April Love Story by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online

roll his eyes: I’d roll my own back and somehow we’d hang onto the shreds of sanity.
    I got to keep my bed, my blankets, quilts, and designer sheets, the clothes my mother deemed suitable (the ugly, sturdy ones), and whatever else would fit into my chest. That chest was our best antique: a pre-Revolutionary six-board blanket chest my great-grandmother got at an auction some sixty years ago. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t hold much. When I put in my old gray wool Eeyore, the stack of chorus programs beginning with the Christmas one in third grade when I fell off the risers, the old plastic doll I washed in the tub with me every night right up to junior high, my journals and diaries (I tended to make six entries and forget it), my photograph album, and my piggy bank from a kindergarten birthday party, there was hardly room for the add-a-bead necklace that all my friends got together to buy for me.
    Everything else in my fifteen-by-fourteen bedroom, with its two walk-in closets, its matching bureaus, and its nine shelves, had to go to the yard sale. Susannah and I spent hours combing through, deciding what to keep. Susannah loved it. She got more treasures than the last two Christmases combined.
    I felt cut.
    Aunt Ellen celebrated the last meal she’d make in their apartment by cooking homemade old-fashioned gingerbread with whipped cream.
    “I wish you two would be more responsive to all we’re doing for you,” she said, dusting her hands on her big white canvas apron. She was sewing a matching one for me.
    “But,” said Lucas, and he stopped.
    “I know what you mean,” I said to him. “There are so many buts it’s impossible to choose one and get started on it.”
    “Have you two declared a truce?” said Aunt Ellen.
    “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Lucas. I threw my gingerbread at him and got him right in the face.
    “Mother, I have to be allowed to take more with me.”
    “No room, dear. We’ll have five rooms. Your father and I’ll have one bedroom, The Petersons another, Lucas will share the third bedroom with the pantry shelves we’ll build to store all our home-canned produce, and you’ll have this dear little loft over the living room. Marnie, you’ll be so cozy in winter, as the heat rises from the wood-stove. It’s going to be so lovely.”
    “I said, can I take more with me?”
    “No, dear, we’ll be too cramped for space. Now, what do you think we can get for these two electronic games of yours? And this stack of your records, are they worth anything?”
    Aunt Ellen’s neighbor’s friends had a house in the suburbs with a big yard and good traffic, so we hauled everything over there to tag and sell. The lamps, blender, rotisserie, waffle iron, stereo, crystal, Ping-Pong table, bridge table, five window air conditioners, about a million books (Lucas was in pain over the sale of each one of these), all my old stuffed dolls and toys, Aunt Ellen’s electric towel-drying rack, my father’s hair dryer, Uncle Bob’s electric typewriter, Mother’s Cuisinart.
    “This is not a joke, then,” said Susannah. “I’ve kept hoping somehow it would turn out to be a joke. After all, this is April first.”
    “No, it doesn’t seem to be a joke,” I said. We cried a little. It wouldn’t make my mascara run because I wasn’t wearing any. Mother threw out my makeup. From now on, she explained, your sparkle will be your own personality. Does it matter, I said, that my eyebrows are blonde and I have only seven visible lashes per lid?
    She laughed joyously. She knew I would love this “land” of hers once I got there.
    My father tied down the last box, wrapped the last old rug around an exposed table corner, and locked the door of the rented moving van. “Let’s roll,” he cried gaily. My mother and father and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Bob and scores of their friends hugged each other with wild abandon—a phrase from some poem I once had to read in English. I hugged back to prevent a