The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  After a long while, I stopped crying and remembered my dream, not the part about Luka, which wasn’t important—of course, he would be swimming, the water rat—but the part about Mr. Insley. I wondered if this was what being in love would always be like, dreaming inscrutable dreams about your beloved and forgetting your duties because your head was so full of him, him, him that everything else was crowded out. I hoped not. If I could not take care of the people in this house, I was a brute, an ingrate of the first water, unforgivable.

  And if Mr. Insley were that present in my mind when I was away from him, well, it was nothing compared to how he was when I was with him. He was a whirlpool, pulling me in; a high wire on which I walked with the ground so far below, everyone else tiny as ants; a narrow, twisting, breathtaking road. Intoxicating. Exhausting. Sometimes, after we’d spent time together, my muscles actually ached from my being so—I don’t know—hyperawake, so tightly coiled. And nervous. Nervous in the best possible way but still nervous, waiting for his reactions, for the next thing he would say or do, wanting so much to say or do the right things back. Maybe someday, I would settle in, remember how to breathe like a normal person in his presence. I loved the way things were, but I didn’t see how they could go on like this forever, and I wanted them to. I swear I wanted our love to last forever and ever and ever.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I was so tired, tired in that way that makes you feel like you have a fever, like you’ve lost a layer of skin, like you’d vibrate like a violin string if someone touched you. Almost as soon as I got to school, someone did touch me, didn’t just touch but knocked into me so hard I dropped my books, and I didn’t just vibrate, I was seized by a minor inner earthquake.

  “God, watch where you’re going, spaz!” said Bec.

  I didn’t ignore her and crouch down to gather up my books, as I might have on another day. Buzzing and prickly and full of earthquake, I took two steps in Bec’s direction, stood stock-still, and stared her in the eye.

  “What?” she spat.

  “Why?” I asked. My voice seemed to come from a cool place at the exact center of my body and was almost perfectly flat, all inquiry, not a trace of whine or accusation.

  “Why, what?” she said, tossing around amused glances to her flat-ironed entourage.

  “Why do you hate me?” It was the voice of someone merely interested, calm as stone.

  Something happened then. I don’t know why, maybe because of what I’d asked or the way I’d asked or just my—for once—failure to be afraid of her, but something altered in Bec, a wall fell down or a curtain went up or something so that what suddenly stared back at me was naked, her true face, her underface, stripped bare of sarcasm and scorn, and what I saw in it, raw as a scrape, was a child’s kind of hurt, sorrow mixed with confusion. It didn’t last. Before I could take two breaths, the old face slid down like a garage door.

  “Hate you?” she said, with a sneer. “Seriously? Why would anyone bother to hate you?”

  She and her friends walked away, laughing, and, sapped, I turned around to pick up my books, but they weren’t on the floor anymore. Luka stood there, holding them.

  “Nice friend you’ve got there,” I growled at him, breaching the unspoken rule in our friendship that we did not mention Bec to each other, ever.

  If he heard me, he didn’t show it. He said, “Let’s go. Why aren’t your books in your backpack, anyway? You haven’t even gone to your locker yet, have you?”

  “No. I was looking over some things in the car on the way here. But just because someone’s holding her books does not mean she deserves to have them knocked to the floor.”

  I reached out my arms to take the books from him, but he ignored me again. I’ll say that for Luka, he was good at ignoring. He started walking in the direction of my locker, and then stood there, leaning against the one next to mine, handing me my books, one by one, as I sorted through what I needed for class.

  “We need to work on the project, really break the whole thing down, interview by interview,” he said.

  Luka and I were making a film about Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon, a pseudodocumentary.

  “I still think you’re wrong about never showing the interviewer. No one likes a disembodied voice,” I said. “Disembodied voices are sinister.” I flashed back to Mr. Insley’s voice in my dream. But, no, that was completely different.

  “Nope, nope, nope. Not wrong. But we can talk about it later. It’s sunny. How about we sit outside under the tree during lunch and work on it?”

  I shut my locker door.

  “We’re not allowed to sit outside during lunch.”

  “Actually, we are,” said Luka.

  I thought about myself hunkered down in that hideous stairwell, gobbling, when I could have been outside on a bench during lunch period like a normal person. But then Mr. Insley wouldn’t have found you, I reminded myself, and where would you be now?

  “Liar,” I said.

  “I never lie,” said Luka.

  “Really,” I said, skeptically. “Never?”

  “Really,” he said, seriously. “Never.”

  “Luka, if we were allowed to eat outside,” I said, “why wouldn’t I know that?”

  We started walking.

  “Uh, because you don’t know a lot of things, especially about school?”

  I pretended to trip him. He pretended to stumble.

  “Anyway, I can’t,” I said. “I have other plans.”

  I was eating with Mr. Insley, just as I always did, but I didn’t tell Luka that. I didn’t care if he knew—because he probably did know—I just didn’t want to talk about it with him.

  “So cancel them,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said, lightly. It may have been the first time in my life I’d said “nope.” I liked it. The word popped in the air like a soap bubble.

  “All right, so meet me after school under the aforementioned tree.”

  I was driving with Mr. Insley after school. We no longer called our meetings “lessons”; I’d graduated to just “driving.”

  “Can’t,” I said, airily. “Plans.”

  “Come on, Willow,” he said, nudging me with his shoulder.

  If I had a large sum of money, I’d bet it all that most girls at Webley would have folded like a starry-eyed house of cards at one of Luka Bailey-Song’s nudges, but I was not most girls. Instead of folding, I yawned, colossally, only remembering to cover my mouth at the tail end of it.

  “Oh, am I boring you?” asked Luka.

  “Can you keep a secret?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I never tell my friends’ secrets.”

  “You never lie, and you never tell your friends’ secrets.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, if that’s true, how very honorable of you,” I said. “But what if you have to lie in order to keep someone’s secret? Hmmm, Mr. Honorable? What then?”

  “I don’t lie. But if a friend’s secret is part of the truth, I just don’t tell the whole truth.”

  “Which is different from lying.”

  “It is,” said Luka. “Totally.”

  “I’m unconvinced, but no matter. The secret is that my mother is a somnambulist.” I don’t know why I wanted to tell him, since I had never voluntarily told a single soul, had in fact gone to some lengths to protect her by keeping it a secret, but for some peculiar reason, telling Luka did not feel like I was betraying my mother or my family or anyone.

  “Wow.”

  “It means she’s a sleepwalker.”

  Luka shot me a look. “I know what it means. I’m smart, remember?”

  “Oh, right. Forgot. Except that she doesn’t just walk; sometimes she bakes or talks. Once she got in the car and started the engine, but she woke up before she drove it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Indeed. Anyway, last night, she had a somnambulistic event out in the rain, and I had to take care of her.”

  I told him this so easily, the same way I’d told him about Eustacia
just days before. Who knows what I would tell him next? I used to be able to predict what I would do, but those days were over. Now, I surprised myself all the time.

  Luka turned to me, concerned. “She’s okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you?”

  This is what it is like to have a friend, I thought.

  “Fine, thank you,” I said. “Just tired. Hence the yawn. Here’s my classroom, Luka. Thanks for helping pick up my books.”

  Luka said, “Listen, I have a free period at the end of the day, so Coach said it was okay if I did some laps. If you change your mind, I’ll meet you in the hallway outside the pool after school.”

  “Okay, water rat,” I said. “But I won’t change my mind.”

  AT LUNCHTIME, MR. INSLEY was late to his classroom and I was earlier than usual, so I saw the writing on the board before he did, thick, black blaring out from the white. It had taken a lot of work to make the lines that thick: “SHE’S 16, PERV.” It took up the entire board. At first, I couldn’t understand what it meant, and even when I did, I didn’t realize right away that I was the “she,” and then, just as Mr. Insley walked into his classroom with his lunch bag, I realized it. Under his breath, Mr. Insley said, “What the bloody hell?,” before he noticed me standing there and demanded, “How long has this been here? Has anyone else seen it?”

  His tone was as harsh as if I had written the words myself. Tears spilled out of my eyes. I was so tired.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, with a ragged little sob. “I’m really sorry.”

  Mr. Insley’s face softened. He took two steps toward me, then spun around and shut the door. In an instant, his arms encircled me, pulled me in. My face was against his shirt. I didn’t fall apart, as I had in the stairwell, just went ragdoll-limp, my arms dangling at my sides, leaked tears, and let myself be held.

  “You smell like limes,” I said, finally.

  He didn’t let go, just loosened his grasp, and looked down at me.

  “It’s all right, you know,” he said. “I got thrown off for a moment, but it’s nothing, just stupid, jealous, callow teenaged vandals. They don’t matter. How could they?”

  “It scared me,” I said.

  I pulled back. Out of the corner of my eye, I could still see the writing. The word perv made my stomach clench. Could there be any truth in it? Was anything here perverted?

  “What are you thinking?” asked Mr. Insley.

  His face was so sensitive, his brow wrinkled with concern.

  “That I trust you,” I said. “That being in your arms makes me feel safe.”

  He leaned toward me, closed his eyes, and breathed in.

  “You smell like roses,” he said.

  I almost corrected him. Jasmine. My shampoo was jasmine scented. But how could that matter? Telling someone that they smelled like roses, even if they didn’t, quite, was the antithesis of perverted.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked again, and the tender pain in his voice was lovely to hear, but awful at the same time. He was looking at me like I was a small, broken thing, an injured bird maybe. I had to put a stop to it.

  I straightened and gave him a smile. Stiff upper lip, Willow, I thought, firmly.

  “I am thinking we should erase the bloody board and have lunch. I’m starving.”

  The clouds in his eyes lifted. He swiped my chin with his thumb. “That’s my girl!”

  Halfway through his sandwich—adorably, Mr. Insley still ate the food of his childhood, bologna sandwiches with mustard, peanut butter and jelly on white—Mr. Insley abruptly interrupted his story about how he’d found an error in one of his graduate school professor’s books on the Pre-Raphaelites and had been honor bound to point it out, and said, “It’s what most of the world would think, you know. That you are too young for me.”

  My heart fluttered. Carefully, I swallowed my mouthful of moussaka.

  “I suppose so,” I said, slowly. “I hadn’t really thought about it much.” This was true. I’d thought mostly about how people might think it unseemly for a student to be in love with her teacher. I hadn’t really considered the age difference.

  “Knightley was sixteen years older than Emma, you know,” I said. I almost brought up Dorothea and Casaubon, but since their marriage was a disaster and since Casaubon, being close to fifty, actually qualified as old in a way that Knightley and Mr. Insley most certainly did not, I decided against it.

  “’Tis true!” said Mr. Insley.

  “And anyway,” I said, “we haven’t—. I mean to say, we aren’t really—”

  My face went hot.

  Mr. Insley reached across the desk and wound a lock of my hair around his finger. “Aren’t we, though?” he whispered. “I know it’s been mostly unspoken, but, Willow, aren’t we?”

  Oh, my heavens, he was so still and quiet, but when he said that, I felt like everything started racing. The room around me blurred. It was just like being dropped into the seat of a moving roller coaster. That I had never actually ridden a roller coaster was irrelevant. I gasped.

  “I-I hope so,” I whispered back.

  How limpid his pale blue eyes were, how fragile the skin beneath them.

  “I guess you are very young, but I feel as though our souls are the same age, as though you were much older than your peers. If anything, your soul is older than mine. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded, feverishly, although I didn’t really agree. When I was with other people my own age, I didn’t feel older, precisely; sometimes, I felt much younger, like a clumsy child. Mainly, I just felt different. And when I was with Mr. Insley, he never felt old to me—perish the thought!—but I felt very young indeed.

  Then something happened. A fleeting, tiny event that penetrated the marrow of my bones, rearranged the atoms in my body, ripped, at least momentarily, the fabric of my own personal universe. Yes, I am exaggerating for effect, but only a little. It was tremendous.

  Mr. Insley whispered, his voice huskier than I’d ever imagined it could get, “I think about you constantly.”

  Slowly, slowly, he lifted his hand, his forefinger outstretched and, slowly, slowly, moved it across the foot and a half that separated the two of us, and with this finger, he touched my lower lip, tugging it downward ever so slightly, and then sliding his finger onto the inner part of it, the damp part. He is touching my mouth, I thought, he is opening my mouth with his finger, and just as the thought darted across my brain, the bell rang, ending lunch period, and I jumped backward, like I’d been stung by a wasp.

  “Good-bye,” I said, quickly, standing and hastily gathering up my things, and then I added, “Thank you.”

  The man had kissed my hand for four seconds, held me in his arms for longer than that, but this touch, this brief touch, his finger on my mouth, well, it was something different altogether.

  “Good-bye, dear girl,” he said.

  I rushed down the hall, my stomach in knots of what I knew was happiness, just of a kind I had never experienced before, the kind that feels like running down the side of a steep and stony hill. I am so happy, I thought, just gloriously happy.

  So I don’t know why, when school ended and I stepped out into the November afternoon, instead of walking in the direction of the woods, where there was a shortcut to the gas station at which I usually met Mr. Insley for our driving sessions, I followed the brick walkway that led to the thrillingly named Brilliant Natatorium (“Brilliant,” after the family who’d paid to have it built, according to Luka; “Natatorium,” a fancy word for pool, according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The door was unlocked. As soon as I stepped from the silent hallway into the actual pool area, a swell of swampy, chemical-scented air enveloped me. I remembered how, back when I used to take swim lessons at an old indoor pool, I’d hated that transition, like walking from the sunlit world into a hot, moist, dark underground cave (I had always looked up, half expecting to see bats hanging from the ceiling), but now it felt soothing. It was brighter in here
than in that other pool, for one thing, light beaming in from the bank of windows at one end of the room. The pool entrance didn’t lead to the deck, but to a raised spectator section, cement bleachers from which you could look down at the swimmers, so I went to the bottom row, the one closest to the pool, and sat.

  Luka was swimming butterfly, and even though I’d heard the name of the stroke often enough before, until I sat there watching him, I’d never thought about the lightness it implied. For all the strength rippling through his shoulders and arms, how silken his movements were, how clean and nearly silent. His swimming loped, oscillated, moved in crests and troughs, like in physics. Oh, my friend Luka. He was a sound wave. He was a seal. He was as supple and as rhythmic as music.

  I watched and felt reverent. I wanted him to swim on and on, but because he would eventually stop and the magic would end, I left while he was still swimming and went out into the hallway to wait for him. I knew that he would walk out soon in sneakers and jeans, with his hair wet, and be his everyday, same old self, but he wouldn’t be the same to me. I wondered what it would be like to do something so well, to carry that around in your body like a secret, every day, all the time, when you were sitting at your desk or walking down the hallway.

  Listen to me: I had visited the Grand Canyon at sunset and the Eiffel Tower at night, had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art six times, and I swear to you that there may be things in this world more beautiful than Luka Bailey-Song moving through the water, but I had never seen a single one.

  THAT NIGHT, EVEN THOUGH I had spent the entire day exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. So much had happened since the night before, and my mind was hopping and restless, like a bird ready to peck the day to pieces and lift every tiny bit to the light. But I didn’t want to give into that, to obsess and churn and analyze. I wished hard that I didn’t have to be alone with it all, but my mother, God bless her, was sound asleep, and my father was, too. I remembered how when I was little and woke up in the night, I would slip out of my room and lie down on the floor outside their bedroom door. Some nights, I would hear them talking, their voices nothing more than a hum, and others, I would listen to my father snore softly. Just being near them was so reassuring. But I was sixteen. Even I wasn’t weird enough to camp outside my parents’ door at the age of sixteen, so instead, I decided to spy on Eustacia.