The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos Page A

worse. I swallowed my food, stabbed my fork into my vindaloo, covered my face with my hands, and burst into tears.
    I couldn’t have blamed him if he’d turned tail and run. I hoped he would, in fact. But he sat down next to me on the step, put a firm hand on my quaking shoulder, gave it a comradely squeeze, and whispered, “Courage, Willow, courage!,” which was so kind that I cried even harder. Once the waterworks began to slow, Mr. Insley said, “Skipped lunch, did you?”
    I choked out, “The cafeteria—I-I can’t face it.”
    I was right on the edge of telling all: how Bec hated me with a fiery hate and made other people hate me, how one time, when I sat down, an entire lunch table had gotten up in blank-faced unison and walkedaway, how those who didn’t hate me felt sorry for me and how their pity stuck in my throat like a bone. But, as socially hopeless as I was, I knew enough about teenagers to know that there was nothing on God’s green earth more despicable than a tattletale.
    “No, of course you can’t,” Mr. Insley said, matter-of-factly. “What could be duller than a high school cafeteria? I find the teacher’s lounge equally numbing. Which is why I eat my lunch alone at my desk. The company’s better by far, if I do say so myself.”
    I smiled at this, wiped my face, and finally got up my nerve to look him in the eye. Mr. Insley’s face was so close to mine that I could see a place on his chin he’d missed while shaving and the tiny dark blue flecks in his light blue eyes. A little shiver of alarm ran through me. At least, I thought it was alarm right then. Later, I would realize that it couldn’t have been. Probably, it was just surprise; in my sheltered life, I had seen so few faces that close up. I just wasn’t used to it. Anyway, two seconds later, Mr. Insley was taking his hand from my shoulder and standing up, and everything was normal.
    “Listen,” he said. “Not that this stairwell isn’t a lovely dining spot, but should you ever decide to make a change, I’d be honored to have you eat with me in my classroom. I believe we share the same lunch period.”
    It was such a nice thing to offer that I almost felt like crying again, but I cleared my throat and said, jokingly, “Careful! I might just take you up on that.”
    His smile was so convivial that if it didn’t exactly beautify that stairwell, it at least sloughed away a couple layers of hideousness, and it fell upon my upturned face like a ray of sun.
    “I sincerely hope you do, Willow,” he said.
    And so it began. The happiness and the looking forward to the happiness and the remembering the happiness. My daily half hour of silver lining; oh, I’d fill my pockets with it, then pull it out later, at home, wind it around myself like Christmas tree lights, and just bask in the glow. We talked. For a total of two and a half hours each week, wefloated high above everything petty and tiresome and mean on a magic carpet of conversation.
    Mr. Insley told me about his Ph.D., how he didn’t have it yet because he refused to rush through his dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the work was just too important. He told me about the childhood summers he’d spent at his grandparents’ lake house in New Jersey, how the bullfrogs’ croaking was the most peaceful music on earth. He told me how to bake sourdough bread, which was a lot more interesting than you might think. He told me that he regretted never having learned to play piano, but that he felt himself to be a musician nonetheless because of how he experienced, in his very bones, the music other people played. Once, he read aloud to me a long poem called “The Blessed Damozel” about a beautiful dead woman leaning out over the edge of heaven and longing for her lover, who was still alive, to come to her. I didn’t understand some of it and I thought the ending of it was too sad, but Mr. Insley’s voice was thrilling—husky and low and charged with emotion. I was