Gift Horse (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 14)

by Claire Svendsen

  Bluebird was good for the rest of the session and I took him out of the ring to graze while he cooled down. We were over by the patch of trees where the juicy grass was when I saw Mickey. She had been missing in action all week because school had started and her mom wouldn’t let her come out to the barn. She’d texted me to say that she had so much homework that it was ridiculous and that now she was really jealous of me and the whole virtual school thing.

  I waved and she waved back.

  “Hey,” she said, coming over and flopping down on the grass. “You’re alive.”

  “I know,” I said. “And up on both feet and everything.”

  “Fancy that,” she said. “Feeling better?”

  “To tell you the truth, it hurts and I’ve only been out here for half an hour but Dad said that if I manage okay then I can ride tomorrow so I’m keeping my pain and suffering locked deep inside.”

  “That’s a good place for it.” She winked. “No one wants to know how you really feel.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And from now on I am completely ignoring Jess. She can do whatever she wants. I’m not going to pay any attention. I am going to rise above it and get on with my life. She’s not worth it.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Mickey asked, sitting up with a funny look on her face.

  “That Jess is not worth it? Absolutely.”

  “No, that you are not going to pay any attention to her,” Mickey said.

  “Yes. Why?” I said.

  I started to feel worried. Had Mickey seen the note on my locker after all? Did she know something I didn’t?

  “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” Mickey said. “I was hoping that no one would see it and that it would just go away but it hasn’t.”

  “See what?” I said.

  “Jess posted a video of you falling off online and it’s gone viral.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Mickey told me that Jess had posted the video and after getting picked up by a comedy blog that usually showed videos of old people falling down, it now had almost a million hits. I sat there fiddling with a piece of grass, wondering why it felt like my insides were rumbling around in a washing machine. What had I ever done to Jess to deserve this? Here I was, trying to make a go of it in a sport that was notoriously difficult for people who didn’t come from vast fortunes of money or who had those vast fortune people sponsoring them. Jess had the money. Her father bought her all the horses she wanted. So why did she have to continue to try and tear me down in the process?

  “Have you seen it?” I asked Mickey.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to watch it but I had to see what she posted about you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Is it bad?”

  “She set the whole thing to music,” Mickey said. “And the part where you go flying through the air is in slow motion. Plus she makes you fly back and forth a few times for good measure and then at the end there is a close up of all the clay on your butt.”

  “Great,” I said. “Just fantastic. Well, at least I wasn’t wearing a great big sign with my name on it. I mean, no one will know it was me, right?”

  Mickey shook her head. “Jess made sure to post at the start of the video that it was a secret training session of Olympic show jumping hopeful Emily Dickenson.”

  “But people fall off all the time,” I said. “Even Olympic riders. What is the big deal? And it’s not like I’m planning to go to the Olympics tomorrow or anything. I’m years away from that. It was just a lesson. A normal, boring lesson in which I just happened to fall off.”

  “She just wants to humiliate you,” Mickey said. “Just ignore her.”

  “I’ve been trying to do exactly that,” I said. “But how am I supposed to ignore something that is now out there for everyone to see?”

  “I don’t know,” Mickey said sadly.

  I put Bluebird back in his paddock with a heavy heart. I had a feeling that this was how it was going to be as long as I was at the same barn as Jess and even when I wasn’t, there would still be people waiting to tear me down every time I experienced a little piece of success. It was so stupid but I didn’t really know what to do about it so I just tried to ignore the people whispering and laughing behind my back.

  Arion was standing in his stall with a suspicious look on his face. He hadn’t seen me in a week and that meant he’d forgotten I was his human treat dispenser but I came prepared. I took out a couple of his favorite apple flavored munchies and held them on my hand. He sniffed them a couple of times and then fumbled them up with his gray lips.

  “See,” I said, patting his neck. “You remember me, don’t you? I’m sorry I haven’t been around lately but Henry told me that you’ve been a very good boy.”

  Henry had been kind enough to send me a couple of pictures of Arion out grazing in the fields since I couldn’t see him from my bedroom window. I put his halter on and took him for a walk. He was getting better about respecting my space and obeying the commands I gave him like halting and waiting patiently, even though patience wasn’t really his strong suit. He was far too interested in everything else that was going on and whether or not there were evil horse eating monsters lurking in the bushes. But getting to know him and earning his respect on the ground was what was going to help us have a hopefully long and productive career together in the saddle.

  Jess was out in the dressage ring, riding her new mare Sabrina. She wasn’t having a lesson. Instead her father was out there giving her instructions. They had the mare in draw reins, her head tucked against her chest as Jess cantered her around. I knew my father would have a fit if he could see what she was doing. The poor horse had flecks of foam splattered down her neck and she was fighting against the bit.

  “That’s it,” Mr. Eastford cried. “Show her you are the boss.”

  For a moment I almost pulled out my phone and videoed her. We were behind the bushes. She didn’t even know I was there. See how she liked it when someone took a video of something that wasn’t your best moment and posted it online for everyone to see. And this wasn’t just being made fun of for falling off, this was something that a lot of people would see as abuse or at the very least, bad horsemanship.

  I had my phone in my hand when I suddenly realized that taking a video of Jess and posting it online would just be stooping to her level. I wasn’t going to play that game. I put the phone back and walked away, hoping that maybe the universe would deal out the karma that I couldn’t. Not that I wanted Jess to fall off or be made fun of because I knew how horrible it was when people said mean things about you. I just wanted her to somehow see the error of her ways and in doing so, to leave me alone. I didn’t think that was too much to ask but apparently the universe thought it was.

  Over the next few days the video gained another two million hits and had pretty much been shared by everyone who had a Facebook account. I promised myself I wouldn’t watch it but eventually I had to see what everyone was laughing about so I got a plate of cookies and a bag of potato chips so that I could eat my pain away and then sat down in front of my laptop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  The video itself wasn’t that bad. I mean the music and slow motion effects were stupid and cheesy but it was actually helpful to see the moment where I had glanced over in Jess’s direction and lost my focus. I saw Socks take advantage of my lapse in attention immediately and speed up, flying down to the last jump where we parted ways as I flew over his head. I watched myself try to land stupidly on my feet and crumple to the ground as my ankle gave out. As a training video it was helpful but the way Jess had done it, I was a laughing stock. The video had thousands of comments, most of which criticized my riding, my horse and everything else in between. That was when I opened the bag of chips.

  Some of the commenters said that I shouldn’t have been jumping that high because I didn’t have a good enough seat. Others said that I shouldn’t be jumping at all. More than a few people said I was fat, even tho
ugh I knew I was smack dab in the middle of the body mass index scale for my height. Other people said I was stupid. How could someone I’d never even met call me stupid? Or dumb? Or other horrible and rude things? I didn’t know how people could be so cruel but I couldn’t stop reading all the things that strangers had said about me.

  It was well after midnight by the time I had finished reading the comments and the chip bag was empty. So was the plate of cookies. At some point I’d started crying and the tears were now dry on my face, a salty sticky residue left in their place. It felt like everyone in the whole world hated me just because I fell off a horse, just like every other rider had done at some point in their riding career. It wasn’t fair.

  A few people had said nice things, like they wished they could ride as well as me and that I had soft hands but their praise was lost in the sea of negativity that all the others created and for some reason the negative comments seemed to hurt more than the positive ones helped. Why was that? Why did just one negative have the power to cancel out a handful of positives? It was like some cruel law of nature. I closed the laptop and eventually fell asleep, hoping that the video was just a bad dream.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  I didn't tell my father about the video. It was bad enough that he'd had to take me to the emergency room in the first place but now I wasn't the only one being criticized. People were commenting and saying that he was a bad trainer and that was a lie. He was a great trainer and a really amazing rider. He didn't deserve to have his good name dragged through the mud just because I fell off.

  I started riding again but my heart wasn't in it. Bluebird and Socks went well for me and even though my ankle still hurt, I just ignored the pain. There was no way that I could skip the Sandman show, not now that I was a laughing stock. I had to go out there and prove that I could ride and that I wouldn't fall off again. Not that there was any guarantee of that.

  I ignored Jess and her friends as they laughed about me. They didn't even have the common decency to do it behind my back anymore. Now they just laughed to my face. I tried to wait until they'd all gone to ride but it seemed like they were there all the time, a rotating group who were always around to make me feel bad. And I was angry inside because they'd stolen my joy, the one thing that made me happy and I wanted it back.

  At night I couldn't stop reading the comments. Even though I'd promised Mickey that I wouldn't look at them anymore. She said that she was worried about me. That since I'd seen the video, I was like a different person but I couldn't help it. The video was an addiction and I couldn't give it up.

  Mickey made me go and ride with her on the trail. She said it would clear my head and help me forget about everything else and usually she would have been right but the video and its comments were like a constant itch that demanded to be scratched. All I could think about was what else people had said about me.

  "You have to stop this," Mickey said. "It's not healthy. You'll make yourself sick. Have you even looked in the mirror lately?"

  I had and I didn't like what I saw so I stopped looking. There had been dark circles under my eyes and my cheeks were pinched and drawn since I'd pretty much given up eating after all those random people said I was fat.

  "I don't know why you care so much about what people you don't even know have to say," she added.

  "If they said all those things about you, you'd care too," I said darkly. “Do you know how many people have seen it now?”

  Mickey shook her head.

  “Five million and most of them think I suck. That’s a lot of suckage.”

  Mickey laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “But it’s better to laugh than cry, isn’t it? At least you're famous, in a falling down kind of way. And they say that any attention is better than no attention at all.”

  “But I don’t like attention,” I said.

  “Fine,” Mickey said. “If I can't make you laugh, do you at least want to gallop for a bit?”

  So we galloped across the open land and the sun was warm with a soft breeze. I tried to ignore the nagging pain in my ankle and the sick feeling in my stomach and just enjoy the fact that I was galloping my own pony but I couldn't just turn the sadness off. There wasn’t a switch that I could flip and pretend like everything was going to be okay and I knew that I couldn’t keep it all bottled up inside me for much longer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  I told my dad that I couldn’t ride with the group anymore. He didn’t ask why but seemed to know that there was something going on between me and Jess. He’d seen the way the girls were laughing at me and more than once one of them had actually shoved me as they walked by. But he didn’t ask any questions. Maybe he thought I’d tell him when I was ready or perhaps he really didn’t want to know. After all, he had a lot on his mind what with Missy and Owen, who was still pretty much crying twenty three hours a day. Instead he arranged to give me private lessons, which was what I had wanted all along.

  “We’re going to do this exercise again,” he said, moving the jumps back into the same places that they’d been before when I fell off.

  It was late. All the other riders had gone home and it was just me and Dad under the arena lights. Socks had big eyes and a spring in his step as he danced around the shadows but I knew he was just being silly because he’d been ridden under the lights before.

  “What did I do wrong?” I asked. “Other than losing focus of course.”

  “Your hands drifted and you let your reins get too long,” Dad said. “You have to always pay attention to that with this horse. He’s not forgiving like your pony is. He won’t save you. If you get in too deep, he’ll bail and leave you hanging just like he did the other day.”

  We worked on the line and this time I didn’t mess up but of course there was no one there to video that. Socks was a really talented horse. It was just that Dad was right. I couldn’t get away with as much when I was riding him and he wouldn’t save me, only Bluebird would do that. For the first time I longed to be on the back of my little pony instead of the horse that had made me a laughing stock.

  “So what about the show?” I asked Dad when we’d finished working and I was walking Socks around to cool off. “Maybe it would be best if I just took Bluebird, what with my ankle and everything.”

  “Is it still bothering you?” Dad asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  The truth was that every night when I took my boot off, it still swelled up and I’d almost come to accept that the pain would always be there because I knew that if I told anyone, they’d stop me from riding and I couldn’t let that happen.

  “Well as long as your ankle is okay, I think you should take both horses. You’ve been racking up points on both of them and as long as you can ride, I think it would be a shame to mess up your standings.”

  “Is that really important?” I sighed.

  Dad put his hands on his hips. “I thought you were serious about this whole thing? I went out on a limb for you with virtual school and I’m trying to get you rides on lots of different horses so that you get more experience but if you’re not really interested then we should just forget about it.”

  “No,” I said, blinking back tears. “It’s not that at all.”

  I knew that I should tell him about the video, then he’d understand. Of course I was serious. I’d never been more serious about anything in my whole life. I basically gave up my relationship with my mother to stay in Florida and train with him. It was what I’d always dreamt of and now it was coming true and being ruined all at the same time.

  “Good,” Dad said. “Then you’ll ride both horses at the show and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  “Okay.” I nodded.

  We were walking back to the barn when he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he said. “I know your ankle has been bothering you but it seems like that’s not the only thing. You know that you can talk to me or
Missy about anything. We’re not just your trainers, we’re your parents now too.”

  I didn’t want to get into a debate over the fact that Missy was far too young to be my mother and at best we were more like sisters but it was nice of him to notice and care.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Well if you change your mind and you want to talk, just tell me. I know I don’t have a lot of time and I’m sorry that you’ve been pushed to the back what with the baby coming but I promise I’m going to try and be a better father and a better trainer.”

  I made a sort of grunting noise in reply because I knew that if I tried to talk, I’d probably burst into tears. And now that I didn’t have to ride in any more groups, I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Forget about comparing yourself to others and having them challenge you. It wasn’t worth the hassle. All I needed was one on one instruction without the distractions that were Jess and her friends.

  “And tomorrow,” Dad said as we got back to the barn. “I’m going to take you to the tack store to get some stuff for Arion. It’s time you started saddling that horse up. He’s an ex-racehorse not an unbroken two year old. He knows the ropes and it’s time he started acting like the horse I know he is.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Except I had kind of been hoping that Arion could start his under saddle training after the show because I already felt like I had enough on my plate as it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE