The Apple Tart of Hope by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald Page B

started to notice it. You see, Barney, coincidentally, it was right then that everything started to go wrong.”
    â€œDoesn’t sound like a coincidence to me,” said Barney.
    Barney said that everyone must be worried. But I’d put my head in my hands, then, and I’d said, “Please, please don’t make me go back.”
    That’s when he said I could stay as long as I wanted.
    â€œNo pressure in the slightest, my dear boy,” is what he said.
    And so I started living in his house, which was the messiest house I’d ever been in, in my entire life.
    After a couple of nights I got used to hearing him leaving late at night when he thought I was asleep, and in the mornings he always had new information, not that I was too thrilled to hear some of it—seeing as it was about posters with my face on them and newspaper articles about my disappearance. I was interested in the Day of Prayer for Oscar Dunleavy they’d had, though. Barney’d said that everyone in my class had been right up at the front and how everyone had said how terrible it was that I had gone.
    â€œOh right,” I said, trying to sound uninterested, “and did you hear anything else?”
    â€œYes. I heard that everyone liked you enormously.”
    â€œYeah,” I said, “maybe some people did. Maybe they meant in the past, before everything changed. Anyway, it’s easy for people to like you when you’re dead. It’s a pity none of them could see their way to liking me when it mattered to me, when I was alive.”
    â€œYou’re still alive, Oscar. You’re not dead. Had you forgotten?”
    â€œLook, I don’t want to talk about whether I’m alive or dead, and I don’t want to talk about my old life. I don’t want to talk about any of that.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause I am ashamed,” I said.

the fifteenth slice

    In the weeks that followed, I tried to confront Paloma Killealy, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out she was trying to avoid me. She and I were in the same year, in the same school. We walked along the same corridors, went through the same doors, ate in the same lunchroom. It seemed impossible that I wouldn’t come face-to-face with her. But I hadn’t—not since Oscar’s mass. I could only assume she was deliberately avoiding me and I wouldn’t have blamed her. I would have avoided myself too if I could have.
    Now my only connection with Oscar was Stevie. He used to make me smile, particularly as he was the one person who kept believing that Oscar was still alive.
    As the days went by, I felt the need to be close to all the gigantic hope that Stevie held inside his small body. Sometimes I’d call by, and Oscar’s dad would let me into the house. But other times I’d go around there very late when I knew Stevie’d be in his room, with his candle always dancing in the window. I’d tap on the window and we could end up chatting there for hours.
    It was nearly a month after I’d been home that my mum caughtme creeping back home on a school night, and naturally enough she wanted to know what I was doing, and where I had been and what I thought I was up to. And then before I had a chance to answer, she said it was too late even to think about having a proper conversation about it now, but next day, me and her and my dad were going to have to have a serious talk.
    I snapchatted Stevie to say I was in trouble for sneaking out of my house, and he said he’d be the fall guy for me if that would do any good.
    My mum said that my obsessive need to talk to Stevie was not good for either of us, and she told me that I needed to see the grief counselor at school, and that if I didn’t set it up, she’d ring Mr. O’Leary herself, so I went okay, okay, I’ll do it.
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