A Horse of Her Own

by Annie Wedekind

  Jane and Ben stared at each other. He slowly put Lancelot’s saddle on the ground, then together they tiptoed to the stall door to peek through the bars. Jane could see Jose’s back; he was standing, as if braced against a wind, with his legs set sturdily apart and his arms folded across his chest. She couldn’t see her trainer—but she could hear her.

  “I have been Jane’s instructor for years! I know what she can handle! You saw her—if I’m not mistaken, you were cheering her on, not trying to stop her! She’s been riding one average horse for a long time, and I knew she had a hell of a lot more ability than she could show on Beau! I’m trying to give her a chance to be the great rider I know she is! And yes, I throw her into things—because she’s proven again and again that she can handle it! There’s no one riding at this barn who works harder!”

  Jane flushed crimson—first from anger at Susan’s scandalous assessment of Beau, then with embarrassment and wonder at her assessment of Jane herself. Ben glanced at her with an I-told-you-so smirk playing at the corner of his mouth.

  “So you’re doing all of this for Jane, is that it?” Jose answered with pointed sarcasm.

  “Of course!” For the first time, Susan sounded confused. “What are you trying to say?”

  “It’s your horse she’s riding, isn’t it?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Susan demanded fiercely.

  Jose’s voice took on a conversational tone. “Just this. Jane trains your new horse for you. Fun for Jane, especially when she runs into trees. Then you get a champion horse—very nice for you. And what happens to Jane?” His voice rose to a shout: “She gets to have another horse taken away from her, that’s what! Back she goes to the school horses, with another broken heart!”

  And with that, Jose turned on his heel and stalked from the barn, leaving Jane and Ben just enough time to duck out of view as Susan strode after him.

  “Well, what are you suggesting I do?” she shouted. “Should I send Jane home? Put her on Brownie? What?”

  “Maybe you should start thinking about what’s best for her!” Jose roared back.

  The only sound was Lancelot’s restless movements around the stall. He looked to Jane as unnerved as she felt, pawing at the sawdust and pacing. She felt the beginning of tears—of anger, confusion, and shock—prick her lids. Ben reached out for her. The moment she felt his warm hand on her arm, it was whisked away, and she looked up to see Jessica glaring at them through the bars of the stall.

  Chapter 12

  Jane’s Big Idea

  Jessica’s voice was dangerously sweet, especially when paired with the ice in her blue eyes:

  “Oh, am I interrupting?” she chirped. “I was about to go swimming … .” And with her usual languid grace, she pulled her T-shirt over her head, revealing a skimpy red bikini top that she filled in a way Jane doubted she ever would. Jane was transfixed, like a mouse caught in an owl’s lantern gaze, as her brain made rapid-fire comparisons between her own sweaty, dirt-streaked, bruised face, grubby T-shirt, and horse-spit-flecked jods and Jessica’s golden tan arms with stacked coral bracelets, her shining hair skimming her shoulders, the huge sunglasses perched saucily on top of her head. Jane quickly surrendered, not bothering to look at Ben, guessing his jaw was hanging a few inches from the ground.

  “Nope, just leaving,” she said, picking up Lancelot’s tack and ducking through the stall door. She waited in the tack room until she couldn’t hear their voices, then retraced her steps to her horse—to Susan’s horse—to cool him out.

  Oddly enough, with all she had to ponder and sort through, Jane found herself thinking mainly about Jessica as she ran a damp sponge over Lancelot’s chest and squeezed water over his withers. She thought of the high, fake tone of her voice, like shiny plastic. She was so different from the unreliable but real girl who had used to be her on-again, off-again friend. It was, of course, because of Ben. But why? Surely Jessica didn’t see her as a threat. Could the mere fact of their friendship really cause such a drastic change? Or, almost worse, did Jessica change because she was, Jane had to admit it, sort of going with Ben? What if Robin started dating someone next year and changed, too? As she picked up the scraper and began sloughing the excess water from Lancelot’s back, a new, ugly vision of freshman year appeared before her: a minefield of phony people just like the worst of the girls at Sunny Acres … . Jane shivered. She admitted to herself that she didn’t have a lot of experience with these things. She’d watched Lily’s loose, buoyant group of friends go through high school together like a single organism—loyal and inseparable. But they were theater people, almost a different category of teenagers altogether. Still, Jane wondered …

  Checking to make sure that Lancelot was cool and relatively dry, Jane hastily put him in the pasture and ran to the main house to use the phone.

  Luckily, there was no one in the kitchen, and Jane had the room to herself. She dialed, hoping upon hope that Lily would pick up first.

  “’Allo?” said a voice in a thick Russian accent almost as bad as Jane’s British accent, and Jane breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Oh, Phyllis, I’m so glad it’s you!”

  “Oh, eet ees the young person. Vat do you vhant? I was vaiting for my sailor to come … .” Phyllis was a character that Lily had invented years before to amuse Jane and Robin. She liked “Russian sailors, who bring me calculators,” and she came from “ze old country.”

  “Phyllis, I need to talk to Lily. It’s kind of important … .”

  Lily dropped the accent at once. “Are you okay, Janoo?”

  The whole story came pouring out. It was like a tap had been released in Jane’s throat, and all of the things that had happened at camp were spilling from her heart into Lily’s listening ear. Their mother had already told her about Beau, and Lily now angrily exclaimed against the Jeffrys. She was horrified by Jane’s fall. And she listened in sympathetic silence about Ben and Jessica.

  “I guess I’m just wondering if this is what it’s going to be like,” Jane finished slowly. “I mean, next year. Is this what girls are going to turn into, when, I don’t know, they start hanging out with boys like that?” Jane knew she wasn’t saying it well, but Lily seemed to get her meaning.

  “Well, it can certainly happen,” she sighed. “Don’t you remember Courtney?”

  Jane did, though Courtney had been Lily’s best friend in middle school, when Jane was very young. She and Lily had been joined at the hip, always inventing skits that they performed in the living room for the Ryans and talking on the phone from the minute they each woke up. But when they started high school together, the friendship had faded.

  “Courtney and I didn’t just grow apart,” Lily explained now. “She started dating older guys and stopped talking about anything else. Even worse, the guys she dated were jerks, so our entire friendship became me listening to her first bragging about them, then complaining about them. And I had to be there to cheer her up when they did something awful, but then she just went back for more. It was miserable.”

  “I bet,” Jane said. It occurred to her that a lot of people relied on Lily for comforting. “But did she also act fake?”

  “Oh, boy!” Lily chuckled. “When she had a crush on someone, she was a totally different person. The giggling, the games … she would even pretend to fall down all the time so they’d pick her up.”

  “Huh?” Jane asked, confused.

  Lily laughed again. “It was sort of her way of flirting. She’d trip and fall, and then everybody would make a fuss over her. So dumb. But it worked. Guys totally fell for the helpless act.”

  “Wow,” was all Jane could think of to say.

  “I know. I always came across as the boring, adult one. It got really old. The only time she acted like herself was when she needed me to talk to, when her boyfriend was being mean to her or ignoring her. Then finally, she started getting suspicious that her boyfriends really liked me and not her. That was when I called it quits. So yes, I know
exactly what you’re talking about.”

  “Ugh,” Jane said. “I don’t think I want to go to high school anymore.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Lily said reassuringly. “Only some girls are like that, and it’s sad, but you just don’t have to be around them. You’ll find your own group, with people who are smart and funny and brave like you are. People who write and paint and talk about things besides themselves. Trust me, it’s possible. High school is hard, but it’s a lot better than middle school.”

  “Thank goodness,” Jane said fervently, and they both laughed.

  “Speaking of which, Dad’s about to have a hernia, you know. This morning he was threatening to drive up to Sunny Acres.”

  “Will you tell him I’m going to MLK?” Jane said.

  Lily shrieked. “That’s perfect! Jane, that’s perfect! Why didn’t I think of that? Of course you should go there! The arts program, and all the interesting people, and being downtown, so close to home …” Lily was in raptures in the way that only Lily could be.

  “So you’ll tell him for me? I’m just worried that they’re going to be mad I don’t want to stay at St. Anne’s.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll tell them. I’ll convince them! They’re going to be over the moon, I promise!” Jane was skeptical, but she appreciated Lily’s enthusiasm and willingness to go to bat for her.

  “But Jane,” Lily interrupted herself, growing serious again. “What are you going to do about Susan and that new horse you’re riding?”

  And Jane told Lily her plan, formed almost unconsciously in the aftermath of her tumultuous day, and still only partly thought through.

  Lily was worried. “I don’t know if that’s safe, Jane. I mean, he sounds like a really unpredictable horse. And you don’t know what sorts of things—”

  Jane cut her off gently. “I’ll be okay, Lily. I need to do this. And you’ll be there to watch me, remember?”

  “If I don’t keep my eyes closed,” Lily groaned.

  “You better not,” Jane told her. “Lancelot and I are going to surprise everybody, and I want you to see it. After all, it was thinking about you in The Miracle Worker that got me through my last ride.”

  That evening, after dinner, Jane grabbed her sketchpad and pencils and headed to the fields for a solitary walk. The farm glowed in the early dusk, its shadows deepening to soft charcoal and its undulating grassy acres shading to emerald. It was past eight, but the sun held to the lip of the horizon, just bright enough to gild the tops of the tallest oaks with a mellow gold. Jane could hear the tumbled-together voices of the younger campers preparing for a campfire and gave a silent thanks that the older girls were now spared this weekly ritual of sharing feelings and singing songs ranging from the stupid to the unutterably sad. She remembered all too well the churning anxiety of being asked to “share” with the group what she had experienced and learned during that week of camp. Jane snorted as she imagined what would have happened if she’d ever been honest during one of those painful sessions: This week I learned that Alyssa told Jessica and Jennifer that she thinks I’m hopelessly boring and weird. I learned that my jeans are too high and that no one wears tennis shoes like mine anymore, if they ever did. She usually had avoided being called on, not all that difficult, since the counselors had an uncanny knack for absorbing the campers’ social structure and favoring the popular girls, or she would make up something about an arts-and-crafts project she would say she enjoyed, when really all she wanted to do was live in the barn. And then heaven help her if they sang “Cat’s in the Cradle” or “Corner of the Sky”!

  “Phooey,” she said aloud now. She thought for one moment of joining this campfire and telling the younger girls that this week she’d learned that she no longer gave a flying fig about working her way into the clique, because they were mean, possibly racist, and definitely cheats. That even the seemingly savviest girl can become a total nightmare if she liked a boy. That her trainer and the barn manager were fighting over her, and that she’d decided to go to public school. That she was maybe the best rider in the barn. That she was determined to prove that she was.

  Jane threw her leg over the fence rail and swung herself to the other side. Just ahead, she saw Beau grazing, and her heart gave a painful squeeze. “Hey, buddy,” she whispered, and he raised his head and whickered, taking a few steps toward her. She met him halfway and put her arms around his neck. His coat felt very soft and his mane was impeccably combed. “I’m glad you’re getting taken such good care of,” she told him. And then out of the corner of her eye, she saw a seated figure near the willow tree slowly stand up, hesitant, and she turned around. It was Megan.

  “Oh, hi,” Jane said awkwardly. “I’m sorry, I was just …” Her voice trailed off. But Megan was smiling shyly at her. She joined her at Beau’s side and stroked her horse’s muzzle. She was the one who broke the strained silence.

  “Um, Jane? He really knows you? He came right up to you?” She had the ten-year-old way of turning everything into a question. Jane was forcibly reminded of how young she was, and something painful and knotted in her seemed to come undone.

  “Oh, he knows you, too. He was just telling me how well you’re taking care of him.”

  “Really?” Megan’s eyes shone up to her. “He’s the best horse in the whole world,” she said in a breathless rush. “He’s so pretty and so good, you know? And he can be so funny! And he’s just the best at going over trotting poles, and he has the best canter ever, and I just think …” Jane smiled as Megan launched into a detailed depiction of her horse’s perfections. This was love, she knew. Beau’s new owner loved him more than anything else in the world.

  “ … and you know, I told Susan that, like, you can ride him anytime you want?” Megan finished, and Jane looked up, surprised.

  “That’s really, really nice of you, Megan,” she said slowly. “I might take you up on that sometime. Keep taking good care of him, okay?” Megan nodded furiously. Jane fished a carrot out of her pocket and handed it to Megan to give to Beau. She left them standing together in the gathering dusk, Megan carrying on some urgent conversation with Beau’s patiently listening, kind, and homely face. She felt a pang of longing toward her horse, toward Megan’s horse, but she was also smiling. Megan waved to her, and she waved back and continued down the sloping knoll to look for Lancelot. And Jane smiled again as she realized that Megan was skipping the campfire.

  Someone was calling her name, and Jane paused, deciphering Robin’s voice hailing her near the cabin. It was too dark for sketching, she realized, and despite her lonely mood, she did need to talk to her friend. “I’m in the field!” she hollered back. “Looking for Nutty!” She heard Robin laugh, then heard her jogging footsteps approach. “Ben just told me—why didn’t you tell me?—about”—gasp—“your ride! Omigosh, Jane! I can’t believe—” Robin was in a tizzy, flushed and out of breath. She threw her arms around Jane, knocking her off balance, and they collapsed ungracefully to the ground, laughing and throwing handfuls of grass at each other.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Jane cried, fending off Robin’s attack. “I just didn’t want to talk about it with everybody there at dinner!”

  “So when were you going to tell me?” Robin rubbed a handful of grass in Jane’s hair, hard, and Jane shrieked in protest.

  “This is unbecoming behavior, young lady!” she yelled in accent.

  Robin gave up, flopped on her back, and sighed. “No more secrets, remember?” She eyed Jane with mock grumpiness. “Even if you do have to wander alone in the fields like some woman of mystery …”

  Jane cracked up. “But I am the woman of mystery.” She chuckled. “Doomed to haunt the fields of Sunny Acres, searching for my own horse … who never comes … until the full moon …”

  Robin made a ghostly whoo-ooh-hoo sound and they threw some more grass around.

  “Did Ben tell you about the fight?” Jane finally asked, brushing herself off. Robin nodded.

 
; “You don’t think Jose’s right, do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Robin said thoughtfully. “It’s hard to believe that Susan would put you in any danger.”

  “Right,” Jane agreed, though the image of the enormous triple, the towering straight rail, surfaced vividly in her mind. But with a surge of pride, she also remembered sailing over them.

  Robin seemed to be following the same train of thought. “She does ask you to do really hard things, but you always do them! I mean, remember the shrubbery?”

  “How could I forget?” Jane muttered. She still wondered why Ben had seemed so uncomfortable that day, on their trail ride. Had he, like Jose, felt that Susan had gone too far?

  “And it’s not like I think of Red as being my horse,” she added. “He’s not like Beau. Actually, he’s nothing like Beau.” She laughed a little sadly. “But here’s the thing …” She assumed a more matter-of-fact tone than she actually felt. “I’m not going to get my own horse. At least, not anytime soon. Beau belongs to Megan now. Even if she did say I could ride him.” She related her encounter with Megan, and Robin agreed that it was strange that Susan had yet to mention Megan’s offer to Jane. “Anyway,” Jane continued, “I’ve got to do the best I can with the horse I’m riding for now, even if I never get to ride him again after this summer … .” She trailed off as the familiar feeling of loss stole over her, despite her assertion that she didn’t feel possessive about Lancelot.

  Then a soft brushing, munching sound broke the quiet, and Jane and Robin turned to see the tall silhouette of a horse tearing at the leaves of the hedge lining the part of the fence that faced the side of their cabin. “Speak of the devil.” Jane raised an eyebrow to Robin, then winced. The gash there was still sore. “Hey, Red,” she called in a low voice, and the big horse broke away from his landscaping and loped over. He startled back a bit when Jane stood up, but stayed still as she pulled another carrot from her pocket. He took it neatly and allowed Jane to reach her arm under his neck to lightly scratch his far cheek. The moon had risen, and Jane saw it shine in his liquid brown-blue eye. She blew gently in his nostrils, and he snorted softly back.