than anything to do with the polite smiling you get used to doing when you get older. Tat photo has the kind of proper smiles that happen when you’re looking straight into the face of someone who’s been your best friend for a long time.
During the weeks before the trip, our talks had taken on a new and mournful tone. I’d sit at my window sniffing while Oscar sat at his, looking at me with a tender kind of frown on his face. He had this way of swinging his legs from side to side with his hands on the window frame, holding on. I’d developed a habit myself that involved picking the loose plaster off our outside wall. It was a measly kind of rebellion – my resentful response to feeling so sorrowful and so misunderstood. Te nights before I left were hotter than I had ever remembered. But in our town, even on the stillest of summer nights, the cold is never far away. I told him about how I didn’t want to go – how my parents were robbing me of my most fundamental human right by making me do something that was completely against my will. I told him about what nightmares I was having because of the gigantically hard job it was going to be to get to know bunches of New Zealand people I’d never met, and who already had friends and weren’t in the market for a new pale red-haired freckly one from Ireland. Even though Oscar Dunleavy was my friend, it didn’t mean he automatically agreed
with everything I said, or believed the things I believed. And when it came to our trip, he was definitely on my parents’ side. He told me I should embrace it, which is exactly what Mum and Dad had been saying the whole time too. Embracing it, he reckoned, was the only way anyone should treat an opportunity like the one that was being handed to me on a plate.
