April Love Story Read Online Free

don’t.”
    I poked the up button for the elevator to our apartment.
    “You know what?” I confided to Joel. “Every time I ride in an elevator, I wonder what I should do if the cable breaks. Should I be calm and stoic, accepting my squashed fate, holding the elbows of old ladies and speaking gently to little children? Or should I leap up and down, trying to be on an up jump when the elevator whacks the bottom?”
    Joel howled with laughter. “I vote for being on an up jump,” he said, and immediately began leaping up and down. Basketball players tend to be good leapers.
    “Stop it!” I said. “What if the elevator stops and somebody sees you leaping all over the place like Super Frog?”
    He leaped harder.
    “You’re going to break the cable just jumping,” I protested.
    But he kept jumping, and when the doors opened at our floor one of our neighbors was standing there, looking at Joel as if he were a disease she thought the World Health Organization had eradicated. I blushed nine shades of red, but Joel simply bowed to her and swept me out of the elevator to our door. Oh, to be a senior and not blush!
    “Mother?” I yelled, unlocking the door. But nobody was home. I was delighted. I am fond of my parents, but conversation that is interesting and funny when I’m alone with another kid is stilted and difficult when my folks are around. I’m not sure why. Mother is polite, but no matter who is with me—even Susannah—I always feel she wishes I had found somebody better.
    “So. What’s to eat?” said Joel.
    “There are quite a few choices, but you’re not going to like most of them any more than you did last time. Mother is still deep into her natural foods kick.”
    “That carrot juice she foisted off on me last week was nauseating.”
    “Well, today we’re featuring pomegranate juice, iced herb tea, buttermilk, carrot cake made with whole wheat and pineapple, and four varieties of tasty cheese.”
    “Carrot cake? Cake made with carrots? I thought you meant real cake, not rabbit food.”
    “Actually carrot cake is moist and good and you don’t even know the carrots are there.”
    “Then why add them?” Scowling, Joel broke off a corner of cake. “Hey. It is good. Okay. I’ll have carrot cake and … and … and ice water.”
    We took our food into the living room to eat.
    I love our living room. I never want to move or change a thing, because it is perfect. My mother has bought every interior decorating magazine ever printed and she has a wonderful color sense, anyway. The walls are a warm, welcoming yellow, not blatty gold or pumpkiny orange or little girl weak, but a cozy, rich yellow. Lots of cherry and walnut furniture with neutral upholstery and pillows and a forest of green plants on the south window ledge. An oil painting my parents got for an investment splashes a sort of half-eaten rainbow over the dining table. Everywhere are magazines, books, and lovely pieces of pottery. People who visit us invariably exclaim that ours is the handsomest, homiest room they’ve ever seen. “Like the country,” they say happily, as if a room that was “like the city” wouldn’t be half so nice.
    “You have to take lots of vitamins and pills with this natural diet, Marnie?”
    “Oh, no, absolutely not. Mother believes an honest diet from wholesome foods supplies you with every nutrient you need.”
    “I saw you getting a candy bar from the vending machine.”
    “I know. I sin. Mother wouldn’t be pleased. She thinks she’s taught me enough about the evils of refined sugar and artificial additives that I’ll make informed choices. And I do.”
    Joel grinned. “When you eat junk, at least you know it’s junk, huh?” He got himself another piece of cake and began leafing through the magazines that filled an enormous brass bucket by Mother’s painstakingly constructed false fireplace. “Strange stuff,” he commented. Organic Gardening. The Mother Earth News. Dairy Goat Journal. Alternative