Read Uchenna's Apples for Free Online Page B

as sandwiches, but she didn’t have enough for one right now, and anyway there would be pizza soon. “Is there enough for gum?” Emer said, poking through the change as they walked away from the counter with their bag of bottles and bread.
    “You and your gum,” Uchenna said. “You should get off that stuff. It makes you look like a camel.”
    Emer punched Uchenna in the arm, though not terribly hard. Uchenna snickered at her as they went out the automatic doors. There would have been more of this, but as they walked out of the store Emer’s phone went off, peeping shrilly—it was one of those chirping ringtones that only kids and some freak adults could hear—and she pulled it out. “Yeah— Hi, Mom, oh I’m glad you called, I was going to call you, can I have supper at Uchenna’s?— Yeah— Yeah, it’s okay with her mam. Pizza. Yeah. Seven thirty? Oh, come on, mom, we’ll hardly even have time to finish eating— Well, nine!” There was a long pause, during which Emer rolled her eyes expressively. “Okay, okay,” she said at last. “Eight thirty. Yeah. Okay, bye.”
    Emer put her phone away with a sigh. “Blah blah blah school night, blah blah blah homework…” she said. “You know how she is.”
    “I thought you had her trained,” Uchenna said.
    Emer punched her again, harder this time. “Do I need this from you?”
    Uchenna just laughed at her friend. The shadows were getting long and the sun had dipped down behind the hills to the west as they made their way back to Uchenna’s circle and up the driveway. The circle was getting full of cars now as people got home from work or school at one of the colleges between here and Dublin. It wasn’t long before Uchenna’s dad came along in the family’s other car, an Audi estate wagon. Uchenna and Emer ran out to help him bring the pizza in: as usual her dad had brought four of them, more than they could all possibly eat. “Old hacker’s bad habits,” he said as he came in after the girls and dropped his briefcase on the washing machine before going into the kitchen and hugging and kissing Uchenna’s mam. “Always buy twice as much pizza as you need, you might want it in the middle of the night…”
    Uchenna turned away to hide a grin, because sometimes they were so cute together even if they were old—the tall skinny redheaded guy with his freckles and buzzcut, and the tall handsome broad-shouldered black woman, out of her doctor-coat now and changed into jeans and a floppy T-shirt.
    Supper was a casual business as usual when they weren’t having guests or other family over. The table became a scatter of Independent Pizza boxes and plates and bottles and glasses and paper napkins, and two sets of conversations got going, crossing around and through each other many times: Uchenna and Emer talking about science projects and school lunches and the stupidity of boys, Uchenna’s mam and dad talking about commuting problems and people at work and the newest really annoying construction going on in Dublin city centre. The time went by so fast that when Emer’s phone began peeping again, Uchenna was horrified: they hadn’t had time to talk about what she really wanted to deal with, which was the horses. And then the really important thing occurred to Uchenna while Emer was on the phone, and she had to sit there moaning and clutched her head until Emer was finished telling her mom that yes, she’d be home in five minutes.
    “What is it, sweet?” Uchenna’s mam said, and her father too was looking at her strangely.
    “Nothing,” Uchenna said: and then hurried to make something up, because telling your parents that “nothing” was going on was always fatal. “Something I forgot for art class. No, it’s not homework! It’ll be okay.”
    Her parents looked at each other dubiously as Emer was closing her phone and putting it away. “I have to go,” Emer said in a long-suffering tone. “She wants to check my homework. She’s just so anal