Thief of Happy Endings

by Kristen Chandler

  “Now hit that switch for me,” he says, pointing to the circuit box.

  As quick as I pull it he’s in the pasture holding out my apple to Goliath. The horse doesn’t pull back or turn away, just muzzles the apple and gathers it in his mouth. A chunk falls out on the ground. Justin reaches down slowly to get it for him and then strokes the giant gelding. The horse drops his head and smacks his lips together as he chews. It’s like Goliath is a normal horse or something. And then dang if Justin doesn’t slide a hand on that huge mustang’s mane and swing onto his back.

  “Justin!” I yell.

  But it’s too late. Goliath goes up in the air, and Justin goes with him, a gray blur under the moon. Then it’s three hard hops and one full-out buck that lands Justin flat on his back with Goliath running around the pasture scaring the other horses.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing. My brain floods. I slide through the wires and run in.

  Justin isn’t moving on the ground.

  Goliath and the other horses are still swirling around, kicking at each other in the dark. I dodge them and run over to Justin. “Are you okay?”

  He pops up on his elbow. “Help me up.”

  I wrap my arm underneath his and reach around his back. His shirt is damp. I’m so short I’m like a crutch. I feel him up against me, pushing, shaking. “Dammit, Justin.”

  We hobble out of the pasture, and Justin leans up against a big rock. He straightens, like he’s getting his wind back. I leave him and get the fence turned back on. Goliath stops snorting, and the other horses settle down.

  I stand in front of Justin. I’m ready to be mad now. “How stupid can you get?”

  “That wasn’t my best idea. Guess I was showing off.”

  “I guess you were. What if he’d stomped you right in front of me? For what? I have to go.”

  Justin waits until I’ve gone a few steps and then calls to me. “You want to start feeding him? Goliath, I mean.”

  I turn. “Yes,” I say. “I’d love to.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “WHERE DID YOU go last night?” says Alice.

  I tip my boots over to check for mice and then slide them on quickly. Banner is outside brushing her teeth. Light rain is pitter-patting on the canvas of the tent. The sky looks gray and drizzly outside. “I couldn’t sleep so I took a walk.”

  “You should wake me up then,” says Alice. “What if something gets you?”

  “I’m fine.” I hear a mouse scurrying in the corner of the tent. “All the wildlife is in here.”

  Alice frowns. “Where’d you go?”

  I can’t tell her about Justin. It sounds wrong. Like I meant to meet up with him. “No place really. I was looking at stars.”

  “Take me with you next time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say. I feel a weird heaviness between us. “Are you doing all right?”

  Alice turns away from me and doesn’t answer.

  At first I think she doesn’t hear me. “Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head but keeps her back to me.

  I stand behind her, not sure what to do. Her hands are curled up in fists. “Alice?” I put my hand on her shoulder.

  She turns her head, and her eyes are rimmed with tears.

  I look around. It’s just a regular morning. There are no loud noises. A few birds are singing. “Did something happen again?”

  I get her to sit down with me on her cot. I slide close so we’re smashed up against each other. I know this could be making it worse by invading her space, but I do it anyway. I’m a hundred percent on instinct here because I don’t even know why she’s sad. I rub her back a little. She doesn’t seem like she’s bugged by it.

  Finally she says, “I got a letter from my parents.”

  “Oh?” I’ve been so jealous of everyone else’s letters from home it never occurred to me that she might be getting anything but good news.

  Banner walks in. “Y’all comin’ or what?”

  I say, “We’re going to be late.”

  “You should go,” says Alice.

  “Banner, can you tell Kaya we’ll be there in a minute?”

  Banner grimaces, “Because the rules don’t apply to you, right?”

  I look up at Banner, trying to let her see in my face that this isn’t the greatest time to discover the rule book, but she just glares back at me. “Don’t worry about it then.”

  Banner shoves the flap of tent out of her way for her exit. The smell of rain rushes into the tent.

  Once Banner is good and gone, Alice breathes in hard and lets her words wash out all at once. “I have been accepted into the Whitmore Academy. I’ve been working to get in since fifth grade.”

  I’m guessing by her clenched fists this is not a good thing.

  She makes a weird chirping noise and then gets ahold of her voice. “I’m not actually that smart. But my parents think I’m a genius. I already study eight hours a day for public school. This place will kill me.”

  It takes me a second to add up what she’s telling me because I go to public school and all. “That’s like a fourteen-hour day with school. When do you sleep?”

  “My mom supported her family when she was my age. She cleaned houses starting when she was twelve. She hardly slept at all for fifteen years. She always makes a joke that this is why she is so short. But now she is very successful.”

  As Alice tells me this I notice that she hasn’t brushed her hair recently, and there is a dirt smudge on the end of her nose that looks like stage makeup it’s so perfectly round and brown. She looks like an orphan in a musical.

  Outside I hear someone coming up the path to the tent. We’re going to catch it.

  I say, “Here’s the thing, Alice. You aren’t your mom.”

  Alice’s face tightens, and I think she’s going to start crying again.

  I say, “It’s okay. We’ll figure something out. I promise. We’ll figure it out.”

  Alice nods and rubs her fingers under her eyes.

  A black hoodie pokes into the tent. It’s Kaya. “You two have missed roll call. And, Cassidy, you haven’t done your morning job. Do you want me to report you?” Kaya’s voice is sharper than I’ve ever heard it. She steps into the tent all the way and takes off her hood. Her hair is unbraided and messy. Her eyes have dark circles under them, and her mouth is set in a line.

  “I’ll go do it now,” I say.

  “You can do it after breakfast. We won’t be riding for a while with this weather. Justin and Coulter have gone into town.”

  I jog down to the fire with Alice and find Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez arguing in the kitchen. It makes my stomach roil. I ask them if they need more firewood, and Mr. Sanchez tells me the work has been done. Ethan comes in and asks for ketchup, and Mrs. Sanchez tells him that the eggs shouldn’t be wasted with ketchup.

  I stand under the kitchen tarp for a second, and I feel the old tightness in my chest. I felt this way at home all the time. Con-ten-tion. Why are humans like this? It was way worse at home, of course. Way. But even the reminder of it makes me cold all over. Why can’t people just act like I want them to—stop fighting and play nice. I mean, how am I supposed to figure my crap out if I’m always dealing with everybody else’s?

  And it hits me how stupid I am. And how annoyingly right Justin is.

  Maybe the only way I’m going to start feeling better is to stop trying to get people to do what I want—they never do anyway—and help them get what they need. Which is to cheer the smack up.

  I sit down on a food crate in the tent, which is leaking rain, by the way. I look around at the other campers, getting wetter and more ornery. I don’t just feel cold. I am cold. It’s so muddy most of our chores are pointless. At home on days like today I would make everybody grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, then we’d bail and go to the library.r />
  * * *

  I find Kaya in the first aid tent with Danny, who has developed a scab under his nose. I think he’s allergic to the whole state.

  I say, “I heard there is a library in the big house. Can campers go in and check books out?”

  Kaya says, “You can borrow them, if that’s what you mean.” She squeezes the ointment on Danny’s finger and demonstrates how to put it on “What kind of book are you looking for?”

  “I want to learn more about mustangs.”

  Kaya stops working on Danny. “Why do you want to do that?”

  I smile casually. “Just seems like I should know something about all the stuff that BLM guy was talking about. Like the politics and stuff.”

  “The politics and stuff?” Kaya frowns at Danny’s finger, which is mostly going up his nose. “Yeah, I can find you some books. But I can’t promise they’re going to explain anything. And it’s not very cheerful reading. It’s a sad situation.”

  “Is that why somebody is letting the mustangs go? Because the BLM isn’t treating them right?”

  Kaya gives me her full attention. “Some people hate the mustangs and think they’re a nuisance. Some people think the BLM is needlessly incarcerating animals they can’t humanely care for.”

  “What do you think? I mean, is that BLM guy hurting the horses?” I put my hands out like pistols. “Is he a good guy or bad guy?”

  She raises her perfect eyebrows. “I think you ask a lot of questions.”

  Danny gets off the table before she goes after his face again. She takes the rubber gloves off her hands and looks up at me. “Not sure what to make of you, Cassidy. But I like your try, and your curiosity. Don’t make me regret that, okay?”

  Devri and her two buddies walk into the tent. “We’re bored and it’s freezing. And we totally hate it here. Can we go into town?” Devri’s blonde hair is flattened with the rain, and she’s wearing her sweatshirt backward. I’ve seen cranes with more body fat.

  “Absolutely not,” says Kaya.

  I say, “I was actually wondering if we could all go hang out in the big house together and read there. Like a read-a-thon.”

  “A read-a-thon?” says Devri. “What are you, like, seven?”

  Ethan walks into the tent, like we’ve called a meeting or something. He’s soaked from trying to get plastic over the firewood. He has little drizzles of water coming out of his hair and onto his face. “Did I just hear someone say we’re getting out of this mudhole and sitting around a fire with a pretty little book? I am all over that. Like literally, all over frickin’ that.”

  Devri looks at Ethan and nods. “Yeah, that sounds okay.”

  Of course, if Ethan suggests it. I ignore Devri and give Kaya the puppy eyes.

  “I’ll get the Sanchezes to give me the stuff to make grilled-cheese sandwiches,” I say.

  Danny says, “Grilled cheese. We get grilled cheese?”

  Kaya shakes her head at me. “Remember what I said about regretting? Coulter’s going to kill me.”

  * * *

  Almost everyone comes inside just to get warm. Charlie reads a trashed copy of Romeo and Juliet. Ethan reads Les Miserables (the real book) and doesn’t make a peep all afternoon. Alice reads something called Common Parasites and Their Treatments, which sounds like one hundred percent disgusting. Banner writes in her journal. The way she’s scribbling, I’m surprised the pages don’t catch on fire. But we all sit together. The fireplaces crackles. It’s warm and dry and kind of wonderful. Except what I’m reading.

  The first mustang book I dive into is like an encyclopedia of bad news. It isn’t like the Internet fluff I read before I came here. It talks about how the mustangs were brought over by Spanish conquistadors. Over hundreds of years wild horses changed the way Native Americans did everything from war to courting. And wild horses supplied cowboys with a way to settle the West. The mustang became the symbol of the Wild West, but when people started driving cars instead of riding horses, wild horses stopped being useful. People started to think of them as feral, especially ranchers who wanted to run cattle where the horses lived. So the horses were hunted, killed, and used for dog food.

  When they passed a law to protect them, the horses stopped being butchered, but they started being locked up. The last chapter of the book says that nobody knows what to do. The authors don’t even try to give a solution. I close the book with a loud slap.

  Banner says, “Don’t tell me you read that whole book just now.”

  “It has a lot of pictures,” I say.

  “You must make your parents so proud.”

  Alice lifts her eyes over the top of her book.

  “I drive them nuts,” I say.

  “What a shocker,” says Banner.

  * * *

  After I make the sandwiches with the Sanchezes, I read all day. The rain stops, and most of the kids leave and go do other things, but I keep on reading. The picture gets darker in my mind as the clouds roll away. I keep reading, thinking I will find something that could fix everything. But I just get more depressed. The whole idea behind the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was to protect them. But now half the wild horses are in holding pens, and the other half are being chased, harassed, and sometimes even killed. And the money and effort being expended to keep things this way could feed and house a small country.

  When I come to bed Alice has gone back to being silent and sad. Banner looks at old letters.

  Turns out, just because you want to help doesn’t mean you can.

  * * *

  At night I don’t hear Goliath. Maybe Justin has decided to feed him for me. I don’t know because I haven’t seen Justin all day. When the sun goes down I read with my flashlight until my head and my eyes can’t take any more.

  I should write Oakley a letter. But I don’t know what to say.

  It rains for two days. I read every book that Coulter has on the mustangs. Banner goes over to Devri’s tent, and they watch videos on the movie player Devri smuggled into camp. Alice, Charlie, and I sit around and lose at cards to Ethan. And then we divvy up the romance novels, because a person can only take so much reality.

  I watch for Justin. He seems busy with other things.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE RAIN FINALLY stops and the mud dries up. Coulter jumps right back into lessons.

  “Fear. You can only beat fear with knowledge. You have to beat fear to feel right with your horse.” Coulter marches in front of us. We’re all paired off with a saddled horse in the middle of a field not far from the ranch. There’s sharp, nasty thistle all over, and the horseflies are already awake. I don’t like the sound of this lesson. Smokey and I hang in the back. Alice motions for me to come stand with her and the boys in the front. Nope.

  Coulter grabs Scotty from the group of mouthy kids messing around next to Alice. “Scotty, how would you like to be our volunteer today?”

  Scotty flips his white bangs. “Yeah, whatever. Sure.”

  His buddies all laugh and bump elbows.

  Ethan says Scotty’s okay. He just has a little too much attitude and has inhaled a few too many things. I wouldn’t mind him if he wasn’t always making fun of people, like me for instance.

  Coulter says, “Scotty is a surfer.”

  Scotty waves hang-loose fingers for applause.

  “He’s not afraid of anything. Is that correct, Scotty?”

  “Damn straight,” says Scotty, smiling.

  “Excellent. Get on this horse then, please.”

  I glance over at Darius, who’s smiling. Kaya has her arms folded across her chest. Scotty shakes his white bangs to the side of his face. His buddies cheer as he gets on. I can barely stand to watch.

  Coulter says, “Walk Tequila across that stream over there.” Coulter motions to a shallow bed of water that runs around the meadow.

 
Scotty walks Tequila through the tall grass swinging his arms, trash-talking, and laughing. The horse gets along fine until he gets up to the water, then he sniffs and backs up. Scotty spurs him, and Tequila turns in a circle. Scotty leans in and spurs him again. I can tell Scotty’s scared now because he’s clinging to the horse, digging into him. Then out of nowhere he kicks Tequila in the gut, like that will help. Tequila crow hops about a foot and then rears. Scotty yells and then tumbles backward and lands in the grass. The horse hops away and stops.

  “Scotty, are you okay?” asks Coulter, jogging up to him. Kaya and Darius exchange a knowing nod. Justin grabs Tequila.

  Scotty stands up, swearing his living guts out. But he’s fine. I breathe out. He’s fine.

  Coulter says, “Scotty. Will you get back on your horse now, please, and stop screwing around?”

  Scotty spits out a premium selection of expletives.

  Coulter gives him a warning look. “Who do you think you’re talking to, your mother?”

  “I’m not getting back on,” says Scotty.

  Coulter puts his hand on his shoulder. “That’s the first rule of riding.”

  Scotty shakes Coulter’s arm off. “I don’t care. I’m not getting on that piece of shit.”

  Coulter says, “Okay, children. Let’s review. Scotty’s afraid, the horse is afraid. And if we don’t get this figured out, we’ve taught the horse and Scotty that the way to avoid fear is to quit. The pressure goes away when you come off. Then if you’re Scotty, you go home, cry to your nanny, and die a little inside. You hate horses, and you stop riding them. If you’re the horse, you’ve just learned how to win an argument by hurting someone.”

  Scotty’s wipes the dust off his pants. He’s going to cry in front of everyone.

  “Are you scared, Scotty?” asks Coulter.

  “You son of a bitch. You knew he’d do that.”

  “You’re the lesson today.” Coulter turns to us. “The first thing you have to do is admit that you’re scared. At least to yourself.”