Winter Wonderland (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 13)

by Claire Svendsen

  “Yes.” Jess rolled her eyes. “I heard you the first million times.”

  “Lately you’ve done nothing but embarrass me and I won’t stand for it.”

  “Whatever,” Jess said.

  She went into Hashtag’s stall where the horse pinned his ears at her but I watched as she looked around and as soon as she thought no one was watching, she fed him a treat. I knew she liked the horse and I was pretty sure she was deathly afraid that her father was going to sell him out from under her like he’d done all her other horses. For a moment I thought about letting her win but then I thought better of it. Riding was a cut throat sport and it was each rider for themselves. And besides, it was going to be hard enough to win the class as it was but at least I’d have two chances.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I thought the show was going to be awful. I tried to ignore the fact that it looked like we had been transported to Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. Instead I busied myself with bathing Bluebird again before the wash racks got too crowded but before I knew it, I found myself humming along to Jingle Bells as the tune was blasted over the loud speaker and waving merrily to people as they walked by.

  “I guess this isn’t so bad after all,” I told Bluebird as I put him back in his stall. “Now please try and stay clean. I don’t want to have to bathe you again.”

  “And you think you wouldn’t be a very good mother.” Mickey came and stood next to me.

  “I’m too young to be a mother,” I said. “Besides, I don’t even have one anymore.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry, your mom will come around in the end.”

  “I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me,” I said.

  But it was hard to stay depressed about mothers who were giving you the silent treatment or horses that you wanted to rescue when everyone at the show grounds was in the best Christmas spirit ever. Everyone, that was, except Jess.

  “How do they expect me to concentrate with all this racket going on?” she said.

  She was zipping up her chaps, getting ready to take Hashtag out for a warm up ride and I was eager to see how he went. After all, she was some of my biggest competition.

  “I think it’s kind of nice,” Tulip said.

  “Oh you do, do you?” Jess glared at her.

  “Well it is Christmas.” Tulip shrugged and slipped into Velvet’s stall before she could get into any more trouble.

  “Why don’t you take Socks out too?” Dad said.

  “Maybe later,” I replied.

  The last thing I wanted was to share the warm up ring with Jess. I knew what she was like and she was more than likely to slam into us, forcing Socks into the rail where he could get hurt or freaking him out by galloping around and generally being an idiot. But I couldn’t wait to see what Hashtag thought of all the Christmas decorations everywhere and so I grabbed Mickey and arm in arm we went to spy on her.

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  Hashtag spooked at the snow. He spooked at the snowmen and the Santa Claus and the Christmas tree with the flashing lights. He almost stepped on Jess’s foot and she smacked his shoulder but he didn’t care. His ears were pricked and his eyes were bugging out of his head. He’d never seen anything like this and to be honest, neither had we.

  “She’s going to get tossed off before her class,” Mickey said.

  “Well better to get it over with now,” I said. “Bluebird and Socks are probably going to be the same.”

  We kept a safe distance and found a spot on the grass to sit and watch. Other riders were doing the same as Jess, taking their horses out to get them used to all the decorations but it was just like when the horses were coming off the trailer. They all fed off each other and that meant that there was basically a ring full of horses acting out because they were convinced the sky was falling.

  “Oh my God, I never thought I’d see you again.”

  This girl with billowing hair and a face full of makeup practically jumped on me.

  “Do I know you?” I said.

  “It’s me,” she cried. “Becka!”

  “Great, it’s you,” Mickey said, sounding sarcastic.

  She’d never really warmed to Becka, who I met at Miguel’s farm. I think she thought that Becka was going to take her place in the number one best friend slot and for a short while she almost did but she lived really far away and it was hard to be best friends with someone that you hardly ever saw.

  “Are you riding?” I asked. “Is Topaz here?”

  “I am riding but not on Topaz,” she said. “We sold him. I have a great big beast of a horse now. His name is Bastille. Just wait until you see him. You’re going to love him. He never knocks anything down.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  I tried to smile as Becka raved on and on about her new horse and her new boyfriend and the hair extensions that she got for her birthday but all I could think was that she had changed so much that I hardly knew her at all.

  “Well, see you guys later,” she said as she ran off.

  “That was weird,” Mickey said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded, lost in my own thoughts.

  “And you thought that it was going to be easy to win the spot in the Young Rider clinic,” Mickey said.

  “I never said that,” I replied.

  But Mickey was right. I had been fairly confident. I had two mounts who were both at the top of their game and I’d felt like I was too. I knew that I could beat Jess and Tulip and the other girls on the jumper circuit if my luck held out but Becka was good. She’d always been good and now she had a new horse too? I felt my confidence slowly being chipped away.

  “I need to warm up,” I told Mickey.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  Bluebird was still wet so I tacked up Socks but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was thinking about Becka. How could one girl change so much? It was like she was a completely different person. When we’d been at Miguel’s farm, we’d been inseparable. Our love for our ponies and the fact that we felt they were just as great as the big horses was part of what had bound us together. We hadn’t cared about boys or hair extensions or makeup and now here she was caring about all of that stuff.

  “I don’t know why people can’t just stay the same,” I grumbled.

  I was so busy being mad that I forgot about tightening Socks’ girth slowly and he swung his head around and nipped me on the arm to remind me that I’d just offended him.

  “Ouch,” I cried. “Okay, I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to your sensitive belly but can you give me a break? I’ve just had a really bad shock.”

  Socks said that no he didn’t think he could give me a break and to show me that he was still mad about the girth tightening incident, he fussed and fretted all the way out to the warm up ring.

  “I’m not taking you in there if you are going to be stupid,” I told him as he spooked at a snowball and his front feet came up off the ground.

  I was standing there wondering what to do when a girl cantered by the gate on a huge, bay horse. He had a roman nose and no white on him at all. He was all business as he thundered by and the girl waved madly. It was Becka and her horse seemed to be having no problems at all with the winter wonderland. He thundered towards the warm up jump and powered over it with room to spare.

  “We’re in big trouble,” I told Socks.

  But Becka had taken the spot away from me on Miguel’s jumper team and I wasn’t going to let her win this spot as well. I ran down my stirrups and sprung into the saddle, feeling a new surge of determination.

  “You are not going to spook,” I told Socks as I pushed him into the ring with my legs. “You are going to listen to me and you are going to do your job just like I know you can.”

  And it worked. As soon as he figured out that I wasn’t going to let him get away with anything, he gave up trying to be an idiot and got down to work. Soon we were the ones soaring ove
r the warm up jump, only Becka had already taken her horse back to the barn so she didn’t get to see it.

  “She’s just trying to intimidate us,” I told Socks. “But we’re not intimidated, are we?”

  His ears flicked back and forth as I walked him out. One down. One to go.

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  I should have known that I didn’t need to worry about Bluebird. He wasn’t scared of anything and by the time he was dry enough to ride, most of the crowd had cleared out of the warm up ring anyway and gone to watch the kids ride. Some of the younger ones had decked their horses out in full Christmas attire and no one cared about the reindeer antlers or the red and green bows, not even the judges.

  I felt bad that Faith hadn’t been able to bring Macaroni because I could already tell that the kid would have cleaned up but instead there was this bright eyed girl with blonde pigtails and dimples who won every class instead.

  “Isn’t she great?” Becka beamed as I walked Bluebird past the ring and back to the barn.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

  “She’s my little sister,” she called after me.

  I didn’t know she had a sister, let alone a sister who rode and now I was even more disappointed that Faith wasn’t here to put Becka and her perfect little sister in their places.

  But the infectious Christmas nature of the show made it hard to stay mad for long and soon Mickey and I were joining in with the games they had set up off to the side of the ring like pin the tail on Rudolf and guess the weight of the saddle bag. It was more like a fair than a horse show with face painting and cotton candy and these really long churros that Mickey and I were totally addicted to.

  We ate lunch in the barn, sitting in front of the stalls and singing along with the Christmas music. It was weird not to have to do anything except ride my two horses. Usually I was in there cleaning stalls and feeding and making sure that no one did anything stupid but that was what the grooms were for.

  Dad ferried students back and forth to the ring. He’d given me a nod after both my warm ups that said he’d seen what I did and that he approved. I hadn’t even thought to ask him for help because I knew that he had his hands full with all the paying students. I was starting to figure out that being the daughter of the trainer wasn’t really of much benefit at all. I still felt like the second class citizen I had when I’d been working for Esther in exchange for board and lessons.

  After lunch we got to walk the course. I tagged along with Dad since he was taking all his students around in one big group anyway. If Jess thought she was going to get preferential treatment this time, she was mistaken. She was forced to walk with Tulip, Rachel, me and two other girls who trailered their horses in to Fox Run twice a month for lessons. Dad barked out instructions for the girls and they nodded and smiled but I thought they looked kind of worried.

  The course was hard. It was long and had a lot of twists and turns and related distances where you could add or leave out a stride. I knew exactly what I was going to do with Bluebird and Socks and since I knew my pony a lot better than my father did anyway, he didn’t tell me how to ride him. He did give a few words of advice about where to steady Socks though.

  “What is this?” Jess stopped by a liverpool that had fake pieces of ice made out of Styrofoam floating in the water.

  “A Christmas themed jump?” I said. “They all are. Look around.”

  “I’m not talking about this.” She pointed to the jump and then pointed at me and my Dad. “I’m talking about this.”

  “What?” Dad said, crossing his arms and starting to look mad.

  “She gets to walk the course with us and she gets special advice? That is nepotism and it’s not fair.”

  “Emily is a Fox Run rider,” Dad said. “And as such, she deserves to walk the course with the group. And I haven’t given her any more advice than I’ve given you. I told you to add a stride in the line before the double, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, probably so that I’ll slow my horse down and lose to your daughter.”

  Dad stepped closer to Jess, his face more menacing than I’d ever seen it before.

  “Do you really want to make a scene right here and now?” he said. “Because I’ll scratch you before you can even get to the ring if you don’t start acting your age.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Jess said but her voice wobbled.

  “Try me,” Dad said.

  I guess she thought Dad wasn’t bluffing because she walked the rest of the course in silence but every now and then she glared at me out of the corner of her eye and I knew that this wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.”

  CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

  I tacked up my horses in silence, trying to memorize the course and remember how I was going to ride it differently with both Bluebird and Socks. With the threat of Becka and her great big monster of a jumper, I didn’t have the luxury of hoping that I’d win on Bluebird and prove that ponies were better than horses. Now I’d just be grateful if I won at all. My horses were gleaming and tacked, their bridles hanging on the outside of their stalls when I ran off to pee. Socks was third in the order of go. Bluebird was tenth. I didn’t have much time but I felt prepared, until I came back to the stalls and grabbed Socks’ bridle only to find that his flash noseband was missing.

  I looked around, hoping it was some kind of joke. That Mickey would jump out and laugh and I’d punch her in the arm for giving me a heart attack. But that didn’t happen. I looked around on the floor, hoping I’d find it even though I knew that was dumb. I always kept the flash part buckled around the rest of the bridle to keep it neat and tidy, all threaded through the throatlatch. It wouldn’t have just fallen off on its own. It couldn’t have.

  Dad was in Velvet’s stall with Tulip. She was supposed to go first but was having some kind of freak out. I could see Dad was trying to be patient with her even though it was driving him mad.

  “Dad,” I said. “Socks’ flash noseband has gone.”

  “What do you mean gone?” he said.

  “Missing. I don’t know. Someone must have stolen it or something. I went to the bathroom and when I came back it had gone.”

  “Why would someone want to steal your flash noseband?” Dad said.

  “I don’t know,” I said but I did. It had to be Jess. She was the only one who would stoop low enough to do something like that before a big class.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Dad said. “Just grab a spare out of the trailer.”

  “I didn’t bring a spare,” I said, a panicky feeling rising up in my throat.

  “There are always spares in the trailer. Just go and look.”

  Dad waved me away with a flick of his hand and I knew I was going to have to deal with this crisis on my own. I ran to the trailer and looked on the tack hooks. Nothing. Sure there were plenty of bridles but no flashes. Desperately I dug through the trunks but I couldn’t find one anywhere. I was almost in tears when Mickey found me.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “You’re supposed to be out there warming up.”

  “Jess stole Socks’ flash,” I said. “And I can’t find another one anywhere.”

  “Well what about the tack store? Just go and buy him one.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I ran through the show grounds to the tack trailer where they sold all the essentials that you might need at a show. Rubber bands for braiding, halters for when your horse sat back and broke his and of course things that you could lose or misplace like flash nosebands. I rifled through the stuff they had laid out but didn’t see any.

  “Don’t you have any flash nosebands?” I asked the woman behind the table.

  “We did,” she said. “But a girl just came and bought them all.”

  “Every single one?” I said.

  “Yes.” She shrugged. “Don’t know what she needed them all for.”

  “Jess,” I cried. “She’s trying to ruin me.”

  “Who?�
� she called after me as I ran back to the barn.

  Mickey was standing there looking worried when I got back.

  “No luck?” she said.

  “No.” I kicked the nearest tack trunk with my foot. “Jess bought them all.”

  “And I’ve asked everyone we know and some people we don’t know but no one has a spare they can lend us.”

  Dad came into the barn looking furious.

  “Why aren’t you out there warming up?” he said.

  “I can’t find a flash anywhere,” I said breathlessly. “Can he go in a figure eight?”

  “No,” Dad said. “You’ll just have to ride without. Now get your butt out there now.”

  “He can’t be that bad without a flash, can he?” Mickey asked as she passed me the bridle but to be honest I had no idea.

  CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

  Socks was a hot horse to ride. That was just the way he was and I usually got on fine with him. I didn’t get flustered when he tried to run out from under me and I didn’t lose my cool when he galloped because I’d always been in control but that was before. Without the flash to keep his mouth closed he grabbed hold of the bit and tried to run off with me, gnashing his teeth with his mouth wide open. I had no control at all and we nearly wiped out over the warm up jump.

  “I can’t ride him like this,” I told Dad.

  “You’re going to have to,” he said.

  “But why can’t he go in a figure eight noseband? There are a bunch of them in the trailer.”

  “Missy’s tried them on him before and he doesn’t like them.”

  “Well they have to work better than this,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Dad said. “There is not time.”

  He tightened the regular noseband an extra hole. “That’s the best I can do.”

  I heard the thud of several rails falling and then Tulip and Velvet came out of the ring to lukewarm applause. I noticed her horse had a flash noseband.