Uchenna's Apples by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online

sometimes…”
    Uchenna’s mam spluttered with sudden laughter, and then hid her face. Uchenna took advantage of the moment to get up from the table. “I’ll walk you down the driveway…”
    Emer finished getting her things together. Then the two of them went out the back door together into the driveway, which was faintly lit by the nearest streetlight in the circle. From inside Uchenna could just hear her mam giggling at something inaudible that her dad had said. “What’s the matter,” Emer said, “what is it?”
    “I just realized,” Uchenna said. “The horses. I forgot to take pictures of their legs!”
    Emer shrugged. “We can go tomorrow,” she said. “If they’re still there, anyway. After hockey.”
    “It’ll be getting dark…”
    “Oh, come on, nothing’s gonna happen.”
    Uchenna thought about it for a moment. It wasn’t as if Adamstown was all that dangerous after dark. But her folks got more inquisitive about where she was then. Still, there are ways to deal with that… “Okay,” she said. “Come meet me after hockey practice. We’ll come back here, grab more apples, and go over.”
    Emer waved and headed off across the streetlighted circle. “And don’t be up late fretting!” she called over her shoulder.
    “What?”
    Emer just waved again and kept on going, around the curve at the top of the circle and out of sight. Uchenna shrugged and went into the house, where her dad was now cleaning up the table and putting the dishes, and her mam was putting the leftover pizza into Zip-loc bags and sticking it into the freezer. In the living room, one of the satellite channels was showing a between-movies promo, and Uchenna saw that the cushions from both the living room sofas were piled up on the floor in front of one of them—a sure sign that her dad was going to sprawl out there with his laptop and do more work stuff while Mam stretched out on the couch and nagged him about working too much and too hard.
    Uchenna grinned at that, doubled back into the kitchen to pick up her book bag, and then headed upstairs to her pink-papered bedroom. It was in one of its neat phases, since her mam had made her move the Zoo Crew out into the Back Office: you could actually see the surface of the bed, and even the desk was tidy. She had her own TV up here, her own computer hooked up to the household broadband, and another radio/CD player if she wanted music besides what she had on her iPod or could stream off the computer. Uchenna pulled her schoolbooks out of her bag, stacked up the ones she wouldn’t need in class tomorrow, and made a separate pile of the books she would need. Then she went to her closet and got her hockey stick and its case, leaning them beside the books to take with her in the morning. When everything was sorted out, she flopped down on her bed and paged through her notebook to where she’d written down the computer URL for the weekend’s assignment. Samhain… But she also found herself looking at the drawings of the ponies, and the way their knees went.
    Uchenna got up again and went over to the computer, bringing up a browser window and loading up the URL of the assigment page. It came up as a standard page on the school website, and Uchenna started reading it. But she couldn’t concentrate. Fretting…  Emer had said.
    Uchenna frowned, pushing the keyboard away and putting her head down on her arms. Emer loved to tease Uchenna about the way she worried about things. “Worry wart!” she called her: and Uchenna, who’d never heard the phrase until she met Emer, would say, “Why would a wart worry?” Just another of those weird American phrases Eames keeps coming out with. But Uchenna couldn’t argue that it was true. She did worry about things. Well, not tonight, I’ve got stuff to do. She turned her attention back to the computer and started reading about the Samhain feast and the ghosts and demons associated with it.
    But the rest of the evening went by slowly: and