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A few times, when those kinds of things went through my head, I'd pull Corporamore's study apart when nobody else was around, trying to find the key to the south gates. I searched in the kitchen drawers and in the old cupboards and through the lidded boxes that sat on top of the dressers in the pantry. One night I had what I thought was a superbly simple idea—I thought it had been staring me in the face all along, which made me realize that I might not even need the stupid key. I brought a rickety warped ladder from the stables down to the south gates and I climbed over, quite pleased with myself until I realized that there was no future on the other side, only the same old past, and I had to climb back in again feeling like a total idiot.

And then there were other times when I didn't try that hard at all. Eventually I stopped trying altogether, and as I said, things grew normal and routine. Everything becomes ordinary in the end, even living in a different time zone.

People think that the past always stays the same, but that's not true. The past changes exactly the same way as the present does, and people in it change too, and the person who changed most was Maggie McGuire—though, as I said, she never ever complained about anything, which made it easier for us all to keep on pretending that she was okay.

There was one person who did complain and who kept
on complaining and who looked like she would never stop, and that was Cordelia. Over the months, she seemed to discover whole new oceans of demandingness and obnoxiousness, but we had to put up with it, and we weren't supposed to say anything to her.

I wanted to tell her how spoiled and mean she was, but it's funny how some things are difficult to say. Cordelia kept on being able to do what she liked, and we had to keep on accepting it. It was to do with something that Kevin and Maggie called the pecking order. I'm not saying I liked it or anything. I'm just saying that's the way it was.

I think it was nearly summer when Maggie got obsessed with apples. They were the only things she wanted to eat, and she didn't really have an interest in anything else. She said she woke up with images of apples in her head. She said she dreamed of apples, red and crunchy and sweet. She said she might go into a decline if she wasn't able to eat them. If Maggie had had cravings for potatoes or turnips or jam or onions, then we would have been grand. The Blackbrick pantry was full of stuff like that. It was Kevin who suggested that it might be a good idea to have a look in the orchard. “That's normally where you get apples,” he said cleverly.

So the two of us went to the orchard, where the trees hung over into the courtyard. Except that there were no apples because apparently it was the wrong time of year. But after a bit of searching around, we found this shed with wooden
buckets that were full of apples that somebody must have stored from the season before. We ran back to the kitchen, where there were big stringy, muddy sacks with dirty potatoes in them. We emptied one of them out, making a big potato mountain in the pantry. Back in the orchard shed, I stood at the door keeping watch while Kevin filled that old ropy sack with apples from the wooden buckets. Apples for Maggie.

We carried them to her room, the two of us feeling very proud of ourselves, dragging that massive sack behind us. We told her that we'd risked our lives to get them, which might have been a slight exaggeration, but in fairness, the whole thing had actually been quite difficult.

“Oh, Kevin, Cosmo, you're as kind as anything.” But she explained that she suddenly didn't want apples nearly as much as she used to. “It's milk that's the only thing I'm dreaming of now,” she said.

“Thanks for keeping us posted,” I said, feeling a tiny bit annoyed.

But I kept hearing her voice over and over in my head telling us how we were as kind as anything. And Maggie had this special way of saying “oh” that always made my heart flip over. Sometimes I hear it in my dreams still, but not very often.

Chapter 17

IT WAS hard to stay annoyed with Maggie for too long, no matter how often she changed her mind. Her face was still pale and oval and her hair was still all curly and messy and she was basically still gorgeous. Even more gorgeous, actually. When someone is as lovely as she was, you sort of want to do things for them even if you think occasionally that maybe they're being a bit demanding.

Kevin did say that he was getting kind of tired of being at her “beck and call” the whole time and responding to all her whims. But I didn't mind too much at all. When she asked me if I could possibly do Cordelia's breakfast again once in a while, there was a part of me that was actually happy.

“Do you consider that girl to be your friend?” Cordelia asked me as I was trying to get out of her room one morning, not long after the apple heist.

“Yes, I totally do.”

“Well, I'd watch out if I were you. I don't think she's the kind of person you should be friendly with at all. A boy can get a bad reputation very easily, and you wouldn't
want to get one, Cosmo, would you?”

I didn't really know what she meant. I said I wasn't all that concerned about reputations. I told her everyone should make up their own minds and not listen to other people's theories. Cordelia replied that in actual fact, reputation was everything, which was the irony of the century, considering how much everybody hated her.

She told me that Maggie was an unchased girl. “Utterly unchased” is what she said. Her father had told her that. I took it to be a very good thing. I told Cordelia that I thought everyone had the right not to be chased, and she looked at me with a big mystified expression in her eyes and a crinkly little frown on her brow.

“Listen, Cordelia, I've got a lot of stuff I need to do, so I'd better go off and do it, right? I'll see you soon.”

She spoke to me then. Her teeth were clenched. She said that I was not to take my leave of her until she said so. She said I was an insolent boy, which means “cheeky and disrespectful.” She said that
she
was always to be considered the most important chore that I had to attend to. I felt like telling her to flip off with herself.

We ended up having to give Cordelia that riding lesson that Corporamore had said he wanted her to have. She trotted down to the stables in a light-pink velvet coat that swung from side to side, and a stupid hat. Kevin said, “Miss Cordelia, hop up there, and we'll start off nice and carefully.” But I
whispered the secret fast signal into Somerville's ear, and that brilliant horse ended up clattering off with Cordelia desperately holding on to her neck. By the time we got back, Cordelia's face was light green in color, but she didn't say anything about it, and neither did we.

The next day Mrs. Kelly told us that Miss Cordelia had decided she didn't want riding lessons from us anymore, and me and Kevin gave each other a high five in the cellar.

One afternoon not long after that, Maggie McGuire disappeared. The sun was like a big blob of honey dribbling out of the sky. We had finished all our chores, and we went off to hang out with Maggie like we often used to. When we got to her room, everything was neat and tidy and all her clothes were gone, and there was this little note on the pillow of her carefully made bed.