Uchenna's Apples Read Free Page A

moment in the school gateway. From off to their left, in the distance, came the clear, carrying honk of a northbound train slowing down to come into the Adamstown station: up on the platform she could see some of the kids from school, waiting to catch the train into Dublin or up toward the shopping centre at Tallaght and the Luas tram line there.
    “You think anybody else is over there right now?” Uchenna said, considering.
    “I don’t know,” Emer said. “But if they are, they won’t stay forever. It’ll start getting dark in a while, and when it does, we can just slip over there. I have a way back into that field, a few houses down from mine. They don’t have a wall: it’s a chainlink fence, and it’s loose on one side. We can just walk through. Or there are about five other ways to get back there.”
    Uchenna turned and paused to look both ways down the street in front of the school, making sure no late school-run SUVs were bearing down on them: then the two of them went across. “Well, I guess I was going to see how these horses’ knees go,” Uchenna said. “I can do that looking through the fence.”
    “Oh, come on, you know you want to go in the field with them!”
    They turned down the street and headed westward down the sidewalk, past the plateglass-windowed stores and the multistory apartments in the town-center part of Adamstown, toward the housing-development side. “In the mud ? Girl, you are insane.”
    “There’s no mud!”
    “It’s a field,” Uchenna said, quoting her dad. “There’s always mud.” But at the same time, she was thinking, If I don’t go in there with her, she’s gonna get herself trampled or something. Two of us will be safer than one. Especially if somebody comes along. And if you’re going to be in a field with horses, maybe you should bring them something—
    That was when the idea hit her. “Okay,” Uchenna said. “I’ll go with you. But we have to go to my house first.”
    “Why?”
    “I have a plan.”
    “What? Tell me!”
    “No,” Uchenna said.
    “Yes!”
    “No!”
    And they kept saying Yes! and No! to each other—with occasional breaks for laughter and argument, and some discussion of the day at school—for something like ten of the fifteen minutes it took them to walk the mile past the town center to the place where the biggest housing developments started. They were both lucky to live in two of the largest and oldest ones, but then both their sets of parents were pretty well off, like a lot of other people in Adamstown—that being mostly how you were able to afford to live there. There was, of course, some so-called “socially affordable” housing off to one side, closer to the town: poky-looking little pebble-dashed two bedroom houses squashed together side by side in long terraces, very flimsy and cheap-looking next to the big handsome four- and five-bedroom houses scattered around the outside of the Adamstown development and the big apartments concentrated by the train station. Uchenna had heard her dad saying quietly to her mam that he thought the socially-affordable houses had been built badly on purpose, so that the developer—forced to build them by the government, and now apparently unable to sell them—would eventually have an excuse to pull them down and build something more expensive on the same site.
    On this side of town, though, the houses were big and separate from one another, with large green yards and attached two-car garages, or separate ones with carports between them and the houses. There were three big circles back here with houses arranged all around them: Uchenna’s was the third one, the middlemost circle which was also furthest back on the westward side. Right out the back of the circle, between the houses and past the side walls that separated their back yards, you could just get a glimpse of the high concrete wall that separated the circle from the empty green field behind it. Away westward, past the fields and