Free April Love Story by Caroline B. Cooney

the whistling wind, “I hate this damn outhouse! Someday I’m going home! To a city, where people know how to live. Where you date. And walk on sidewalks. And the milk comes in cartons. And the bathrooms are inside!”
    The snow kept falling and the outhouse was colder than ever.
    One blustery January day when the school bus was late, and I’d stepped in an icy puddle and discovered a hole in my boots (the boots we couldn’t afford to replace), and Lucas had lost a glove and had one hand balled up in his pocket, taking it out now and then to huff on it, he said suddenly, “Marnie, let’s run away.”
    “Great idea. Where shall we go? Bahamas? Virgin Islands?”
    “No airfare. Don’t you have any loving relatives who’d give us shelter?”
    “Two of them. They live down the lane in a drafty farmhouse with your two loving relatives.”
    “Oh. You mean those back-to-the-land types.”
    “Right. The ones whose hearts are pure and whose sweat is honest.”
    “And whose teenagers are rebellious.”
    We laughed. When the bus came, Connie wasn’t there again, and I sat with Lucas for the very first time. For the very first time, we talked, not about goats or wood, but about ourselves. “I was sort of hoping the whole experiment would be doomed to failure,” I said.
    “Me, too. So far there are no signs of adult enthusiasm wearing thin.”
    “Well, hang in there, Lucas. Only six more months and you’ll be off at college somewhere.”
    The pain I’d seen on his face before settled back in. His features turned bleak and miserable. “I’m not going to college, Marnie,” he said simply. “They can’t make a success of the orchard without another full-time worker. And the only one around for free is me.”
    “ Not go to college? But your whole life had been a preparation for college!”
    “Dad says college merely leads to a diploma that is but a piece of paper. Meaningless. Superficial. I’m an adult now, he says, and I’m needed at home with my family, helping to earn the daily bread.”
    “Oh, Lucas, how terrible! Did they make it an order? You have to stay?”
    “No, they wouldn’t do that. I’m eighteen now and I don’t think they could force me to stay. Or that they want to use force. But they can’t give me a dime and you can’t go to college, even local state colleges, without an awful lot of dimes. Besides, they’re right, they do need me.”
    “Oh, Lucas!” My heart ached for him. I could hardly stand to see the slump that had taken over not just his posture, but his face as well. I’d have hugged him, patted him, if it would have helped. But he didn’t need me. He needed a different future.
    Lucas shrugged, leafing through his schoolbooks with a detached longing. For Lucas, learning was something exciting. College had meant knowledge all around him, spilling out of books and professors and laboratories and libraries, waiting for him to scoop it up. And now learning was going to stop here, with a high school reader.
    “Are you going to stay, then?” I asked.
    “I suppose so. I owe it to my parents, I guess.”
    I remembered Eve—so long ago it seemed like another world—saying Lucas’ profile was fine, it was his personality that worried her. It seemed to me that both his profile and his personality were in pretty good shape. It would be an incredible sacrifice for him to stay, and from what I knew of the way he’d behaved all year, he’d do it cheerfully, too. Not bothering the adults with his complaints. Not like Marnie, who drowned people in complaints. “What did you want to study at college, Lucas?”
    “Literature. Wanted to be a college professor.”
    A year ago I’d have said he looked like a college professor. Sort of weedy and bookwormy. But not now.
    “But I’m not sure anymore,” he said, surprising me. “Farming really has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I don’t want to be a farmer, but sometimes I think I’ve learned as much working around those apple