Lead Change (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 29)

by Claire Svendsen

  My heart sank. I’d only just managed to get over my initial fear of riding and now we were supposed to jump? Jess looked over at me and sneered.

  “I bet Emily won’t be jumping,” she said.

  “Emily may jump or not. It’s up to her to decide what she wants to do,” Duncan said diplomatically.

  “But if she doesn’t jump,” Jess carried on, slithering lazily off her horse. “Doesn’t that mean that she’s off the team. I mean we are a jumping team, aren’t we? We’re not a plod around and only jump when we feel like it team. How are we going to compete at team shows if one of our riders won’t jump? We don’t even have an alternate.”

  “Thanks to you,” Andy said under his breath.

  “You should leave Emily alone,” Rose said, her soft voice suddenly sounding strong. “You’re just being mean.”

  “That’s enough,” Duncan said before what was an annoying discussion about my future fate turned into an all-out fight. “Back to the barn. All of you.”

  I put Bluebird in his stall and thanked him for not killing me or letting me break him but I think I knew all along that my pony could take care of himself. He wouldn’t let me do anything to hurt him and I would never anyway. If I could trust anyone, I could trust him. I closed the door to his stall feeling confident that I’d be able to ride, as long as Bluebird was the only pony that I ever rode.

  But as I slid the latch shut, Duncan beckoned me over. I felt like I was being summoned to the principal's office. Was he about to tell me that Jess was right? That I needed to get my act together or I’d be off the team for good? Or was he going to tell me that I just wasn’t good enough anyway. That because I hadn’t been riding I’d become sloppy and lazy and an embarrassment to the team.

  I walked towards him with a heavy heart. I thought I’d done okay. I’d made it through something that terrified me, even though I had no reason to be scared of my own pony, and I’d come out the other side intact. Surely that was enough. Apparently not.

  “This is Honor,” he said, pointing to a chestnut mare who was tacked up in her stall. “And you are going to ride her now.”

  I looked at him like he was crazy. The others were putting their stuff away, cleaning their bits and bridles and talking. Laughing like nothing was out of the ordinary. Jess was on her phone, talking to someone who sounded like maybe he was her boyfriend. She was telling him that he should have called her back and that if he didn’t end his text messages with at least three hearts then that meant that he didn’t love her. And here I was, staring into the abyss.

  “I can’t.” I shook my head.

  The mare was pretty. Her brass nameplate said Made of Honor and she looked sweet and kind but she was also big and strong and a chestnut mare, just like Grace. And when I looked at her, all I saw was broken poles, broken legs and broken hearts.

  “You rode your pony,” Duncan said gently, putting his hand on my shoulder. “And that was great. But you need to ride other horses too. Honor is a good mare. She’ll take care of you. I want you to jump her.”

  I shook my head again, wondering why I wasn’t jumping at the chance to ride one of Duncan’s horses. The old me would have said yes in a heartbeat. Now my heart was beating fast but not from excitement, it was out of fear and in that moment, I knew that Duncan was right. If I didn’t overcome this fear, it would follow me around for the rest of my days.

  “Alright,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  I said okay but really inside I’d been screaming no at the top of my lungs. I had ridden my pony and survived. I could get out of the afternoon jumping session by saying that I had a stomach ache or something but I couldn't get out of this. Duncan was going to do what Walter should have done and what my father hadn’t been able to do. He was going to get me to jump again. And I wanted him to. I also wanted to puke into a bucket.

  Duncan gave me the reins and my helmet and shuffled me out to the ring. The others noticed and followed at a short distance. Jess looked up and then away again with a scoffing laugh. She didn’t think I could do it. I wasn’t sure that I could do it either.

  “She jumps like a stag,” Duncan said. “She’s a really special mare. I’ve ridden her a lot myself and there is a whole cork board of ribbons that she’s won in the tack room. She’s getting older now though.” He patted her neck. “We don’t bring her out as much as we used to but she loves to jump. She’ll take care of you.”

  “But will I be able to take care of her?” I asked quietly, my voice shaking.

  “You’ll take care of each other,” he said. “You know what to do. Just don’t second guess yourself. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And before I knew what was happening, he’d given me a leg up. Honor was tall and wide. She was also a sweet mare. She stood there quietly, her ears flicking back and forth as I adjusted my stirrups and checked the girth, wasting time so that I wouldn’t actually have to ask her to move.

  Andy and Rose were perched on the fence. Andy was eating a sandwich like I was some kind of lunchtime entertainment, waiting for Honor to turn into a bucking bronco and toss me off. Rose just smiled enthusiastically and gave me two thumbs up. Jess was still off in the barn but I knew she’d come out eventually too. She wouldn’t want to miss the drama that was me trying to jump and failing. Falling off or slamming into the fence or pulling poor Honor up at the last minute, ruining her nerves as well as mine.

  “Do they have to watch?” I asked Duncan.

  “Will it really make a difference if they don’t?” he said.

  “I guess not.” I sighed.

  “Well let's get on with it then.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  We worked on the flat for a while. Honor was a little stiff but she soon worked out of it and she was a good schoolmaster. I could tell. She ignored my nervous aids and did her job anyway and when Duncan finally got us to canter and I asked for a lead change all wrong, she did it anyway.

  “You know what to do,” Duncan said. “Don’t lean into the change. Sit up and ask for it again.”

  He made me practice taking the mare around the ring and getting her changes and when I asked for them correctly, I could feel a difference. It was subtle because the mare had done them anyway but it was definitely there. And by now Jess had come to join Andy and Rose, my riding on display for all to see.

  “She doesn't like the small jumps,” Duncan said as he went around raising up the fences. “She’ll knock them down every time. She needs the height and so do you.”

  No, I screamed inside my head. I needed cross rails and baby gymnastics and little verticals that were barely a foot off the ground. Fences that a horse could walk over. Fences that wouldn’t cause a horse to hang a leg and flip. That wouldn’t break their legs or mine.

  “Duncan,” I said quietly, my voice wobbling. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  He looked up at me and patted my boot. “But the difference is,” he said. “I know that you can.”

  He asked me to trot in a circle and then canter down the long side, cross the ring and jump a vertical. It was tall, over three feet. To me it looked like a mountain. There were bees in my stomach and sweat dripping down my back. The mare was calm, completely unfazed by the fact that I was a bundle of nerves up on her back and probably holding the reins too short, ready to pull her out if things got bad.

  As we cantered easily up to the vertical, I saw my take off spot and so did she. Her ears flicked forward and I got the overwhelming urge to pull her away from the jump. To circle her so that she wouldn’t run the risk of being hurt but then it was too late. She was launching into the air, her haunches propelling us up and over and I was going with her, reaching up her neck to give her the rein that she needed. And then we landed. She shook her head and looked for the next fence and we were away like a bullet that had been released from a gun and didn’t have a target.

  Duncan called out the instructions as we cantered around. Five strides to the oxer. Si
x to the vertical. Back around to the double. Don’t grab her face. Sit up. Breathe. He called them all out and I listened and did as he said because normally I wouldn’t. I’d be too arrogant to think that I needed his instructions but now I knew that just like everyone else, I did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  The lesson was a success, which was just as well because the last thing I wanted to do was wreck one of Duncan’s horses. By the time we had finished, Honor and I had jumped all the jumps several times and he’d even raised them higher. Andy and Rose had cheered but Jess had just sat there with a scowl on her face. I knew she’d been waiting for me to fail. I couldn’t blame her. I’d been waiting for me to fail too. While I was cooling the mare out she crossed her arms angrily.

  “So do we all get to ride your horses then?” she shouted at Duncan.

  He walked over calmly to her. I could tell he’d dealt with a million girls just like her. He knew what he was doing and how to handle her without inciting a meltdown.

  “You can ride one of my horses when you can stay on your own,” he said quietly.

  “I did stay on my own,” she said with a sneer.

  “Over fences and at a show,” Duncan added.

  “But Emily fell off at her last show,” Jess wailed.

  “She didn’t fall, she was thrown due to an unfortunate accident,” Duncan said. “Have you had an unfortunate accident?”

  “Yeah, her birth,” Andy said.

  Jess turned pale and jumped off the fence, storming off to the barn.

  “Hit a nerve?” Andy said looking at me.

  I shrugged. I’d never seen Jess’s mother before. I’d assumed that her parents were divorced but what if it was something worse. What if her mother was dead? That just made me feel sorry for her, which happened a lot. Jess was a complicated person and it was so easy to hate her one minute and then feel pity for her the next. I wondered if she knew that she had that power over people. Probably not because then maybe at least she’d be a little nicer. Right now I knew that she was ready to rip my guts out with her teeth.

  “That was great,” Andy gushed as we walked back to the barn, Honor sandwiched between us. “I knew you could do it.”

  “I think I did too,” I said. “Deep down. But I was still scared.”

  “That will pass with time,” Duncan said as he walked past us. “And practice. You have lots of horses at home, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Good, then I want you jumping at least one of them every day,” he told me.

  I thought of Falcon and how Faith needed my help. I’d let her down and now I knew it. When I got back home I was going to ride that pony and help her fix him. She deserved nothing less than my undivided attention. I’d get her to a show by the end of the month if it was the last thing I did. And Cat too. She could ride in a walk trot class. Then maybe she’d be less inclined to keep bringing home bags of stolen goods. I’d been so busy focusing on my own problems that I’d completely forgotten about everybody else's and that just wasn’t fair. And maybe by helping the others, I’d help myself too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  Jess refused to sit with us, just like she always did. She sat in the tack room and looked at her phone. I wondered if she was really texting someone or just pretending. Despite her cruel words, I told her that she could sit with us if she wanted to. She just stuck her nose in the air and ignored me.

  I knew it was because I hadn’t failed like she’d expected me to. The funny thing was that I’d expected myself to fail too. The nightmares, the flashbacks, they were all still there but now I had a new memory, the pricked chestnut ears of a once great horse, showing me that it was okay to jump again. That bad things might happen but that didn’t mean they were going to happen every time.

  “I’m starving,” I said, pulling out the sandwich that Cat had made for me.

  It was filled with pickles and pineapple. I bit into it and spat out the disgusting combination, not sure if Cat had thought I’d like it or had been playing a practical joke, which was totally unfair because I was starving.

  “Here,” Andy said, passing me one of his. “It’s cheese and tomato. I have five of them. My mom thinks she’s feeding three boys not just one.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the chunky bread.

  “And I have an extra apple and a few potato chips,” Rose added, sharing her lunch with me as well. “I’m not supposed to eat the chips anyway.”

  “Why not?” I said, biting into the sandwich. “You’re as thin as a rail.”

  “How do you think I stay that way?” she said with a soft sigh.

  I knew that body image was a big deal and we’d all had trainers who had told us that we were too fat. That we didn’t fit the image of the perfect rider with a slim torso and long legs. Of all of us Andy was the one who looked most like a rider. He was muscled and lean and looked like he’d been working out. Rose was wispy like a strong breath of air could blow her away. She should have been a ballerina.

  I was small, short for my age which meant I could still get away with riding the ponies but still growing every day. I hoped to remain short my whole life because I’d never want to give up riding Bluebird and the fact that I was small and strong enough to ride ponies meant that I could help kids like Faith with Falcon and pick up catch rides on ponies that other kids my age couldn’t. Not that I was too keen to ever catch ride again. I think I’d stick to my own horses and ponies because at least I knew what I was getting into with them. At least I knew that I could trust them. But I’d trusted Duncan’s horse too. He was a good trainer and great team leader. He was already trying to bring us together to form a coherent team and that was something that we badly needed.

  “I need a nap,” Rose said with a sigh, laying her head back on her balled up sweater and stretching out her long legs.

  “A nap?” Andy said. “I’m so pumped up I feel like going for a run.”

  I didn’t want to do either of those things. Instead I slipped into Bluebird’s stall and told him all about how a horse called Made of Honor had helped me get my nerve back and how soon I’d be jumping him again and even though I had butterflies in my stomach, at least this time they weren’t bees and this time I didn’t feel like puking. Instead I was excited.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  I was the first one out to the ring for the afternoon session. Bluebird was happy. I knew he could tell that I was happy too. I felt a little nervous but it was more an excited sort of nervous. The kind you got before a show and not the puking kind. I wouldn’t say that Duncan had healed me. It wasn’t like you could just erase a trauma with one good jumping session. Not even a therapist was that good. But it had been a step in the right direction. A baby step. Something that I was going to have to keep working on if I wanted to get better. Like Duncan had said, ride every day. Jump everything I could. Get over the fact that something bad happened and hope that it would never happen again.

  “You’re such a faker,” Jess said as she rode her mare into the ring before the others. “I bet there was nothing wrong with you at all. You just wanted extra attention.”

  “You’re one to talk about extra attention,” I said as we circled our horses around one another. “What happened to your mother? Why did you storm off like that?”

  “Not that it's any of your business but she’s dead, alright?” Jess said.

  And for a moment I saw a vulnerability in her that I hadn’t seen before. Her mask pulled away to reveal a scared teenage girl who was trying to make her way in a sport where she was mostly hated with a father who pushed her too hard and made a fool out of both him and her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t need your pity,” she spat. “I just need you to get out of my way. You think you’re the only one with Olympic dreams? That you’re special? Well you’re not.”

  I moved Bluebird off to the rail before Jess and her mare trampled us to death. The mask was back. The vulnerable girl gone. Now there
was only hatred in her eyes. And Andy and Rose were riding their horses into the ring, all smiles like they’d just shared some secret sort of joke. I wondered if there was something going on between them but I didn’t have time to think about it any longer than a second because Duncan was there, squashing the jumps back down and telling us to trot our lazy horses around before they all fell asleep. And so it was that my world turned the right way up again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  “Push on, release, push on, release, push on and release,” Duncan called out as Bluebird hopped down the gymnastic line like a bunny.

  It was a line of bounce jumps and just up his alley. He loved to hop over the fences without adding a stride and I was so happy to be jumping my trusted pony again that I couldn’t stop smiling.

  No one else was though. Their horses were big. It was harder for them to bounce. They got in too close after the first jump and then it all went wrong. Jess’s mare had already demolished the whole line more than once and Andy’s horse, Mousse, had just given up and tried to jump the fences together like they were part of a large oxer.

  “You guys are hopeless,” Duncan said as he put the poles back in their cups for the third time. “What is wrong with you? Emily can do it.”

  “Her pony is handy,” Jess said. “Maybe if you’d set up the exercise for big horses then we’d be doing better.”

  “You want me to pull them apart?” Duncan said. “Because I will.”

  He moved the jumps so that the distance between them was longer. I knew that Bluebird would still jump them fine, I’d just need to add a little extra leg.

  “Go on then,” I said to Jess. “Show us how it's done.”

  “You first,” she said. “Now you’ll see how we all feel when the jumps are rigged for a pony.”