The Precious One Read Online Free PDF Page A

where everything was beautiful, noble, nutritious, and pure, a life from which everything coarse, crass, ugly, or just plain dumb had been strained out and thrown away. No television! No pop music! No magazines! No sleepovers! No high fructose corn syrup! No unsupervised Internet surfing! No—God, no! Are you kidding ?—social networking!
    Only to throw me into high school at the age of sixteen?
    Do you know the story of the dodo bird? It lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean for who knows how many centuries, happy as a clam. Somewhere along the line, it lost the ability to fly, or to be more accurate, dumped the ability to fly like the extra baggage it was. Why waste energy on wings when there was nothing to fly from? No predators, no mammals at all on Mauritius. It ate windfall fruit. It was big, about three feet high, and by bird standards, quite zaftig, over forty pounds. It nested and laid its eggs on the ground. It was placid and fearless. Why bother having a quick fear response when there was nothing to be afraid of? No need for flight or fight. In short, the dodo was perfectly suited to its world, a tubby, hook-beaked perfect citizen.
    And then the universe played a mean joke on the dodo: human beings. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. They killed the fat, friendly, unsuspecting dodos for food. Their monkeys, pigs, and rat stowaways gobbled dodo eggs like popcorn. Everything that had made the dodos successful inhabitants of Mauritius for so long now made them sitting ducks. In eighty years, they were kaput. Gone. Every last one.
    I think you see where I’m going with this. I was perfectly suited to my world, too. I was . I was flourishing, damn it. And the thing is, no invaders landed on my shores. Worse, the person I trusted most ripped me out of my world and, with nothing even close to a real explanation, plopped me into a new one, where suddenly everything about me was wrong.
    My clothes. My hair. The way I talked. My taste in everything . The food I brought in my lunch. The bag I brought my lunch in. Wrong,wrong. I didn’t know how to talk to people. I didn’t know how to find a seat in the cafeteria. I didn’t know how to raise my damn hand. The dodo held out for eighty years. I knew I wouldn’t last eight months.
    What kind of father makes his daughter a sitting dodo?
    I knew exactly what to say to him. He had always told me that, in teaching me, he wasn’t preparing me for college (although there was never any doubt that I would go to college). He wasn’t paving the way for others to teach me. No, sir. He was teaching me to do what the only real scholars in history had ever done: teach myself. So here was my pitch: I wanted to come home because I wanted to try going it on my own. Until he was well enough to teach me again, I wanted to pull myself up by my bootstraps, summon my pioneer spirit, and teach myself. It was a foolproof argument because how could my father argue with the pioneer spirit? Or with his own, inarguable wisdom?
    But he never got the chance. Every day, on every ride home from school, I planned how I would say these things to my father. And every day, I didn’t.
    He looked so sick, for one thing, not just pale but dingy, like old glue. And he was whispery. And shrunken. And much, much, much too old. Looking at him, it was easy to forget what I had always known: my father was never going to die. Even so, I might have said it all anyway. I might have planted my feet and looked him squarely in his tired, dull eyes and argued my case with a clear voice and a lot of quotes by people he admired. Except. Oh, except!
    Except that what I knew, what I could never escape, what sat like a rock—not just a rock but a molten, seething, blistering rock, if you can imagine such a rock—inside my chest was this: It was all my fault. All. And at my lowest moments, I believed there was no punishment awful enough to balance what I’d done.

CHAPTER THREE
Taisy
    T HE LAST TIME I ’