Read Online The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos - Free Book Online Page B

Trillium was born; her father was—if you can believe it—the son of a plantation owner, a college kid named Packham Boyd who got Elena pregnant over fall break and then went back to school without a backward glance.
    Through a combination of smarts, looks, audacity, luck, and an ineffable iridescent effervescence that I would come to call Trilliuminosity, Trill had scratched, scrambled, finessed, floated, and earned her way from fruit picker to Ivy Leaguer to bond trader to revered university professor and inspirational speaker to—and here’s where I came in—bestselling writer.
    Her story was good. Supergood. Much better than most, but one morning, about two days after she’d finished, after all those hours of telling—and the hours stretched over months—I realized, with a jolt, that it wasn’t so different, on its face, from others we’ve all heard. Rags to riches. The triumph of the human spirit. Et cetera. What made the story special, what made it thrilling and irresistible was Trillium herself: the cadence of her throaty voice, her leaping mind, the way she’d throw words out like handfuls of confetti one minute, and select them,one by careful one, the next. Trillium spoke with her whole body; sentences shot out the tips of her long fingers, ran off her like rain.
    I told her to write her story down. I was a writer myself, a freelance business writer and editor. I worked for corporations and law firms, mostly, got occasional work from one of the nearby universities or hospitals. It was a far cry from the kind of writing I’d always hoped to do, but, honestly, I liked it. There was something satisfying about taking raw, messy material, no matter how bland it might be, and giving it shape, rhythm, clarity, a dash of razzle-dazzle. On good days, I like to think I even gave it a little poetry. It was something that had always made me happy, putting words on a page in an order that pleased me. Even writing grocery lists was a small, contained joy; sometimes, I’d add items I didn’t need—lemons, figs, buttermilk—just because I liked the words, and then I’d buy them because they were on the list and that’s what the list was for.
    But Trillium, as it turned out, with her gold mine of a story and her gift for bringing it to life, hated to write, had only ever done so in school, under duress, and at the last minute.
    “There’s nobody there ,” she groaned, referring to the writing process. “It’s so dull and lifeless and cold, like the tundra .”
    “Actually, there’s plenty of life on the tundra, if you look,” I told her.
    “You! You and your Planet Earth . Like what, for example?”
    It’s true; I was and am an enormous fan of the BBC series, while Trillium was a die-hard speciesist, adored almost everything that involved people, no matter how questionable (theme parks, reality television, jury duty), and almost nothing that did not.
    “Shrubs,” I offered in my best David Attenborough voice. “And sedge. A veritable ocean of sedge. So much sedge that the sedge can be seen from space.”
    In the end, she talked; I wrote. When I brought her the first chapter, the one about the bees, she read it, then sat down on the floor and burst into tears.
    After a couple of minutes, when she could speak, she said, “It’s like living it all over again. It’s sheer and unadulterated perfect gorgeousness . It’s genius ! It’s me —it’s so me !”
    She wiped her eyes, caught her breath, and then said, “But the pancakes, the ones at the hospital, they were blueberry, not chocolate chip. Big, fat, purple splotches in the pancakes. I thought I told you that. Purple. And, oh! You need to include how the epinephrine made me shake, my whole body trembling like a leaf. Not like a leaf! When do leaves actually tremble? Like something else. Something trembly. I’m sure you’ll think of it.”
    This would turn out to be our process: she talked, I wrote, she read, cried, gushed, called me a genius,