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better than candy,” she admitted, with a shy, delighted laugh.
    “Have another,” said Lars, pleased. “They’re best fresh, right from the tree and warm from the sun. If your family comes out for the harvest, I’ll prove it to you. My father always lets me pick some of the best apricots for my friends.”
    Rosa froze, her hand still reaching for the bag. Working the Jorgensen apricot harvest was a summertime tradition for families throughout the Arboles Valley, a festive, happy season of visiting with neighbors and picnicking in the orchard at noon, or so Rosa’s friends had told her. Her parents had never joined in the harvest—nor would they want Rosa to accept gifts of apricots from Lars.
    “Go on, help yourself,” prompted Lars as she hesitated, holding out the bag. “There’s plenty.”
    “I—I don’t want any more.” Her cheeks burned as she imagined her mother’s reaction if she could see Rosa sitting beside Lars in the schoolyard, not only sitting beside him but speaking with him and enjoying apricots that had grown on the land that had once belonged to their own family.
    Lars waited for her to explain, but when she turned away from him, he shrugged and offered the bag to the other girls.Eagerly they passed it around the circle, sampling the fruit, thanking him, and exclaiming that they had never tasted sweeter, yummier apricots. For the first time, Rosa imagined her friends enjoying themselves at the Jorgensens’ apricot harvest without her and resented missing out on all the fun.
    She wished she had not refused to take another of Lars’s dried apricots when he had first offered her the bag, because when it came back to her after being passed around the circle of friends, it was empty. Lars must have seen her disappointment, because he said, “I’ll bring more tomorrow.”
    Don’t bother
, she almost retorted, but something made her hold back the words. Instead she nodded, and the next day he brought her a small bag of dried apricots all her own.
    For the rest of the school year, Lars brought Rosa apricots at least once a week, and he would sit with her and her friends at lunchtime and entertain them with stories of his escapades on the ranch. On rainy days when the teacher held recess inside, Rosa and Lars would read together or play checkers, but their burgeoning friendship began and ended at the schoolyard. If they happened to see each other anywhere else, they would exchange a surreptitious glance of acknowledgment and then pretend not to know each other. If they were on an errand with their parents, which they usually were, they wouldn’t risk even the glance.
    As the years went by, Rosa’s friendship with Lars blossomed, but in secret, like the delicate roses that climbed the trellis in the shade of her parents’ house.
    When Rosa was fourteen, the Arboles Valley School celebrated Valentine’s Day with a party and gift exchange. Rosa had written Lars a clever poem, which she knew would make him laugh, and she had drawn a simple landscape of an apricotorchard to remind him of her promise to come to the Jorgensen ranch at harvest time someday.
    When Rosa had returned after distributing her valentines to her classmates, she found a pink carnation on her desk, pink and white ribbons tied around the long stem, a small white card tucked beneath it. “For my Spanish Rose,” Lars had written inside in his familiar, orderly script, and he had signed it, “L. J.” Glowing with warmth and happiness, she slipped the card into her valentine bag and suppressed a laugh. Lars knew all there was to know about apricots but he didn’t know one flower from another. She didn’t care. The pink carnation from the Arboles Grocery was as lovely to her as the most tenderly cultivated rose, because it was from Lars.
    She walked home from school dreamily, smiling to herself and often raising the carnation to her face to inhale its delicate fragrance. She had watched Lars from the other side of the