“Yes. You. You have a natural gift. I know you know this. It’s in your blood. Why do you think I let you clean stalls in order to ride when I can hardly afford it?”
I felt sick and yet over the moon all at the same time. Esther thought I had the talent to make it but now I knew the awful truth. Her barn was in trouble.
CHAPTER SIX
Nobody came for their lesson. I stood in the barn holding Harlow’s reins, wondering what I’d done. The British girls were missing in action. Esther said that Mickey had stopped by first thing to say that she wouldn’t be able to ride today. The team was falling apart before it even had a chance to stick together and I was left with the sick realization that my show dreams were over before they had even begun.
Esther came out of the tack room with some open front boots and handed them to me. The leather was supple beneath my fingers, the sheepskin soft and thick.
“Put these on him,” she said. “He needs to remember what it feels like when he hits a rail. He’s become far too lazy.”
“Won’t that hurt him?” I said, pulling off his wraps.
“Just a sting,” she patted Harlow on the neck. “It won’t hurt the old guy.”
I buckled the boots on, making sure they were snug but not too tight. He dipped his head down to see what I was doing, his reins still looped through my elbow.
“You’ve got your fancy boots on,” I told him. “So please be careful. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
He sniffed my hair and fumbled it gently with his lips. Then he blew his nose all over me.
“Thanks a lot,” I laughed, wiping the snot from my face.
“Why are we even doing this?” I asked as Esther handed me my helmet. “We don’t even have a team anymore.”
“We have you,” she said. “And Harlow.”
I tried to smile back at her as she beamed at me but deep down I felt really scared. If Esther was pinning all her hopes on me then things must be really bad. I’d never even competed in a show before, unless you counted the pony classes when I was five and I was pretty sure I spent most of those hanging onto my pony’s mane as I bounced around in the saddle like a little sack of potatoes.
I was nervous and Harlow knew it. He pranced his way over to the arena with his tail flagged, looking like an Arabian. Then he stepped on my foot. I yelled and pushed him off where he stood with his eyes wide because I’d had the nerve to slap him on the neck. Esther stood with her arms folded, glaring at us both.
“Emily,” she said. “Take a breath. This isn’t the show. This is just a lesson, just like any other lesson.”
But it didn’t feel like just another lesson. Esther had me warm Harlow up and then take him over the same course that I took Hampton over the day before. And where Hampton had taken the jumps in stride, powering over them with his massive hindquarters, I felt Harlow struggling.
“It’s too much for him,” I said as I pulled him up.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she patted him on the neck.
I didn’t feel like taking Harlow for a walk through the woods after our lesson. Instead I gave him a long bath and rubbed a good amount of liniment on his legs and back. He sidestepped away from me in the wash rack.
“I know you have sensitive skin,” I said. “But it’s for your own good. Trust me. You’ll be thanking me tomorrow.”
He didn’t think so but I put it on anyway, the menthol stinging my fingers. I put him back in his stall and sat in the corner, watching him. Esther said he was eighteen. Not too old but certainly not in the prime of his life. She was pushing him and I knew it. But what was worse was that she was making me push him too. I wanted to compete. I wanted to win. But not at the expense of the horse that I loved.
He nudged his pile of hay, tossing it aside to look for the tasty pieces that had fallen through. If the light was right, you could still see the scars on his side where the trail guides had beaten him to make him behave. He’d been through so much. It wasn’t fair.
I rode my bike home dejectedly and spent the afternoon in my room doing homework. It was piling up and something I usually avoided at all costs but I was hoping that maybe if I did something I hated, then I would stop feeling so bad. Penance for the way I’d treated Mickey and the way I was treating Harlow. I had to restore my good karma somehow but the homework didn’t seem to be working. I stared at the math problems and the numbers danced in front of my face as tears filled my eyes. Why did everything always have to be so hard?
“Are you okay?”
It was Mom, standing in the doorway with a sandwich and a smile. I wanted to run to her and fold myself up in her arms. To tell her everything that I was going through but it was the one thing I couldn’t do. So I just smiled back and nodded.
“Lots of homework,” I said.
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
She squinted at me. Her Mom sense was obviously kicking in. I was going to have to feed her something otherwise she wasn’t going to let this go.
“I just had a fight with Mickey, that’s all.”
“That’s a shame. What was it about?”
She sat on my bed and handed me the sandwich. I laid it on the floor next to me, unable to eat anything right now.
“It was just something stupid,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings but I did and now she won’t forgive me.”
“She will,” Mom said. “Give it time. She’s a good friend. I know she won’t stay mad at you forever.”
“But how can I make her listen to my apology when she won’t even talk to me?”
“You just keep trying. Why don’t you do something nice for her?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Mom laughed. “She’s your friend. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Mickey loved surprises and gifts. I just had to come up with something awesome to win her back.
“Thanks Mom,” I said.
For once I felt like she’d actually helped me. But coming up with a surprise for Mickey was harder than I thought it would be. I only had ten dollars and sixty nine cents in the tin I kept in the back of my closet and that wouldn’t buy very much. At least it wouldn’t buy anything that would make Mickey happy. She had the best of everything already. How was I supposed to compete with that?
At school Mickey ignored me. Every time I tried to talk to her she turned away and pretended that I didn’t exist. So I trailed after her from class to class, hoping that she wouldn’t be able to hate me forever but apparently she had the stubbornness of a mule. At lunch she actually sat on the table with the girls we used to laugh about. The ones on the cheerleading team who cared more about makeup and boys than anything else.
Mickey had always been my salvation in a school where I felt like an outcast and now I was back to being alone and hated. She even laughed along with them and every now and then they sent evil glares in my direction. I couldn’t take it anymore. I dumped my uneaten food in the trash and spent the rest of lunch in the library, scouring the only two horse books there for advice on how to help Harlow.
The books just told me what I already knew. Harlow needed to be conditioned. He needed to be ridden every day. But how could I explain that away to my Mom? Choir practice every day? She’d never believe me. There was always Esther but she barely had the time to ride at all. Her full time barn help had quit a few months back and she hadn’t found a replacement yet. She’d been mucking stalls and turning out horses ever since. I hadn’t seen her ride in ages. It was starting to look hopeless.
After school I rode my bike to the mall. It was full of Mom’s with screaming toddlers and kids from my school. At least I didn’t see Mickey anywhere. I spent ages wandering from store to store, looking for something to show Mickey I cared. I couldn’t find anything. The stores were filled with shiny plastic things that pretended you needed them when the reality was that you didn’t and that they would break in a few weeks anyway when the shininess had w
orn off. I didn’t want to show her how important her friendship was to me with some fake piece of plastic.
I was just about to give up when I saw it, hanging on a hook at one of those jewelry stands in the middle of the mall. It was silver and delicate, a tiny horseshoe hanging from a chain. Mickey always said that she had bad luck. This horseshoe would hopefully bring her the fortune she thought she didn’t have. But it was twenty dollars and I didn’t have twenty dollars.
The girl behind the counter saw me eyeing it wistfully. She had hot pink hair and a nose ring. I wondered how she blew her nose when she got a cold.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said, pointing to the horseshoe.
“Yes but I can’t afford it. Any chance you’d sell it for less?”
She looked at the tag and then at me.
“I wish I could,” she said. “But my boss would kill me.”
“It’s okay. Never mind.”
But it wasn’t okay. I went home and had nightmares about falling off Harlow halfway round the course at the show and there was Mickey, standing over me laughing. The next day at school was worse than ever. I found a note pinned to my locker. For a moment I got my hopes up that Mickey had forgiven me and everything was back to normal but when I opened the piece of paper I saw a stick drawing of me, falling off a horse and landing in a big pile of manure. Turned out my nightmare wasn’t so far off after all.
By Wednesday it felt like everything was starting to fall apart for good. I dumped my bike at the end of the barn, looking for Mickey or her Mom’s car. I didn’t see either.
“Is she here?” I asked Esther, who was in the office.
She shook her head. “No. She rode yesterday.”
I sunk down into one of the rickety chairs. “I guess the show is off then. Mickey won’t ride with me. The Brits never came back. I guess we should just forget about the whole thing.”
“I’m sorry,” Esther said. “I should never have put you on Hampton. This is all my fault.”
“No,” I said sadly. “I could have said no but I didn’t. The truth was that I wanted to ride him. I wanted to show Mickey that I was better than she was and now I’ve ruined everything.”
“They’ll always be another show,” Esther said.
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to think about riding in a show ever again. It had ruined everything. And deep down, I was also kind of glad. I didn’t want to be the one who pushed Harlow so hard that he broke. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. So I guess part of me was glad that Mickey had walked out and Esther had decided to scratch the show idea. Maybe now everything could go back to normal and Mickey wouldn’t hate me anymore.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Let’s forget about riding in the ring today,” Esther said, looking at my downtrodden face. “If I saddle Saffron, we could ride down to the beach. I could use a break and it looks like you could too.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling.
I wasn’t a big fan of the beach when it came to surfers and sunbathers but riding was another thing altogether. Esther had taken us once before and it was one of the most magical things I’d ever done in my whole life. The horses pranced through the surf and we rode up and down the shoreline, the waves crashing around our feet. After that, Mickey and I begged Esther every week for a month to let us go back but she said that we needed to work on more things than galloping through the surf like the Black Stallion. She was probably right but today, that was exactly the sort of thing I needed.
“Today we’re going for a ride that you’ll really enjoy,” I told Harlow as I picked out his feet.
He looked at me curiously when I left his legs bare. Salt water made the wraps sag and the boots just got too heavy. Today Harlow would be going naked.
“Put the synthetic on,” Esther put one of the synthetic saddles on the rack.
The last time we went, Esther didn’t have enough of the synthetic saddles to go around and we spent a week trying to get the ocean out of the leather ones.
“And use this bridle,” she said. “You might have to adjust it a little but it should fit him okay.”
I picked the bridle up off the hook. It had a flash noseband and a d-ring with a slow twist. The leather was soft and supple between my fingers.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“He starts to pull when you gallop,” she said, walking away from me with the tack for Saffron.
“Gallop?” I squeaked.
There were only three paces at Sand Hill Sables. Walk, trot and canter. Very controlled canter. Galloping was for cowboys, at least that’s what Esther always told us and that if she ever so much as caught us attempting to urge our horses into a gallop, we’d be grounded for a really long time. And grounded at Sand Hill wasn’t like being grounded at home. It was worse. Much worse. It meant no time in the saddle until Esther forgave you for whatever you’d done wrong. And endless tack cleaning.
But this time she turned and smiled.
“You know Emily, conditioning. I’m sure you’ve read all about it. I saw that worried look on your face when you took Harlow over the last course.”
All the worry I’d been holding inside melted away as I mounted Harlow and waited for Esther. It wasn’t long before she was leading Saffron down the barn towards me. The pretty mare was black and white with one blue eye and the sweetest personality you ever did meet in a horse, on the ground anyway. She loved sugar cubes and wither scratches and Esther had bought her in the hopes that one day she would be her next champion. But Saffron was only four and when it came to jumping, she had a mind of her own.
On a good day I’d seen her clear every jump in the ring with feet to spare. On a bad one she’d crashed through every last jump with an evil glare in that one blue eye that said she knew exactly what she was doing. Esther hadn’t yet figured out how to communicate with the temperamental mare and lately she’d had no time at all. But she was a beautiful horse and as Esther put a foot in the stirrup and took up the reins, Saffron sidestepped with her black and white tail held high.
“This should be fun,” Esther grinned. “Maybe I should pack my seatbelt.”
“Grab mane and kick on?” I laughed. It was something Esther always shouted at us.
“Grab mane and kick on indeed,” she grinned back.
Saffron was far too full of herself for Esther to lead the way so she pointed out the paths to follow and Harlow stepped out in front. It was a back trail that led to the beach. The only downside was that once we were close, we had to cross a road. It was what made Esther hesitant to bring us in the first place and I had to admit that at the time, standing there by the side of the tarmac, I'd had visions of riders being bucked off and horses galloping wild between the cars.
"Left up ahead," Esther called out.
The trail forked and we took the left, Harlow's gray ears lolling back and forth lazily in front of me. He was happy and relaxed. I felt the tension literally melt away when we passed by the arena and didn't go in.
"We're going to have so much fun," I whispered.
Then I remembered. Mickey. It would have been so much more fun if she was right beside me on Hampton. His sensible bay nose stuck in the air as Saffron snorted and jigged behind us.
The trail was originally made by the local four wheel riders who raced up and down at breakneck speeds and had no regard for anything that had four legs. I'd crossed my fingers that we wouldn’t come across any of them today and we didn't. Soon we were standing at the edge of the black road. Saffron was bug eyed, her back rounded beneath Esther. She had her legs clamped around the mare and her face was set in a grimace. This was Saffron's first trip to the beach and apparently her first road crossing too.
"Should we go first?" I said.
"Yes," Esther nodded. "If she sees Harlow go across without anything eating him alive then hopefully she'll follow."
I wasn't so sure but I gave a little on the reins and Harlow stepped across the tarmac like it was nothing. At the other side we turne
d to face Esther and Saffron. I don't think I'd ever seen her look scared but she was pretty close to it now. Her face pale and lips pursed as she closed her legs around the mare and sent her forward.
For a moment Saffron didn't seem to know what to do and I wondered if she might just go up instead of over. She let out one pitiful whinny to Harlow, who nickered softly in return as if he was telling her that it was okay. Then she launched over the road in a half jump, hooves skittering as she fought to find her balance. In a split second it was over and she was standing next to us, sides billowing in and out as she snorted at the road from this side.
"Wow," I said. "Maybe you should have brought one of the other horses instead."
"Maybe," Esther patted the mare's foamy neck. "But I've neglected her so badly. She needs more time under saddle. It's not her fault that she's still so green. It's mine."
It may have been Esther’s fault that Saffron was green but it would have been my fault if she got bucked off and I didn’t catch the horse in time. That was the sort of responsibility that I could live without. But we were only two blocks away from the beach and Saffron didn’t look like she would be crossing the horse eating road to go back home anytime soon. It was safer to just keep moving forward, so we pressed on and before long the white sands and blue water stretched out before us like a postcard.
“Wow,” I said.
I always forgot how amazing the ocean was. All that water going on and on forever. The breeze was light and the tide had gone out. There was a stretch of wet sand just waiting for our horses to test it out. To the left tourists were dotted on the sand. Their bright towels and umbrellas colorful specks on the horizon but they were too far away to bother us or our horses. To the right were the rocks that jutted out into the water like a lumpy finger.
“Shall we?” Esther asked, her face bright.
“Let’s go!”
We walked our horses through the deep part of the sand and then as soon as we got to the flats, closed our legs around their sides. Saffron let out a buck but Esther just laughed as she reined the willful mare back in and sent her forward. Harlow and I followed her lead as she settled Saffron into a working trot. Back and forth on the wet sand, we made circles and serpentines. Forcing our horses to pay attention to us and not to the unfamiliar environment we had brought them to.
Secret Rider (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 1) Page 4
