The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos Page A

were occupied or I might have brushed it back into place. “Most gourd stealers don’t make them dance a jig before they take them.”
    I snorted. Snorted . “Well, that’s stupid. How else would they know which ones to take?”
    “Good point,” he said, grin deepening. “You know, I sort of hate to tell you this, but those Turk’s Turbans might not actually be gourds. They might be squash.”
    “That might matter to me if I were a gourd stealer,” I snapped, “which I’m obviously not.”
    Then, that bright star of a boy tipped back his head and laughed, a sound unself-conscious and ringing, so completely uncool, more like the laugh of a little kid or someone’s granddad than like a high school guy talking to a girl his age he had just met. If I’d been in another state of mind, my usual state of mind, I might have felt embarrassed for him. But nothing at that moment was usual, and his laugh was like my own private meteor shower.
    “I’m Ben Ransom,” he said.
    He held out his hand for me to shake, and later, I’d kick myself all the way home for not jumping at the chance to touch him, to grab hold and hang on, but at that moment, I would’ve given everything I owned to hear Ben Ransom laugh again, so I slapped a Turk’s Turban into his open palm and said, “Taisy Cleary.”
    “ I KNOW WHAT YOU ’ RE thinking,” I said to Trillium. “Granddad laughs and dancing pumpkins don’t make for the most romantic meeting in the world. But they did! We were sixteen. We barely felt comfortable alone in our own rooms, and we cared more about what people thought of us than we cared about anything, world peace, anything . Yet there we stood, talking like no one was watching, like we’d known each other all our lives.”
    Trillium said, “Actually what I was thinking is that you were insane to ever let him go.”
    As soon as she said that— boom —there was Ben’s face again, the way it looked the last time I saw him, stunned, betrayed, a world of hurt in his eyes. I blinked the image away.
    “I didn’t want to. Trust me. But I was a kid! I didn’t have a lot of choices.”
    This must’ve come out more plaintive than I’d intended because Trill reached out and took my hand.
    “Hey, babe, I wasn’t judging. No way. Of course, you were a kid! So let me guess. Wilson caught you doing some totally normal people-in-love thing with Ben that he thought no daughter of his should be doing, called you whorish, and—kaput, Ben and Taisy were no more.”
    “Yeah. Well. Something like that.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, it was a long time ago.”
    “You think you’ll see him? Does he still live in the area?”
    I shrugged and looked away. “How would I know?”
    “Pfft! Yeah, right. You googled. Don’t try to tell me different, lady. Does he still live there?”
    I grinned. “Not still. Again. He went away to college and then grad school in Wisconsin and seems to have lived out there for a while. Anyway, he’s back. He has an address.”
    “So you’ll see him!”
    “Trill. He’s probably married with ten kids.”
    She stuck out her hand. “Bet he’s not. Bet you a refrigerator clean-out that he’s not.”
    I considered. “Since you don’t even keep food in your refrigerator and since your rock-and-roll cleaning guy cleans it for you every month, it’s a deal.”
    We shook.
    “I hope you see him,” said Trillium. “I hope, I hope, I hope.”
    “Oh, I’ve seen him. He has all those tattoos and smells like Pine-Sol, but he’s still kind of cute.”
    “Hardy har har.”
    “You know what Ben did, about three weeks after we started dating? He took a couple of ballet classes, just because ballet was so important to me, and he wanted to see what it was like.”
    “Wow.”
    I sighed, chased a pea around my plate with a fork. “What if he’s different?”
    “He will be,” said Trillium.
    “Oh, God, what if he’s the same ?”
    “He’ll be that, too, honey,” she said. “Just like you.