You couldn't ignore crystal. She was a hungry little earthquake, a pretty hand grenade.
Crystal was every song you'd ever listened to high in your friend's car doing one fifty on the backroads of your hometown in the summertime, the final gooey gulp of warm hot chocolate at your favorite coffee joint splattered with slow masturbation in the morning just a little hungover and a big bowl of cherries on the side. Lashes so long and dark they took light years to travel, lanky punctuations attached to the galactic green velocity of what the unaffected (there were none) called eyes, which when she rolled at you, set your hands to shaking worse than a junkie nine days without a fix.
She was a quirky ignition source, the most adorable stick of dynamite you ever had the pleasure of wrapping your doomed head around. The loveliest ten car pileup you ever saw.
The new girl at work, and hated instantly by the rest of us. Something that beautiful, that maddening, was not allowed to exist. She was an alien. A terrifying anomaly. The giddy grin of sheepishness after a late night spent doing something you knew you'd regret in the morning.
The cooks in the kitchen made her grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup hearts. The truckers salivated like dogs. Her presence had rattled the antennae of the boys from the carwash over the hill and they came in delirious droves, enchanted by the possibility of getting a number, perhaps a glance, maybe a smile from her strawberry milkshake mouth. Would you settle for overhearing her giggle shyly, attempt to capture the elusive ghost of a hair twirl?
But she grew on you, a tiny puppy your bitter heart no longer wanted to kick. She was endearing. She played the ukelele. She spoke fluent, lilting french. Made animal noises over the loudspeakers, danced down the aisles while sweeping the floors and changed her hair every five minutes (the hair she woke up with was anyone's guess, its natural state was as perplexing and changeable as its host). Brown and blond highlighted chaos in motion, strands standing every direction of beautiful.
Sometimes, she'd get her heart broken. You'd wake up with the distinct feeling something was wrong with the world, only to find Crystal reduced to glorious girl-scented puddles and soaking into the carpet. She'd stop eating. She was a kitten in a basket in a torrent of freezing rain with bombs all around. The feeling in your guts when you realize you forgot your mother's birthday. Again.
When Crystal was sad, even the bricks knew, and it was all the mortar could do to hold on for dear life.
But the next day she'd bounce up to you, twirling and growling like a wolf and she'd chirp, "I decided I'm too awesome to be sad anymore!" and that would be that.
It happened about once a week.
It seemed the universe has its silky tongue lodged so deep betwixt the apex of this particular girl's sweetly-clenching, soul-milking honeyed existence that her astral keens reverberated into the kinds of velvety galaxies and swollen nebulae that would make even the most liberal-minded telescope blush. It wasn't so much that that universe revolved around her. That wasn't the point.
The point was that you couldn't tell for sure that it didn't.