Chapter 1

My name is Michael Love. How you doin?

My family and I moved into a part of Louisville, Kentucky, specifically a nice neighborhood twenty minutes south of downtown called Lake Forest.

We have a pool in the backyard, and a hot spa. Only our parents are allowed in it, but after I asked to be responsible for it, I earned the opportunity to occasionally use it for myself.

Next-door to me growing up was a family with four girls. Coincidentally (or not) my family was four boys.
An immediate pairing off problem occurred when I found out that the girls, from oldest to youngest were named Mary (13), April (12), June (11) and Nancy (10). The girls were all redheads like their mother, Nevina and father Tyrone.

My brothers and I from oldest to youngest are Michael (14), Charles (13), Kenneth (11) and William (10). We had different shades of brown hair, with Sarah, my mother, and John, our dad.

After meeting the girls for the first time, my brother Charles paired off with Mary, the oldest, while April and I seemed to hit it off. We both thought we got the better deal that way.

My family’s last name is Love. Their last name is Nicholas.

While not uber rich, both families were rather well-off, thank God.

We lived in a very nice neighborhood on the southwest side of Louisville, Kentucky, just on the east side of the Ohio River, which is the border between Kentucky and Indiana.
It didn’t take long for April and me to become pretty good friends. Our parents got along so well I think they are hoping we might all just end up married to each other.
Being fifteen years old, that seemed a long way off to me. However, April had it in her head to be a bride at the ripe old age of sixteen.
Since I wasn’t old enough to drive yet and I doubt her parents would have let her go with me if I had, we needed to either ride our bikes or be taken to wherever it was we wanted to go.
We often ended up in either her room in her house or my room in my house, with the door open, doing something on the computer, or listening to music.

After being around each other most of the time, even going to the same school, I had just turned sixteen (on May 30^th, Memorial Day) and got my driver’s license and she was turning fourteen coming up (November 11^th).
That made my parents very proud and her parents very nervous.
For my birthday, my parents got me a previously owned Toyota Camry, only a few years old.
My only problem with the car was that it had bucket seats and not a bench seat, which conversely made Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas very happy!
Back when we became close enough to hold hands, two years earlier, April and I both became aware of a place across the river in the town of Vincennes (164 miles away) called the Palace Drive-in Theater, that had sixteen movies showing at the same time, and it didn’t cost very much.
Fast forward two years, they had opened their fifth one in Louisville, exactly 7.4 miles from our front door.

Despite the much closer location, her parents locked horns with my parents with the probability that something might still happen to their ‘little girl’ if I took her to such a place.

I found out more detailed information about the place: It’s very innovative. Some rich dude named Michael Thomas in Vincennes created the place for people to go see a ‘Drive-in Movie’ inside!

Sixteen theatre screens, eight on each side, each holding 105 cars, all inside what looked like a very large circus tent. The truly innovative part of it was that movies started at nine in the morning and went all day until midnight. My dad said that it was the kind of idea that would be making somebody a ‘shitload’ of money. His words, not mine.

They talked about it with us in the room making me mad and upsetting April.
Just as I was about to get up and give them my two cents, April got up and said, “Daddy, if you think that I’m going to let Michael kiss me and stuff like that then you’re wrong! We like each other very much and he has always been a complete gentleman to me. I don’t think it’s fair that you assume he will try to do something ... naughty!”

“We are very good friends and I would slap him in the face if he tried anything at all,” she continued although we were holding hands.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” my father asked me.
“To be honest, I believe I am developing feelings for April, so I understand what the Nicholas’s are talking about. I care for her and in time I hope she will care for me.”