Free The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos Page B

short?”
    “Tallish.”
    “Outstanding facial feature?”
    I shut my eyes, and there he was. I made my way down his face. Dark hair; dark brows; black eyes; fair, flushy skin; cheekbones tilting up; nose tilting down; deep, v-shaped divot in his upper lip.
    “I don’t know.” It was almost a whisper.
    I opened my eyes to see Trillium smiling.
    “So it’s like that, is it?” she said.
    I shrugged. “It was. Seventeen years ago.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    I shrugged again, shrug overkill. “You know what he looked like? He looked like a guy who should wear corduroy trousers, boots, and a fisherman sweater and maybe some kind of brown jacket, and live in Wales. Or something.”
    “You’ve been to Wales?” asked Trillium.
    “I have not been to Wales.”
    “Did he wear all those things?”
    “Of course not. He was in high school. I just mean he looked sort of, or gave the general impression of being—forget it.”
    “Windburned? Tousle haired? With those pink lips that look chapped but aren’t?”
    I stared at her.
    She did a victory dance.
    “Don’t get carried away,” I told her. “Sometimes they actually were chapped.”
    “You. Must. Tell. Me.” She signaled the waiter. “We will get wine, and then you will tell me everything !”
    In the end, I didn’t tell her everything. Apart from Marcus and my mom, I trusted no one as much as I trusted Trillium, but there were some parts of the story that had been stowed away in the dimmest, dustiest corner of my mind for so long that just thinking about pulling them out into the light of day hurt. What I ended up giving her was the story of how we met. I told it carefully and hoped for—what’s the word I want? Synecdoche. I wanted that small part to stand for something bigger, if not the whole story of me and Ben, then the essence of it.
    And because, if you’re going to tell the story or even just part of the story of the love of your life, you should begin with solemnity and maybe even a little pomp and circumstance, I began like this: “In all my life, I’ve loved just three men. One was only a boy, so maybe he doesn’t even count, except that he did and does, and he wasn’t an ‘only’ anything, ever. He was Ben Ransom, the love of my life.”
    IT STARTED THE WAY a lot of things in tenth grade started, with Itzy Wolcraft shrieking across the cafeteria. Marcus and I had attended the same school since prekindergarten, private, paid for by Wilson but chosen by my mother, so it was a good place, tough on academics and community service but easy on things like dress code and cafeteria shrieking. In this instance, Itzy’s shrieks were so high-pitched, so nearly hysterical that they sounded first like undifferentiated noise, then, as she got closer, like an insane and vaguely Japanese chant—“Hagai aga nurshi”—before, at long last, resolving themselves into, “Hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery.”
    The afternoon before, Itzy had gotten in trouble for a C- on a math test and, in addition to losing her phone privileges (which happeneda lot, hence her frequent episodes of piercing cafeteria gossip mongering), she had been forced to accompany her mother to Ransom’s Garden World to buy fall yard decorating supplies, “mums and pumpkins and hay and corn husky thingies and such.”
    “And I was sitting in one of those big white chairs, the wooden ones with the flat armrests, where you are in no way supposed to sit because there’s a sign saying PLEASE DO NOT SIT , when this totally beautiful wavy-haired guy just materialized from behind some rubber trees or something, and I swear to God I was paralyzed, like momentarily frozen in place , until I saw that he was wearing one of those man-aprons with RANSOM ’ S across the chest part and carrying a humongous pumpkin that was possibly diseased because it was totally covered with barnacles or possibly plant tumors and was completely disgusting, but luckily he had those