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doors.
    But the months and years snuck by, and in small, tentative trickles she let herself accept what she could no longer deny: the attention, the fawning, the advances on the phone, the boys handing her red plastic cups at parties, wrapping their hands around her waist when the gym was dark and shaking with hip hop. The second-hand whispers of he likes you, he’s into you , and Crystle’s cheeks flushing with blood and the most delirious embarrassment ( of course he likes me , she thought, has he seen those other girls? ). Slowly, she affected a kind of swagger, done with thinking too hard of other, less attractive girls, her eyes rising from the bottoms of lockers and spiral-bound notebooks to watch the sun slant across her afternoon classrooms with something like joy. Soon she could take time off from studying in her spare periods because she was already smart; she could run circles around the girls who were known as straight-A achievers. And how sweet the springs became when her head was dizzy with sunlight and pollen, and the lark sparrows and goldfinches sang, and she drove with her friends in her parents’ car to Houston, feeling the warm air blowing over her bare skin while they sang the lyrics to whatever song was on, didn’t matter if it was any good. Those dark, pitying feelings had been blown out by the sun and by vodka at parties and by the wet lips of boys her age or older, whose hands slipped down her back and squeezed what they could get away with. Screw it , she thought; she was desired, popular from day one without feeling like she’d donned a mask, and the A’s rolled in and soon college loomed so magical. And so it was a quote on a scrap of paper that suddenly made things snap together: the race goes not to the swift but to the one who endures . Hadn’t she endured? Hadn’t she endured those evenings in the lunchroom of the Kroger, with its rank scent of wax cardboard and carrots while the dance was thumping at the school? Or being rejected by the ‘smart girls’ just because she was gorgeous and they were not, or snubbed by certain so-called popular girls who turned to catty bitches whenever Crystle caught the eyes of their boyfriends? She’d endured – endured so much that victory, truly winning , was now only right.
    But the leap from pretty to supermodel was still slow in the making. Crystle couldn’t remember the moment, couldn’t pinpoint an instant. Girlfriends offered their admonishing jabs when she felt ugly, or too skinny, or just plain dull: What are you whining about? they’d ask. You’re one to talk. Ugly? You’re perfect, you’re gorgeous, like no one I’ve ever seen . When she was comic and self-deprecating like her father, or when a boy didn’t return her gaze or her veiled flirts: It’s ’cause he’s scared, girl. ’Cause he ain’t never seen something like you. First it was walking through the mall and one day catching sight of herself in a mirror and not recognizing who she saw. Then it was whole rows of men turning their heads in theatres, in church pews, in restaurants. Pimpled gas-station crews having to focus on the hood of her car, windshield wipers soapy and dripping in their hands. Buttoned-up waiters trembling with memorized menus. Door-to-door religious witnesses suddenly forgetting why they’d come calling. They done broke the mould , or My oh my, I remember you when you was just a little , or simply Daaaaaamn , a drawn-out eruption from a passing window, the collective sighs of Missouri City falling to worship this mature, tall, full-lipped woman, neck so long it could reach the clouds that capped the city in its flatness. Suddenly she was the Crystle Danae Stewart, name recited by ninth-grade boys as they scanned the graduating photos of 1999, thinking ahead four impossible years, baffled that anyone so beautiful could have sat in their seats or stared at the same