“Nice job girls,” Esther said. “Go cool out on the trail.”
Mickey couldn’t seem to stop laughing at me.
“Stop it,” I said. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s totally funny,” she giggled. “You looked hilarious.”
“Well I felt ridiculous.”
“She’s not a half bad jumper though,” Mickey said, slipping her feet out of the stirrups. “You should have seen her tucking up her little front legs.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I can’t even let my feet out of the stirrups because if I do they’ll drag on the ground.”
“But think of all the brownie points you’re getting with Esther. Schooling ponies that she doesn’t have the time to train. That has to count for something, right?”
“I guess.”
Princess let out a sigh and I patted her sweaty neck. She’d done a good job once she finally got it into her pretty little head that we were there to work and it had felt good to be jumping again.
“Do you think she’ll make you ride all the ponies?”
“I hope not,” I said. “I’d rather ride Saffron.”
Saffron was a pretty paint mare that Esther had picked up in the hopes that she would be her next show horse. But she hadn’t had much time to ride her lately and the mare was wild and unpredictable. Sometimes she’d take all the jumps like she could fly and other times she’d knock them all down with a sneaky look in her one blue eye that said she knew exactly what she was doing. I was pretty sure that Esther wouldn’t be letting me on her back anytime soon.
We’d reached the end of the trail and as we stepped out of the cool shade into the sun, I heard laughing. Momentarily blinded, I couldn’t see who it was but it didn’t matter. I knew anyway. It was Jess. She and her twin sister Amber lived next to Sand Hill and rode at Fox Run Farm. At the last show I’d told Jess to break a leg and she almost had. Now she had it in for me, big time.
“Your horse has shrunk,” she squealed. “Don’t you know, you’re only supposed to wash them in cold water?”
“Very funny,” Mickey snapped.
I didn’t say anything. When it came to Jess, I figured it was better to keep my mouth shut.
Jess and Amber were ambling along the fence line on their horses, two identical black mares with white spots on their foreheads. They were riding bareback in shorts and bikinis, looking tanned and gorgeous. Meanwhile we were sweaty and disgusting in our dirty breeches and boots.
“So what happened to your precious show horse? Did Esther sell him to save her failing farm?”
“The farm is fine, thank you very much,” I snapped.
Before the Fox Run show, Jess had sent two British girls over to spy on us. They’d taken a couple of lessons and reported back that we were a bunch of hick cowboys and that the farm was going under. Apparently Jess was waiting for the farm to fold so that her father could buy it and they could turn it into a training facility. Over my dead body. I’d do anything and everything I could to make sure that never happened.
“So you broke him then,” she said lazily, her sandal kicking against the fence.
Her mare, Beauty, skittered sideways and nearly unseated her. Mickey started to laugh but I just bit my lip.
“You did, didn’t you? I bet that old meat bag is lame,” she laughed. “You know what happens to lame horses, right? They end up at the dog food factory.”
“Esther would never do that,” I glared at her.
“Really? You know a lame horse costs just as much to feed as a sound one. Where do you think all the broken down horses go? Some retirement farm where they can frolic and play all day?”
The truth was that I didn’t really like to think about it at all. Horses were expensive. What did people do when their horse just wasn’t sound anymore? If they had their own farm, they could keep them forever but what about the people who boarded and needed a new horse to ride? It was just too horrible to think about. But Sand Hill was Esther’s farm, surely that meant she could keep him forever even if he was lame.
“Harlow is fine. He’s just taking a break but he’ll be ready for the show season in the fall.”
“If you say so,” Jess laughed. “But don’t be surprised if you see your precious Esther loading him up and taking him to the auction at the end of the month.”
She kicked Beauty who took off like a rocket and left Jess clinging to her neck as they galloped away. Amber walked off after them on Belle, giving a sad wave as she went.
“What auction?” I asked Mickey as we rode back to the barn.
“I have no idea,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
“Esther? Do you know anything about a horse auction at the end of the month?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual, as if the auction was something I didn’t really care about.
“Auction?” she asked, looking up from the pile of papers on her desk.
“Yes. I heard there was going to be one. Did you know?”
She sighed and shuffled around some stuff on her desk before pulling out a hot pink flyer.
“Summer Fun Sale?” she said, tossing the paper in my direction. “Is that it?”
“I guess so,” I said, grabbing the paper. “You’re not going, are you?”
“Do I look like I need any more horses?” she said before going back to her charts and forms.
I knew she didn’t need any more horses. It was selling the ones she already had that I was worried about but I was too afraid to ask in case she hadn’t thought of it at all and I somehow planted the idea in her head.
“Did she know?” Mickey asked.
“Not really. But she had this.”
I showed Mickey the flyer. It had silhouettes of horses galloping and jumping and rounding up cattle.
“Summer Fun Sale?” Mickey said. “Well it doesn’t really sound like the kind of auction where the horses all go off to the dog food factory, does it?”
“I know,” I said. “Jess is full of it.”
I tossed the flyer aside but in the back of my head I was already planning out how I could get there. If I didn’t have to worry about Esther offloading Harlow onto some horrible, shady horse dealer then perhaps this would be the perfect place to find my five hundred dollar champion.
But it seemed that I didn’t really have time to think about things like buying a horse or why Harlow was still lame, as the summer camp kids arrived at the barn bright and early Monday morning like a curse of locusts. They had a mixture of hope and fear on their faces, some of them clearly being terrified and others having not even enough sense to keep them safe. They had only been standing in the barn five minutes and I’d already had to rescue one little hand from inside a pony’s mouth and tell another girl that if she didn’t stop screaming, she was going to have to go outside.
I looked at Mickey helplessly. There were ten of them. Ten kids that we had to keep from being bitten and stepped on and then teach how to ride. When Esther mentioned the summer camp, I’d had visions of neat little children dressed in breeches and boots with checkered helmet covers like the Pony Club kids in movies. Mickey was right. Most of these kids didn’t even look like they wanted to be here. Summer camp was obviously just code for an elaborate type of daycare.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” I told Mickey. “I’m telling Esther, I quit.”
“You can’t quit. It hasn’t even started yet,” she said.
But I didn’t care. If I’d wanted to be a babysitter, I could have just stayed home and looked after the neighbor’s kids who were always screaming and crying and breaking things. Only before I had a chance to tell Esther, she appeared with a whistle which she blew at the top of her lungs. The kids immediately fell silent.
“Line up,” she barked.
The kids scattered, pushing and shoving to form a wobbly line, their eyes wide and mouths open.
“Is this summer camp or boot camp?” I nudged Mickey.
“I don’t know but it’s pretty impressive,” she grinned ba
ck.
“Raise your hand if you’ve ever been to camp,” Esther snapped.
Most of the kids stuck their hands in the air.
“Good. You,” she pointed to the little blonde girl who’d nearly had her hand eaten. “What did you do at your last camp?”
The girl stepped forward and puffed out her chest like she was proud to have been chosen to speak.
“We played games and made crafts and sung songs,” she said proudly.
“And did you have fun?” Esther asked.
“Oh yes. It was so much fun. We got to play the whole time.”
“Well this camp will be nothing like that,” Esther said sternly.
The little girl stepped back in line, her bottom lip wobbling like she was about to cry.
“There will be no play time. This is not a daycare. Here you will learn about the magnificent creature we call the horse. You will learn his likes and dislikes and how to act around him so that you don’t get bitten or stepped on.”
A plain little girl with brown pigtails raised her hand.
“Yes?” Esther said.
“Do we get to ride?”
“You will ride and you will learn to ride well,” Esther said.
The little girl nodded solemnly.
“Now, how many of you have ever been on a horse before?”
Half of the kids raised their hands.
“Good. Then maybe this won’t be a complete waste of time after all.”
If Esther was planning on wooing kids to ride at Sand Hill, she wasn’t doing herself any favors. I didn’t like the kids but at least I hadn’t made any of them cry. As Esther sat them down in the tack room with a sheet showing the anatomy of the horse, I was pretty sure that at least half those kids would beg their parents to pull them out of riding camp as soon as they got home.
“This is going to be a nightmare,” I said to Mickey.
“I know,” she nodded.
Esther waved us away and we ran out of the tack room without a second glance. I still had to take care of Harlow’s leg and Mickey was going to take Hampton out on the trail for a little while. I watched her ride off, a sad feeling lingering in the pit of my stomach as I stood there with the hose.
“Your leg is feeling better, right?” I asked Harlow.
He looked off into the distance and whinnied sadly as Hampton and Mickey disappeared out of sight.
“I know, boy,” I said. “I wish we were going with them too.”
I hosed his leg for ten minutes, letting the water splash against his gray hairs. Then I poulticed and re-wrapped him. Esther had said that it was okay to let him graze out on the little grass patch in front of the barn. The poor guy acted like he hadn’t seen grass in three months let alone a day or two. He practically dragged me to the green patch and dug his nose in. I had asked Esther about calling the vet and she just shrugged but I knew that there wasn't really much more that could be done. Sure there were expensive treatments but I knew that Esther didn't have the money for them. Stall rest and wrapping was about as good as it was going to get.
I was hanging on the front of Harlow's stall feeling morose when Mickey came back. She had a weird look on her face as she led Hampton into his stall and started to untack him.
"You're not going to believe what I just saw," she said.
"Jess falling off her horse?" I asked hopefully.
Since it was summer, our neighbors had been more present than ever and after the last time, a part of me was actually kind of relieved that I didn't have to go out on the trail and endure Jess gloating at me on the back of another tiny pony.
"Not exactly," she said. "But I heard a lot of shouting and yelling so we stopped by the fence at the top of the hill where you can kind of see their barn and there was a trailer."
"Great, don't tell me they are getting another fancy horse," I rolled my eyes.
"No," she said. "They were loading one up."
"They're getting rid of Beauty or Belle?"
"No. It was a chestnut but a pony I think and it was all skinny and beat up."
"That is weird," I said. "I wonder what was going on?"
"Me too."
But I soon forgot about the beaten up pony because we spent the afternoon helping Esther show the camp kids how to mount their ponies properly. When we were done we stood by the rail and watched Esther teach them how to sit at the walk with their heels down and shoulders back.
"Were we ever that bad?" I asked Mickey as one little boy got his hands tangled in the reins, lost his stirrups and then fell off.
"I think we were worse," she said. "Because we thought we already knew everything. Like that kid."
She pointed to the girl with the brown pigtails who'd asked if they were going to get to ride. You could tell that she'd learnt everything she knew from horse books just like I had as a kid. She had that posed look. Her face scrunched in a frown as she kept checking her hands and feet.
"At least back then we didn't have to worry about lame horses and summer auctions," I said.
I could remember my first pony, fat little Pudding, and I was pretty sure back then I had no clue that feeding him too much grain could make him sick or that if he was lame then I wasn't supposed to be riding him. But I’d had my dad for that. Now he was just a distant memory, a bad one.
"Want to sleep over at my house?" Mickey nudged me.
"Sure," I grinned. "But I have to grab some stuff from home and check in on my mom. She's been acting kind of weird lately."
"Good weird or bad weird?" Mickey asked.
"I'm not sure," I said.
I knew Mom was up to something. I just wasn't sure what it was. But when we got to my house, my mom wasn’t there. She had pinned a note to the refrigerator telling me that she had to work late at the museum and that perhaps I would like to sleep over at Mickey’s house.
“It’s like she’s a mind reader,” I said to the empty kitchen.
I turned her note over and scribbled on the back that I had decided to stay at Mickey’s house and that I would see her tomorrow. I signed it with a smiley face. Mom had been spending so much time at the museum lately that I barely saw her anymore. At first it had been kind of cool, cooking my own meals and taking care of myself. Now it just felt kind of lonely. I missed her and I wanted to tell her about how Harlow was lame and the camp kids were crazy but I didn’t have time to wallow in self-pity.
I threw some stuff into a bag and at the last minute dove into the back of my closet and pulled out the tin with my winnings. Mom had wanted me to open up a bank account but I’d refused, opting instead for a big wad of cash. I knew that once the money was in the bank, there would be no way she would let me spent it on anything horse related. This way I was free to do with it whatever I wanted.
I pulled off the million miles of tape that I’d stuck all over it and slipped the cash into my bag. If Mom was going to be missing in action all summer then maybe I should just stay at Mickey’s permanently. And with the Summer Fun Sale only a few days away and Harlow still lame, I knew I needed my money. I just wasn’t sure for what.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So what is going on with your mom?” Mickey asked.
We were sprawled out on the couch in her living room having just gorged ourselves on pizza. Her mom had fallen asleep and was snoring gently.
“No idea,” I said. “I’ll ask her, if I ever see her again.”
“Perhaps she’s working overtime to save up and buy you a horse,” Mickey grinned.
“I’m sure that is the last thing on her mind,” I said.
“Ohhhh, maybe she has a boyfriend?”
I felt my face turn red. My mom’s dating life was something I’d rather not think about. I mean she was pretty and nice and everything and I knew that sometimes she was lonely but we had a good life together. It was just the two of us. The thought of her bringing home some new guy who would muck it all up and change our lives forever made me totally sick.
“So do you think your mom
will take us to the auction on Saturday?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“Probably. She said something about getting a new fish for her aquarium and the pet store is just past the fairgrounds where they are holding the auction. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“Another fish?” I said. “Doesn’t she have enough already?”
Mickey’s mom was obsessed with tropical fish. She had two giant tanks set up in the living room and another smaller one in the kitchen. They were full of all kinds of fish whose names I couldn’t pronounce that were always staring at me with their bulging eyes while I tried to eat. Fish kind of gave me the creeps.
“Probably,” Mickey shrugged. “But I have my horse and she has her fish. It kind of seems like a fair trade.”
“What does your dad have?”
“Golf,” she said. “Lots and lots of golf.”
Later that night I called my mom.
“Is everything okay?” I asked because she sounded weird.
“Yes. Fine. I’m just really tired,” she said. “How is your riding going?”
“It’s fine,” I lied.
She was working hard and I was spending the summer goofing off with the horses. It didn’t really seem fair to burden her with my problems and I knew that when it came down to it, she preferred to know very little about my riding life.
“Should I stay here at Mickey’s for the rest of the week?” I asked.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Perhaps that might be for the best. I hate to think of you here all alone but you’d better put her mom on the phone. I want to make sure that it is okay with her as well.”
“Alright.” There was silence for a moment and then I added, “I love you Mom.”
“I love you too,” she said quietly.
Now I knew for sure that something was definitely up.
The next day only seven kids showed up to camp so my suspicions were right but the ones that were left were far more serious about learning to ride. Esther roped both of us into helping teach them all about horse care in the mornings and then they rode in the afternoons. Sometimes Mickey would take Hampton out on the trail while I took care of Harlow but she never saw anything suspicious over at the neighbors again.
Pony Jumpers (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 2) Page 2
