The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  Actually, I never wrote that last one down. For one thing, by the time it happened, I no longer kept the notebook. For another, to have to see it written out that way would have smashed my guilty heart to flinders.

  I hadn’t played the historical marker game for ages, of course, but if I still had, I would have mentally stuck a big shiny sign in the manicured grass beneath the giant oak tree in the south field of the Webley School, one that read: WILLOW CLEARY, AGED SIXTEEN, HAS HER FIRST-EVER ARGUMENT WITH A BOY HER AGE—AND WINS. At least, I thought I won. Luka might have had a different take on the outcome, but even he couldn’t have denied that, at the very least, I held my own.

  The argument was about Dorothea Brooke, one of the central characters in Middlemarch. If you haven’t read it, you should, but here’s really all you need to know to understand our argument: Dorothea is a wealthy, beautiful young woman barely out of her teens who dreams of doing something big and world-changing, so, despite her family’s horrified disapproval, she marries a much older, unhandsome, emotionally detached scholar named Edward Casaubon, whom she deeply admires, with the thought that she will help him finish his “great” work, which has something to do with religion, and send it out into the world for the benefit of all; the marriage is a failure, mostly because Casaubon isn’t very interested in finishing his book or in having a wife, and after the sickly Casaubon dies, Dorothea admits to herself that she is in love with her friend, Casaubon’s young, handsome cousin Will Ladislaw, who has loved her all along; and even though no one approves of this suitor, either (because Will is not rich and Dorothea is), she marries him and lives happily ever after.

  I adore Dorothea. Adore! Which is how the argument got started.

  It was one of those out-of-nowhere, brilliant, orange and cobalt fall afternoons, so Luka and I decided to talk about our English project outside, instead of in the library. At first, the decision appeared to have all the makings of a disaster because for a few long, agonizing seconds, I could not for the life of me figure out how to be on the ground without looking like an idiot. Should I sit cross-legged? Legs stretched out? Legs tucked under? Or like Luka, knees bent, elbows propped on them? My mind and heart raced. Finally, I opted for a sideways, bent-legged position that instantly mortified me because it was so girlish, like some nauseatingly prissy version of that statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid who sits on a rock, minus the partial fish tail. So I shifted to having my legs stretched out in front of me, remembering a split second too late that in fitted black pants, my storky appendages would look exactly like ebony chopsticks, but then I simply couldn’t shift yet again because nothing could look worse than writhing around on the ground, twisting myself into shapes like a crazed origami person. I cursed my legs, along with my pathetic self-consciousness, and the afternoon might have gone to hell in a handbasket except that as soon as we got started talking about the book, I forgot all about how I was sitting and just sat.

  “So,” said Luka, “what did you think of the book?”

  It was one of those thrilling, exasperating, impossibly wide-open questions to which there are far, far too many responses, but I had to try to answer it. I owed as much to the book, to George Eliot, and to Luka for choosing me, so I took a deep breath and gave it a go.

  “Well, for one thing, I found it interesting how Eliot is so distant one minute, and then so intimate the next, and at one point it hit me that this style really mirrored the story because there are these large, public issues at stake and then there are the characters’ relationships, and the two don’t stay separate at all, when you think about it. They overlap all the time. Um, another thought I had was that there was a lot of attention paid to women’s looks. I admit that I haven’t really come to any conclusions about what Eliot was doing with this, but there’s the fact that the most beautiful woman, Rosamond Vincy, had the worst values and the plainest woman, Mary Garth, had the best, but then, of course, there’s Dorothea who is definitely beautiful, but not in your typical . . .”

  At about this time, I caught sight of Luka’s face, which was bemused and also twitchy around the mouth in a way that clearly meant he was trying not to laugh. Obviously, I should have died of embarrassment if for no other reason that, when it came to interacting with kids at school, dying of embarrassment was my fallback response, but for some reason, maybe because he was still somehow coming across as nice, I didn’t. I cut off midsentence, lifted my eyebrows, and said, “Am I amusing you?”

  He grinned with one side of his mouth. “When I asked what you thought of the book? I was really just asking if you liked it.”

  “Ohhhhh.” I grinned back. “I did like it. I loved it, in fact. How about you?”

  I would have supposed Luka to be too cool to truly consider a question like this, much less give a serious answer, but he tipped his disheveled-haired head to one side and appeared for all the world to contemplate. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be some lofty echelon of coolness that allowed a person to forget about cool and act interested in what he found interesting. Who knew? What I didn’t know about coolness could fill a book even longer than Middlemarch.

  Luka said, “Yeah, I liked it. It was funny, which I definitely did not expect. There were some caricatures, obviously, but a lot of the characters were down to earth and cool. Fred, Mr. Farebrother, Celia, Mary Garth. I liked how Will wasn’t some perfect guy and was actually kind of directionless for most of the book. But, God, Dorothea.” He made what I can only describe as a vomit face. I had the fleeting thought that if you could be handsome while making a vomit face, you had to be pretty handsome, but my next thought was What?

  “What?” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “You didn’t like Dorothea?”

  “Ugh. She was so annoying. Didn’t you think she was insanely annoying?”

  Let me be clear. I don’t think you have to like characters in order to love them. I love a lot of characters with whom I would never want to, as my peers say, hang. Hamlet, for one. Practically every single character in Wuthering Heights, for another. But Dorothea Brooke? Dorothea Brooke I liked and loved and admired and cherished. She just tries so hard to be a good person. How can you not love that? I set my jaw.

  “No one,” I said, “could be annoyed by such a person as Dorothea Brooke. She’s so pure-hearted and generous and nice.”

  Luka had the nerve to roll his eyes.

  “Come on. She thinks she’s better than everyone, except for Casaubon who is clearly a loser. Everyone she knows tries to talk her out of marrying the old guy, but she thinks she’s smarter than all of them.”

  “She is smarter than all of them!”

  “You’re saying she was right to marry him?”

  “Okay, no. Obviously, that was a bad decision, but she made it for the right reasons. She wanted to devote herself to something beautiful and important. And all those other people, yes, maybe they were trying to talk her into doing the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons.”

  “They thought he was a pompous ass, which he was.”

  “They made fun of the way he blinks, for heaven’s sake. Do you really think someone shouldn’t marry a person because other people don’t like the way he blinks?”

  Luka shook his head. “If he weren’t a pompous ass, if he were a nice guy, probably they wouldn’t have made fun of him like that.”

  This took me aback for a moment because it hadn’t occurred to me before. But as soon as Luka said what he said, it seemed true, even, maybe, universally so. If you liked a person, or if you loved him, you didn’t mind his physical imperfections. Someone’s narrow shoulders or knobby wrists or slightly bugged eyes, for instance, might even endear him to you more. But if you disliked someone, well, it was all grist for the meanness mill. Truth be told, once I’d noticed Bec Lansing’s vaguely round cheeks, her one physical glitch, I’d mentally hissed “chipmunk” at her every time I saw her, with glorious satisfaction.

  “True,” I conceded.

 
; “Tell me this: Do you think Dorothea actually thought Casaubon was hot? The guy had moles.”

  “So?”

  “White moles. Two of them. On his face.”

  “So?”

  “On his face. With hairs growing out of them.”

  I shrugged.

  “Willow.” Luka leaned toward me. “Hairs. Moles with hairs.”

  I had to laugh at this. “All right. So he wasn’t hot, even to Dorothea.”

  It should be noted that I had never before used “hot” as a descriptor for a human being and, prior to this conversation, would have sworn I never would.

  “But Dorothea was thinking of less superficial things than hotness,” I said and immediately thought Do people say hotness?

  Luka gave me another bemused but friendly look. “Uh, yeah. Sure they do.”

  “What?”

  “You just asked if people say hotness, and they do.”

  For the love of God, I had said it out loud. How had that happened? Was it possible there was a fine line between comfortable and pathological and that, after ten minutes with this boy, I’d already crossed it? Perhaps because I had done exactly that, I decided not to worry about it. I shrugged. “Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “No problem. So admit it: Dorothea thought she was above physical attraction, but she was wrong. If you’re dating a person, if you’re marrying a person, hotness matters. It’s fundamental.”

  I looked at Luka there on this grass, with his shoulders, his white, square, straight teeth, his long black eyes, the leaf shadows on his honey-colored skin. I thought, You’re not exactly a disinterested party when it comes to that particular subject, are you? But this time, I made damn sure I only said it inside my head.

  “Fine,” I said. “Yes, she made a mistake.”

  Luka leaned his head back, looked up at the canopy of oak leaves. “Yeah, it’s almost always a mistake for a young person to be with an old person.”

  For the first time during our conversation, I felt a hot rush of embarrassment, which made no sense, since I had never “been” with anyone, much less a person who would remotely qualify as old. But I shoved the embarrassment aside and got back to the business of defending Dorothea.

  “But that doesn’t make her annoying. She made a mistake because she was idealistic and naive; that could happen to a lot of people.”

  “True,” said Luka, still staring up at the tree, “that it could happen to a lot of people. False that it doesn’t make her annoying.”

  “But listen,” I said. “She could’ve run home when she realized what a louse Casaubon was, but she stuck by him. Why are you smiling like that? Standing by one’s commitment is noble!”

  “‘Louse,’” said Luka, with a short but real laugh. “Nice word choice.”

  “Thank you. Now admit that I’m right.”

  “I was rooting for her to dump the guy, but, yeah, I guess sticking with him was noble.”

  “It most certainly was. And she learned from her mistakes, too. You can’t say she married Will for the wrong reasons. In the end, she realized she was an ordinary person in that way: falling in love. If she was a wee bit arrogant to begin with, she found humility later, right?”

  “Okay, you’re right,” said Luka. He looked at me, shook his head, and laughed again.

  “What?”

  “‘Wee bit,’” he said.

  He gave me a thumbs-up, and I gave him one back, without a thought to whether doing so was in keeping with thumbs-up etiquette, about which I had not the slightest idea.

  Luka and I stayed under that tree for almost an hour, not making all that much progress on our paper, but, even though I had previously bemoaned the time-squandering aspect of group work, I found I didn’t mind. There was no reason on earth for it to be so, but talking to Luka was the easiest thing I’d done in such a long time. These days, I was almost never relaxed, not at school, not at home, not even with Mr. Insley, around whom I was happy, yes, oh, so happy, but far too—I don’t know—exhilarated, perhaps, to ever really relax. Somehow, the lawn beneath that oak tree felt the way my house used to feel, like breathing space, like a sanctuary so safe you forgot there was anything to be safe from. When Luka got out his cell phone to check the time, I had the wild urge to wrest the damn thing from his hand and fling it to the four winds.

  “Shit, I have to go,” he said. “I have swim practice in less than an hour. Totally lost track of the time.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said.

  “Nah, it was good.”

  He stood up, a tall shape against the sky—the silhouette of his spiky hair looking remarkably like the Sydney Opera House—and reached out his hand to help me up. For a blank split second, I stared at it; I had never held hands with a boy my age, even in a comradely, matter-of-fact, entirely non-boy-holding-hands-with-girl way, but, before he noticed my hesitation—I hoped—I grabbed hold (it was a good hand, much larger than mine, not especially rough or smooth, not sweaty) and he helped haul me to my feet.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  It would amaze me later, how I wasn’t paralyzed with awkwardness about what to do with his hand once I was upright. In a move that I fancied almost qualified as smooth, I let go of it and, in the same motion, brushed the grass off the backs of my legs. “Are you practicing here at the school?”

  “No, high school swimming doesn’t start for a while. I swim year-round with a club team.”

  “Oh, my. Every day?”

  “Twice a day, during the week. In the morning before school and again in the evening.”

  “Holy smokes. You never miss?”

  “Not that much, but if I have a lot of homework, I usually try to grab a quick workout by myself in the school pool and skip my real practice. Coach Wheelwright, the Webley coach, gave me a key.”

  We started walking toward the door to the library. In the distance, I could see some girls running, the cross-country team I guessed, and felt a pang of longing. But it was hard to truly long to be somewhere else when where I was was so pleasant and normal-feeling.

  “Well, that explains it,” I said, nodding.

  “What?”

  “Your hair.”

  He smiled wryly and scratched his head, making his bronzy, goldy hair stand even more on end.

  “Yeah, right, it’s pretty rough. My mom says it’s no color known to man and that the strands break off like glass, which is true.”

  “It reminds me of a hedgehog, except metallic.”

  “Wow. No one’s ever called me a metallic hedgehog before,” said Luka.

  “I find that very hard to believe,” I said.

  Luka laughed. “Hey, how are you getting home? You want a ride?”

  And that’s when I stopped being relaxed because I remembered that I was supposed to have a quick driving lesson with Mr. Insley. Afterward, he’d do what he always did, which was to drop me a few hundred yards from my house, and I’d walk the rest of the way. I had told him I had a group meeting after school, but I hadn’t told him it would last over an hour. Like Luka, I’d lost track of time. I was gripped by the sudden, worrying thought of Mr. Insley sitting in his office, fiddling with his wristwatch, waiting, but was simultaneously gripped by the idea of just forgetting the lesson and riding home with Luka. I suppose I just wanted the easiness to go on a little longer. What to do, what to do? But my dilemma only lasted a few moments because right then, the cross-country team got close enough so that I could see Bec leading the pack (of course!), her hair streaming behind her, and when she caught sight of Luka, she started waving the wave of a person on a deserted island who spots a ship and broke into a dead sprint. In a matter of seconds she was upon us, although if she saw me, she never let on.

  “Lukey!” she yelled and leaped gleefully onto his back, her arms wrapped around his neck.

  And, just like that, I became invisible.

  “You’re killing me, here. God, what do you weigh now?” said Luka, pretending to stagger. “One e
ighty? One ninety?”

  I gave Luka a quick wave, which he didn’t see because I was invisible, jogged over to the library door, and was inside before anyone noticed I’d left. Or, in the case of Bec, noticed I was ever there in the first place. For some stupid reason, I found my chest was heaving in the short, jerky way that meant I would cry if I didn’t calm myself. So I stood for a little, trying to subdue my heart, breathing in the papery, dusty smell of the library with slow, careful breaths. They don’t matter, silly girl, not Bec, not even Luka, not one student at this godforsaken school matters. How could you ever have thought otherwise? Did you forget what you have, what is all yours and no one can touch?

  Of course, I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? None of them mattered, none. I stood in the back of the library, drawing myself upright, easing my shoulders back, reminding myself of the truth I had so recently learned: nothing can touch you, not guilt or fear or sisters who are not sisters; no one can hurt you, not enemies or loneliness or friends who stop being friends when other people show up; you can rise above anything, anything, everything when you are in love.

  And I was—oh, was I ever—in love.

  WE DIDN’T HAVE THE driving lesson that day and not because Mr. Insley was upset with me for being so late. As it turned out, he had gotten trapped into a conversation with the dean about an unruly student and came striding briskly into his classroom a full two minutes after I’d gotten there. He was so charmingly out of breath and apologetic, and I was so exhausted from the encounter, or non-encounter as it were, with Bec (and, if I’m honest, still smarting from Luka’s having dropped me like a hot potato) that I didn’t even mind his canceling the lesson and simply taking me to the usual drop-off spot near my house. I didn’t say much on the ride home, just listened to Mr. Insley make fun of Dean Fogerty (“he of the bombast, rulebook rigidity, and copious potbelly”) and felt grateful to be with someone who liked me enough to make fun of his superior in my presence. Before I got out of the car, though, Mr. Insley’s mood shifted to serious, and he laid a hand on my arm. Even through my coat, I could feel the jolt of electricity.