Free Uchenna's Apples by Diane Duane

a troubled look. “Anyway, they’re gone, all right…”
    “You sound even more freaked now than when you thought the field behind your house was full of cars you couldn’t hear,” Uchenna said as they came around the curve that led toward Uchenna’s circle.
    “Well, cars I could have coped with, sort of,” Emer said. “But now there’s no sign of anything, and I don’t know what to think…”
    Uchenna sighed as they headed down into the circle and toward her house. “I need a shower,” she said. “It won’t take long. Then let’s go take some pizza out in the Back Office and chill for a while.”

4: Visitors and Secrets 
    Inside Uchenna’s house, her mam had been home from the hospital for some hours: and to Uchenna’s astonishment, her dad was home too, and had even brought dinner with him from one of the Indian takeaways in Naas. But Uchenna wasn’t yet up to feeling hungry—she was too sweaty and achy from the exertion of the game to care much about food just yet. “How did it go, sweet?” her mam said, looking up from the computer desk in the corner of the living room, while Emer paused in the utility room to pull the wellies off.
    “Pretty good,” Uchenna said. “I’ll be down in a while, mam. Gotta sluice myself off…”
    She and Emer went upstairs, and Emer went to Uchenna’s desk, woke up the computer, and while Uchenna went through her dresser drawers to get out some jeans and socks and a sweatshirt, Emer brought up her Facebook page and scanned idly down it to see who’d written anything new on her wall. Outside, the streetlight had come on: evening was setting in. Glancing through the window, Uchenna sighed. “I hate that,” she said.
    “What?” Emer glanced at the window. “Oh, you mean it’s getting dark faster now…”
    “I just seem to get stuck in the summer,” Uchenna said, shutting the sock drawer, “when the sun doesn’t set till like ten thirty, and it stays light so late… Somehow I expect it to keep doing that forever.”
    “It drives me crazy,” Emer said. “It takes me forever to get to sleep in June and July.”
    “You’re still stuck on California time. You’ll get used to it eventually,” Uchenna said. “And meanwhile, pretty soon you’re gonna start wanting to go to sleep at three thirty, when the sun goes down around Christmas time…”
    “Please. I don’t want to think about it.”
    “So don’t.”
    “I can’t help it. I’m stuck in the Land Of Eternal Night Which Starts Gradually Next Month.”
    Uchenna rolled her eyes at Emer’s moaning. “Going to shower now,” Uchenna said, and went.
    Twenty minutes or so later she was out, dried, dressed, and found Emer staring hard at somebody else’s web page, on Tumblr.  “These people,” Emer said, not looking up, “not only have no souls, they have no design sense. Look at all that dumb pink glitter. How can anyone read this?”
    Uchenna looked over Emer’s shoulder at the page. It had a noisy magenta-and-blue tiled background that (since all the print was dark pink) turned it into a torment to the eyes; the whole rest of the page was a mile-long scrolldown of reblogged music-album art and movie promo pictures. “Whose is that?” Uchenna said.
    “Big Aisling’s.”
    Uchenna shook her head and went tsk-tsk. There were two Aislings in their class, one little and fair, the other broad and dark, and their entire relationship was based on how much each of them hated the other one for having the same name. The attitude seemed to have carried over into the Tumblr, which—when Uchenna squinted at it—she could see featured many crudely Photoshopped phonecam images of “EVIL AISLING”. 
    “School’s gonna call her parents in when they see those,” Uchenna said.
    “Maybe they won’t see it…”
    “They will,” Uchenna said. “The IT teacher has it fixed so the school system archives every student page automatically whenever it’s changed.”
    Emer pushed away from the desk,