305

Crystal

Not even the doe cantering across open grass barely thirty yards from the highway could break Crystal’s fixation on the thing that had been haunting her all day long and just would not shut the hell up. Under ordinary circumstances she’d have thrilled to a flash of dashing fauna while driving home from work. But that snot bubble had ruined this, too.

Why did that have to happen? she kept asking herself with the disbelieving indignation of someone who’s scolding God. How could you have let that happen?

The sudden recollection of that bubble—as big as a golf ball or a paddle ball at least—could not have been more vivid or seemed more immediate had Crystal been Proust biting into a madeleine.

She’d been standing in front of her fifth-grade class, nervously delivering an oral book report, and with no forewarning and for no apparent reason had snorted in mid-sentence, such that a huge bubble of snot had bloomed from her left nostril to the shrieking, guffawing delight of everyone in the room, Miss Goik included.

Why did that have to happen to me?

And why did that mortifying memory have to come rushing into her brain as she was buttering her wheat toast at 6:44 a.m.? And why had she not been able to blind her mind’s eye to it from that moment on? There seemed to be no stopping the video loop; not with the quotidian activities of the workplace or the casual banter of the lunchroom or even with a doe cantering over open grass.

So Crystal decided to purge her head of poisonous content by putting it all down on paper—every embarrassment, every regrettable incident, every single thing she’d undo or do differently if only she could. She started filling her first spiral notebook that evening, believing that looking backward was the best thing she could do for herself, going forward.

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