"-should tell our story, warn them, warn them not to do what we did, what everybody did."
Crystal was never really completely comfortable in her own skin. She considered her name a mixed blessing – although she wouldn't call it that, because she didn't like to use the word "mixed". On the one hand, it firmly established her cultural identity before you even glanced at her, and, since she was proud of that identity, she liked that. On the other hand, have you ever seen a lower-case-c crystal? They're white. For many girls named Crystal living in Skid Row and similar areas, this fact was a simple little bit of irony. But for this particular Crystal, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the father she never saw and tried not to think about, the one who left her physically split between two different, conflicting racial identities, no matter how culturally she sided with one of them – the one without whom she couldn't exist and with whom she couldn't exist in a way she really liked. At least she didn't live in Baltimore, where segregation was still a thing. But then again, the people in Baltimore were dumb as shit anyway.
But whether or not she lived in Baltimore, Crystal was still secretly offended whenever anybody interacted with her, because she was never sure if anyone viewed her as lesser. The only exceptions were her two best friends, Ronette and Chiffon. But even then, her insecurity about what, exactly, she was, made her the aggressive one of the three - and that aggression was what left her where she was now. The three of them – Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon – could all sing, and they could all sing fantastically. When Mushnik's Skid Row Florists – well, it was Mushnik and Son now – no, it was a WBE Superstore – got big, the world's spotlight came down on Skid Row. And that spotlight was the chance the three girls had been waiting for, to rise up and accomplish their dream of getting their music spread throughout America. And Crystal thought she would be happy. But she wasn't.
Because Ronette had always been the lead singer – and the leader of the three in general – it was no surprise that she was the focus in most of the tracks being recorded. Crystal had never minded, or even really thought about it, before. But in this studio, surrounded by old, rich, white men she'd never met before? Her mind began racing, considering the possible causes for this, and she was certain that she had been robbed in some way. Why wasn't she getting more vocal focus? Where were all the songs she wrote? And the songs that she did write – why was it Ronette singing them instead of her? So she snapped, and she began to rant. And rant. And rant. Her volume, and her tone of voice, and her throwing things scared the people around her, so she didn't really notice when they weren't reacting to her, but rather to something behind her. Eventually, she realized that something wasn't right, so she turned around, and there it was. An enormous, mobile, toothy Audrey II, filling the studio faster than the Beatles could fill the radio stations. The last noise Crystal made as a human was a multi-pitch scream, half of an extreme frustration and half of a very confused sort of terror. But Crystal wouldn't want it described that way, as two separate halves. She'd probably say it was just the anger.