The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  “I want to make movies,” he’d told me. “My parents want me to be a brain surgeon. Literally. But they’ll get over it.”

  Luka told me that I was wonderful in the film, too. Actually, what he said was, “You’re, like, made for this. Check out your face, which first of all, looks incredible, but also see how you totally turn into each character just by making the smallest adjustments? So cool.”

  And if you’ll forgive the immodesty, it was cool. I watched myself in a state of wonderment, if you want to know the truth. I hadn’t known I was doing all those things. For instance, when I was Mrs. Cadwallader, I hadn’t decided to let a smile play around the edges of my lips, to raise my eyebrows, to turn my voice razor edged; I’d just been Mrs. Cadwallader as she said the line, “It’s true what Sir James says, Casaubon has no good red blood in his body. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses. Oh, he dreams of footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.”

  “See?” Luka had said. “You’re even good at being that old bat, which is interesting. I mean, of course you were good at Dorothea, since you basically are Dorothea. But how the hell did you pull off Mrs. Cadwallader? Amazing.”

  “What do you mean I am Dorothea?” I asked. “Because I believe I recall your describing her as—what was it—‘insanely annoying’?”

  Luka smiled. “Well, I’ve revised my position since then. But she’s, you know, this beautiful misfit, kind of misguided in some ways, okay, many ways, a ton of ways, but always well-meaning. And she can seem kind of, uh, distant, but she also has this effect on people.”

  He dropped his eyes. It was a rare thing to see Luka shy. Even though I would not have unheard what he’d said for all the tea in China, even as I was cradling “beautiful” in the palm of my brain like a jewel, I also could not bear his embarrassment. I had to end it.

  “The effect of causing people to make vomit faces? Is that the effect to which you refer?” And then, for good measure, I made one. It took some effort. If I had ever made a vomit face before, when I wasn’t actually vomiting, I could not recall it.

  “Ha!” said Luka, with a laugh. “You are shockingly good at that. Look at you, Cleary, full of hidden talents.”

  “That’s the effect you meant, correct?”

  Luka’s face went river-rock seamless the way it did when he was giving something his full attention. Most people, when they are concentrating, bunch up, wrinkle, but Luka smoothed. Smooth forehead, smooth arched cheekbones, smooth, smooth jawline. I was hard-pressed not to reach out and run a finger down that face; I imagined it would feel like glass, but warm.

  “Nah. I meant that she makes the people around her want to be better, like you do.”

  I closed my eyes briefly, absorbing this, giving that sentence its full due because here was a historical marker moment if ever I’d had one: LUKA BAILEY-SONG PAYS WILLOW CLEARY THE COMPLIMENT OF A LIFETIME.

  “Oh,” I managed to say. “Well, thanks.”

  For a fleeting instant I considered trying for cool-headed irony or casual insouciance, but my joyful smile would not be conquered; I may as well have been trying to stop a speeding train. I sat there, stared at my face-as-Mrs. Cadwallader’s-face frozen on the computer screen, and grinned like a damned fool—or a blessed one. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luka steal a glance at me. A flash of white, a dip of his head. Oh, we were ridiculous! Behaving as though unrestrained happiness were a crime against humanity.

  “No problem,” said Luka, quickly. “Hey, you want to watch the film again?”

  It was even better the second time.

  But it is one thing to sit in a tiny room and watch a film you made with just the person with whom you made it and another altogether to watch it on a big screen in a darkened classroom with twenty other people, one whose approval you value so much it makes your stomach burn. But once the film got rolling, I sat riveted. This time, for the first time, I watched it as a regular viewer, not as the person who made it, paying less attention to all the tiny pieces and more to the story we were telling. It was the story of Dorothea’s growth, her transformation from ambitious idealist who held herself above her fellow human beings, to an ordinary happy woman, and we used the narrative arc of her romantic life to demonstrate this. It wasn’t a story that wrapped itself up with a bow in the end, not entirely. Yes, Dorothea found true love with Will (“We are bound to each other by a love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it”), but she also resigned herself to a life of helping her husband (“I like nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that my husband should struggle against them, and that I should give him wifely help”) instead of being a hero in her own right.

  The funny parts came mostly at the beginning, with all the characters weighing in on Dorothea’s engagement and marriage to the old, ugly Casaubon. (“Good God, it is horrible! He is no better than a mummy!” “He has one foot in the grave!” “Look at his legs!”), and the film got more serious as it went on. The only thing Luka was better at than the comedic parts was being Will Ladislaw. When he said, with shadowed eyes, a rasp in his voice, and sudden hollows in his cheeks, “I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her,” I think it’s fair to say that the classroom engaged in a collective swoon.

  The clapping started before the lights went back on. There were whistles, a war whoop. We were a hit! In the midst of the clamor, Luka and I turned to each other and gravely fist-bumped (a first for yours truly), and then both of us, at the same time, forgot the rule against unrestrained happiness and smiled.

  “Ready?” asked Luka.

  “Ready,” I said, and we stood up and walked to the front of the room to give our presentation. That’s when I saw Mr. Insley’s face and gasped as though I’d been struck. To say there was no joy in his expression would be the understatement of the century. His face, that face I had studied with every ounce of my attention, the face I had cherished from its wide brow to its prominent blue eyes to its narrow chin, was a white-lipped mask of rage. And I swear that it wasn’t until that second, in a flashbulb pop of understanding, that I considered how our film might look to him.

  The older, scholarly first husband of whom no one approved. The naive young girl desperate to please him. Phrases fizzed through my mind: “white moles,” “beautiful lips kissing holy skulls,” “I think when a girl is so young as Miss Brooke is, her friends ought to interfere a little to hinder her doing anything foolish.” It was all I could do not to cry out, “But it’s got nothing to do with us! It all started with my and Luka’s argument about Dorothea and grew from there!” And there was also—I am sorry to say it—a small part of me that felt just plain irritated with him. Here I was, at long last, after months of being scorned and reviled and ignored, standing tall and triumphant, my ears ringing with the approval of my peers, and he was the only one in the room—well, except for Bec—who wasn’t cheering me on.

  As I was standing there, jostled by conflicting emotions, Luka reached out and put a steadying hand on my shoulder.

  “Willow,” he whispered. “Are you ready?”

  And, just like that, I was.

  But before we could start, just as we were clearing our throats and straightening our notecards, Mr. Insley said, in an ice-pick voice, “Unfortunately, your film ran over the allotted time limit, so we will not be able to hear your presentation today. I will attempt to squeeze it into a future class, but I certainly can’t promise. Please retake your seats.”

  The classroom went dead quiet, and I felt tears fill my eyes. Luka looked so mad, he almost shimmered with it, and he was opening his mouth to say something to Mr. Insley, when a voice came gliding across the room from the direction of the door: “Oh, it would be a terrible shame, Mr. Insley, to leave such a gorgeous project unfinished. I believe I’ve never seen a student film nearly so accomplished. And there are ten minutes left in the class.”

  Janine S
hay, one hand on her hip, her lipsticked smile curving like a scimitar. Until she spoke, I hadn’t realized she was there. Mr. Insley must not have realized it, either, because his eyes nearly popped from his head. Later, when I remembered his face, I would feel compassion for him having been shown up by an intruder in his classroom, his personal kingdom, but right then, all I felt was relief.

  “Wouldn’t you agree, class?” asked Ms. Shay.

  Nods. One low-key war whoop. We did the presentation.

  On the way out, tremulously, I attempted to smile at Mr. Insley, my beloved, but he stared down at the papers on his desk as though he were trying to set them on fire with his eyes.

  “I’ll see you at lunch,” I said, softly, so that only he could hear. A muscle in his cheek twitched. Otherwise, nothing. Panic began to roar in my ears, but I beat it back with the certainty that he loved me. He loved me, and I would explain everything. Right then, I realized—with guilt and rue—that, in the past week or so, I had been thinking less about Mr. Insley when I was away from him, maybe because I was getting used to the idea of him, maybe because I had been so busy. But all it took was the prospect of losing him for my love to rise up and seize me by the throat. Now that I stopped to consider, I saw it was usually in my moments of deepest anxiety regarding our relationship that I loved him the most. Odd, but then love was odd, wasn’t it?

  At lunch, his classroom was empty as a tomb.

  As I was walking away from it, I spotted Luka, his jacket off and slung over his arm, his lunch bag in his hand.

  “Luka!”

  We ate outside, under our tree. Careless of the cold, as always, Luka threw his jacket to the ground and sat in the gray, autumnal weather in his shirtsleeves. I tucked my knees under my chin and fiddled with my food. We discussed our success, of course, but I found that my heart wasn’t quite in it.

  “Good thing Ms. Shay showed up,” said Luka. “Now, Zany Blainey won’t be able to give us a shit grade just to punish us.”

  I flushed. “Oh, I don’t think he’d do that,” I said, hastily. “All we did was go over the time limit, right?”

  “We didn’t. We hit the limit exactly. But so what if we’d gone over? Max Bolton’s violin piece inspired by the Rosamond character went on for ten minutes longer than ours, and Insley ate it up, even though he obviously doesn’t know crap about music.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because for starters, seventy-five percent of that piece was ripped straight out of Mozart’s ‘Violin Concerto Number Five.’”

  “You know this how?”

  “Dude, my mom’s Chinese. I’ve been playing violin since I was four years old.”

  “Hmpf. Stereotyping, I see.”

  Luka smiled. “Hey, I’m allowed. And anyway, did you see Insley making that big show of keeping time, doing a little conductor act with his pencil? But he was totally off rhythm. It was painful.”

  Full disclosure: I had noticed this. I’d winced at first, inadvertently, but ultimately found it quite endearing.

  “I suppose,” I said, vaguely.

  Luka threw a pretzel nugget at me.

  “Hey, what’s wrong? We’re amazing filmmakers. We rule the world. Remember?” he said. Luka was the sort who had so many different kinds of smiles that it was tempting to categorize them. Now, he was smiling his “prompt” smile, a small, private, head-pitched-slightly-forward affair the purpose of which was to get me to smile back. I tried to oblige.

  “I suppose I’m just sad that it’s over,” I said, and as soon as I did, I realized I meant it. Did I ever! The Mr. Insley worries were only part of my sadness.

  “Working on that project was the most stimulating experience of my entire school career.”

  Luka shook his head.

  “Okay, (a) you should avoid using the word ‘stimulating’ in all conversations; and (b) you meant to say ‘working on that project with you, Luka, was the most stimulating experience of my school career.’”

  “Hmm. Before you strain a muscle patting yourself on the back, consider that I’ve been in school for less than a single semester.”

  “Hey, I knew when you said ‘school career’ you really meant ‘life,’” said Luka. “I could tell.”

  “You could tell no such thing,” I said.

  “I can read you like a book, Cleary, a book with extremely long, very confusing sentences.”

  At the sight of his merry face looking at me, sadness fell again. At that moment, the bell ending lunch sounded, and as we gathered our things, the world before me blurred. Tears, real tears, not just of the eye-tingling variety, but the kind that wet your cheeks. In front of Luka. I could have kicked myself. But this felt, for all the world, like the end of something.

  “Hey, stop that!” said Luka, alarmed. He left his belongings in a heap on the ground and came over to me and tugged a hank of my hair. “We make an awesome team, right?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, lest I burst into sobs.

  “So here’s the thing: the project’s over, but we aren’t. Okay?”

  It was as though a skylight I hadn’t even noticed was there opened, letting in a brand-new kind of light, and that light fell right on Luka. Because I’d been living and breathing Middlemarch, and because I was a hopeless nerd, a line from the book leaped to my mind: “Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there.” Oh, I felt breathless, newly bloomed, and so confused. You love Mr. Insley, I thought, and of course, I did, but then, God help me, not in a baffled rush, but carefully, deliberately, I put my arms around the person who stood before me and gathered him in. His white cotton button-down shirt was thin, so that his back was there, under my hands, and the strange, startled thought I had was, Oh, he’s just a boy. Luka the great, the popular, the larger than life, became, under my palms, life sized. In all my sixteen years, I had never felt so suffused with tenderness. It was unbearable.

  Then the skylight closed. And I let go. Let go? I practically pushed him away.

  “We’re going to be late,” I said, stiffly, not looking at him.

  Luka stood there for a second, not saying anything. I don’t know if he was looking at me or not; I could not lift my chin to find out.

  “You’re right,” he said. “See you later.”

  We went our separate ways. After a few steps, I broke into a run.

  When I got to my locker, there was a note in it from Mr. Insley. He must have pushed it through the vents in the door. He hadn’t signed it, but I would have recognized his handwriting anywhere: I am sorry to have missed lunch. Fate intervened. Can you come to me after school? Oh, he wasn’t angry with me anymore! I pressed the note between my two palms, in an attitude of prayer, and let the relief—that everything was the way it used to be before the film, before Luka had felt so terribly fragile and precious in my arms—wash me clean.

  In my last class of the day, I opened my notebook to find this in black marker on what had been the next blank page: 16 + 30 = RAPE. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but just knowing inexactly was enough to make every muscle in my body clench. I was on the verge of tearing it out and ripping it to shreds, but then I thought, I will show it to Mr. Insley and he will talk it away.

  As it turned out, I didn’t show it to him immediately, as I’d planned, because the minute I walked through his door, he shut it behind me and took me in his arms so fast that I fell back against the door with a thunk. Even as I gladly let myself be swept up, I hoped fervently that no one walking by had heard.

  “Darling,” he whispered. “I thought this damned day would never end.”

  Mr. Insley’s face was so close that I could feel his breath on my lips. In a single motion, he pressed his cheek against mine and slid a hand roughly up the side of my neck into my hair. I gasped, audibly. It was just so new and so ardent. Even his opening my mouth with his finger had not been quite like this.

  “Tell me you missed me,” he whispered, his lips flicking mois
tly against my ear.

  “I missed you,” I whispered back. Even though I had just seen him a few hours ago, I had missed him, the version of him that loved me and that I loved, not the one whose entire being was contorted with anger.

  He leaned a few inches away and took my face between his thin hands. I was sure he was going to kiss me, and I wanted desperately for him to do it, but he just stood, caressing my face, looking into my eyes, until I was blushing so deeply, I knew my cheeks had to be hot to the touch. He has done this before, was my sudden thought, and the idea did not repulse me as I knew it should have. No, heaven help me, I relished it because what it really meant was that he was a man. He had lived in the world, known other women, maybe even many others, and still, it was me whom he wanted. For the first time since I’d met him, I felt a heady rush of power.

  In time, he let go of me, except for my hand, and led me to his desk. We sat down on it, shoulder to shoulder.

  “May I tell you something?” I asked him.

  “Anything.”

  “Remember that day when there was writing on the board?” It was an idiotic way to put it, since when was there not writing on the board? But I knew he would know what I meant.

  “Yes.”

  “I got another, um, message.”

  He made a disgusted face. “Those sad, twisted little animals,” he said. “I got one, too.”

  “Different from the last one? Um, a kind of addition problem?” I didn’t want to say the words or show him the notebook.

  “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “For us? Nothing. It has not a thing to do with us. How could it? But, technically, generally, it refers to a law, one that says a physical relationship between a person thirty or over and one between the ages of sixteen and eighteen cannot legally be considered consensual. It assumes that the sixteen-year-old is not mentally or emotionally mature enough to make decisions on her own and is therefore automatically being tricked, violated, taken advantage of by the older party.”