“No one wants to be ignored, no one wants to be invisible. Some pick up a skill, others a hobby, and others still resort to crime. I learned in 1981 that I was such a person, and before the 1990’s I would become a murderer. I wasn’t the first, and I certainly wasn’t alone.”

­- Planning a Murder, Executing an Execution

Crystal Callino had always taken pride in her name. Not only did she treasure the way it sounded with its repeated “C’s” and “L’s,” but she had also had a special appreciation for how normally spelt it was. Crystal, possibly in conjunction with the name she had grown up with, liked things to be clear. She hated being lied to, she hated people who put on their masks everyday before heading out the door, and, to a smaller degree, she hated people who spelled their name in ridiculous ways. Kristal, Chrystle, Kristelle, and the one that started the corruption in the first place: Krystal.

With such a distaste for personas, deceit, and strange names, Crystal’s association with the drama club wouldn’t make much sense to the casual observer, but with a little thought, the reasons were simple enough. People whose job it is to project, project, project, often lack the energy or spare creativity needed to create a concrete fake personality for themselves for the day to day high school life. As a result of such, the people in drama club were often brutally honest, painfully awkward, or mind-numbingly boring. She treasured her thespian friends, though, because they were real and to her they were a blast and a half. She hadn’t really become fast friends with any of the people she had tried to hang out with in junior high, but joining the drama club on a dare from her parents had turned out to be something of a blessing.

Crystal didn’t even know she could act or sing, of course she had always dreamed of doing it growing up, as any kid does when given a microphone or any spot of attention, but she had never had the palle to get up on stage. She loved movies, and could lip synch along to the better parts of What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (which, as her parents joked, was all of it) and she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be part of some big, dramatic production. It was her sophomore year of high school, and she was convinced that this year was her year to be center stage, or at least off to the left a little. Whatever role she could get, she just wanted a piece of that stage.

She loved everything about the auditorium. Their school didn’t have a huge budget, especially for the arts, but the auditorium was a place that had grown on her so very quickly. She loved it in all stages, empty and quiet, in the middle of rehearsal with people scattered amongst the seats in cliques, and especially full of people. It was a lot like having house guests. It had capacity for around six or seven hundred, and the stage was preceded by a rather hazardous looking orchestra pit. They had no orchestra to speak of, and the band seemed to spend most of their time in the gym or on the football field, but the pit provided a different function to her. It was a viable representation of what had been described to her as the “fourth wall.“

It was all about separation, and Crystal supposed that’s what differentiated it from a house party. The stage was something that belonged to them, and she found herself flinching every time she saw cheerleaders or talent show acts on the stage. They seemed to have no respect for it, no knowledge of the history of the stage of the love for the stage. To them it was just a wooden platform. She had no clue where all the sudden fanaticism for the craft came from, even with her love of movies she never pictured herself as one of the theater elite.

From backstage the stage was a different world, which she knew was true in every stage, but people always assume that the feelings they have belong to them. Backstage is where her and her friends were her and her friends, it was where they were pre-masking. There was a small corridor behind the backstage area where they could be louder, and where the dressing rooms were. The hallway functioned as common room and sprinting track, as secret passageway and main thoroughfare. It was designed in much the same way as the halls in every one of her class building, down to the crappy linoleum and the paint on the walls, but it was so very different. The entrances were locked to the outside, and it was often populated with people wearing dresses and mustaches at one moment, who might swap them in the next few minutes with one another.

The dressing rooms were another matter entirely, they were obviously labeled for boys and girls, but they weren’t hard labels like with bathrooms. She could remember diving into the closet on more than a few occasions where an over-eager actor-to-be had burst in after a scene, even though he had been admonished for such over and over. They sang along to Disney songs, and they threw shoes at people who were daring enough to whistle or call the name of the play. They would leave each other messages on the mirrors and laugh as the boys ’endured’ their stage makeup. Her teacher had taught them early on to treat the backstage crew with more than equality, but with reverence. She once even went so far as to imply that alienating your crew might leave you naked and in the dark. The crew ranged from bubbly to oft-putting, but they had no masks to wear and Crystal had a great respect for the sometimes blunt honesty that several years of doing technical theater seems to give people.

Crystal Callino could be honest and open with anyone, but that was on the ground. On the stage, and with the pit separating her with the audience by worlds, she could be anyone (anyone that the script dictated anyway). In her first role, she had been in ______ where she had been directed to strike at her friends, to yell at just about anyone, to be an overall terrible person, and she relished it. She had been the quiet one, although she despised the label. She was nowhere near quiet at home, and she walked into each school year, each new class prepping herself to say something great and hilarious that would bond her to her classmates. She played it through each year on the first day, she would just waltz into first period and say something like, “English 101? I thought this was Japanese!” and then go to turn around. Crystal didn’t know if this would or wouldn’t be accompanied by Vaudevillian piano, but people would laugh and she could immediately talk to the people sitting around her. Typically though, she just asked them to borrow paper and worked her way up to sheepish ‘Hello’s by the end of the year.

Crystal had a core of close friends in the club that radiated outward to their connections in what would appear in a diagram as a labyrinthine spiral. As a result of which, Crystal Callino found herself with more friends than she knew what to do with. All of a sudden people wanted to know about her take on bands, movies, lunch line waits (they were atrocious). They sat outside the crowded cafeteria building which was mostly for seniors anyway. Picnic tables sat in student-rearranged groupings outside the cafeteria, so sometimes their table would wind up touching the different cardinal points within a single week.

She had finally found their table on a drizzly Monday morning. She quickly sat on the end where her closest friends were. They were mostly actors, but the one she spent the most time with was Dryden, who was a makeup artist. His name was actually James John Dryden, but he found James, Jimmy, Jim, John, and any combination of his first and middle names to be “pedestrian,” which is how he took to describing anything that he found distasteful. Having these common names that he refused to use, he simply resorted to his last name, which Crystal had found endearing and more than a little suave in a secret agent kind of very. She found a place next to Elizabeth and Aniella, who were two of the people who had kind of latched onto her when she started in the club. Elizabeth was a Mormon, which didn’t keep her from having an earth-shatteringly huge libido. Aniella was quiet in speech, but if Crystal had heard a more sonorous and melodious voice in her life, it certainly hadn’t come from someone so small.

“Welcome to the seventh circle of Hell!” Dryden near-screamed at her from across the picnic table. Crystal ignored him for the time being to say a quick hello to everyone. When he began to repeat himself she turned,

“Why? Why Dryden? Why must you yell such things?”

Elizabeth answered for him, “I ask him to do a few flashcards with me, and all of a sudden were knee deep in Divine Comedy references.”

“Abandon hope, ye who enter in, abandon hope!” Dryden continued, obviously enjoying himself.

Elizabeth ignored him, as she had probably grown used to doing. She was more than tired of Dryden’s antics, but Crystal and Aniella still giggled a little every time, which was more than enough to fuel him. Dryden ran on rocket fuel, and just a little drop could keep him for quite a while. She was scanning her lunch for hair when Elizabeth spoke up again.

“Do you think you could do flashcards with me, Crystal? I know it’s kind of bogus, but you know, school.” she rolled her eyes and made a gagging sound.

“Don’t sweat it, Elizabeth. Hand them over.”

They ran through some drills, with Crystal trying to balance between holding up the card, keeping an intense stare on Elizabeth, and trying to fork what may have been chow mein into her mouth. The combination eventually became too much to stand, and Elizabeth lost her concentration. As they laughed, Aniella started giving her a weird look. Drawing back a little and making sure to wipe her mouth a few times, Crystal asked, “What’s up, Ani? You’re psyching me out a little bit.”

Ani blinked, “I’m sorry. It’s your--well I was trying to peg it last week when we were testing out your costumes and makeup and stuff, but your eyes…” she trailed off.

“Woah, get out! What’s wrong with them?” she started to fumble for a compact or something in her bag that she knew she probably didn’t have.

“No, it’s nothing wrong!” Ani flushed a little, “It’s just, they’re a different color today. They were blue last Friday, I remember, and now they’re almost…brown.”

Elizabeth grabbed Crystal’s face and turned it to her, “Duh, Ani, she wears contacts. Right Crystal?”

Crystal slowly shook her head, confused by the whole thing.

“Wait a sec!” Elizabeth said, “come to think of it, your hair was different on Friday too! Look, it was brown, but now it‘s kind of red.”

Crystal went to say something about it being a trick of the light, but all the exclamations had drawn the attention of the table as a whole, and soon Crystal had hands on her hair and faces in her face. She tried to keep calm, but started to feel more than a little claustrophobic. There was definitely hair in her food by now, she thought. All the picking at her hair started to make her think of birds picking out bits of things to make nests, and the resulting images of her drama-friends making nests caused her to begin to laugh. This dissipated the crowd pretty quick. More than a little embarrassed, Crystal shrugged, “It must just be the shampoo I’m using or something. I’m no magician or anything guys, so chillax.”

Everyone settled down a little, and Crystal was left throwing glances at her hair as she did more flash cards with Elizabeth. Truth be told, she had noticed her hair change a little too, what she didn’t want to say for fear of inciting another riot of prodding, was that she had found a clump of blonde hair in the shower drain on Sunday night. She had just thought that it had something to do with the kind of cleaning her mother was doing on the shower. She was debating whether magic hair or the possible complication of chemical permeation through the feet was a worse theory to accept when Dryden once again spoke, this time in his normal voice,

“So, Crystal, a bunch of us are going to the drive-in after rehearsals to catch ourselves a double.” he briefly returned to his dramatic omen voice, “It’s cheaper on Mondays!”

“I don’t know, my parents have been a little off around me lately. The kind of storm-brewing feeling that can only mean a lecture.”

“Through me is the way into eternal woe! Through me is--”

“I’ll see, alright, alright? Maybe I‘ll do some work at rehearsals while you flub up some more lines.” They laughed at this and Dryden returned temporarily to his sandwich. There was a lull as everyone presumably ate, but Crystal turned her face up slightly to the sky, feeling the cool breeze that threatened to bring more than just a light rain. It felt good, and she noted that her arms were beginning to break out in gooseflesh.