The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  I stood there in the doorway for a moment, just watching him, before I cleared my throat to announce my arrival.

  He heralded me with a swivel of his chair in my direction and a booming “Willow, my girl! Enter, enter!” I took a few steps toward him, halted, and pulled myself straight as a sentry.

  “Daddy, if it’s all right with you, I won’t waste time with preliminary small talk. I think this situation calls for plunging in straightaway.”

  He waved his hand in the air. “By all means, plunge!”

  I gave a brisk nod and said, “Here it is: tomorrow evening, I am attending a school dance with a fellow student, a young man named Luka Bailey-Song.”

  Everything I knew about my father had led me to expect that, at hearing this, he would begin to flush and would then proceed to grow redder and redder as the conversation continued, but to my amazement, the opposite happened: his cheeks got a shade lighter—they could even have been said to pale—and, while I couldn’t be sure, I thought his eyes went misty. Oh, God, what have I done, I thought. I waited for the other shoe to drop, for him to clutch his heart, fall from his chair. But he didn’t. He said, quietly, “My dear girl, you might be hurt. You know so little of the ways of the world.”

  At this tenderness, my own eyes misted over. “I know more than I used to,” I said, with a smile, “but it’s true that I am still rather wet behind the ears. However, I may not know the world, but I know this boy. He is my true friend.”

  I did not add that he was my only friend or that I was hopelessly—no, hopefully—and eternally in love with him.

  “A high school dance?” scoffed my father. “Surely, you are above such nonsense.”

  Two months ago, this sort of argument would have worked wonders on me, but since then, I had made a list of mistakes as long as my arm, longer; except for everything to do with Luka and academics, my entire high school career had been one long, mainly unfunny comedy of errors. A girl who had kissed her English teacher not once but twice and in the yard of his house to boot, a house that would nearly burn down with her inside it, was surely not above a high school dance.

  “Daddy, you sent me to high school to experience high school. Dances are part of that.”

  “Boys your age have terrible judgment and lack empathy. It is not their fault, necessarily; their frontal lobes are still developing and are connected to the rest of their brains by the flimsiest of circuitry.”

  “Luka plays the violin and gets up at four thirty every morning to swim. He is possibly the best student in our grade, and he’s kind and good and funny, and, when no one else would even speak to me, he chose me as his English project partner.” I smiled. “Which should be evidence enough of his good judgment.”

  “Hmpf,” said my father. Then, he said, “Is this how it is to be now, Willow? You tell me what you will do rather than ask me?” He didn’t sound angry. He sounded sad.

  I’d actually been compiling a mental list of things I was planning to tell him I would do: get a driver’s license, read literature written after 1900, beginning with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and watch every Foyle’s War episode in existence, for starters. But I decided I’d save those things for another time.

  “Only when I am certain I’m making the right choice,” I said, with a sigh, “which I daresay won’t happen very often. I think my frontal lobes have quite a long way to go themselves.”

  My father laughed. It was a brief laugh, possibly also slightly forced, but a laugh nonetheless. It occurred to me that perhaps I wasn’t the only one here learning how to adapt. I walked over to him and kissed his cheek.

  “Even so,” he said. “You must promise that, if the need arises, you will trust your lobes over his.”

  “I solemnly swear from the bottom of my heart and of my entire cerebral cortex,” I said, holding up my right hand, “that my lobes get the final word.”

  My father tapped me lightly on the forehead. “That’s my girl!” he said, and in a flash, there—in my father’s room!—was Mr. Insley’s voice inside my head, saying the same words. Go away, I told his ghost, I could never be your girl. I hate you, and, unfair or not, for that moment anyway, from the bottom of my everything, I meant it.

  I DREW THE LINE at the grand staircase entrance. I would not, for love or money, descend our curved staircase while Luka waited in the foyer below, eyes agog, mouth agape, even though my mother and Taisy avowed that it was such a “classic” moment as to be practically mandatory.

  “I would find it unbearably awkward, horrifically melodramatic,” I told them. “And so would Luka.”

  “I know!” Taisy yelped. “That’s part of what makes it classic!”

  But I stood firm, and they gave up after minimal hounding, probably because I submitted to the rest: hair, dress, nails, shoes, jewelry, makeup, the crash courses on popular music and how to pin a boutonniere (both taught by Taisy, of course), and a pool house viewing of a film called Pretty in Pink during which popcorn, pizza, and fancy grapefruit soda (my first soda experience!) flowed like milk and honey. Wait, scratch “submitted.” Submitted implies, perhaps, reluctance on my part, and certainly does not reflect the utter abandon with which I threw myself into all these preparations. And as I looked in the mirror, when it had all come to fruition, when I was a finished product, I liked what I saw. Liked? I was dazzled.

  Taisy had been right about the dress, which was above the knee, thin-strapped, sequined, slightly flapper-esque, and silver of all colors. On our mall excursion, when I’d seen the dress on the hanger at the store, my hand had gone right to it, as though yanked by an irresistible force, but I knew it was useless to hope. Someone as paper-white as I could surely never wear such a color, just as someone so stork-legged could surely never wear such a length, but Taisy had dismissed these misgivings with a toss of her head.

  “Nonsense!” she said. “Your skin has warm undertones; you have distance-runner legs, which are lovely; and with that magnificent auburn hair, you can pull off almost anything. Try it on!”

  They’d oohed, they’d ahhed; it was, as my peers say, awesome. For the rest of the shopping trip, they had plotted my ensemble like generals.

  “Berry-stained lips and nails,” said Taisy to Muddy. “Don’t you think?”

  “And silver peep-toes!” said Muddy to Taisy. “Oh, and it will be chilly outside, and, oh my goodness, I have the loveliest royal blue velvet evening coat that will hit just below the hem of the dress!”

  “Wonderful! Oh, wait, and I have a tiny, jeweled evening bag, a wristlet just big enough for a cell phone and lipstick that will be perfect,” said Taisy. (I had told Muddy about the phone a few days before, and she had given it her blessing.)

  “Perfect!” sang Muddy.

  When they had come upon the sparkly dragonfly hair clip in the fancy department store, their faces glowed with a light that was out and out celestial.

  “We’ll just pull back a small section in front, don’t you think? And leave the rest wild?” Taisy asked Muddy.

  “Brilliant!” said Muddy. “Oh, and I’ll do a bit of the ringlet thing I tried the other day. Remember the ringlet thing, Willow?”

  I did.

  And, by and by, all of what they had foreordained came to pass. As I stood before the full-length mirror in my bedroom, with Muddy and Taisy all smiles in the background, hands clasped in hope that I would like what I saw, I felt a great surge of love for the world, the girl in the mirror included. Not just because she looked pretty—dewy faced and lashy eyed and fiery haired—but because she looked so avidly, unabashedly joyful. Her entire person glowed with a joy so bright, it almost outsparkled her dress. It was impossible not to root for a girl like that.

  “How do you feel?” asked my mother.

  “Like tinsel!” I told her.

  While I stood firm in eschewing the staircase entrance, I deferred to them in the matter of who would answer the door when Luka arrived.

  “Let your mom get it,” instructed Taisy. �
��And you come walking in from the living room. I’ll be standing by with your coat and bag and the boutonniere and the camera. We’ll follow the two of you to Luka’s house for the picture-taking extravaganza, of course, but we need to be sure to get some front door shots.”

  And these things, too, came to pass. All went as planned, except that in the minutes before Luka was due to arrive, I was suddenly seized by a tremendous fit of nervousness. I sat on the living room sofa, jittery as a jumping bean. My knees bobbed, my heart skittered, and Taisy had to remind me three times not to touch my face with my restless hands. When the doorbell rang, it was all I could do not to run out of the room and hide in the kitchen pantry. But I stayed put and the rest went like clockwork. Taisy manned her station; Muddy walked to the door. I heard her open it; I heard my mother say, “Hello, you must be Luka,” and then, there in my house where I lived every day, was Luka’s voice.

  “Hi, Mrs. Cleary,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Unexpectedly, he sounded nervous, too, which made me feel just a tiny bit steadier. Breathing almost like a normal person, I stood and walked out of the living room, and when I stepped from the rug to the marble floor, at that very first tap of my shoe, Luka turned around. His jaw did not drop; he was neither agape nor agog. He simply looked happier to see me than anyone ever had in my life, and, when he smiled, the drunkenly spinning world righted itself and everything, everything was fine.

  “Hey, look at you,” he said, admiringly.

  I laughed. “I’ve done nothing but look at me for hours. I’d rather look at you.”

  He held his arms out to the sides so that I could better inspect him. I made a twirling motion with my finger and, dutifully, he turned in a circle. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt, and a silvery tie (we had conferred on this point, since Muddy had sworn that all would fall to wrack and ruin if we did not match). In one hand, he held a nosegay of red rosebuds.

  “Your hair,” I said, squinting up at it, “has been subdued. I mean, somewhat.”

  He raked his fingers through it. “Turns out there’s this stuff called conditioner.”

  “You are very debonair,” I pronounced. I looked at Taisy and Muddy and added, “Isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  “Do I look like I just won the Battle of Agincourt?” he asked.

  “Yes,” they said again. They could have had no idea what he meant, of course, but it didn’t matter. Luka could have said, “Is it okay if I take ownership of this house and everything in it?,” could have said it in Greek, and those two good women—agog and agape as anyone ever was—would have said, breathlessly, “Yes.”

  “Much cleaner and less bloodstained,” I said. “Although that could all change when I pin on your boutonniere.”

  He laughed and held out the roses. “Here.”

  “For me?” I asked. I meant the roses and his hand holding them and the arm attached to the hand and every part of him thereafter, including the smile he was giving me right then, focused and private, like a secret handshake, like a quick kiss on the side of my head.

  “Who else would they be for?” he said.

  PERHAPS BECAUSE I HAD spent days under the spell of Pretty in Pink, which had made quite an impression on me, since it was not only my first teenage-romance movie but my first movie of any kind ever, I had secretly been wishing for the Fall Fling to be one, long, drawn-out love scene. Which would have been a certain kind of wonderful, although maybe not the kind for which I was actually, when push came to shove, ready. Instead, what the dance gave us was another kind altogether, a kind of wonderful I’d been pining for without knowing I pined, and it was this: fun. Oh my goodness, that dance was fun! Fun like I’d never had because it was group fun, noisy, crowded, jostling, feeling-the-bass-in-your chest fun. The closest I’d ever come to group fun was being on the cross-country team, but this was even better.

  For the first half hour or so, I kept an eye out for Bec, and then, I decided just to seize the bull by the horns and ask Luka if he thought she was coming.

  “Nope. She’s got this new boyfriend, a freshman at Penn that she met at some party. She’s visiting him.”

  “A boyfriend. So she’s not madly in love with you?” I said it lightly, but the truth was that I was dying to know.

  Luka looked surprised and laughed. “Uh, no.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I know it’s hard to believe,” he said, “because I’m obviously so lovable, but I’m sure. We’ve been friends since kindergarten. In ninth grade, we dated for, like, a month, mainly because everyone was always saying we should, but it was just too weird.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So you’re friends.”

  Luka’s face got serious. “We’re friends the way people are friends who have known each other forever. But I don’t like everything she does. When I think she’s being a jerk, I tell her.”

  Suddenly, none of it mattered, and the fact that we were dressed to the nines, standing in the middle of a dance, talking about Bec struck me as a colossal mistake.

  “This is a dance, isn’t it?” I demanded. “So why aren’t we dancing?”

  He grinned. “We are,” he said, grabbing my hand, and the next thing I knew, we were.

  And maybe because Bec wasn’t there to enforce her decree that no one was allowed to like me, or maybe because Luka had issued some decree of his own, although it seemed more likely that his sheer Lukaness had just won out in the end, people were nice to me. They included me. Without ado or apologies, girls who had never met my eyes in the hallway once in all the weeks I’d been at Webley danced next to me on the dance floor, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, all grins, like it was the most natural thing in the world. We threw our hands in the air. We shimmied under the spinning lights. Between dances, we chattered about shoes and lipstick and hair. For the first time in so long, I was in a crowd of people and felt neither like a naive child nor like an old lady; I felt sixteen going on seventeen, just exactly.

  The boys were part of the dancing group, too, with Luka right in the center, jacket off, tie loose, hair increasingly unsubdued, mostly because other people kept messing it up. I didn’t blame them; my fingers itched to touch it, too. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see Luka for a stretch of time, which was surprisingly fine, and then he’d catch my eye across the room or appear with a bottle of water for me or a funny remark in my ear, and that was even better.

  At the end of the night, he held out his hand, and we slow danced, my fingers entwined on the back of his neck, and I don’t know if we were supposed to or not, since the rules of slow-dancing were, naturally, a mystery to me, but we talked the whole time. Maybe this wasn’t exactly movie-romantic, but even as Luka told me that my dress made me look like the Chrysler building in the best possible way and I answered by stepping on his foot on purpose and as we whispered about how the new ninth-grade math teacher and the boys’ soccer coach had just been caught making out in the broom closet, part of me was hyperaware of Luka’s lips, how close they were to me, and also of his hands pressing against the small of my back, and of the smell of his neck, and of his overall, general, monumental, overarching, heart-stopping luster, and what I thought was, I want it to always be this way, even if he falls in love with me back, and dear God please let him, but even if he does, I don’t want to leave anything behind. I want it to be both things at once. True friendship and true love at the very same time. I wondered if such a thing even existed. If it didn’t, I would tell Luka that we had to invent it.

  We were invited to an after-dance party at a girl named Caitlin’s house, but Luka asked me if I wanted to go have bacon pancakes at an all-night diner instead, an invitation that came as an enormous relief to me, since my only high school party point of reference was the one in Pretty in Pink during which people behaved insultingly and danced in their underwear.

  “I bet you’d like the diner. It’s the kind of place where everyone tells you their names. And we could talk,” he said.
“Not that this wasn’t fun, but I miss talking to you.”

  I cocked my head. “You miss talking to me or you want pancakes?”

  He grinned. “Did I mention they were bacon pancakes?”

  I waited.

  “Talking. The pancakes are secondary,” he said. “So what do you think?”

  “Well, I think it depends,” I said.

  “Depends, huh? On what.”

  “On whether the bacon is inside the batter or on top.”

  He leaned in and gently tugged one of my curls until it was straight.

  “Which one will make you say yes?”

  “On top. And in between, if the pancakes are stacked.”

  He let the curl go. It bounced like a spring.

  “Then that’s where it is.”

  THE PANCAKES WERE CRUNCHY, spongy, sweet, salty, syrupy heaven, but talking to Luka was better. Under the bright lights of the diner, I told him how close Taisy and I had gotten, and he told me that his older brother, Jackson, had started college that year and that he missed him so much more than he’d expected to. He told me how it felt to swim, and I told him how it felt to run. I told him about my mother’s glass art and my father’s heart attack and how it had changed him and all of us in so many ways. He told me that his parents watched all his swim meets and were great about them, but they were hard on him about everything else—school, behavior, violin, thank-you notes (how many guys wrote thank-you notes?)—but that he could never manage to totally resent them because they were also really funny. Then, with my fork, I carefully crumbled the bits of bacon that were left on my plate and told Luka how I felt when he chose me to be his English project partner.

  “Like someone had thrown me a lifeline, and I am not exaggerating, and you probably didn’t have the first idea of what it meant to me,” I said.