Lizzie Flying Solo

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  “So that would be twenty-four dollars. If they sell,” he repeated again.

  The koala bear’s fur was the softest of all four, but the pony and the golden retriever had always been my favorites.

  Twenty-four dollars.

  Fire.

  “Okay,” I said, handing them over. “I’ll do it.”

  The man had me fill out a Consignor’s Agreement while he arranged the animals in the basket. He propped the golden retriever’s head over the side of the wicker, just like I had it at home.

  “We don’t call when something sells, but we keep a log and you can check back whenever you want. We pay out the first and fifteenth of each month. So even if one sells today or tomorrow, you wouldn’t get paid until the fifteenth.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, good, then,” he said.

  I looked past him to the basket, said a silent goodbye, and fled down the stairs.

  That night I wrote in a new extra section in my savings notebook, showing how much I might get: Possible money from stuffed animals $24.

  The next day—the last day before school started again—I went back to the thrift store. The same man was there.

  “Oh, hello. More stuffed animals?”

  I shook my head. “I have some clothes that don’t fit anymore. My mom said to bring them.”

  Liar.

  I handed over two pairs of jeans, still in near-perfect condition. The man looked at the labels, then glanced at me suspiciously.

  “And your mom does know you’re selling these?”

  I nodded, my face burning. I tried not to look in the direction of the basket, but I couldn’t help it. All four animals were still there.

  “Hmm, okay. Well, these are Gucci jeans, and they look almost new. I can’t price them as high as they should be priced because we don’t have that kind of clientele, but I can put them out at fifty dollars and see what we get for them.”

  “How much are they new?”

  “New? In the city? Over two hundred bucks. For a silly pair of jeans. My kid would kill for these. So are you good with that?”

  I could get fifty dollars altogether if both pairs sold.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” I said.

  We did the same thing as the day before, but this time I didn’t need to say goodbye. I couldn’t have cared any less about those jeans.

  Possible money from Gucci jeans $50.

  At school the next day, all I could think about was the money I was hoping to make. Still, I waited for two days to pass before I went back, hoping the man wouldn’t remember me. But he wasn’t even there. It was a lady instead, with gray hair in tight curls, thick ankles, and heavy, scuffed-up shoes. She looked up from her newspaper when she saw me climb the stairs lugging my weighted-down backpack.

  I pulled out of the pack the big book of horse photos Dad had given me and laid it on the counter. “I’d like to sell this.”

  “Oh, my. This is a horse-girl’s dream book,” she said. “My granddaughter would love this.”

  She licked her fingertip and scanned through page after page of the full-color horse photos I’d drooled over and studied countless times.

  “Do you know how much I could get for it?”

  She closed the book and pushed it toward me on the counter. “We are on top of the library. We don’t sell books here. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, right. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  I heaved the book into my backpack and turned to the stairs, forcing my eyes not to look in the direction of the stuffed-animal basket.

  “Young lady,” the woman said. “Wait one second.”

  She came out from behind the counter and handed me a business card.

  “If you still want to part with it, there is a homeless shelter for families right around the corner, just off Brook Drive. It’s called Good Hope. I’m sure there are children there who would absolutely love that book.”

  I stared at the card with Miss May’s name on the front and a picture of happy children playing under the oak trees in the front yard.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  I sprinted down the stairs, waving at Linda as I passed her desk on the way out. She watched me fly by with a worried expression on her face.

  “See you Saturday!” I said.

  “Okay!” She gave me a thumbs-up. “See you then!”

  Twenty-Three

  Ms. Fitzgerald was absent the first few weeks of January because of a death in her family. The substitute teacher was fine, but she didn’t know anything about my poem and it being printed in the high school newspaper. I was antsy to get my copy and bring it home for Mom. I didn’t have to wait too long, though, because on the second Thursday that Ms. Fitzgerald was gone, Jasmine brought a copy to school with her. As soon as I got settled at my desk for history class, all four girls descended on me.

  “My brother brought this home from the high school yesterday,” Jasmine said. “Your poem’s in it.”

  She had the newspaper folded back so “Behind Birchwood” was typed across the top.

  “It’s a good poem, Lizzie,” Jade said.

  Rikki nodded in agreement. “Congrats on getting it published.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sabrina said, “Well, even with the poem being published and all, what we really wanted to tell you is that you shouldn’t go into those woods back there.”

  “Yeah, no one goes back there.” Jade raised her eyebrows. “Ever.”

  It was obvious from the way Jasmine was looking at me that she’d put two and two together and realized I was the kid sitting on the stone wall last summer, spying on their riding lesson. She knew that this poem came from my firsthand observations. She didn’t look mad; instead she looked a little sad, like she pitied me. I didn’t want pity.

  “Why shouldn’t I go back there?”

  They closed in around my desk.

  Rikki lowered her voice. “There’s a homeless shelter back there.”

  The other three nodded solemnly. I trained my eyes on the grooves someone had dug in the top of my desk and ran my finger over the tiny gutter.

  “I mean, you just never know what kind of people could be lurking around in those woods,” Jade said.

  Sabrina flipped a braid over her shoulder. “Yeah, my dad says homeless people will say anything to try to get money from you.”

  Jasmine hadn’t taken her eyes off me and looked genuinely worried. “Really, girl, be careful.”

  No words would come from my mouth. Nothing. So I smiled and nodded, like I was agreeing. Like I appreciated their warning and their description of the Homeless.

  Of me.

  Coach Redmond came into the room tossing a football in the air.

  “Okay, class, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” He always talked like that, like he was on the sidelines of a football game trying to pump up his team. “Everyone into your seats. We’ve got drills to work on today!”

  “We just thought you should know, that’s all,” said Sabrina quickly.

  “Girls in the back of the room, whatever is distracting you, get over it!”

  Jasmine patted my shoulder. “Be careful, Lizzie,” she said.

  As they moved toward their desks, one of them said, “We warned her. That’s all we can do.”

  I slumped down low in my seat and barely looked up when Bryce came in five minutes late. I was relieved that he didn’t try to catch my eye; I didn’t want him to see that I was in danger of crying.

  The next weeks went by fast. I couldn’t shake the ugly feeling that clung to me after I had nodded in agreement with Jasmine and her friends about homeless people being dangerous. Even though Leonard always looked like he hated being in the same room with me and even though I’d never played Monopoly with them again, none of the people at Good Hope were dangerous. I knew that. They were just like me and Mom. Something had happened that put them in a tough spot, and they were trying to get out.

  I put my head down a
gain and focused all my energy on keeping to myself and earning money. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the girls came for their lessons, I made sure I was occupied in a different part of the barn so we didn’t have to make eye contact. And I also made sure to stay long after they left so they wouldn’t see me walking myself home right through those woods.

  One afternoon in the first week of February, I tallied up all the money hidden next to my mattress, then wrote the amount earned from each category on a new sheet of paper.

  TO BUY FIRE

  $1,000

  −245 (previous page)

  = $755

  −300 (polo)

  = $455

  −24 (stuffed animals)

  = $431

  −28 (Angela)

  =$403

  −25 (Gucci jeans—1 pair)

  = $378 to go

  There was six hundred and twenty-two dollars. That total assumed I’d win the poetry contest, which was two weeks away. Even with that, it still wouldn’t be enough. I stared at the numbers for a long time. Fire’s training was going well. He was getting stronger—so he’d be more appealing to potential buyers. Six hundred and twenty-two dollars felt as far from one thousand dollars as the sun was from the moon. It could take me a year to earn the remaining three hundred and seventy-eight if I didn’t hustle.

  When I got to Birchwood later and went to sign in for my working student duties, a couple of younger riding students, Becky and Melissa, were gossiping in the office.

  “Mike always looks like he’s in a bad mood, anyway,” Becky said.

  She was only ten, but her whole family owned horses and fox hunted. She’d been around Joe and Mike since she was born. Melissa was nine but had started riding at Birchwood in the Tiny Tykes class for five- and six-year-olds. They were good kids, but I was painfully aware that even though they were younger than me, they knew much more about horses and Birchwood than I did.

  “Joe didn’t look very happy about him showing up out of the blue, either,” Melissa said.

  “Especially when Mike told him, ‘Go get Fire!’” Becky flung her arm and scowled like she was imitating Mike.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “Mike showed up right after we got here and told Joe he had to bring Fire and show him what he’d learned,” Becky said.

  “I think he might have found a buyer,” Melissa said.

  I dropped the pen and slammed the clipboard onto the desk. “What?”

  My voice screeched. Both girls looked startled, but I didn’t wait to explain. I sprinted from the office and broke the no-running-in-the-barn rule all the way to Fire’s stall. Luis stood in the otherwise empty stall, methodically tossing clumps of soiled shavings through the air into a wheelbarrow parked just outside the door.

  “Where’s Fire?” I asked.

  “En el pequeño anillo,” he said, pointing to the small private ring where Bryce had his dressage lessons.

  When I got there, Joe was trotting Fire in figure eights on a loose rein. He pushed him into a canter, crossed the diagonal line, trotted a few steps, and changed leads. Fire was perfect. I watched from outside the gate until Joe brought Fire to a walk and let the reins slip through his hands.

  “He’s looking better,” Mike said gruffly. “But I want him ready to sell by the end of this month. Show or no show. He’s been eating up the profits since last fall.”

  The back of my knees felt like someone had swung a baseball bat into them. The end of the month. Less than four weeks. That was all the time I had left.

  “Get it done.” Mike turned to leave and nodded at me as he passed.

  Joe jumped off Fire. “Hey, Lizzie, perfect timing. Wanna cool him out for me?”

  I stepped into the ring, checking to be sure Mike was already out of hearing range. “I heard what he said.”

  Joe took his helmet off and ran his fingers through damp hair. “I’m sorry. But you’ve always known this was the plan.”

  “I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

  “Mike owns this place,” Joe said sadly. “At the end of the day, what he says goes.”

  “But, Joe, I’m saving money—”

  I wanted to say I was only a few hundred dollars shy, but he cut me off.

  “Lizzie, I wish I could hand him over to you and never charge you a penny for his board. But that’s not why I bought him, and that’s definitely not what Mike expects. Fire is going to make a nice little show pony for someone at another stable.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to be a show pony at another stable.”

  “You’re right, maybe he doesn’t. But we don’t always get to pick where we live, do we?” He paused for a second, struggling to keep his face from showing just how bad he felt for me. “Wherever that is, though, wherever we end up, it usually works out and we’re okay.”

  I took the reins and rubbed my chest, trying to massage away the pinched feeling in the middle. “I’ll cool him out and put him away.”

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie,” he said.

  Everything inside me froze. I felt nothing as Fire and I walked around and around the ring. There had to be something I could do. Some way to speed up earning more money. A few minutes went by and a string of adult riders came in, leading their horses to the middle of the ring.

  “Drill team practice in five minutes,” one of them said to me. Meaning I had to clear out of the ring for them.

  “Thank you.”

  I walked Fire toward the gate. Another rider rushed past me, leading a horse with only three polo wraps on his legs. He had bits of hay clinging to his uncombed tail and a manure mark on his white saddle pad.

  “Sorry I’m so disheveled,” she said to the riders already in the ring. “I’ll have my tack clean and all four polos before the next practice. I promise.”

  When Fire was back in his stall, I wrapped my arms around his neck and whispered close to his ear, “Don’t worry, Fire. I’m going to earn that money in time. I promise.”

  The next day I posted signs by every tack room on the whole farm.

  TACK CLEANING SERVICE

  FEBRUARY SPECIAL!

  COMPLETE CLEAN, CONDITION, AND POLISH

  SADDLES: $10

  BRIDLES: $5

  BRIDLES W/BIT CLEAN & POLISH $8

  MARTINGALES: $3

  SEE LIZZIE TO SCHEDULE

  Forty-eight hours later, six horse owners had signed up. Six saddles and bridles equaled ninety more dollars! The lady who’d bought Tiger Lily at Christmas brought me four fuzzy saddle pads to wash and said she’d pay three dollars each. Another person whose horse lived across the driveway in the boarder barn came to find me. She had four pairs of dirty polo wraps in a bag.

  “If you roll them correctly,” she said, “I’ll give you two dollars a pair.”

  I was closing in on the entire thousand, and except for Mr. McDaid’s one hundred dollars, I’d earned every penny of it honestly and through hard work. That night, I ran the whole way home, my fingers itching to mark everything in my notebook.

  I got to the door at the same time as Angela. She looked like she needed a long vacation.

  “You okay?” I asked. “Do you need help with the girls tonight?”

  She set her bag down inside the door and shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but Faith was extra clingy this morning. I want to spend some one-on-one time with them tonight. Valentine’s is next week, though, and I’m working an extra day at the florist on Sunday. Could you help me then?”

  “The whole day?”

  “If possible. Lots of deliveries, so I should be able to share lots of tips with you.”

  “I can do it.”

  “Super! Rest up. That’s a long day by yourself with three kids. Heck, that’s a long day for me with three kids!”

  “I need the money,” I said. “Badly.”

  Angela took off the hat Mom had crocheted for her and tucked it under her arm. “Are you okay? You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?”

>   “No, nothing like that. I’m saving money, and I need to save more, faster.”

  “Ah,” she said. “To help your mom? That’s awesome, Lizzie.”

  Leonard came in and banged the door shut behind us, stomping his feet on the mat. “You two plot to take over the world?”

  Angela laughed. “No, we’re talking about saving money.”

  Leonard’s black eyes narrowed at me. “Yes, for the horse.”

  I reached down to pretend to tie my boot laces so Angela wouldn’t see the truth on my face. Leonard’s boot was a hand’s width away from mine. I resisted the urge to reach out and punch it.

  “Now where would you get a silly idea like that?” Angela said. “A horse? Do you forget we live in a homeless shelter?”

  Leonard brushed past. “Yes, I remember bezdomnyy, but maybe I’m the only one.”

  I’d never really thought much about miracles, about whether they were real or just happy coincidences. But the very next day, more work for more money was plunked into my lap without my even asking. Joe came into the office right after I got to Birchwood and sat down in his chair.

  “Just the person I needed to see,” he said. “Wanna earn some money?”

  I held the pen over the sign-in sheet and felt a jolt of relief.

  “Heck yeah. Doing what?”

  “We’re going to the big winter show this weekend in Simsbury, and I suddenly don’t have a groom. Right now it’s just me and Kennedy, but we’ll be coaching.”

  “What happened to the person who was supposed to go?”

  “Janet. Her grandma passed away. She’s going out of town.”

  I’d heard Janet talk about working at the show in Simsbury. It was at one of the fanciest barns in the whole state. She’d been really excited.

  “Does that mean I’d have to come Friday night to help get ready, too?”

  “It does, so you’d have to skip the polo match, but you’d make a lot more money helping us. We’ve got fifteen kids going, and each of their parents contribute and tip the groom. You could make a hundred fifty, hundred sixty bucks for Friday night and Saturday day.”

  “Yikes! For real?”

  “For real.”

  I did some mental math. If I got that much at the horse show, I’d only need another two hundred and twenty-eight dollars, and once I got paid for the tack I was cleaning I’d be even closer to the full thousand!