The Precious One (18 page)

“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.

She was still awake, baking cookies, brownish ones, possibly molasses, in the pool house’s tiny oven. I caught their buttery fragrance even through the closed window. The television was on. We had one at the main house, too, but used it only to watch DVDs: documentaries, science and nature programs (
Planet Earth
was my personal favorite), Leonard Bernstein’s
Young People’s Concerts
. But this was a bona fide show, some kind of British thing, from what I could tell. The characters wore World War II–era clothing, and there was an older man with a serious face who might have been a police detective and a young red-haired woman in a brown uniform. I stood at the window and watched the show through the glass, and even though I couldn’t hear a word and had next to no idea as to what the plot might be, there was something comforting about watching the people move around their green, old-fashioned, countryside world. The hats were comforting. Ditto the
sensible shoes. The cars, those funny, cumbersome, humpbacked cars were somehow the most comforting part of all.

I’d like to use the excuse that my guard was down, that the events of the day had left me vulnerable, but the truth is I was lulled, seduced by the idiot box like so many others have been, and, like so many others, I paid a price.

What happened is that I forgot myself and leaned against the window, which let out a silence-shattering, bone-rattling creak. The window creaked, Eustacia jerked her face in my direction, and I froze, trying to wish myself invisible. It must not have worked because Eustacia came stalking toward the window, the cookie spatula raised like a weapon, and peered into the darkness. Suddenly, her face broke into a smile, and she waved, and the next thing I knew, she was on the porch of the pool house, singing out, “Willow! I’m so glad you came!”

Ugh. I had a desperate split second to decide what was worse: having her know I was spying or letting her believe that I would ever desire to be in her company. With a sinking heart, I opted for the latter. Sort of. Although I managed—rather deftly, I thought—to avoid actually saying that I wanted to spend time with her.

“I couldn’t sleep, and everyone else was asleep, so I thought I’d just walk over. And, well, it’s late. So I decided to look in to make sure you were awake.”

All true. Only my faintly conciliatory tone was a lie.

“Oh, gosh, I’m a night owl,” she said, with a dismissive wave. “I’ll be up for hours more. Why don’t you come in and try these cookies? They’re molasses.”

Heaven help me, I felt a tiny pulse of pleasure at having guessed correctly the variety of cookie. When you have been caught in a humiliating position, you take your triumphs where you can, but my humiliation was destined only to deepen. Within minutes, I found myself seated at the infamous white tile-top table, a cookie in hand, discussing television—what Wilson called “the dry rot fungi of the American soul”—of all things, with Eustacia, of all people. The show she was
watching turned out to be a BBC (right again!) detective series (and again!) set during World War II (and again!).

“I’m not much for television shows,” she claimed (of
course
), “but I adore
Foyle’s War
with all my heart. I actually brought my own boxed sets with me. Oh, Foyle, those steady eyes, that calm voice. When Foyle is on the job, all’s right with the world. I love characters like that.”

“I never watch television,” I said, stiffly, “but I can imagine that such a character would be very reassuring.”