The Apple Tart of Hope Read Online Free

stack the odds even further against you by moving away from everythingthat’s even vaguely familiar to you and being forced to start over again in a completely different place.
    But before I knew it the tickets were booked, the plans were made and Dad was hogging the iPad so that he could Skype his brilliant new colleagues on the other side of the world.
    Mum started folding our belongings into huge plastic boxes with lids on them. And they put an ad in the local paper telling the world that our house was available to rent for the six months that we were going to be away.
    And then there was only a week left, and I was beginning to realize things that I’d never realized before.
    I had to pack too—the things I was supposed to take with me, and the things I was supposed to leave behind. It felt wrong, stuffing my favorite hoodies and boots and tracksuit bottoms away when I should have been pulling them out.
    There’d been a few fairly massive fights in my house before we left. Oscar had claimed he’d been able to hear every word due to my mother’s habit of throwing the windows wide open as soon as it was June. He reckoned that I’d sounded mean and ungrateful, which according to him was in no way consistent with my real personality. He said he hardly recognized the new angry me. I was a strange girl sometimes, he said, difficult to figure out.
    Our houses were so close together that me and Oscar could talk to each other from our bedroom windows. I remember the exact moment he came to the neighborhood. We were both kids then. The removal van had darkened our kitchen as it passed by and I’d peered over from the front door, and that’s when I’d seen him, tall even then, and thoughtful and faraway-looking. I remember the first time I saw Stevie too, small and chatty in his wheelchair, and their dad, carefully taking out thesegigantic boxes and stacking them in the front garden, but not saying a word and with no expression of expectation that you might imagine there would be on the face of someone who’s moving into a new home.
    Later I’d spotted Oscar again, this time from my bedroom, sitting in his window, staring at the sky, the breeze in his face, his chin resting on his arms. A gigantic telescope was right beside him, which, from time to time, he peered into. In the beginning, I’d pretended not to see him; I don’t really know why. Then from the cherry tree that was squashed between our houses, he’d broken off a dead branch and whacked it on my window. When I opened it, he said “hi” and stood there smiling at me.
    Oscar had a straightforward, dimpled, happy smile. It was one of the hundreds of great things about him.
    And after that we were best friends. It had been as simple and inevitable as the striking of a match.
    He came over all the time and we’d hang out. One day we sat under the kitchen table in my house and carved our names on it where nobody could see. And from then on that table was special because it had our secret underneath.
    You don’t notice yourself growing up, but one day, sooner or later, it’s just not comfortable to sit under the kitchen table anymore. When we were old enough to be allowed out on our own, the first place we used to go was the harbor to throw stones into the water. We took it in turns to see who could skim theirs farthest. I always used to win, but he didn’t care.
    â€œEveryone has their special skills,” he’d say, “and one of yours happens to be a strong intuitive sense of the aerodynamics and contact requirements of disc-shaped seashore skimming stones.”
    He’d make me laugh almost all the time with the way he spoke, and the things he said.
    We got to sitting at our windows, late at night, at the end of every day. He was different from anyone I’d ever met, and when Oscar was my friend, nothing was annoying or complicated. Everything was simple and enjoyable and fun.