The Precious One (22 page)

“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 moistly 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.”

I sat in silence, considering this. What we had just done, there against the door, had certainly been physical, but I hadn’t felt violated. I’d felt like my blood had been turned, magically, in an instant, to hot maple syrup.

“No,” I agreed. “That has nothing do with us.”

“I won’t lie to you, though,” said Mr. Insley. And stopped.

“What?”

“No, I can’t tell you,” he said, shutting his eyes. “Forgive me for bringing it up.”

“Please,” I said.

His eyes met mine. If powder blue eyes can be said to smolder, his were.

“I have imagined you in my bed,” he said. “Your milky shoulders against my sheets, your glorious hair spread across my pillow.”

My mouth went dry.

“Have you imagined the same?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Ah. Does the idea repel you?” His voice was so gentle.

I shook my head again.

“Does it frighten you?” He leaned very, very close, awaiting my answer, eagerly.

“I don’t know.”

“I can live with that,” he said, nodding. “Darling Willow, you must know that I would never push you, not the smallest nudge.”

“I know,” I said. “But thank you for saying so.”

“Come to my house this weekend,” he said, squeezing my hand so hard it hurt.

And, oh God, what a stupid roller-coaster of a girl I was because, yes, I had just been turning to molten sugar in his embrace, and yes, when my being in his bed was just a wistful, floating desire of his, I was, as my peers said, into it, sort of, anyway. Now, though, post-embrace, my head clear once again, by which I mean again full of my usual confusion, and with the prospect of going to Mr. Insley’s house wherein the aforementioned bed no doubt abided being no longer a dream but an actual invitation, I floundered. Stop. Let me clarify that. I didn’t flip around, uncertain; I lay flat on the bottom of the ocean, staring blankly up with my two eyes, and did not want to go. What I wanted was to run seven miles, or sit and talk to my father about who was more admirable, Winston Churchill or Theodore Roosevelt, or make something amazing, like a film or something, with a good friend.

But there was Mr. Insley, asking me to come the way he did everything: passionately, every piece of him leaping into animation.

“I don’t think I should,” I said, more weakly than I meant to.

“Should? No, most certainly you should not; you should go to school, do homework, joke with your peers, go to the mall. But what does ‘should’ have to do with someone like you? You are above ‘should,’ my girl.”

“It’s just—my father hasn’t been well, and I know it’s not something he would want me to do.”

Mr. Insley laid a hand on my hair.

“My dear Willow, your father knows better than anyone that you are not a typical young woman. He’s groomed you to be singular, extraordinary,
a dove among pigeons. I think we would like each other, your father and I; I think—at the risk of sounding arrogant—I am exactly the kind of man he’s been preparing you for.”

Had my father been preparing me for any kind of man? The idea took me off guard. Maybe. He was practical, after all; he knew I would marry someone someday. I guess. But it was not something we had discussed. I thought about Taisy and Ben, how he had forced their annulment at eighteen. But I was not Taisy, and Ben was not Mr. Insley.

“I haven’t thought about that much,” I said, “but I think he would say I was too young right now.”

As soon as I’d said it, I realized my mistake. Age was the last thing I should have mentioned. I braced myself, awaiting Mr. Insley’s white-lipped rage, but it did not surface. He sat very still for a few seconds, and then gave me a smile.

“I am sorry to be presumptuous, but is it possible that you underestimate him?”

Certainly, this was the first time I had been accused of
that
.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess I am asking: Do you think your father would want you to
date
?”

He said the word like he was spitting out a piece of rancid meat. And to be honest, I could imagine my father saying it in just the same way.

“Go to dances in the gym?” Mr. Insley went on. “Would he want you to sit in movie theaters eating greasy, yellow popcorn or go to basketball games in a Webley red sweatshirt? Do you think he—Wilson Cleary—would want you to be the girlfriend of a teenaged boy?”

To this last question, probably to all of them but definitely to the last, there was one, resounding answer: No.

“Come to see me, Willow,” said Mr. Insley, cupping my face in his hand. “We were made for this.”

I gripped the edge of the desk. The muscles in my chest were so tight. This wise, ardent man had saved me from the ugly stairwell, from the cafeteria, from hallways full of people who hated me. He had
taught me how to drive. When he was near, I felt shining and iconic, like I wasn’t so much myself, Willow in her boots and parka, as I was a girl in a book—Dorothea or Catherine Earnshaw—or a woman in a painting.

“You are spun out of moonlight, Willow,” he whispered. “You are poetry.”

There, for one flashing second, unbidden, was Luka, throwing a pretzel at me under the oak tree. I blinked him away. Mr. Insley’s face, full of passion, was inches from mine.

If you say no, you will lose him
.

“Yes,” I told him, “I’ll come.”

I
CALLED BEN AND ASKED
him to have dinner with me. To be precise, I called and asked if I could cook him dinner at his house. One friend cooking dinner for another.

After a few beats, he said, “Sure. Why not?,” and his nonchalance only broke my heart a little.

“We’ve demonstrated that we can talk while on the move,” I said. “Walking, riding in cars. I thought why not see if we can have a conversation while sitting?”

“I feel like the polite thing to say would be, ‘No, I’ll cook,’” he said, “but, uh, over the years, my cooking skills haven’t evolved at the same rate as, say, my fashion sense.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Hey, my fashion sense isn’t that bad. It’s just not that fashionable.”

“You prefer a classic look.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’m even pretty sure that those khaki pants you wore the other day were not the same ones you had in high school.”

“Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “I threw those out months ago.”

“So about the cooking. I did offer to cook, but I also invited myself over to your house. Obviously, these two things cancel each other out, which means for you to offer to cook would be overkill, politeness-wise.”

“That’s a relief. But I might be able to score some dessert from my dad. He’s back in the kitchen with a vengeance.”

“Perfect.” When I said the word, I tried to make my tone voluminous enough to cover the dessert, Ben’s dad, Ben’s dad being back in the kitchen, and Ben himself, who most certainly was.

THAT DAY
,
I GOT
a letter. Caro left it on the pool-house porch, with a note that said, “Hi, Taisy. This came for you. Love, Caro.” Oh, but the mystery that was Caro never stopped deepening! I hadn’t even known that she knew my nickname. Marcus and my mom had possibly called me that during the visit-from-hell on Willow’s first birthday, but Caro had surely never heard it since, and here she was getting even the spelling right. And then there was that “Love.”

The letter was a mystery, too. Hardly anyone knew I was here, and Trillium, my mom, and Marcus either called or texted me every day. I’d had my mail sent to my mom’s, but she would’ve told me if she were forwarding something here. Besides, the sender had addressed the letter to “Eustacia.” Exactly three people in the world called me that, and one of them apparently didn’t anymore. The envelope had a typed label, no return address, and was so light it might have been empty.

It wasn’t, alas. Inside, was a note that said: “Dear Eustacia—You should ask your sister Willow how things are going at school. It’s not my place to tell you what’s going on, but I’m not talking about her grades. Sincerely, A Friend.” It sent a shudder up my spine. The message wasn’t made up of letters cut from magazines—it was just a printout, Helvetica type—but it felt as ominous as if it had been. I wondered if it had to do with Luka; I hoped not. The two of them had looked so happy and at ease out in front of the school that day. Still he was both
a high school kid and ridiculously good-looking, which could be—but wasn’t always—a recipe for trouble. Or could the trouble have to do with girls? High school girls made fascist dictators look like dewy-eyed cocker spaniels; everyone knew that. And then I remembered the man Ben had seen Willow with, the one who had impressed him as both older and a creep. Willow didn’t seem to go much of anywhere apart from school, unless you counted the occasional stop at an English pub with creepy old men. Could the man have something to do with school; could the note have something to do with that man? My head fizzed with possibilities, all of them awful.

When I went out to buy cooking supplies for dinner at Ben’s, I made a split-second decision and a quick stop: I bought Willow a cell phone and added it to my plan, an act of audacious overstepping that would enrage Wilson, if he found out about it. And there was a chance he might. My relationship with Willow was improving, mainly in that it now seemed almost to
be
a relationship, but it was still shifting and slippery and subject to pitfalls, particularly if you considered that the last time we’d really spoken, she’d called me a fool. So there was a decent possibility that she would take the phone straight to Wilson, but I was willing to risk it.

That evening, before I drove to Ben’s, I walked across the yard and went in through the back door of the main house. Key ownership notwithstanding, I still felt anything but at home in Wilson’s house, so I had hoped to find Caro and ask her permission to chat with Willow. But Caro was nowhere in sight. The downstairs seemed to be empty, in fact, so after a few humiliating false starts—foot on step, foot off step, turn around, turn back—I made my way up the stairs, only to face a hallway lined with four doors, all shut. Because I’d visited him there, I knew the one on the end was Wilson’s room. I scanned the others for clues, but they were all bare. No playful
WILLOW
’
S ROOM
—
KEEP OUT
sign to aid me. No white message board, doodled over with flowers or song quotes. No girlish scarf tied around the doorknob. As
I stood there, on the edge of losing my nerve, the door at the end of the hallway opened and there stood Wilson.

“Eustacia!” he said, startled. His eyes fairly boggled at the sight of me, but quickly, he collected himself, tightening the belt of his dressing gown with a firm tug. “Was there some matter you wanted to discuss with me? I am busy at the moment, but I would be happy to send for you at a more convenient time.”

“Uh, actually, no,” I said. “I came to see Willow.”

Wilson was so surprised by this, he began to sputter, and the sputter became a full-blown cough. When the spasm had passed, he said, “Did you send word that you were coming?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was a good thing Wilson’s house was gated and set so far back from the main road because God help the Girl Scout who showed up unannounced selling cookies. “By what? Errand boy? Carrier pigeon?”

Behind me, a door opened. I turned around, and there was Willow, her light brown eyes wide open and round as quarters. Evidently the wonder of my showing up unexpectedly would never cease.

“Taisy?” she said.

“Hi, Willow,” I said. “I was hoping for a quick chat with you.”

“Oh!” she said. She glanced at her father. “Daddy, are you all right? I heard you coughing.”

Wilson waved off her concern. “Right as rain, child,” he said, heartily, and then with a grand “Carry on then!” went back into his room and shut the door.

Willow turned her attention back to me, and, now that I had a head-on view of her, I noticed how tired she looked, tired and maybe also unhappy, her usually sharp eyes listless, her queenly bearing all gone to wilt.

“Hey,” I said, quietly. “Do you have a minute?”

She nodded, then opened the door to her room, and stepped back to let me enter. “Please come in.”

Willow’s room was lovely, like something out of a magazine, but, like her door, it was eerily devoid of anything suggesting a sixteen-year-old lived in it. Of course, I wouldn’t have expected lava lamps or boy band posters. But there was no bulletin board tacked with photos; no stack of magazines on the bedside table; no bin of makeup supplies; no landline phone; no coat stand decked with scarves, hats, and hoodies; not an iPod dock or CD player in sight.

The walls were cool gray with a hint of violet, and nearly all of one of them was taken up with a bookshelf full of hardcovers, the spines perfectly aligned. On the wall opposite the bed hung a long glass sculpture that looked, sort of, like overlapping, translucent scallop shells in shades of blue and purple, and from the center of the ceiling dangled a chandelier of what looked, sort of, like an upside down bouquet of calla lilies caught in a rain shower. Both were unmistakably Caro creations and unmistakably ravishing. In one corner of the room, near the big window, was a dark rose armchair covered in velvet. Willow gestured to it and said, “Would you like to sit down?”

I sat. She turned her desk chair around and sat, too, so that she was more or less facing me.

“I have something for you,” I said. “I thought it might come in handy, now that you’re going to school and everything.”

“Oh?” she said, vaguely. “Well, that was nice of you.”

Maybe I’d caught her off guard by coming to her room or maybe the trouble at school to which the letter had referred was getting to her, but she seemed more open, less imperious than I’d ever seen her.

I held out the tidy white box with the phone in it, and she didn’t recoil at the sight, but simply reached out and took it.

“It’s a phone,” she said, quietly, and then, like she was trying out the phrase, she added, “A smartphone.”

“Open it up,” I suggested.

As she did this, I could see the sheer niftiness of the packaging working its magic on her. The phone was a slip of silver and shone like a rectangle of moonlight as she turned it over in her hands. Oh, the
persuasiveness of exquisitely designed inanimate objects! She pushed the button and the screen lit up like Times Square.

She sat still, staring down at it, and I braced myself for her to thrust it back at me or to toss a disparaging remark (“Cell phones are causing human relationships to wither on the vine, Eustacia, don’t you know that?”), but instead, she lifted her chin and said, wonderingly, “Is it hard to learn how to use?”

“Easy as pie,” I told her. “And I have an account at the online store I can give you the password for, in case you want to order any extra apps.”

“Oh,” she said, confusion crossing her face. “Apps.”

“Why don’t you read the instructions and then ask me if you have any questions? I’m no techie, but together, we can probably figure out whatever it is.”

She hesitated, then gave the phone another quick glance, and nodded.

“Also. I, uh, put my number in the contacts, in case you ever need it,” I told her, trying to sound casual. “You can call any time, if you find yourself in need of a ride or, well, anything at all. And if you never have a reason to call or would prefer not to, no worries there. I just thought . . .” I trailed off.

“Okay,” she said, gravely. “Thank you.”

Her thank-you was followed by a tiny, glimmering smile. It disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, but it left me feeling closer to Willow, as though my gift and her smile had worked to clear a small circle of space in which we could sit and be normal with each other. If there was ever a time to ask her how things were going at school, I suppose it would have been then, but the circle felt fragile as frost, like a breath could make it disappear. So I said, “Well, good, then,” and put my hands on the arms of the chair.

But before I quite got to my feet, Willow said, her face pinking, the words tumbling out, “Eustacia, I’m sorry I said that the other night, about you and Ben. In the pool house.”

I froze, crouched in midrise, then dropped back into the chair.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to apologize.”

She shook her head. “No, I do. You see, I don’t really know anything about love. Not nearly enough to have any business judging someone else.” She mustered a weary, flat-eyed smile. “In fact, I’m rather muddled on the subject. Like, hopelessly maybe.”

I smiled back. “You know what, though? You were right about me and Ben. I didn’t love him enough back then to deserve to keep him. I never understood that until you said it. And I apologized to him the very next day.”

“Really? Did he forgive you?”

“I think he might have. But there’s a big gap between forgiving someone and giving them another chance.”

Willow considered this. “I guess he would have to believe that this time you would love him enough.” Then, as if catching herself, she added, “Um, right?”

“Right. He would. And I would.”

“You would?”

“Actually, I already do. But that doesn’t mean I can convince him. In fact, I’m beginning to think I never will. We’re friends, though, and that’s something.”

“I bet you can,” she said. Not a trace of guile or animosity. Nothing in her face or tone suggested, for instance, that I would let my sordid, slutty wiles do the convincing. Her lack of meanness and disapproval was positively scaring me. Whatever had taken the wind out of her sails had done so with a vengeance. There was also the possibility that she was just starting to like me, and maybe that was true, too, but there was no trace of the white goddess, the upright, scorching-eyed Willow who had always been. Something had happened.

“Thanks,” I said.

Willow touched the button to bring the phone’s screen flaring to life again. I considered leaving, but I got the sense she wanted to say something else to me. Finally, without looking up, her finger flitting
over the touch screen, in a low voice, she said, “Did you ever say no to him?”

“Ben?”

“Yes. Besides the, um, annulment, I mean. Did you ever tell him no when he asked you to do something that you didn’t want to do?”

Worry slid cold fingers down my neck.

“Sure,” I said. “Usually, though, when we were deciding something, we talked about it. If one of us just truly didn’t want to do it, we’d let it drop.”

She nodded, still not looking at me. Then: “Was there ever someone in your life to whom you just could not say no?”

Oh, God
. I kept my voice calm. “Wilson.”

She didn’t leap to defend him, just nodded again, still not looking up.

“What about you?” I asked her, as carefully as I could.

I thought she might tell me. The light from the chandelier cast a greenish glow across her pensive face, and for a second, she was otherworldly, mermaidlike, and so fragile. When her eyes met mine, though, she looked like any teenager who realizes she’s said too much.

“Nope,” she said, shrugging. “Not really.”

AFTER BEN AND I
carried in shopping bag after shopping bag (and one large red cooler) of dinner supplies—not only food (in various stages of preparedness) but also flowers, a vase, candles, candleholders, matches, wine, trivets, olive oil, spices measured out into Ziploc bags, oven mitts, paper towels, parchment paper, placemats, cloth napkins, salt and pepper shakers, and two green bottles of bubbly water—I stood in his kitchen unloading them, while Roo and Pidwit wove around the bags, sniffing ecstatically, their stubby tails tick-tocking. Ben watched me with the twinkle in his eyes getting increasingly twinklier, then dropped his head back and laughed a laugh that was like Mardi Gras and the Fourth of July rolled into one.