The Apple Tart of Hope Read Online Free Page A

Everything made sense.
    I don’t remember now who took the photo of us, but I’ve had it in my room for years. We’re leaning out of our windows and we’re laughing at each other with a joyfulness purer than anything to do with the polite smiling you get used to doing when you get older. That photo has the kind of proper smiles that happen when you’re looking straight into the face of someone who’s been your best friend for a long time.
    During the weeks before the trip, our talks had taken on a new and mournful tone. I’d sit at my window sniffing while Oscar sat at his, looking at me with a tender kind of a frown on his face. He had this way of swinging his legs from side to side with his hands on the window frame, holding on. I’d developed a habit myself that involved picking the loose plaster off our outside wall. It was a measly kind of rebellion—my resentful response to feeling so sorrowful and so misunderstood.
    The nights before I left were hotter than I had ever remembered. But in our town, even on the stillest of summer nights, the cold is never far away.
    I told him about how I didn’t want to go—how my parents were robbing me of my most fundamental human right by making me do something that was completely against my will. I told him about what nightmares I was having because of the gigantically hard job it was going to be to get to know bunches of New Zealand people I’d never met, and who already had friends and weren’t in the market for a new pale red-haired freckly one from Ireland.
    Even though Oscar Dunleavy was my friend, it didn’t mean he automatically agreed with everything I said, or believed the things I believed. And when it came to the trip, he was definitely on my parents’ side. He told me I should embrace it, which is exactly what Mum and Dad had been saying the whole time too. Embracing it, he reckoned, was the only way anyone should treat an opportunity like the one that was being handed to me on a plate.
    â€œIt’s really not something to complain about,” he had said, pointing out that I was going somewhere brilliant and different for half a year, and reminding me that I’d be living in a house that had a swimming pool in the garden and a fantastic lake nearby surrounded by mountains. He said that if I was grumpy about a trip like that, people would get jealous of me—they’d think I was taking for granted something that hardly anyone ever got a chance to do, which is to get away from the life they’re living, and try a completely new one for a while.
    According to him, it could be quite bad luck to have the evil eye of resentment following me around when I was in the middle of getting used to a whole different country.
    I tried to explain to Oscar how dangerous and unrelenting the sun was going to be and how, compared to the New Zealand people, I would look so pale that everyone was going to assume I had some serious illness or pigmentation-related disability. I was sure to be marked out as a misfit, and I was positive that no one was going to talk to me.
    â€œThey’re going to be
dying
to talk to you,” he had said. “Nobody’s going to think there’s anything wrong with you. You’ll be so exotic and fascinating and pretty much the whole population will want to be your friend. Plus, there are things that have been invented for hot climates, you know, like sunblock. Air-conditioning. T-shirts. Meg, there’s a solution to every problem. What you’re doing right now is looking for reasons not to want to go.”
    He told me that within a few short weeks I’d have forgotten all my unwillingness about the trip and that I’d be populating my Facebook page with photos of smiling sunny fantasticness.
    Meanwhile, back here, he reminded me, the Irish winter would be sneaking up on everyone. The mornings would be growing colder and gloomier, and getting up for school