Crystal by Walter Dean Myers Page B

poetry?”
    “With his dumb-butt poetry.” Pat sighed.
     
     
    Crystal had picked up a copy of La Femme on the way home from school. She lay across her bed, thumbing slowly through the pages. The girls in the magazine were beautiful. She looked closely at some of the pictures and saw that they had been shot with either a soft focus or developed that way. Loretta had told her about a model who started developing wrinkles around her eyes and the account photographer had used softer and softer focus to keep her career going.
    She knew boys in her school liked La Femme. They would sure buy it if they knew she was in it. Crystal looked at the faces of the girls. They were all supposed to be scientists. They looked happy enough, as if they enjoyed showing their bodies. Crystal could look at them, look at their smiles, and imagine that it was all right to pose the way they were. But when she imagined herself doing it, lying back on a couch with her legs…No, she couldn’t imagine it at all.
    “Crystal?”
    “Who is it?” Crystal pushed the copy of La Femme between her bed and the wall.
    “It’s me, Sister Gibbs. I got something for you.”
    “Come on in.” Crystal sat up quickly and dabbed cleansing cream on her face to hide the places where tears had smeared her makeup.
    “Look.”
    Crystal turned and saw Sister Gibbs bring her hands from behind her back. In the palm of her right hand was an orange puffy ball.
    “A kitten?” Crystal stood up to take a closer look.
    “I was walking down near that pet shop over on Fulton Street, down from Concord Baptist, and I seed thiscrowd, so I went over and took me a look. Guess what the fools got in the window?”
    “What?”
    “They got this little kitty in a cage with a snake.”
    “With a snake?”
    “Yeah, child.” Sister Gibbs sat heavily on the end of the bed. “Poor thing is trembling and shaking to beat all get-out. I marched myself right in there and asked them fools what in God’s name they was doing. They come talking about how they putting on a show so they can sell them some snakes.”
    “They were going to let the snake eat this kitten?”
    “Sure as I’m sitting here.” Sister Gibbs rested her elbows on her knees. “Now if that ain’t Satan’s handiwork, ain’t nothing is! You hear me?”
    “I hear you, Sister Gibbs.”
    “I snatched that kitty up and said if they don’t stop they evil ways I’m going right down to the S.P.C.A. and run ’em out of business!”
    “People do anything for a dollar.”
    “You want that kitty?”
    “I sure do,” Crystal said. “Does he have a name?”
    “None I know of,” Sister Gibbs said.
    “I’ll call him Gizmo, then,” Crystal said, taking the tiny kitten.
    “Gizmo? What kind of name is that for a cat?”
    “It just came to me,” Crystal said. “You don’t like it?”
    “I guess it’s okay,” Sister Gibbs said. “You know what happened to me yesterday?”
    “What?”
    “I was doing me some day’s work for this White girl overon Ninety-third Street and I was catching my breath a little when I seed her reading the paper. I look at the paper and then I look again. Then I said to myself, ‘Ain’t that my Crystal in the paper?’ Well, sure ’nough it was. So I told this White girl I knowed you. She didn’t say nothing, but she give me one of them looks like to turn hard cheese into buttermilk, like she don’t believe a word I be saying.
    “Now, nothin’ I like better’n Jesus Christ A-Mighty and I follow His ways. I don’t be going around here lying—Watch that kitty ’fore he pee on your bed, sweetheart.”
    Crystal took a hatbox from the bottom of her closet and put Gizmo in it. “He’ll be a fashion cat,” she said.
    “So when this poor skinny thing look at me like I’m lying, I look right back at her and say, ‘As God is my Secret Judge, I know that girl.’
    “You know what she say?”
    “What?”
    Sister Gibbs pursed large lips into as small and as tight a pout as she