It was too early for class, so Kit returned to her dorm room. “Anya?”
The room was empty.
Or was it? Earlier that morning while she had been getting dressed, Kit had thought that Anya’s bed was empty. But these dorm beds were superfluffy. A person as petite as Anya could hide under there, unnoticed, couldn’t they?
She yanked the covers back. There lay Anya. Her hands flew up to cover her face.
“Have you been in there all morning?” Kit asked her. “The whole time I was getting ready?”
“I’m actually not here,” Anya mumbled.
“Huh. Weird.” Kit perched on the edge of the bed. “Not sure who I’m going to share this delicious pastry thingamajiggy with, then.”
That got Anya’s attention. She peeked through her fingers at the delicate sweet roll sitting on Kit’s napkin. Several telltale dark blotches revealed what it was. “They had pain au chocolat at breakfast?”
“Yup,” Kit said. “Apparently pan oh chocolate is available only to those who actually make it to the Assembly of Doom. And in about two seconds, I’m going to devour this. One . . . two . . .”
Anya bolted upright and grabbed the pastry.
Kit wanted to laugh — Anya picking at the pastry looked so much like a hungry squirrel nibbling nuts. But she was on a mission to make her roomie feel better, not worse. “Now, if I can get you to leave this room, we might be able to find some delicious milk shakes!”
Mouth full, Anya shook her head no.
“Some cute new boots?”
Headshake no.
“Some cute new boys?”
Anya’s words came out almost in a whisper. “I can never show my face in the ring again. Or in school. I’ve never done anything quite so awful before.”
Kit shrugged. “You messed up. So? It happens.”
“I wasn’t prepared for my dressage test,” Anya lamented. “I didn’t have any of my clothes ready or my tack or my mind! None of it! It was horrible. . . .”
Kit had a sudden inspiration. “My friend Charlie and I used to play this game called Best/Worst. It would always make us feel better because it was highly unlikely that either scenario would come true. So — what is the worst thing that happens if you leave this room?”
“Nothing, because I’m never leaving it.” With that, Anya and her pain au chocolat disappeared under the covers again.
Kit pulled the duvet back down. “What is the best thing that happens if you leave this room?”
Anya popped back upright and said glumly, “Spaceships touch down and wipe out everyone’s memories so that I can start all over again.”
“Great! Maybe the aliens can sweep up Lady C while they’re here.” Kit’s attempt at humor almost won a smile, but not quite. “Come on,” Kit urged, getting up and bringing Anya’s riding uniform to her. “I bet Ducky would love to go for a run.”
“Okay,” agreed Anya. She pushed her uniform back at Kit. “So you take him.”
Oh, dear. This was not the direction Kit wanted the conversation to go. “I — I can’t,” she said.
“You have to get on a horse, or you’ll lose TK.” Anya paused. “Best/Worst.”
It was only fair for Kit to give an answer. “Best,” she said, creating the image in her mind, “I hop on TK, and we clear all of the jumps like superstars on the first try. With my hands up in the air like this.” And she threw both arms up in the air like she was riding a roller coaster.
Anya actually smiled. “Worst?”
Kit didn’t have to create an image for that. It had been haunting her since coming to Covington. “My fear overpowers all of my other senses, and I pass out in the dirt. Face-first. And the video goes viral.” She frowned at the mental image, but Anya’s cute giggle broke through. Kit took advantage of it and pushed the riding uniform back at her. “Come on, get dressed.”
The suggestion just made Anya bow her head. “I’m taking a sickie,” she announced, and flopped back on her pillows, pulling the duvet over her head. She became nothing more than a suspicious lump in the bed again.
Kit let it go. Anya just needed time, right?
Right?
Nav was trying to study — he really was. He sat comfortably cross-legged on his bed, textbook and notebook open on his lap, pen in hand, his mind clear of distractions —
No, that wasn’t true. About every three minutes, his roommate (Will, of all people) tossed a wadded piece of paper at the trash can. Sometimes it went in. Sometimes it didn’t. Either way, the noise of Will crunching each sheet of paper into a wad followed by the sound of said wad hitting the trash can (either on its way in or bouncing its way out) disrupted Nav’s train of thought. How could one possibly improve one’s intellectual abilities in such a hectic environment?
It wasn’t bad enough that Will was, by any standards known on Earth, untidy. It was the fact that he didn’t stop at untidy. He dived all the way into filthy and continued right up to the burning edges of toxic waste dump. While Nav’s side of the room was spotless — bed tidily made, clothing neatly put away, floor clear, furniture surfaces not only clutter free but dusted and polished — Will’s side of the room displayed all the charm of a bar brawl — clothes strewn everywhere, dresser and table overflowing with piled-up junk, bed unmade, posters half hanging off the walls. And to top it off, Will lay in his unmade bed fully dressed and listening to loud music on headphones while reading some magazine or other and eating crisps. A bag of crisps! In bed! Getting greasy crumbs all over his sheets and pillows! And he didn’t care!
It was enough to give Nav nightmares.
When yet another piece of paper got wadded up and thrown, Nav listened for the results. He didn’t hear the sound of paper-in-can but of paper-on-floor. “You missed,” he stated. He enjoyed stating the obvious. It annoyed Will to no end.
“I’ll get it later,” Will said grumpily.
“If you’re going to act like a pig, William, you will soon become one.”
“Did you know that pigs are very smart?” Will shot back. “Anyway, I know exactly where everything is.” He gestured at his mountains of clutter. “It’s my system.”
Nav had had enough. “Either you pick it up, or you get better aim.”
Will adjusted his headphones. “Oh, sorry, can’t hear you. Guitar solo.” And just to annoy Nav even more, he began to hum, very badly, along with the tune.
Okay, two could play this game. Nav ripped out a page of his notebook, crunched it up, and tossed it. Perfect shot right into the trash can! “That’s how it’s done,” he said with a superior smile, adding, “Andrada style.”
He should have known better. Before Nav could even think about resuming his studies, Will crunched up another page and scored. “That’s not so hard.”
Nav tried again and missed. “Two out of three?” he suggested.
Will gestured for him to go ahead.
Nav tossed and scored.
Will wadded up a paper, tossed, and missed. “Three out of five?”
Nav knew to quit while he was ahead. “No, thank you. I’ve got some tack to clean.”
“You serious?” Will leaned back. “I got all mine cleaned after the event yesterday.”
That sounded like a challenge to Nav. “Are you saying that you’re faster than me?”
“Hear what you want to hear,” Will replied. “Andrada style.”
Oh, yes, that was a challenge. “Let the games begin!” Nav said, and he hustled out the door without looking back. He didn’t have to. He knew that Will would follow. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, after all.
Kit was sharing some quality time with TK. She had just given him a thorough grooming in his stall and was now putting the equipment back into her grooming box.
“It’s so different here,” she chatted, placing several different currycombs into the box along with a soft face brush and hoof-pick. “I keep having major misunderstandings. So I’ve started a list.” She pulled TK’s tail brush out of her back poc
ket and dropped it in the box. “It’s in the boot means something’s in the trunk of a car, not in my footwear.” She flapped a couple of rags clean and dropped those into the box along with a sponge. “A fizzy drink is soda pop, so I can stop giving Will weird looks when he offers me one.”
She checked around the stall and located the pulling comb, a tool used to thin a horse’s mane so that it lay down more smoothly and was easier to braid for shows. She hadn’t yet ridden TK in a show, but since that was the plan, she figured she should use one on him. TK nickered as she placed the pulling comb into the box. She pretended that he’d asked her a question, to which she replied, “There wasn’t even anybody in class to laugh with me about it. Anya is still in bed.” She picked up the grooming box and placed it outside the stall so that she’d remember to take it back to the tack room.
Her dad approached with a wheelbarrow full of hay. “Hey, kiddo,” he greeted her. “What are you up to?”
Kit instantly recognized his tone. He was trying to sound casual, but underneath that light greeting was a question she didn’t want to hear and especially didn’t want to answer. So she said flippantly, “Oh, just teaching TK to throw down like Jay Z.”
“Really.”
“Well, I figure if I can get him spitting mad rhymes, Lady C will have to let me keep him.”
Rudy was in no mood for jokes. “If you want to keep him, you’re going to have to ride him. Otherwise he’ll be gone so fast it’ll make your head spin. Lady C’s not in the mood to compromise.”
So much for avoiding the topic. “You don’t have to be so blunt.”
“Push yourself a little. You need to get on that horse yesterday.”
Over in the tack room, Nav and Will were in a race to finish cleaning their saddles. They’d reached the polishing stage, standing side by side, each of their saddles on a sturdy wooden saddle rack while they madly rubbed with polishing rags. They tried to ignore that they could hear Kit and Rudy talking.
“My knees get wobbly,” they heard Kit say, “and my stomach starts to flop around like I’m on the world’s nastiest roller coaster.”
“It feels bigger than it is,” came Rudy’s fatherly voice as the boys continued their polishing. “Just take a deep breath so your imagination doesn’t get ahead of you. Tell yourself you can do it.”
Nav couldn’t stand it anymore. “Sounds like Kit could use a hand,” he commented. “I could even offer her a little boost into the saddle —”
“Done!” Will yelled, dropping his rag and stepping back triumphantly.
Nav stopped polishing. “You can’t possibly be done.”
“Yeah, well, the less you talk, the more work gets done.”
Nav clenched his teeth. A slob like Will couldn’t possibly have beaten him and done a good job. “I’m going to check your work.”
“Go for it,” Will replied. “I’ll be helping.” He jerked his thumb behind him, indicating Kit.
He ran out, leaving Nav to examine his untidy pile of work rags and polish. “Pigsty.” Then Nav got an idea and pulled out his mobile phone. . . .
Will quietly approached TK’s stall. “Who can handle the wildest horse in here?” Rudy was asking his daughter. “You. That’s rare. That’s special. And remember, growing up, you spent nearly every weekend at the ranch with your mom and me.”
“Yeah, and then I fell off. And I remembered that horses are high and weigh, like, a bazillion pounds.”
That made Rudy chuckle. “Do you know how many times I’ve fallen off? Too many times to count.”
“Not helping,” Kit said, dismayed enough by the whole dilemma that she added, “Rudy,” knowing it would annoy her dad. It was a childish thing to do, but the fact that her dad had fallen off a dozen horses just didn’t make her feel any better.
Will made his move and entered the stall. “Hey, what if you rode something else?” he suggested.
“Like what, a train?” Kit asked. “Great idea.”
“No, like something that’s not a horse,” said Will, “like a pony or something.”
Josh was good at rugby. Though Covington stressed the equestrian arts and left little time for students to do much more than maintain their classes and ride, he’d made sure to squeeze enough time into his schedule for the rugby team as well. He was high-energy; he needed to keep moving. Then there was the matter of physique. He was determined to develop a six-pack. Girls liked six-packs, and he liked girls, so it only seemed logical.
He was heading for his room in Juniper Cottage after practice, thinking manly thoughts about six-packs, which then made him thirsty for a fizzy drink, when he stopped. Something nudged at the back of his mind.
He had just passed a bench. Something about it . . .
When he turned around to look again, he recognized the person sitting on it. Oh, she was wearing a disguise, of sorts — dark glasses, printed kerchief over her dark hair, a raincoat over her uniform even though the sky was clear. She made him think of the old movie star Grace Kelly, whose movies his mother loved to watch on DVD. But this wasn’t Grace Kelly.
“You know, I don’t know which celebrity you are, but hey, can I get your autograph?” He sat down next to her.
“Hey, Josh,” Anya answered quietly.
“I thought you had, like, extreme chicken pox.”
“My roommate really knows how to sell a story.” Anya took off her glasses, turned to face him, and asked out of nowhere, “How do you get ready? When you’re going to a show?”
It took a minute for Josh to shift from rugby/fizzy drinks/girls to horse show preparation. “Eat a lot of carbs, sleep tons, burn pictures of my rivals in a midnight ceremony beneath the blood moon —”
Anya stood up. “Forget it.”
Josh reached out and took her arm, gently pulling her back to the bench. “I have a tack box with all the stuff that Whistler needs,” he said seriously. “And then I have my own bag, and I have a checklist for that. So, you know, a day or two before, I go down the list and make sure that everything’s in there. My mom helped me work out a system.”
A system. Anya liked that idea. “I’ve never really lived by myself before.”
“None of us have,” Josh said. “Except maybe Elaine. I think she was born fully formed and, like, forty.”
That made Anya laugh, but her next question was accompanied by a pleading expression. “No, I mean, like, I’ve always had . . . help.” She stressed the word, as though there was some meaning that she hoped he’d catch on to.
He puzzled over what she’d meant by help. “Like, help with a capital H? Like servants?”
Anya tipped her head one way then the other, trying not to commit to an answer.
Josh had already suspected that Anya was not your run-of-the-mill student. Of course she had servants! “Like riding instructors and coaches? Cooks, personal chefs, personal shoppers — nannies?” He clearly enjoyed the idea and eagerly asked her, “Oh! Did you have one of those ladies who, like, handed you a towel after you washed your hands? Or one of those dudes who would taste the food and make sure, like, nothing was messed with?”
Josh could see relief flooding through Anya. She nodded. “Something like that.”
“That is sweet!” He turned serious again. “Listen, Big A, it makes total sense that you had a tough time getting ready for the meet. It was like a first for you.”
“But you think I could learn?”
All he could think was how cute she looked when she needed reassurance. “Yeah,” he told her, and he meant it.
Kit entered the practice ring after Will. The only reason she was actually going to try this was because it was Will’s idea. That didn’t mean she was happy about it. Anything but.
“You promise she’s not scary?” she asked.
“I promise,” Will assured her. They crossed the grass, heading for a post where a saddled pony stood ready and waiting. “I give you — Mrs. Whiskers!”
Mrs. Whiskers’s back swayed slightly, and her brown coat ha
d a noticeable gray tinge to it. If there was such a thing as a sweet, old granny horse, Mrs. Whiskers was it. The pony flicked an ear as if in greeting but kept munching from a little pile of hay. Kit figured that if an alien rocket ship landed in the practice ring, Mrs. Whiskers would give it a glance and then go back to chewing.
“Okay, even I can agree to the fact that she looks pretty unscary,” Kit admitted. “She’s big, though.”
“Well, TK’s about sixteen hands,” said Will. “She’s barely twelve. She’ll fit in your pocket.”
Kit knew that the size of a horse was measured in hands, with one hand equaling four inches. The measurement was taken from the ground up to the horse’s withers, which was the little ridge between their shoulder blades. That meant that TK, being sixteen hands high, measured sixty-four inches tall. Mrs. Whiskers, at twelve hands, measured a mere forty-eight inches tall. Kit could see right over her back.
“Plus, she’s about a million years old, and she’s had a million different riders,” Will went on, trying to encourage Kit, “so she’ll be fine. Do you want to go for it?”
This was it. The moment of truth.
A thrill of terror shot through Kit’s innards, making her tremble. I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, ran through her mind, along with I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this. She felt her body shrink into itself as if trying to hide right there in the open field. “I forget how to start.”
Will grinned. “Left foot in the left stirrup, then you swing your right leg over the back of the saddle, and up you go.”
“She’s eating!” Kit blurted, pointing at Mrs. Whiskers as if Will might not have noticed all that loud nonstop chewing. “Is that okay? Maybe I should wait. Maybe I should eat!”
“Kit.” Will sounded sympathetic, but he was also cutting her excuses short. She had to do this, and they both knew it.
“I’m still scared.”
Will tried a different approach. “Do you know what I’m scared of? Snakes.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No, I’m not. Have you seen the way they move? They’re like cut-off fingers that want to crawl all over you.” He shivered. “I once jumped off a footbridge just ’cause someone made a hissing noise.”
Kit Meets Covington Page 8
