The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos

leathery or cloth or something gloves on, which anyway I realized meant that he worked there, and so no doubt knew that I was sitting illegally, so I started to, you know, scramble to my feet, and you’ll never guess what he said.”
    There were five of us, and we all yelped, “What?”
    Itzy dropped her voice to a near whisper, “‘Don’t worry about it. Everyone sits there. That one’s really just a sample.’”
    Our excuse was pumpkin shopping. Six teenaged girls dressed in their best jeans and new fall boots and sweaters, lip-glossed within an inch of their lives, and eager—avid, breathless, pink cheeked—for gourds. It was a big place, Ransom’s, deep and wide, with rows of open-air wooden tables covered with pots of plants and flats of flowers giving way to rows of larger plants and shrubs, and delicate, hopeful little potted trees, and interspersed throughout, pretty objects: birdbaths and garden furniture made by local artisans, and ceramic planters full of artful arrangements, funny things like purple-hearted cabbages and chili pepper plants and trailing vines mixed in with the usual flowers.
    There was a shop, too. A cottagey structure full of vases, wind chimes, fancy, seasonal tabletop decorations, blown-glass hummingbirdfeeders, candles, crystal garden balls, wreaths made of herbs, pomegranates, eucalyptus. My mother rarely shopped there. “Too expensive,” she’d say, “but it’s a great place to get ideas.”
    I’d find out later that Mr. Ransom and his wife had opened the center together, years before Ben was born, and that in the beginning, it was Mrs. Ransom who had been in charge of all the arty things. After they divorced, when Ben was three, Mr. Ransom had taken over that part, too, and, to his surprise, found that he had a knack for it, a real eye. Sometimes, the local rich ladies would even pay him to come to their houses and decorate their yards, dining room tables, and mantelpieces, fill their planters and window boxes. Mr. Ransom didn’t really need the extra jobs because the center did fine; he did it because he loved it.
    Because the six of us had so much ground to cover, we decided to divide and conquer, some of us starting at the perimeter and walking in ever-smaller circles toward the center, a couple of us taking the cottage, and one of us cruising the displays out front.
    I took the front displays, and because, even though I was boy crazy, I was also kind of a nerd, I got interested: gripped by gourds, pulled in by pumpkins. There was a mind-boggling variety of them: the usual basketball orange, of course, but also green-striped ones, bone-colored ones, enormous blond ones, flattish princessy ones, the barnacled type that had made such an impression on Itzy, and giant tear-shaped ones whose long, curved handle-tops made you want to grab one and club something. And all along one bench were the gourds that would change my life. I’d never seen anything like them, not gourds so much as creatures: small orange pumpkins with squatty white legs.
    I picked up two of them, one in each hand, and made them toddle, jauntily, along the bench. I hummed a little tune. Behind me, someone said, “Hey.”
    A boy’s voice. Slowly, I turned around. His eyes sparkled under his eyebrows. His smile was crooked and genuine. I noticed he had onedimple, just like I did. I also noticed that he was perfect, man-apron and all, and I was making little pumpkins walk. I stood looking at the boy, my hands full of gourd monopod spacemen. And here’s the thing: I should’ve been mortified. Every interaction with the opposite sex I’d had since the age of ten had taught me that, at that moment, I should’ve wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. But I didn’t .
    “Hey,” I said, smiling back at the boy. “You probably thought I was trying to steal your gourds.”
    “I don’t know about that,” he said, shrugging in a way that made his hair fall sideways on his forehead. Luckily, my hands