The Apple Tart of Hope by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online Page B

herself again. She said that Meg must be a really special person for someone like me to feel those things about her. She said Meg was lucky and I said thanks.
    She even asked me for Meg’s email because it would be nice, she said, for her to drop her a line and introduce herself, seeing as she was renting her house and living in her room. So I wrote Meg’s email address on a torn scrap of paper and I rolled it up and tossed it over to Paloma, who caught it in her long fingers and started uncrumpling it straight away and putting the details into her phone.
    â€œCall over to me tomorrow, okay?” she said, not looking at me and pulling across Meg’s curtains. And I said that I would.
    Next day when I knocked on her door, Paloma’s mother showed me into the back garden. Paloma was standing by the fence with a huge fanlike bat in her hands, hitting a mattress so hard that dust was rising from it in huge clouds.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I asked.
    â€œWhat . . . THWACK! . . . does . . . THWACK! . . . it look like . . . THWACK! I’m doing?” she replied, panting and scowling a bit on account of the effort that this was taking.
    â€œIt looks like you’re beating up a mattress.”
    â€œI’m
airing
it,” she said. “Which is obviously something that your girlfriend Meg never did because it’s rancid. I’ve no idea how on earth she expected me to sleep on it in that condition.”
    â€œFor the record, she’s not my girlfriend, and also for the record that conversation was confidential.”
    Paloma continued with her whacking and didn’t reply.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Paloma?”
    â€œWhy would you think there’s something wrong?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know, it’s just that you look so scary and angry.”
    She stopped beating the mattress and she smiled at me.
    â€œMaybe that’s because I’m not used to boys rejecting me.” She laughed a high, shrill, trembly laugh that didn’t sound like her. I started to say something but she held her finger up to my mouth and in this juicy kind of a voice she said, “Oscar, you don’t have to say anything in response to me, I was only messing.”
    â€œOf course, I knew that,” I said, but messing, I mean
that
kind of messing that Paloma was doing, seemed sort of sour. It felt like biting into a bitter fruit and finding that at the gritty center there were hundreds of tiny pips of truth.
    Paloma had found a letter in Meg’s room addressed to me. She dropped it into the mailbox with a note attached to it:
Oscar!! Found this letter to you. I didn’t read it or anything—just passing it along!! See u soon!!!!!! PalomaK xxx
    That was nice of her, I thought, looking at the envelope, whichwas a bit battered, and noticing that the lip of it seemed to have been opened and closed a few times because it was crushed and a little bit torn, as if Meg had possibly changed her mind and taken the letter out once or twice and then put it back in again.
    I took it up to my room so I could open it in private, and before I did, I glanced across at Paloma’s window. There was a new kind of light in there, strong and dazzling, making it very hard to see properly. It felt as if I’d been staring at the sun.

the seventh slice

    When you move somewhere new, the difference and adventure and surprising experience feels like its own kind of forever. The mundane, repetitive times in your life are the ones that slip away in your memory as if they’ve hardly happened. You’d think it would be the opposite—that the uninteresting bits would seem to take ages, and the fun times would fly by, but that’s not actually the way it works.
    From the moment we arrived, practically everything was sprinkled with newness and surprise—a fresh adventure around every sunny corner.
    I learned to water-ski and