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

that you should never lose contact with the people who are supposed to be important to you in your life. There is no excuse for doing that.

the tenth slice

    She stopped emailing me and I couldn’t get hold of her. And that was exactly the time I really could have done with talking to her because of a whole pile of other things that were happening. The old Meg would have been a massive help. The old Meg would have done her best to get me to figure things out, and everything might have got a good bit better, but I wondered, as the weeks slipped by, whether the old Meg was ever coming back. I began to doubt whether she even existed anymore. When she’d first left, I’d heard from her every single day. Now I hadn’t got a single email from her for over a month.
    I thought about how I’d kind of assumed that Meg was my person and how stupid I’d been to think that she and I had a fairly excellent future waiting for us when she got back home. And when I realized that I’d been wrong, ridiculously, embarrassingly, shamingly wrong . . . quite rapidly the world went from color to black and white and the magic seemed to drain away and the only thing left for me to do was gather up my personal pride and try to look like the hope I’d had had never existed. I acted as if I wasn’t destroyed or defeated. I pretended that I didn’t care.
    After the letter, everything was different. How could anyone ignore something like that? Maybe some people would be able to, but I couldn’t. It’s not like I didn’t try, but the knowledge of it made its imprint on everything.
    It’s not as if I didn’t have other things in my life: Paloma, for example. She’d been great, and we’d become good friends. At least I thought we had. I guess she was difficult to read sometimes and okay, there were definitely times when I wasn’t really sure what to make of her. I’d call in on the way to school and she’d be happy enough to cycle along beside me, chatting away until we got close to the school gates, when she seemed to disappear. Quite often I’d have a hard time catching up with her for the rest of the day.
    I’d see her in the yard standing very close up to people like Andy Fewer and Greg Delaney, who used to be pretty good friends of mine too, and I’d wave, and when she looked up or if she saw me heading toward her, she’d have a strange crooked smile on her face and she’d laugh and the three of them would scatter in different directions. And then I’d be waving at thin air, feeling stupid.
    She’d made a lot of friends since she’d arrived, and she often liked to have private one-on-ones with them. Most of what she said must have been very funny because people often used to explode with mental-sounding laughter just after she’d whispered something in their ear.
    My apple tarts had never seemed to work on my dad, and it’s not like I hadn’t tried. But no matter how many times I encouraged him to have a slice or two, it didn’t seem to make any difference. I reckoned that some people were just immune and there was nothing you could do about it.
    But then one night, Dad, Stevie and I were watching this program. It had a celebrity baker on it who wasn’t much older than me, and who happened to be showing everyone how to make tarts—apple tarts as it turns out—quite like the ones I made myself. My dad sat up straight and he pointed at the TV and he looked over at me and he smiled.
    I hadn’t seen him smile for a long time. He told me that
my
apple tarts looked way nicer than the ones on the show, and he said he bet that the ones on the show couldn’t possibly taste nearly as fantastic as mine did.
    When he went to the kitchen for a cup of tea, Stevie whispered to me that this was a sign. It felt like the first time Dad had said anything in weeks.
    Stevie was happy to help, as usual—sieving the