April Love Story (16 page)

“Farming,” I said.

“Farming,” said Lucas.

Nobody was interested in that. We’d always done that. They wanted to talk about college. About going places and doing things and learning things. About which school had better engineering classes and which was best for elementary education.

The prom was Saturday night.

When Lucas and I met at breakfast Sunday morning, the house was empty. Our parents must be out working somewhere, I thought, and I suggested a picnic breakfast to Lucas.

We fixed a thermos of coffee (a recent splurge of Uncle Bob’s) and a jar of homemade—what else?—applesauce, some of my sweet rolls and napkins. Out the window we spotted our parents.

“They’re deciding whether to put in more herbs this year, I bet,” said Lucas. “Mother was thinking she might be able to sell herb vinegar or something.”

Quietly and carefully we walked out the front door so they wouldn’t see us. Not that we were off to do anything wrong, but people who are up and moving in our house get chores to do, and we both felt the need to talk instead.

The geese honked the way they do for me, but nobody yelled after us, and we went over the meadows, up the hill to our favorite picnic spot under a sourwood tree.

We had just sat down and opened the thermos when five goats joined us. Lucas swore. I had forgotten to shut the gate behind us. I didn’t blame him for being furious. There is nothing harder to catch than a playful goat. You can sit still and hope he’ll get curious about you, but that rarely works five goats in a row.

One goat had its collar on, so I grabbed her and Lucas manhandled another, using his belt for a collar. We got those two down to the barnyard, shoved them in, rounded up some escaping hens, and caught the cow halfway across the pasture that would have led her into the flowerbed. Then we ran up the hill again, this time with ropes, to get the other three goats.

“I think,” said Lucas, puffing, “that those goats want out just as much as we do.”

“Some old film buff should be here,” I said, leaping unsuccessfully after an agile young nannie.

“Why?” panted Lucas.

We both slipped, catching each other instead of the goat between us which would have been fine, except we really did have to catch the silly goats. “We must look like something out of Laurel and Hardy, that’s why.”

It took us half an hour to get the last goat and haul him down to the barnyard and close the gate on him. “Lucas!” yelled his father. “Work to do!”

We hesitated. There was work to do, a lot of it, and we’d wasted so much time because of my carelessness. “I’ve got something to fetch up on the hill,” yelled Lucas back. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

We trudged back up the hill. “Climbing up gets less romantic each time,” said Lucas.

“I noticed.”

We flopped down on the grass. After a bit I poured us each a cup of coffee that was still nicely hot.

“Do you know what we’d be doing right now if we still lived in the city?” said Lucas.

“Let’s see. Sunday morning after a big night out. We’d be reading the
Times
. We’d be ready to start the crossword puzzle.”

“No. We’d be perusing the catalog of the college of our choice. Deciding whether to take Economics One or Oriental Literature. And whether to take these at nine
A.M.
, thus leaving insufficient time for sleeping late, or at noon, thereby cutting into our carefully arranged program of television soap operas.”

“Anxiously awaiting the mail, to see if Basketweaving has been filled and we have to take freshman English after all.”

“Wondering about the really big decisions. Like whether to join a fraternity.”

It was impossible to believe people were still out there worrying about social acceptance when I had to go down the hill to clean kerosene lamps, haul water, handwash a load of laundry filthy from our slipping in the mud of spring rains.

“Which fraternity are you joining?” I asked.

“I thought maybe Tri-Goat.”

We laughed hysterically.

“Marnie,” said Lucas. “I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go.”

I looked at him uncertainly.

“I don’t want to plant another seed, spray another apple, or catch another goat.”

It wasn’t our usual shared complaining. It was a calm statement of fact. A shiver ran up my back. Lucas meant it. He was ready to leave.

“You want to go with me?” he said. I could hardly hear his voice. I touched his cheek and both of us forgot how to breathe.

“You know what a fraternity guy does,” he said, “when he wants to show a girl he likes her best?”

“Mother says we can’t do that. We aren’t that free.”

“Not that, Marnie. You don’t have to be in a fraternity to do that, believe me. No, fraternity guys have these little gold pins, and they pin them on the girl’s sweater, and that proclaims to the campus that they’re pledged to each other.”

I thought of the goats and the chores. “I don’t think our campus is interested.”

Lucas reached into his hip pocket and pulled out something shiny.

“A safety pin?” I said.

“It’s all I have.” He pinned the tiny metal strip on my blue chambray work shirt.

“If there one thing we know about, Marnie, it’s work. We’ve put in two years reclaiming this orchard and getting this farm going. There has to be something out there that we can earn a living at. I’ll put you through school and you put me through. Is it a deal, or do I rip my pin from your blouse?”

We held each other and I could feel the tiny hard line of the safety pin between his chest and mine.

“It would hurt them,” I said.

“I don’t think so. They won’t need us so much this year as they did the others.”

That was true. Routines were easier now, chores less exhausting or confusing. Impossible tasks had been dropped, intensely disliked jobs refined.

“Besides,” said Lucas, “I’m nineteen and you’re eighteen. Old enough to make a decision together. Our parents moved here for our sakes as well as for theirs, and I guess I really am grateful to them for it. It did us a lot of good. But it’s spring, Marnie, and in the spring—”

“And in the spring,” I said, laughing, “a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.”

“Darn right. This young man’s fancy has also turned to college and jobs and money, and I wouldn’t mind a goat shortage at all.”

Spring. Two Aprils ago, my parents had dragged me away from everything I thought had counted. One April ago, I was in love with a boy who didn’t know I existed. This April, he loved me.

April is a time for new beginnings, I thought. And our beginning will have to be different from our parents’.

“It’s a deal, Lucas,” I said.

We packed up the picnic things and walked back to the farmhouse, hand in hand, to tell our parents we loved them, we loved what they had done for our sakes, but we loved each other, too, and things would have to be different.

The wind riffled our hair, the sun glinted off my safety pin, and somewhere out there, a world was waiting.

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning
The Face on the Milk Carton,
about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in
Whatever Happened to Janie?
(1993),
The Voice on the Radio
(1996), and
What Janie Found
(2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book,
Janie Face to Face
, will be released in 2013.

Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the
Mayflower
.

The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

Cooney at age three.

Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.