The Apple Tart of Hope

Text copyright © 2014 by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Leo Nickolls

All Rights Reserved

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Children's Books.

The rights of Sarah Moore Fitzgerald and Leo Nickolls to be identified as the Author and Illustrator respectively of the Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

www.holidayhouse.com

ISBN 978-0-8234-3578-4 (ebook)w

ISBN 978-0-8234-3579-1 (ebook)r

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fitzgerald, Sarah Moore, 1965- author.

Title: The apple tart of hope / by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald.

Description: First American edition. | New York : Holiday House, 2016. |

Summary: Oscar Dunleavy, a teenager who used to make incredible apple tarts, has gone missing and everyone thinks he is dead, but Oscar's best friend Meg, and his little brother Stevie, try to figure out what happened to him and form a bond and learn about commitment and friendship. | “First published in Great Britain 2014 by Orion Children's Books.”

Identifiers: LCCN 2015022313 | ISBN 9780823435616 (hardcover)

Subjects: | CYAC: Missing children—Fiction. | Hope—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.F5762 Ap 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at HYPERLINK “
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015022313
”
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015022313

For Ger

They had to have an ambulance outside the church in case someone fainted. Men with green armbands directed the traffic. Someone had written “FULL” in red on a sign and hung it on the entrance to the car park. Neighbors opened their gates.

Inside, big strips of paper had been taped to the backs of the first four rows of seats on which another sign said, “R
ESERVED FOR
3R” because only the people in his class were allowed to sit there.

Everyone looked dazed. It was the Day of Prayer for Oscar Dunleavy, who was missing, presumed dead—and no one ever gets used to something like that.

Father Frank was at the absolute center of everything. He said that Oscar's classmates were going to need space and protection and respect on account of the “unnatural, wretched, disbelieving things” you feel when a person in your class looks like they are never going to be seen again.

We were also going to need blankets because the heating in the church had broken down just when the February weather had taken another turn for the worse.

I heard Father Frank talking to the parents about how we were “in for a very difficult time”—facing Oscar's empty desk, and passing his still-padlocked, graffitied locker that nobody had had the heart to wrench open. Father Frank was in his element, focusing on something more important than his usual duties, which normally involved going around the school telling people to pick up their rubbish or to spit out their chewing gum.

Now he was soothing people who were sad and traumatized, and talking a language of grief and comfort that it turns out he is fluent in.

He explained that even when it looked as if everyone was fine, we were going to encounter bewildering moments when the loss of Oscar would be like an assault on our impressionable young minds, not only during these empty sad weeks, but for many years to come.

Everybody filed in. Pale faces. Blotchy red noses. The whole class melded into one single silent smudge, a blue blur of uniforms shimmering like a giant ghost.

Every time I looked at the crowd, I saw something I didn't want to see: a grown man's face quivering, a woman rustling in her bag for a tissue, tears dropping off the end of someone's chin. There were low murmured hellos and unnatural-sounding coughs.

And then there was Oscar's dad, pushing Stevie's wheelchair, the two of them looking like the broken links of a chain. For a second, the squeal of someone's baby drifted above us—an accidental happy little noise ringing out, clear and pure in the middle of the despair. There were flowers, tons and tons of flowers, all blue and yellow.

“Cornflower. Buttercup,” said Father Frank somewhere in the middle of his endless speech.

“Cornflower for the blue of his blue eyes. Buttercup for his bright soul.” Seriously, that's actually what he said.

There was something in the air that smelled of herbs and musk.
Dust seemed to rise from corners of the church like an unearthly kind of mist. And for the duration of this unwanted ceremony, everyone in my class seemed to be trying their best not to look into each other's eyes.

I was on the verge of assuming that Father Frank's speech really was going to go on forever, but then his voice got deeper and slower and more solemn, signaling the end of something and the beginning of something else.

“Ahem,” he said, “now we're going to ask Oscar's best friend to come forward, please, for her reading. She was the person closest to Oscar. She is going to say a few words in memory of her friend—on behalf of all of us who knew him and loved him so well.”

I could feel myself heating up with that embarrassment you get when you're not prepared for something important. Nobody had said anything to me about a reading. I wasn't in the mood to stand up in front of anyone or say anything. But I took a couple of deep breaths and I told myself that I had to keep it together for Oscar. I felt sure that the words I was supposed to read would be up there on the stand beside Father Frank, waiting for me. Someone was meant to have cleared this with me in advance, and there must have been a mix-up because nobody had, but I guessed that was probably understandable under the distressing circumstances.

Nobody was hovering nearby waiting to give me instructions, and all I could see was the top of everyone's heads. I got to my feet as the silence bulged inside the church and people shifted around on the benches. The crowd seemed to quiver in front of me.

And then she stood up. Golden-haired and glittery, rising like an angel from her seat and walking so gracefully to the top of the church that it looked as if she was floating. At the sight of her, I was
thick-footed—stuck to the floor. The angel girl proceeded to the microphone.

“Who is that?” I asked my mum, who did not know.

“Who”—I leaned over to Andy Fewer who was sitting in the row in front of me—“is that?” And as the girl began to speak I realized that I'd seen the outline of her before and I did know who she was.

“
Death is nothing at all . . .”

Her voice was like melted chocolate and it drifted among us, as if music had begun to play.

“. . . 
one brief moment and everything will be as it was before.”

Andy turned to me with a mystified look.

“That's Paloma,” he said as if I'd asked him what planet we were on. “Paloma Killealy.”

Of course, I thought. Of course it's her.

When she'd finished the reading, she said there was this song that was Oscar's favorite, like, ever, and how whenever she heard it, she'd always think of him.

“This is for you, Osc,” she said, and she started to sing some song that I did not recognize.

Osc? Since when was that his name? Nobody ever called him that.

When something bad happens to someone young, and when people get together in a church to say prayers for that person, there is a weird vibration, sort of like a buzz or a whistle. Everything shudders, like I reckon it would at the beginning of an earthquake, as if even the ground is shocked and horrified by the wrongness of it all.

“
There should have been so much time ahead of him,”
was the kind of obvious, useless thing that everyone kept repeating, not that anything anyone said was going to make a single bit of difference—at least not now. It was too late, they said. Because Oscar had made his
decision, and we were going to have to suffer for the rest of our lives because of it. He was gone. And by now, everyone more or less took it for granted that he wasn't coming back.

February had been Oscar's favorite time of the year.

I'd told him he must be the only person in the universe with a pet month, but he was quite stubborn about it. He explained that when you stop being a kid, Christmas is nothing but a terrible disappointment. And January has never been anything but a dark and boring month full of homework and dull dinners. But then, right at that moment when the world seems to be at its bleakest, February creeps up on you like a best friend you haven't seen in a while, tapping you on the shoulder.

Plus, this particular February had been holding up a new sign, allowing us to make plans to do things that none of us had ever done before—exciting stuff—different stuff—teenage stuff. We weren't little kids anymore and this February had been full of a hundred different kinds of new chances.

Now, any of the chances Oscar might ever have had, had dropped radically. To nil.

Outside, on the steps of the church it was formal and hushed, but there was a low murmur that felt as if it was growing, like some distant, gigantic monster was moving closer by the second.

A group of parents clustered around Father Frank, and the sun shone like a cruel joke, making everything seem more beautiful than it deserved to be. Andy was there, and so was Greg, and Father Frank was asking, “Deary, deary me, boys, why? Why would someone with so much going for him have . . . have . . . ended it all in the way he appears to have done?”

“Oh Father, you see, it could be for any number of reasons,” Andy said, serious and fluent, as if he was an expert on the subject. “Personally, I think that it's pretty much a miracle that any of us survives.”

“What do you mean?” said the priest.

“I mean,” continued Andy, “there's this one moment as you're growing up when the world suddenly feels more or less pointless—when the terribleness of reality lands on you, like something falling from the sky.”

“Something falling? Like what?” asked Father Frank, trying his best.

“Something big, like a piano, say, or a fridge. And when that happens, there's no going back to the time when it hadn't landed on you.”

“But what about the pleasure and the joy and the purpose, like sports, music, girls, and the like?” Father Frank was nearly pleading now.

“Fiction,” sighed Andy. “Mirages in the desert of life, to make people feel like it might be worth it.”

“Oh,” said Father Frank. “Oh I see, and do all you youngsters get this feeling?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Andy, not even asking anyone else for their opinion, “but most of us learn to live with it.”

“Well that's a relief, I suppose.”

It took me ages to find Stevie, who was sitting close to the church entrance in his wheelchair. His dad was nearby, fully occupied with the sober, repetitive job of shaking hundreds of hands.