Uchenna's Apples by Diane Duane

one side, a tall brown-haired girl Uchenna didn’t know. “That Traveller kid that transferred in from Tallaght last month.”
    Uchenna nodded at the brown-haired girl, then turned to scowl at the owner of the oh-so-smackworthy voice that had spoken first. Eamonn was standing there and peering past them, trying to get a last glimpse of Mallon and Jimmy Garrity as they vanished around the building, and of Brian Mayfield, who was being led off in the same direction by one of the other teachers. “Not a very nice word to use on somebody, Eamonn,” she said.
    “Yeah, well he is,” Eamonn said, unrepentant. “Or a knacker, anyway.” It was another rude name for a Traveller, one that implied that he not only traded in old worn-out horses, but probably also chopped them up and boiled them down for glue.
    Uchenna flushed hot with the stupid rudeness of it. “And you would know, of course,” Uchenna said, “being such a specialist in all the kinds of crimes the rest of us are supposed to commit.”
    “Huh?”
    Eamonn was trying to look innocent and unconcerned: a losing battle. Emer leaned toward Eamonn and got in his face. “Four, one, nine,” she said, distinct and scornful, as if trying to teach a three-year-old how to count. “Remember that? Or have you finally copped on that not everybody whose mam comes from Nigeria is an internet scammer? You plank.”
    Some of the kids standing around them stared, for Emer wasn’t normally the kind to come out with lines like that. Eamonn tried to look casual. He didn’t make a very good job of it, however. From behind him, one of his friends, a guy named Mihaul, said, “Anyway, yer man there is a knacker. Everybody knows it.”
    “He lives over in the bog,” said another boy, behind Mihaul: a tall dark-haired kid that Uchenna didn’t know. “The bog” in this case didn’t mean the toilet, but was the school name for the two rows of affordable housing over on the south side of Adamstown. “There’s like twelve of them in the house.”
    “You sure?” Emer said. “It helps to be able to count.” The others around them brayed with surprised laughter— Emer wasn’t usually so caustic— and the kid she’d been talking about blushed and turned away.
    Inside the school, the bell rang for the first class, and people started heading toward the door. Shortly Uchenna and Emer were left by themselves. “What started that, I wonder?” Uchenna said.
    “Don’t know,” Emer said as they headed for the steps, “but I bet we’ll know everything about it by lunchtime.”
    They went through the door, joining the streams of other students heading for their classrooms. “And what got into you?” Uchenna said. “You’re bitchy this morning.”
    Emer shook her head. “They get on my nerves,” she said. “Anyway, I’m freaked out about the horses.”
    “Why? You were the one who said they might be gone in the morning.”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t really think it would happen! And Chen, I should have heard it happening. Where those horses were, it’s practically just outside my window! I don’t like thinking somebody got so close to my house with a trailer or whatever and neither me or my mom heard a thing. It creeps me out.”
    Emer really did look worried. “But you just had the new alarm system put in,” Uchenna said. “Nobody’s going to get into your house without you knowing when that’s turned on.”
    “Well…” Emer said. “I guess.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
    The pace of movement in the corridor was picking up as people hurried faster to get to their classrooms. “Don’t worry about it right now,” Uchenna said, as they went into classroom 4-A. “We’ll ask around at lunch and see what we can find out.”
    *

    Three hours later, half the population of the school was in the ground-floor lunchroom—something like a hundred and fifty kids, all scattered among fifteen long tables and a group of round tables at the back of the room, near the