Blue Ribbons

by Kim Ablon Whitney

  I whispered to her, “Ask about the brand.”

  “We were wondering a few things about the pony my dad bought from you. We body clipped it and it has a brand.”

  “A brand?”

  “Yes, it’s a half-moon with a triangle over it.”

  “I don’t brand my ponies. There must be some mistake. It’s not one of mine.”

  “Do you remember the pony you sold my dad?” Jane asked.

  “Good-looking man, am I right? Quite dapper?”

  Jane held back a giggle. “Yes, I guess he’s dapper.”

  “Of course I remember him. He bought one from the six-year-old crop out of Legend. She’s giving me some nice foals, that one.”

  “Legend? Is that her registered name?”

  “Legend Has It. She was first on the line at Devon.”

  “Do you register the foals?”

  Vi’s outraged voice returned. “What kind of a question is that? What kind of a breeder do you think I am? What kind of establishment do you think I’m running? This isn’t a hog farm. My ponies have won at every top show in the country.”

  “I know,” Jane said.

  “Ask about the bowing,” I mouthed.

  “One other quick thing . . . Do you ever teach your ponies tricks?”

  “Tricks? Parlor tricks?”

  “We just wondered because the pony knows how to bow on cue.”

  “I don’t think this is very funny,” she said. “Now you’re playing a trick on me. Shame on you.”

  “We’re not,” Jane said. “I’m sorry if you thought—”

  Vi cut her off. “Do say hello to your father for me. Quite a dapper young man. I have to be going. Ta.”

  “Okay,” Jane said. “Thanks!” She took a deep breath. “Ta?” she said to us.

  “She’s weirder than I thought,” Hailey said.

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “Dapper?” Hailey made a face. “What century is she living in?”

  Jane laughed. “Quite dapper.”

  I chuckled, but I was more interested in what we’d learned. “So we need to look up Legend’s foals. See if we can find one that fits Frankie’s description. I guess he could be one of Vi’s. But the brand still doesn’t make sense, or the bowing.”

  “Maybe someone’s sneaking into pastures and randomly branding ponies and then teaching them tricks,” Hailey said.

  Before I had the chance to laugh, Alex opened the door to Jane’s bedroom. “Have you seen my red shirt?” he asked.

  My face flushed just seeing him. He was totally cute.

  “You could try knocking next time.” Jane rolled her eyes. “What red shirt?”

  “The red shirt I wear all the time,” Alex said, like it should be obvious.

  “The one you never wash?” Jane made a show of holding her nose.

  Alex looked at Hailey and me, as if he just realized we were there. “What are you guys doing anyway?”

  When no one answered I said, “We’re trying to find out about Frankie—where he’s from, what he did before he somehow ended up in Vi Kroll’s pastures with a strange brand.”

  “And how exactly are you doing that?”

  “Well, we started by calling Vi. And we’ve been researching Frankie’s brand.”

  Alex nodded like he was kind of impressed. “You guys are like the pony detectives.”

  The pony detectives—I kind of liked the sound of that. And Alex didn’t seem like he was making fun of us, either.

  “What did you find out?” he asked.

  “Not much so far,” Jane said.

  “Got any ideas?” I could tell Alex was losing interest in us. He was about to leave and I didn’t want him to.

  Alex shrugged. “I can’t even find my shirt so I’m probably not the person to ask.”

  As Alex turned to leave, Jane said, “Check the dryer. Maybe there’s a load that got left in there.” To me she said, “So what next, Spy Kid?”

  Alex left the room, taking with him what seemed like all the energy. I kept staring at the door, listening to his footsteps as he ran downstairs to the laundry room.

  “So?” Jane said.

  “Why do you even think Alex wants his red shirt?” I realized I had said something out loud that should have just stayed in my own mind when I saw Jane’s suspicious look.

  “Wait, why do you care?”

  Before I could make up an excuse Hailey blurted, “Because she likes him.”

  “What? You like my brother? My disgusting, revolting brother?”

  I stood up from the bed. “No!”

  Hailey was looking at her fingernails. “Oh, come on, it’s so obvious.” She turned her gaze to me so they both were staring at me.

  I said in a low voice, “Well, maybe I think he’s a little cute.”

  “Oh my god, Regan, you can’t like Alex!”

  “Shh!” I practically tackled Jane, covering her mouth with both my hands. The last thing I needed was for Alex to hear her.

  Jane made a dramatic show of shivering. “I’m so grossed out right now.”

  “Nothing’s ever going to happen,” Hailey pointed out. “He’s three years older and he barely knows Regan exists.”

  “Yeah, exactly.” I wanted to get Jane off my back, but Hailey’s words stung. As always Hailey was just calling things as they were. Alex would never like me. But why did three years have to be such a big deal? My dad was two decades older than my mother. Plus, Alex was only two years older than me. He was three years older than Jane, because she was still twelve, not thirteen like me.

  “I guess I’ll keep trying to figure out more about Frankie’s brand,” I said, happier than ever to dive back into the mystery of Frankie.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  Our next show was Old Lyme. The weather was overcast and colder than it should have been for early June and some of the ponies were wild, playing in the corners of the ring. But of course Tyler was perfect. I won every single class with him, got good ribbons with Sammy, and was reserve champion with Drizzle. I should have been super psyched. Hailey got a third in one class and otherwise just got low ribbons, even with lots of ponies misbehaving. To make things worse, Dakota was reserve champion.

  School ended for me the next week and the summer was officially here. With it came temperatures that were suddenly in the nineties. I had nothing to do each day but ride and hang out at the barn. In the summer we spent a lot more time in our house in Darien, usually at least from Thursday through Sunday, depending on Mom’s work schedule. I liked some things about our Darien house, like how much closer it was to the barn, and my walk-in closet, but it was huge and I often felt lost in it. It was also almost too quiet in Darien. Our apartment was quiet, too, but you still had the outside sounds, the honking, car alarms, and sirens. Darien was just one big hush. Maybe I would have liked our house in Darien more if I had a dog to walk and play with in our ginormous yard. Of course we didn’t have a dog. Ginormous yard, no dog.

  Mom was making me take a kids’ web design class that started in a few weeks and I’d probably spend time at the country club we belonged to, playing tennis or swimming in the pool.

  At home, I did endless googling about brands, but couldn’t find any brand in any country that matched Frankie’s. I did learn about brands themselves and how they began way-back-when as a way for owners to mark their property. It made it possible to graze animals communally and thieves were less likely to steal branded horses. The Romans also used to brand their animals as part of a magic spell to protect them from evil. While most brands consisted of letters and numbers, people got creative and used symbols, shapes, slashes, reversed or upside-down letters, or combinations of a few of these things. One site also talked about how to read brands. You could read them from left to right or from top to bottom, or, when one character encloses another, from outside to inside. By reading them you could figure out who the owner was. There was information about some letters and symbols and what they mean
t. But there was nothing about either a half-moon or a triangle. I copied Frankie’s brand onto pieces of paper and tried reading it from top to bottom. I still couldn’t figure out anything beyond that it had something to do with a moon and there was a little triangle involved. It certainly didn’t seem like he was any kind of recognizable breed.

  Mom had her first week of chemo and for some reason this time the combination of drugs gave her really bad diarrhea. She started losing weight alarmingly fast—the first outward physical sign that something was wrong. She still tried to pretend she was fine and she kept doing everything at full speed, causing Dad and her to have some of the only arguments I’d ever heard them have, when he tried to insist she slow down and take it easy on her body. I felt like Dad, except angrier. How was she ever going to fight this if she didn’t conserve her energy?

  Different people took Mom to her chemo. She called them her cancer-brigade. Dad took her and her best friend Wendy and some other friends from ProduX. When I found out Susie was taking her, I said I got to go with her next. I’d never been allowed to go last time she’d been sick, but that was two years ago, and I felt old enough now. She and Dad agreed and I felt triumphant until the second we stepped off the elevator at Sloan Kettering, and I wished I’d never asked to come. It was eight o’clock at night—kind of a strange hour to have chemo, but Mom liked it that way. The hospital was quiet and afterward she could come home and go to sleep.

  The hospital smelled like the Raid bug killer they used at the barn when they found a hornet’s nest above one of the stalls. It was enough to make you feel nauseous, even if you weren’t the one having chemo. That was the one thing I knew about chemo before Mom got cancer and had to start having infusions. (That was what they called getting chemo at the hospital—infusions—and that was what Mom liked to call it, too, although it sounded kind of weird to me, like it was a fruit smoothie, instead of a poisonous medical treatment.) All I knew about chemo pre-cancer-in-my-life was that you threw up a lot and you lost your hair. But actually, as I came to learn, not everyone throws up—Mom didn’t—and you don’t lose your hair right away either.

  Mom knew all the nurses by name and chatted easily with them as they put a hospital bracelet on her and took her vital signs and blood. Then we had to wait around for what seemed like forever while they did up her blood work so the doctor could talk to her.

  “Does it always take this long?” I checked the time on my phone. Twenty-five minutes felt like hours. I wanted to be back home.

  “It’s probably worse if you come during the day,” Mom said. She handed me the US Weekly she’d just flipped through. “It won’t be that much longer. Check out page fourteen . . . Shailene Woodley uses our new facial peel.”

  Facial peel? How could Mom be so relaxed? Mom said getting her infusion was no big deal, but I hated even the sight of a needle.

  They finally called her name and I stayed in the waiting room while she went to meet with the doctor. When she came out, she said, “Okay, it’s show time.”

  Mom had her own private room with a plasma TV and even a dinner menu to order from. I wouldn’t have thought anyone would eat while they got their infusion but Mom ordered us two BLTs.

  I gave her a confused face. “You hate BLTs.” BLTs were always something that just Dad and I loved.

  “It’s kind of like being pregnant with you all over again,” she said, smiling at the idea of that. “Strange cravings for foods I used to hate, and then there are some foods I used to like that I can’t stand all of a sudden, like avocado.”

  Mom introduced me to the nurse, Shelly, who came in to hook up Mom’s IV. Shelly was kind of pretty, but she wore too much makeup—blue eyeliner even though she had brown eyes. Mom always said that if you noticed someone’s makeup that wasn’t good.

  “What’s going on with the new guy?” Mom asked her.

  Shelly clucked and shook her head. “Didn’t turn out to be anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said.

  Shelly shrugged. “I’m beginning to think they’re all losers.” She worked quickly, setting up the IV. I looked away at first. Then I couldn’t not look at it. Mom had been right—it really wasn’t that bad.

  Mom reached out and patted Shelly’s arm like she was the one who had the life-threatening illness. “Hang in there, okay? I never thought I would meet the man of my dreams but I did, and—” Mom looked at me. “Now I have my angel here.”

  Shelly smiled. “I can hope, right? Okay, I’ll be back to check on you in a little bit.”

  After Shelly left, Mom said, “So you want to watch a movie?”

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, now you just sit here?”

  “Yeah, simple, right?”

  “And you don’t feel it or anything?”

  “In a little while my legs start to tingle and they drive me crazy—it’s called restless leg syndrome. It’s the same thing that happens to me at night. But otherwise, yeah, that’s about it.”

  “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t believe I didn’t really know about the restless leg thing. Now that Mom mentioned it, I sort of remembered a few mornings where she went straight for the Keurig and moaned to Dad about how badly she’d slept. But I guess as much as I claimed to want to know everything about Mom’s cancer, there was a lot of stuff I tuned out.

  Mom must have seen me looking kind of upset because she said, “It’s not that bad, really.”

  “Then why didn’t you want me to come when I was younger?”

  Mom’s eyes teared up. “Because you’re not supposed to be having to go with your mom to get chemo.”

  “You mean your infusion,” I corrected.

  Mom chuckled. “Right.”

  Then there was this moment when neither of us said anything but still it felt like we both knew what we were thinking. I was thinking how she was right—that I didn’t want to be here, that I didn’t want my mother to have cancer, that I just wanted to have things back to the way they were before. That it didn’t seem fair. But more than anything, I was thinking of how it might have been better if the infusions had seemed worse—if it had seemed like they were really doing something. Because this didn’t seem like much of anything and that made me think they wouldn’t be able to make the cancer go away. That made me think she was really going to die this time.

  My eyes filled with heinous tears and Mom seemed to understand why without my having to tell her. She whispered, “Come here,” and pulled me close. “I’m glad you came with me.” I hugged her tight, nearly shaking. I’d been able to keep myself from thinking about her cancer all the time these last few weeks. I guess I had bought into the pretend-nothing’s-wrong attitude. I’d been able to push cancer thoughts away, which was what she and Dad wanted me to do. But seeing her here, getting chemo, made it seem more real. I gripped her harder than I probably should have, the whole time in my head saying, please let this work. Please fix my mother.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  Hailey and Jane finished school two weeks later and we all headed to our first away show of the summer, Montclair. When we got to the show Hailey, Jane, and I hacked our ponies around and watched other classes. That night we went out to dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant and then swam in the hotel pool. When I first started riding with Susie, Mom often booked us into the Hyatt and Starwood Hotels, while Hailey and Jane stayed in the Holiday Inn and Days Inn. But once I became friends with Hailey and Jane, I begged Mom to always book the same hotel that they were staying in. Being with my friends was much more important than the sheet thread count.

  Mom and Mrs. Mullins sat by the pool talking while the three of us cantered into the water again and again and then judged each other on handstands. Jane’s mom hadn’t come to the show and her dad went out to dinner with another trainer so Jane had come back to the hotel with us. Anna was in the pool, too. She was always hanging out with us, which Hailey hated, and the three of us sw
am to the deep end and hung on the sides of the pool, in part to get away from her.

  “Is Dakota showing?” Hailey asked.

  Jane pulled her legs up to her stomach. “Yeah, I saw her. Oh my god, I didn’t tell you what I heard.”

  Hailey and I both said together, “What?”

  Jane was our source for gossip. She heard things from Tommy and was around more trainers to overhear them swapping stories.

  “Dad was talking to Alison, who works for Hugo . . .”

  We both nodded.

  “She said at West Salem they were stabled next to Hell’s Acres and that they had Dakota’s pony in its stall in a bitting rig all day long.”

  We always heard horrible stories—people not watering their ponies so they’d be low on energy and quiet in the ring, or giving them drugs to make them quiet. It was hard to know what was true, but people definitely did terrible things to win. It was kind of funny to hear it from Alison, because from what we’d heard Hugo wasn’t exactly a saint either.

  “The poor pony.” I shuddered, thinking of Smitten with her nose essentially tied to her chest all day. None of us liked Dakota, but that didn’t mean Smitten should suffer.

  Hailey pushed off from the wall. “That’s animal cruelty.”

  We swam to the shallow end. Hailey’s lips were blue. “I’m freezing.”

  “That’s because you have no body fat,” Jane said.

  “I can’t help it that I’m skinny.”

  I was actually cold, too, and I knew at any moment Mom would be saying we should get back to the room. We climbed out and wrapped up in the thin hotel towels.

  “Sometimes I’m just dying for a real night out,” Mrs. Mullins was saying to Mom. “Remember your pre-kids days when you went out with your girlfriends and did wild and crazy things?” Mrs. Mullins made a face, her eyes wide and suggestive. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  Mom cleared her throat. “I guess so.”

  I couldn’t imagine Mom ever doing anything wild and crazy. Everything in her world was always planned and reasonable, probably even when she was younger and single.