The Apple Tart of Hope (7 page)

Mum and Dad continued to be surprised and happy by my change of heart—“thrilled” is what they said—about how much of an effort I was making.

They said my positive thinking had made all the difference.

I've discovered that you can have a great time somewhere while at
the same time missing somewhere else, and I missed Ireland. I obviously missed Oscar more than you might imagine was possible for anyone to miss another human being without getting sick or permanently sad.

I used to dream about him, and in my dreams he'd always be framed by his window, swinging his legs and smiling his beautiful smile.

I'd got him to promise to tell me the minute someone even looked like they were going to move into my house. I told him that even if someone didn't move in, still he was to stay in touch on a regular basis. And he promised he would, and I did too. And so—in the beginning—we did.

“I know, totally,” I'd replied, trying to ignore a big judder I suddenly felt inside my body.

Later he'd sent more details:

I don't know why, but I told him to take a photo of her and send it to me.

I clicked on the attachment and found a picture of a person in shadow, just an outline really was all I could see, standing behind my white curtain. The person's head was bent and it looked like she was carrying some kind of unreliable light—a candle say, or a bad flashlight, and it cast strange shapes in my old bedroom making it look like a foreign place, and I wished immediately that I hadn't asked Oscar to take any photograph at all, or now that he had, I wished that he hadn't sent it to me.

Not long after that, he sent another photo just as he had promised. It wasn't any clearer, with a dark shadow still covering her face, but it was of her sitting on my window ledge, with her body leaning forward in a way that it only would be if you knew the person who was taking the photo extremely well.

After a while, Oscar didn't really talk much about anything or anyone else.

He seemed to have learned a huge number of details about her, like she was coming to our school, and how she had a mother who was a businesswoman and how they were looking for a bigger house while they rented ours and how she didn't like certain things in my house: for example it was much too small and the pipes rattled whenever you turned the faucets on, and how the boiler room had a funny smell and how the shower beside her room was totally unpredictable—scalding one moment and freezing to death the next.

“Tell her they're not unpredictable,” I wrote back to Oscar. “Tell her that she only has to get to know them properly.”

He said he'd pass that along, and then he went on about how she had massive brown eyes and hair like golden silk.

Golden silk?

I'd studied the two photos he'd sent, and from what I could make out, her hair didn't look anything like golden silk to me. It looked like ordinary hair—the kind of hair that anyone would have. Nothing amazing at all.

I tried my best to be pleased for Oscar. When I told my mum about how he was getting to know the girl who was living in my room she asked me if I had any particular feelings about that situation that I might like to talk about.

“What do you mean?” I'd asked her, and for the first time in ages, I felt kind of annoyed, and she said, “It might be difficult for you to hear of someone sleeping in your bed and spending time with Oscar like that.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I replied, slamming my laptop shut, and heading to the door. “And anyway, you're the one
who decided to rent out our house. I never thought it was a good idea, and on top of that, it doesn't matter now, I don't even care, because I've loads of friends here. I'm not dependent on Oscar for anything.”

“I didn't say you were, it's just—”

“Mum, honestly, I'm fine. I mean, Oscar can hang out with whoever he wants. How could I stop him from doing that? In fact I'm glad. I'm really glad for him. I was worried about how he was going to spend the winter, what he was going to do and now, see, look at that! He's made a new friend and it's great. Really, really glad for him, okay?”

Then I told her I was off to hang out with a bunch of my own new friends at the lake. We might even go water-skiing.

And we did, and then afterward I chatted to Keira and Dougie and a few of the others and I told them about this girl and I wondered aloud if Paloma Killooly or whatever her stupid name was, knew how to water-ski or surf or if she'd ever swum in a lake with black swans gliding nearby and huge craggy mountains looking at her from a clean pale sky.

We sat at a picnic table and I pulled at a few strands of my red hair and I held them in between my fingers and I wondered what I would look like if it was a different color—swan-black say, or golden silk.

“I've done a load of interesting things here that I bet she's never done,” I announced to everybody. I wasn't sure why, and neither were they.

“Hey, Meggy, don't fret,” Dougie had said. “You'll be going home in a couple of months, and you'll be back in that room and you and Oscar will pick up exactly where you left off.”

I often thought about those words afterward, and they used to hit me between the eyes sometimes, as if someone had thrown a big rock straight at my face.

She sounded okay, I had to admit. I mean it was a friendly note and—apart from the exclamation mark overdose—I couldn't really fault it. She was being nice, and Oscar was always reminding me that most people are fundamentally decent and that it doesn't pay to think badly of them. And why wouldn't she make friends with Oscar? Everyone wanted to be his friend. Nobody in our school didn't want to hang out with him—and nobody didn't like him. That's the way he was.

I wrote back to her saying how “gr8” it was to hear from her and that I was looking forward to meeting her in person too.

The morning after that, there was another email waiting for me:

A massive wave of heat flooded through me, followed by what felt like a skewer of ice stabbing me in the stomach. Bloody hell. I tried desperately then to remember the exact words that I'd written, but all I remembered was that it had definitely been my declaration of
love
. And now Oscar was going to read it—that's if he hadn't already. It wasn't Paloma's fault. She'd thought she was being helpful. No one could blame her.

I felt dizzy and a bit sick. Perhaps I still had time, I thought for a moment as the image of Oscar actually
reading
my secret note became more and more clear and more and more mortifying.

I checked the time of her email, thinking for one bright and comforting second that I might still be able to reverse things and persuade Paloma to snatch that letter back before Oscar had had a chance to read it. But no chance, of course. She had sent it over a day ago. He already had my letter, and he knew what was in it and it was too late to do anything except sit blinking at my laptop thinking what kind of damage-limiting thing I should try to do next.

As soon as I'd read it, I'd wished I hadn't.

I lay on my bed then all rigid and tense, letting a thousand cheerless thoughts chase each other around my head. And then I
heard a noise. It was Paloma throwing those little bits of plaster—plaster she'd found on Meg's sill—at my window and asking me about the letter. I wasn't in the mood to talk about it but Paloma had this way of blinking at me quite slowly, and it made me want to tell her my secrets. And before I knew it, I was confiding in her about how Meg didn't have any interest in . . . well . . . in me. She listened carefully and she nodded her head a lot and went “uh huh, I see, mm.” She said she had some advice. She said that the only way to respond to a letter like that was to ignore it completely, and to act as if I didn't care about what it said—as if what it said was totally immaterial and of no consequence to me whatsoever.

“Oscar, you need to let her know that what was in that letter is so irrelevant that you've practically forgotten what it says. That's by far the best way to deal with something like that.”

I reckoned Paloma was doing her best to be wise and honest and helpful and I wanted to take her advice.

“I'd say you're better off not thinking about that girl. She doesn't sound too nice,” Paloma said, then, which was Paloma's own opinion and possibly fine if you're able to apply logic to a particular situation. But the things I felt about Meg, they didn't operate, they didn't even exist, in the logical, rational part of my brain. Paloma might as well have been telling my heart to stop beating, or commanding my blood to stop flowing through my veins.

After Paloma had said good night, an email pinged into my mailbox: