking about her. Or when a job was done and everyone was packing up to go home, and no one seemed to care about anything except that the shoes she had been wearing looked good or that the name of the product was centered well in the pictures.

  At breakfast the next morning, her father was putting too much butter on his toast, as usual, and talking up a blue streak, also as usual.

  “So they want me to go to Chicago and show it to some bigwigs.” Daniel Brown stirred just the top of his coffee as he spoke. “I don’t know, though. Sometimes they get you in them big buildings and try to steal your ideas. They pick your brain and tell you they’ll get back to you. Then the first thing you know they coming out with your idea and talking about how somebody else developed it.”
r />   “I don’t see what’s so wonderful about these dyes when you didn’t even invent them.” Carol Brown had poured a measured quarter cup of half-and-half into a mixing bowl with two eggs. “I think you’re just frustrated because you’re not a doctor.”

  “Frustrated?” Daniel’s forehead furrowed. “Damn right, I’m frustrated. Anytime you can’t be what you want to be, you’re either frustrated or a fool!”

  “So what’s your idea, Daddy?” Crystal was doing her face-stretching exercises in front of a makeup mirror on the table.

  “Are you in pain or something?”

  “Her facial exercises,” Mrs. Brown said. “To keep her face firm. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’re right about that,” Daniel said. “I sure don’t understand what a sixteen-year-old girl needs to do exercises to keep her face looking good for. Suppose a ugly girl do the exercises, do she stay ugly?”

  “Tell me about your idea, Daddy.”

  “Yeah, well, I figure if all the hospitals in the country would use these inert dyes as wrist markers to color code basic patient information—allergies and whatnot—then there would be a lot fewer accidents.”

  “If people were more careful, then there wouldn’t be any accidents,” Carol said.

  “Yeah, but they ain’t and that’s that,” Daniel responded. “Put some fire under the coffee, baby.

  “Anyway, if I do go, I’ll get a lot of recognition from the hospital,” he went on. “Then, if they put my idea in practice, maybe they’ll even name it after me.”

  “The Brown Plan?” Crystal looked up. “Sounds like Dull City to me.”

  “What’s wrong with Brown? Brown’s a nice name. If you were smart you’d look around for a boy named Brown to marry so you wouldn’t have to change your name.”

  “Can’t you think of anything else for your daughter than getting married?” Crystal’s mother asked.

  “Loretta thinks I should just use Crystal. She says it has a nice feel about it.”

  “Sure does, baby.” Daniel closed his eyes and put his head back. “I remember when I went to see you for the first time. I was working at Sydenham Hospital and you were born in Metropolitan.”

  “Do you want coffee?” Carol poured two eggs into a small frying pan and ran the whisk through them in a quick, counterclockwise motion.

  “Yeah, give me a little more coffee,” Daniel said, his eyes still closed. “The last snow of the season had just fallen and it was cold as anything for March. I was walking down along Fifth Avenue, and there was a newsstand with icicles hanging from it.”

  “I think I’ve heard this story a thousand times, and it doesn’t get a bit better,” Carol said.

  “Yeah, it do,” Daniel said. “Now listen to this part. I saw them icicles and they look just like crystals to me and that’s how you got your name.”

  “If I had known that’s what you were naming her after, I wouldn’t have accepted it,” Carol said.

  “Crystal.” Daniel opened his eyes and put his hand on his daughter’s wrist. “The way your mama used to love me, I could have called you Snowflake and she would have loved the sound of me saying it.”

  “She still does, right, Mama?” Crystal was cutting the cantaloupe her mother had given her.

  “Can you imagine?” Carol put the perfectly scrambled eggs in the middle of the table. “If we had had a boy, he wanted to name him Roosevelt.”

  “After Teddy, not Franklin,” Daniel said.

  “What difference does it make?” Carol asked.

  “It makes a lot of difference,” Daniel said. “Franklin was a politician, Teddy was a fighter. That’s what the Browns are, fighters.”

  “When you going to Chicago, Daddy?”

  “They want me to go the end of October,” Daniel Brown said. “I guess I’ll go. What the heck, they can use the thrill of seeing a real Brown in action.”

  “Mama, did you tell Daddy?”

  “I don’t see why we have to discuss everything in the world with your father, Crystal,” Carol said, glancing toward her husband. “We wouldn’t, either, if he could drag himself out of the Stone Age.”

  “Tell me what?” Daniel Brown looked at Crystal.

  “Daniel, please don’t start acting colored,” Carol said. She turned out the fire under the coffee and poured him a cup.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Loretta wants Crystal to go out with a boy in public so they’ll be seen together.”

  “In public?” Daniel put two teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and stirred it. “Who’s the boy, King Kong?”

  “Sean Farrell, Daddy,” Crystal said. “He was the teenager in US Inc. last year, but he’s going to have his own show in the fall.”

  “This date is going to be in public?”

  “Yes.” Carol turned and looked at her husband. “They’ll be taken to a nightclub in a limousine, stay for two hours, and then Crystal will be brought back to the house in the limousine.”

  “Yeah, so why you so worried about me acting ‘colored’?” Daniel asked.

  “Sean Farrell’s White,” Crystal said.

  “You are the funniest people in the world,” Daniel Brown said, shaking his head. “You keep thinking I got something against White folks and I don’t. I mean as long as this whole thing is in public, it’s okay. You just take a hatpin or something along in case he gets frisky in the back of the car.”

  “I heard he wasn’t the frisky type,” Crystal said, smiling.

  “You can’t tell about them show-business types,” Daniel answered. He brought the coffee to his lips and tasted it. Then he made a face. “This is the worse coffee I have ever tasted in my whole life, woman. Didn’t your mama teach you nothing?”

  “Not enough,” Carol Brown said.

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Daniel asked. “Crystal, what is your mother talking about?”

  Crystal shrugged and stretched her face in the mirror, this time sticking out her tongue. Her father did the same thing and they both laughed.

  4

  Loretta said that she would be working all day for Crystal, and that Crystal, in turn, would be working for two hours for her.

  “Jerry called this morning—he has this shoot to do with the Waterman agency, something about Swiss watches. He was going to let it go by, but then he thought about shooting you and Alyce Winslow together.”

  “Who’s Alyce Winslow?” Crystal was in the back of the limo with Loretta, facing her on one of the small seats.

  “She was with Mannequin, but now she’s with Corolla. She’s very hot. I understand she’s not very nice, though.”

  Crystal shrugged.

  “When Jerry asked if you were free this morning, he was really beside himself. He apologized all over the place, but I think we have to bend for somebody like Jerry once in a while—don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t mind,” Crystal said. “It beats Geometry.”

  “I even picked up the wardrobe for him,” she said, indicating the boxes on the seat next to Crystal. “We still have to do the thing with Sean Farrell tonight, too. Do you know Rosemarie’s column in the Journal?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Crystal said. “It has all the inside information on stars and everything.”

  “You’re going to be in it tomorrow,” Loretta said. “Rosemarie owes us. You’ll change at the office.”

  “Okay,” Crystal said. “Do I go back there after I leave the club?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Loretta leaned across and looked closely at Crystal. “Do you have a base on?”

  “No.”

  “You’re marvelous,” she said. “I’d kill to have skin like yours.”

  “Black?” Crystal asked.

  “Maybe not Black—no, wait—if I got the youth to go with it, I’d take the Black, too,” Loretta said.

  “You’re so sweet,” Crystal said.

  “Only because you’re so lovely,” Loretta said. “And speaking of lovely, have you ever seen Se
an Farrell? He’s beautiful! And he’s going to try to outshine you tonight. But we have a little something special planned. It was Rosemarie’s idea. We might even get the top of her column.”

  “Will I see you later?” Crystal asked as they pulled up outside of Jerry Goodwin’s studio.

  “No, I have to go and talk to the movie people about you. I want to talk to them today, and then tomorrow they’ll see the column, et cetera. It builds.”

  “I feel like a project,” Crystal said.

  “You are, baby,” Loretta said as they stood in front of Jerry’s brownstone. “You’re getting seven-fifty for the shoot this morning. I sent your mother a check last week, did she get it?”

  “Yes,” Crystal answered.

  “How are you doing for money?”

  “Fine,” Crystal said. “I’ve never had so much money in my life. I’ve never even dreamed of so much.”

  “Think about this, baby,” Loretta said softly and slowly. “Modeling is a tough racket. You have to put up with a lot of garbage. You’re earning this money. No one is giving it to you. Watch for Rosemarie’s leads tonight.”

  Jerry had a problem with the lights flickering and was trying to find the landlord. He told Crystal to go up to the studio.

  “Alyce Winslow is there already,” he said. “Rowena’s there, too. She’ll fill you in on the details.”

  Going up the stairs to the studio the second time was different from the first. Crystal felt more comfortable with it than she had the first time, and she was glad to see Rowena again. She rarely had time to talk to other models. Even when there were other girls on the same job, they rarely spoke. The mothers of the other girls would be fixing their hair or somehow fussing with them or just talking to them while they stared at one another, especially during auditions.

  There was usually a lot of staring. Crystal would stare at the other girls to see how attractive they were, or if their breasts were more developed than hers. They would look at one another’s hair or legs or the way each girl moved, and compare themselves. It was not one of the nicer parts of the job.