Thief of Happy Endings

by Kristen Chandler

  I look over my shoulder. Justin’s talking to Coulter and Darius about something life changing, like how to spit farther. “About like I thought it would be.” But I have other things to do tonight than talk about that jerk. “You ever had anyone besides me scared of getting on a horse?”

  “Sure.” She keeps eating. It’s barbecue tonight, and everybody’s ravenous.

  “How’d they get over it?”

  She munches her coleslaw thoughtfully. “They got on. I mean, I stood next to them, but it comes down to that really. I’ve even kept the horse in a halter and led them, but they had to get on.”

  I try to imagine myself climbing on. I drop my spoon in my food. “I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?” says Charlie. He sits down right next to Kaya. He’s having seconds on beans. I’m glad I’m not in his tent tonight. But I love the denim jacket he’s wearing. Red kerchief pockets. I mean, it looks a little out of place compared to the T-shirts the rest of us are wearing, but the kid has style.

  “I just can’t,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Everything makes sense if you understand it all the way through,” says Charlie.

  Surprisingly, that makes sense, even if Charlie said it. Behind me I hear Banner laughing. I didn’t mean to start this conversation in such a public place. “There ought to be a better reason why I’m afraid. On the other hand, it also seems logical to me that if doing something hurts, you don’t do it. Maybe the illogical part is that I’m here at all.”

  Alice sits next to me. She must have had a great ride today because she’s eating enough for two Alices. She has barbecue sauce on her cheek.

  “Maybe you’re making this too hard,” she says. “The best part about horses is that when you get on them you don’t have to think about anything else.”

  “Great,” I say. “But how do I get to that part?”

  Ethan shoves in. I’m having an intervention. “Alice is right. You just have to do it. You can’t overthink it.”

  “Spoken by the person who has been afraid of nothing ever,” I say.

  Ethan laughs. His plate is so full it’s bending at the edges. “I’m afraid of things. I’m afraid of sleeping in the same tent as Charlie tonight.”

  “Me too,” says Charlie.

  * * *

  The mustang is having as bad a night as I am. First he blows, and then he bellows. How can no one else hear him? I look at Banner’s cot. Her breathing is steady. Alice is silent but I think she’s out, too. I go for the bear box as quietly as I can. I take out the two beautiful red apples I stashed from dinner tonight and put them in my jacket next to my flashlight.

  The mustang corral is a walk. But it’s blissfully chilly after a day of heat and flies. And the moon is full. I walk close to the trees. Crickets and wind cover the crunch of my footsteps until I hit the soft dirt trail. I almost turn back when I get to the draw. In the dark, the trail feels twice as skinny and three times as long. But after a night of people telling me how to stop being such a baby, I can’t go back.

  The mustang’s whinnies get louder once I get on top of the plateau and am near the fencing, so it’s not hard to locate where he is. The electric fence is hot, so I just look through the wires at him. In the moonlight, he glows white. He looks so huge and miserable. He runs back and forth. The other horses give him ample room. I think about what Justin said about the fix being in. He whinnies again.

  I hold the apples out. “Hey, Goliath,” I whisper. “What’s up?”

  He stops whinnying.

  I stand stock-still and hold the shiny fruit out. He blows through his nose, but quietly, like he’s thinking. Maybe he thinks too much, too. I feel prickles on my skin as he walks closer. He sniffs the air. “Goliath. You like that name? He was a bully, too. But he kicked some butt for a while.”

  I chuck one apple just over the fence so he’ll come right next to me. He lifts his head up and down, shaking his long mane, but doesn’t move farther forward. I chuck the other apple. He waves his head at the apples irritably but stands his ground.

  “Come on, you do it for Justin. And he’s a complete ass.”

  It feels nice to talk to Goliath. I think he gets it. Also I bet he agrees. Even if Justin does mesmerize him with horse sorcery. That nose. That attitude. Those stupid arms.

  The gelding looks off, shunning my petty bribe. He can’t be had so easily. Go, proud cut. But I hear him chomping the fruit as soon as I turn my back to return to the tent. And I don’t hear him whinny afterward. Not once as I fall asleep.

  I don’t know what I’ve accomplished. But something.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE NEXT MORNING Justin is standing by the outhouse waiting for me.

  “What brings you here?” I ask.

  He doesn’t laugh. “We need to start over.”

  I probably should almost-apologize, too. “Okay,” I say.

  “Let’s do our lesson right now. Before everyone gets up.”

  I haven’t even brushed my hair. I’m wearing a hoodie with tree sap on the shoulder. “Can I go do my jobs first?”

  “No,” he says. “I’ll explain to Kaya. Let’s go.” Then he starts walking across the field. His long, skinny legs take one step for my two. Luckily, there’s enough pink-and-yellow light coming up over the mountains that I can see the holes in the ground. Plus I just did this walk a few hours ago in the dark.

  We walk up the hill to the mustangs in silence. Well, I can hear the rooster waking up. I breathe too loudly. Being alone with Justin is hard on my nervous system.

  He asks, “How did you get hurt from a horse? When you were little, right? Tell me the whole thing.” He doesn’t even turn around to ask me. Like we’re doing a tour and I’m supposed to show him the room with my crazy in it. Plus I love that Kaya or Coulter blabbed this to him.

  “I got bucked off. Thirty stitches.”

  “Yeah, what else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No. I don’t believe that.”

  What? “Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t know. Why does anybody lie? But if we’re going to get you on a horse in three days, then the first thing we’ve got to do is figure out what you’re scared of. Fear’s an animal. I want to know what we’re hunting.”

  “Do you always talk like that?”

  We walk a little ways more. Logically, I know he’s trying to help. But it doesn’t feel like his business. I don’t need a therapist. I need a riding instructor. So I don’t say anything, and he doesn’t ask again.

  When we get to the pasture the horses aren’t there. I try not to act surprised, since I wasn’t exactly supposed to be here socializing in the middle of the night. “Where are they?”

  “I moved them to the second pasture to give this grass a rest.”

  “This morning? How long have you been up?”

  He says, “I’m not much of sleeper.”

  “Me either,” I say.

  He tips his head. “I noticed.”

  We walk across the top of the bluff until we reach a dense patch of trees and stream, then we cross the stream on rocks. There’s still a layer of mist on the ground that makes everything smell like sage and cheatgrass. As pretty as it all is, I’d like to know where we’re going. My feet are getting blisters. And we are a long way from anyone else. “Are we walking to town?”

  He frowns. “Are you tired?”

  “No,” I say.

  A breeze pushes through the pines. The stream bubbles. I guess walking’s not the worst thing I could be doing this morning.

  “There,” he says.

  The mustangs are grazing in lush undergrowth on the other side of the trees. They’re enclosed by two strands of electric fencing. “How’d you get them over here?”

  “I haltered the gelding, and they followed me.”

 
“They followed the gelding? I’d think the other horses would want to stay as far away from him as possible.”

  “Horses follow strength.” He nods. He’s using that calm voice he used on the speckled mare. But the way he treated me yesterday is still fresh in my mind. He puts out his hand. “You can find a stump and sit on it if you don’t like standing.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Watching.”

  “For what?”

  “Just tell me what you see.”

  The gray gelding is in the corner by himself, and the other yearlings are milling around each other, grazing off the buffet table of grasses. They all have their heads down and their ears flopped over forward. Most of the horses are two or three years old. Big, but not full-grown. They flip each other with their tails. Two geldings chase each other around the perimeter of the fencing. I wonder if the gray gelding remembers me. He doesn’t seem to.

  “I guess I see horses hanging out. They seem to like each other.”

  “Yeah. So what do you think this has to do with riding?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does a twelve-hundred-pound animal let a one-hundred-pound animal get on his back?”

  I think about it for a minute before I answer. “I guess it’s because they’re either afraid or they trust the person.”

  “Right, in a way.” Justin’s voice warms up even more. “You can force an animal to do what you want if you know which levers to push. But if you are forcing something on a horse, you have to keep the lever there all the time or you have no control, and after a while the horse will get used to the lever and you’ll have to get a bigger lever. So you have no room to back up and let the horse figure anything out for themself. If I let the horse get to know me, if the horse feels a certain amount of friendship or trust in me, then he likes to be with me. Like you like to be with your friends.”

  “I never thought of that,” I say. Riding a horse is a kind of friendship. “That’s totally cool. My grandfather said something like that. He said you make the horse think it’s his idea.”

  “Your grandfather said that?”

  “Yeah.” It’s weird what I’m remembering about him now.

  “Coulter says that, too. He probably learned it from your grandfather. What else did he teach you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember most of it. I feel like I don’t know anything.”

  “That’s fine. Most of the problems that happen on a horse are because someone thinks they know what they really don’t.”

  “Well, I should be a great student then.”

  Justin almost smiles. “Tell me more about your grandfather.”

  Before I know what I’m doing I’m blabbing my guts out about how my grandfather let me sleep in the hayloft with the cats and taught me to swim in the creek behind his house by chucking me in.

  Justin smiles. “I’d love to have a grandfather like that.”

  “What’s your family like?” I ask.

  “Not like that,” he says. “I’ve been chucked around plenty of times, but never to teach me to swim.”

  While we’re talking I notice the gray gelding moving around in the field. He’s all muscle. Set against the trees his coat shows off all the dark rings of his dappled coloring, like raindrops. His mane flips over his eyes. “Hey, Goliath,” I say without thinking.

  “That’s not his name,” says Justin.

  The gelding takes a step forward. I hold my hand out. “Are you sure? Come here, Goliath.”

  The gelding comes toward me. No doubt he thinks I have another apple.

  Justin stands there with his hands in his pockets.

  I put my hand all the way out over the fence, careful not to touch it. The gelding walks past two mares and steps within a foot of my fingers. He shakes his head and stops, then he sniffs and lifts his head to me. And right about the moment I’m feeling smug, Goliath leans over and nearly takes my thumb off with his mouth. I pull my hand out of the way just in time. “Hey!” I yell.

  Goliath doesn’t back away. He stands at the fence watching us.

  Justin’s voice is sharp. “How did you do that?”

  I look at my hand. All five fingers. “Yeah, I’m okay.” I look at the horse again. I know he’s a horse, but if he weren’t I would think he was laughing.

  “He never does that,” says Justin.

  “Eat people’s fingers?”

  “He likes you.”

  “He does? Wow, I hope he never loves me.”

  All the way back to the ranch Justin asks me questions about my grandfather. Which is not exactly what I expected from a riding lesson, but it’s also cool because I start remembering even more. The accident wasn’t all that special, but my time before it happened was. My grandparents spoiled me with things like homemade ice cream and shopping trips to town. My grandmother watched old movies with me and my grandfather did magic tricks with peanuts. I mean, I was messed up by the injury and the shock of it. But I should have been okay. I should have gotten back on, and I didn’t. My parents should have put me back on, but they didn’t. My grandparents didn’t come see us in Colorado. There were just lots of didn’ts.

  “The horse just threw you in the air and split your head open. What scared him enough to buck?”

  Of course Justin asks about the horse. “I don’t remember, and my parents don’t like to talk about it. My mother says I could have had brain damage.”

  “So you got thirty stiches and then you never rode a horse again. After riding like a wild thing before?”

  “Yes,” I say, my face heating up.

  He looks me up and down. “You lack resilience, girl.”

  It’s hard to believe how much it hurts me to hear Justin say this. Maybe because I lack resilience. But his words pound in my ears like a drum. I march to the beat of a fainthearted drummer. We walk across the bluff and down the trail in silence, at least on the outside. I’m listening to failure drums that could drown out a football stadium at halftime.

  Then, right before we’re out of the canyon, Justin grabs my arm. Hard. I pull back from him, but he won’t let go. His face is expressionless. Not mad. But blank. I think he’s gone crazy. I’m walking alone with a cowboy psychopath. I reach out with my other hand and swing, like out of nowhere, hard. Lightning quick, he ducks and lets go of my arm. And then he laughs.

  I jump away from him and yell. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Sorry,” he says, still laughing. “I just had to know. You’ve got resilience. You just gotta get mad first. Then you’re fine.”

  “Look at my arm.” I pull up my sleeve, and there’s a puffy red fingerprint. I don’t know what gets into me, but when I look up and see him smirking I reach over and hit him in the shoulder. Hard. At least for me. He doesn’t stop laughing.

  “Yep,” he says, with a wide smile. “I can work with that.”

  I turn my fainthearted face toward camp and walk as fast as I can without running. But it does no good. The memory of that day I got hurt follows me. It’s like the wind around here. Once it gets going I can’t stop it or outrun it, so I let it roll right over the top of me.

  * * *

  WHEN GRANDPA ASKED me if I wanted to ride Hurricane I wasn’t worried. I mean, I had no reason to be. Riding a more advanced horse was just another thing I could brag about after I was done.

  Of course, I noticed this horse was different when we were saddling him. He tried to bite my arm when I brushed him. He flipped his head when I put on the bridle. When I picked out his hooves I had to have Grandpa help me because he wouldn’t lift his legs. By the time I finally got on him I was in as bad a mood as he was. Well, almost.

  He seemed okay through the warm-up, just pulling on the reins here and there. Then the wind came along and ruffled the trees by the arena fence. He broke away into a trot. Grandpa yelled
at me to get my horse under control. So I did what any self-respecting seven-year-old would do. I yanked back hard on the reins and yelled, “Whoa.”

  Instead of stopping, everything just happened in slow motion.

  When that bridle’s bit smacked his mouth, Hurricane came up off the ground like there was a bomb underneath him. When he came back down, he seesawed back and forth bronco style. I grabbed the horn with both hands to save myself, but that just meant I dropped one of my reins. Within a second the rein was under his feet, snapping in half, scaring him back up on his hind legs. With the one rein I had left, I pulled his head. He spun sideways and pitched me backward into the air, slamming my shoulders and the base of my head into the fence.

  I always say I don’t remember. And I don’t remember hitting the fence, not the impact anyway. But I remember in sharp, clear color the details of what came before. And what I remember the most is the feeling of knowing that I was about to be hurt and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  WHEN I GO to bed that night I hear Goliath calling. I’m tired. I’m so far past discouraged I don’t remember what it looked like when I crossed the state line. I’m hundreds of miles from home but not one inch closer to riding a horse than I was when I got here.

  I can only listen to my roommates sleep peacefully for so long. I find the apples I’ve hidden in my sleeping bag. I put my dang boots on and walk up the long hill one more time. When I get to the pasture Goliath is whinnying at the fence. I throw out the apple instead of holding it in my hand. I want to keep my fingers this time. At least, I’m getting a little braver standing next to horses. I just don’t dare sit on one yet.

  When I get back to the cabin Alice is actually snoring, although it sounds more like a cat purring. I walk over to the bed of the girl who didn’t come and stare at it. I reach out my hand and run my fingers over the empty cot.

  “What the freak are you doing?” asks Banner.

  I jump. “Sleepwalking,” I say.