Manties in a Twist

by J. A. Rock

  Just promise you won’t bale if the going gets tough, Dave said. That wouldn’t be farrier to the rest of us.

  This went on for a while. But amid the puns, there was a lot of support too. Ricky and Drix weren’t gonna be able to make the competition, and Maya would have to arrive late. But Gould, Miles, Dave, and D would be there. And though I was still pretty embarrassed at the idea of them seeing me in my pony gear, struggling to prance, I decided I was fucking glad they’d be there to cheer me on.

  Cinnamon didn’t stand a chance.

  Saturday Ryan and I slept in and arrived at our practice spot late in the afternoon, ready to tackle dressage. It was hot out. Ryan and I hauled the bag of pony gear out into the meadow. The grass was getting longish, and right from the get-go I barely had the energy to pick up my feet. We were so sweaty that all he did was give me a brief rubdown with a cloth and put some sunscreen on us both before we got started.

  “So I guess we just need to start practicing the moves.” He pulled up the list on his phone. “Here, I’ll leave the bridle off for now, and you just face me and try to do the thing I describe. All right?”

  “Okay.” I took a few steps forward and turned to him. “Hit me with it.”

  “You’re gonna have to enter the arena at a working trot. Which is just like the trotting you’ve been doing, except your hands aren’t gonna be behind you. In dressage, you have to move your arms like they’re legs. So each time you lift a foot, you move the opposite hand forward, like in the videos.”

  “So, like, left hand at the same time as right foot.”

  “Exactly.”

  I gave it a go.

  “Not bad. Your legs and arms are a little out of synch. And maybe lift your knees a little higher.”

  “Easy for you to say. You just get to stand there and watch while I die of heatstroke.” I got my arms and legs synched, and then we worked on the extended trot, which was the same thing but with longer strides. My T-shirt was soaked through, and the idea of having to put hooves and tack on eventually was making me want to die.

  “The extended trot needs to be like a glide,” Ryan called, glancing at the phone and then shielding the screen with one hand so he could read it. “Really throw those legs forward and imagine you’re floating.”

  I imagined I was drowning in a sea of my own sweat.

  We practiced the salute, which was like a horse curtsy that took place at marker X. Dressage rings had a bunch of posts with letters, and I guess marker X was something special. “We need to make some letter posts,” Ryan said.

  I rolled my eyes. Yep. Maybe we should’ve brought our craft shit so we could sit here making letter posts in the blazing-as-balls sun.

  Next we tried a passage—which, according to Ryan, was pronounced “pa-sahhhge.” The passage was a collected trot with very little forward movement. So it was almost like jogging in place, but you still moved forward a little. “I do not feel graceful,” I complained.

  “Shh. Work on keeping your arms moving with your legs.”

  I grumbled under my breath. Shushing me? Really?

  We kept going. Cantering with lead changes—tempi. Piaffe. Pirouette. I was terrible at everything. Though I did kind of like the pirouette, since it involved spinning around. He put my bridle on and tried to practice cuing me with the whip for all the different moves, but all I could think about was AC. A cold beer. Curling up in front of the TV with Collingsworth.

  “Prance when you trot,” he urged me. “Lift those legs.”

  I seriously tried to prance, but it was exhausting. He kept tentatively tapping my calves with the whip and telling me to lift my legs higher, which was pissing me off. So then I started pulling away whenever the whip came near me, and finally I yanked the reins right out of his hands and bolted. I hadn’t planned to do it, but it felt pretty great. There wasn’t really anything I could do with all my gear on, so I just stopped a few feet away and stared at him.

  “Thunder!” he shouted. “Not cool.”

  I backed up a little as he approached, since he was still holding the whip. When he got too close, I turned and jogged away again. What was interesting was that even though I was irritated with him, I felt as close as I ever had to slipping into a pony headspace. To communicating as a horse rather than a person.

  He tossed the whip aside.

  Reached into his pocket and took out a Jolly Rancher.

  Game changer.

  “C’mere,” he said. “Come on over here. No more dressage today.”

  For a second I thought maybe it was a trap. But the Jolly Rancher was green apple, so I walked forward until I was right in front of him. He took my bridle off and set it on the ground. Unwrapped the Jolly Rancher and fed it to me. Then he helped me drink half a bottle of water and poured the rest over my head.

  “You worked harder than I did today. I think you’ve earned something when we get home.”

  “Is it wings?” I asked hopefully.

  “It’s better than wings. If I do my job right.”

  We took my tail out, and walked over to the trees. Sat in the grass together, under the shade. He picked a blade of grass and spun it between his thumb and finger. I watched him.

  “What if we lose?” I asked after a while.

  He turned to me. “What if we do?”

  “Will it all be for nothing, then? Like, the hundreds of dollars we spent, and all the drives out here, and the guys building the cart for us . . .”

  “Kamen.” He shook his head and kinda huffed, smiling. “It’s not for nothing. I’m having, like, the best time ever.”

  I nodded. “I mostly know that. I just wanted to make a dramatic speech because it’s, like, that moment in the movie when we have a crisis of conscience right before the big day.”

  “You mean crisis of confidence?”

  “Sure.” I took the piece of grass from him. “And I also wanted to make sure you feel like I do. This is really fun. Even though I hate dressage.”

  “Look, we’re probably going to win. Because we’re awesome. But if we don’t, it’s fine.”

  “Because we’re still awesome?”

  “Exactly.”

  I twirled the grass against his forehead. “I really want to win, though.”

  “Good.” He slapped the grass out of my hand. “Then let’s get home and get your reward. And we’ll be back at this in a couple of days.”

  He took me home, and we showered together. And I guess he did his job right, because everything that happened that night was better than wings.

  We took off early the next morning to have brunch at Ryan’s family’s house, leaving a key under the matt so Gould could walk Collingsworth. We spent the drive there singing along to the radio, and I tried to teach Ryan how to harmonize.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked as we got close.

  “Are you kidding? I hung out with your parents that one time. They were awesome.”

  “Yeah, you hung out with them for, like, two seconds. This is your first experience spending any significant amount of time with them. And meeting my sister.”

  “I am one hundred percent looking forward to it.” Parents freaking loved me. Especially moms.

  We had an awesome time. Ryan’s mom was a weatherwoman for a local station, so I got her to do the weather voice for me. His dad was charming as fuck, and just super chill. Ryan’s sister, Jacey, was all breathtakingly beautiful and wickedly sarcastic, and even though during brunch I saw her put her finger in her ear and then look at it, she made my list of favorite people ever.

  The meal conversation sort of turned into embarrassing stories about Ryan’s childhood, which I loved, even though Ryan looked like he wanted to drown himself in his OJ.

  “One time—” His mom laughed. “Ohhh, God. Ry was six, and I took him with me to the grocery store. We passed this really tall black man in the produce section, and Ry goes, loud enough for the whole store to hear, ‘Look, Mom! It’s Michael Jordan!’”

  Everyone got
a kick out of that.

  Ryan’s mom rubbed her temples. “I thought I was going to die of embarrassment.”

  I took more crepe thingies. “Dude, that sounds so much like stuff I did when I was little.”

  Jacey flashed Ryan a grin. “That’s what I remember most about you as a kid. You never knew when to shut up.”

  Ryan flushed but grinned back. “That hasn’t changed.”

  Ryan’s mom shook her head. “What I remember is Ryan had so many interests. School and drawing and sports and clubs . . .” She looked at Ryan. “And you would work so hard to do things perfectly. But then always, right before you finished something, you’d stop.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “It’s true!” She turned to me. “We have all these unfinished drawings of Ry’s. And then school, you know, he studied and studied for the ACT. He was so determined to get into the college he wanted. But then once he’d taken the ACT, he didn’t do anything to prepare for the SAT, and—”

  “So I ended up going to my second-choice college.” Ryan didn’t sound like he thought this was funny anymore. “Big deal.”

  “And you had all these ideas about what you were going to do for a career. We couldn’t keep them all straight.”

  “Until I stepped in.” Ryan’s dad raised his OJ glass like he was toasting.

  We all looked over at him.

  Ryan’s dad took a swig of juice. “I said, ‘Ry, you’re gonna have to make a decision and stick to it. You can’t go your whole life jumping from job to job. Hobby to hobby.’”

  Ryan’s expression was strange. He didn’t look upset, exactly, but he definitely didn’t look happy. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You told me to be a paralegal.”

  “I didn’t tell you to. You did the research on practical careers, and you made a decision. And you’re doing great. Your mom and I are very proud of you.”

  Jacey was staring at her plate. Ryan’s mom looked about to say something, but she didn’t.

  Ryan’s dad laughed. “You see these shows and movies glamorizing people in their late twenties and early thirties who are so self-absorbed. Who still haven’t settled down and are, you know, playing video games and bitching about their love lives. And I always think, ‘This is not as complicated as you’re making it.’”

  Ryan’s mom served herself more salad. “Young people have a lot more options now than we did.” She’d bought a massive bag of croutons in my honor, and there was an awkward silence as she shook some onto her plate.

  “It’s like—” Ryan’s dad settled back and turned to me. “You’re in the restaurant business, right? You can enjoy many different foods. You can like lamb and beef and pork and chicken. But when it comes time to cook a meal, you have to decide what’s gonna be your main course. People don’t trust a leader who can’t make decisions and stick to them.”

  I was kind of surprised I’d thought he was so chill. He definitely had a dickish side to him. I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “I don’t actually eat a lot of meals with main courses.” I watched Ryan’s dad take a long swig of OJ. “I eat a bunch of different foods for each meal. And, like, a lot of people I serve send their meals back because it turns out they don’t like them, or they think it needs more seasoning, or whatever.” I wasn’t sure I was, like, rocking the correct metaphor here, but hey. “I don’t think I’d trust a leader who wasn’t willing to provide a wide variety, or consider a lot of different paths to deliciousness. Or admit they were wrong about a choice they made.”

  I glanced at Ryan, who shot me a grateful look.

  His dad went on. “But I think that amount of choice is what’s hurting young people today. Why not pick something practical to do with your life and take pride in doing it? Instead of puttering around from endeavor to endeavor.” He shook his head. “Young people don’t have any concept of hardship. They think hardship is not being able to buy the newest iPhone.”

  “Anyone who’s alive knows what hardship is,” I said, pretty loud.

  Silence. So great, Ryan was probably never going to let me near his family again.

  But his dad shrugged. “Maybe so.”

  We all went back to eating.

  We played Cranium after the meal, which was insanely fun. Ryan was real good with the Cranium clay. We watched TV, then got all the food out again around dinnertime for round two.

  Ryan and I had planned to leave by eight, but it was nine thirty by the time we started home.

  Ryan leaned against the passenger window. “I should’ve taken tomorrow off work. I am not gonna want to get up.”

  “Aw. I’ll switch places with you.”

  “You’ll walk around hunched over, and no one will know the difference?”

  I grinned and started singing “Short People” by Randy Newman.

  He shoved my arm gently. Looked out the window. “I always do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Stay at my family’s longer than I mean to.”

  “Yeah, ’cause your family’s awesome. Except for your sister who picks her earwax.”

  “I know. We’ve never been able to do anything about her.”

  “You all are so cute.”

  “Yeah. We’re like a family of meerkats. We’re all tiny and blond, and we turn at the same time if you say something to one of us.”

  “I love you all.”

  “Except my dad?”

  “Your dad’s cool. I’m sorry if I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  He shook his head. “I really appreciated that. My dad’s great. He just has, like, really strong ideas. And feels these random urges to express them.”

  I drove for a moment in silence. “You wish you saw them more?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was soft. “I know why you spend so much time with your friends. When you get around the right people, it just . . . changes you from the inside. And you forget about the robot you are at work, or the dick you are when you have to wait too long in line at the store, and you’re just totally you, and it’s perfect.”

  I nodded. “You nailed it, man.”

  “That’s how I feel about you.”

  I smiled at him quickly, then looked back at the road. “Me too. About you, I mean. Not about me.”

  He got really quiet after that, and I figured I was missing something. This was a thing that had been happening most of my life: People around me would get sad—not just I really wanted to eat at Thai Spice but I forgot it’s closed on Mondays sad, but deep sad—and I’d understand sort of what they were feeling and why. But I didn’t get there all the way. It was like we were snorkeling together, but the other person had an oxygen tank and that thing that goes in your mouth when you scuba dive, and suddenly they’d just dive down into the sea, and I’d be left up at the surface with my snorkel, wishing I could follow them.

  I was the right guy to go pick Gould up at the hospital, because I wasn’t gonna judge and I could keep a secret and I knew the best place to get a milkshake afterward. But I was the wrong guy to figure out exactly what Gould was feeling and help him deal with it.

  We were approaching the exit for Silverton, and suddenly I had an idea.

  I turned to Ryan. “Can we make a stop?”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  I saw him trying to peek at the gas gauge.

  “Just for fun,” I said, pulling into the right lane. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “What’s fun in Silverton?”

  I didn’t answer. I took the exit and headed toward the state forest. “Do you like stars and stuff?”

  “Um, at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, when I have to work in the morning? I suppose.”

  “Come on. I just want to stop for a few minutes.”

  He laughed. “Okay.”

  We reached the entrance to the forest, and my mind was still on people’s sadness. Even my grief when Hal died hadn’t seemed to match my friends’. I had watched news about the trial—the others were like, “No, we can’t even stand to hear about it.” I’
d been the first one to go back to Riddle. Whenever we were hanging out, I’d wanted to tell funny stories about Hal, but for a while, the others gave me weird looks if I was like, “Hey, remember that time he tried to make a frozen Slip’N Slide?”

  Dave had said recently that the way he remembered it, the four of us hardly spent any time together after the funeral. He remembered the group almost falling apart—like we all just diverged and left each other alone.

  I didn’t remember it like that. Maybe we hadn’t spent a lot of time together as a group, but I’d still seen each of them pretty regularly. Except Gould—Gould had been hard to contact. And he hadn’t lived with Dave at the time, so it wasn’t like I could just go pound on his bedroom door when I visited Dave and force him to come out.

  I really didn’t think I missed Hal any less than they did. My mom kept telling me people dealt with grief differently. I used to have nightmares about Hal that I only told her about. Not really nightmares about his death, but nightmares that he had survived the rope scene but was badly injured, and we’d just gone on with our lives, thinking he was dead and never knowing better.

  I turned into the picnic area of the forest.

  “Is this some kind of Lovers’ Lane?” Ryan asked. “Makeout Point? Tail Trail?”

  “Sort of.” I parked in a gravel lay-by and shut off the engine.

  We walked past picnic benches and dark shelters, to a grassy area with a few scraggly bushes. I took off my hoodie and spread it on the grass, and we both sat on it. The sky was cloudy, so not that many stars. But I always liked night clouds even better than day clouds. And, man, you could breathe out here without feeling like you had your mouth around a car’s exhaust pipe.

  “Sorry,” I said after a while. “I shouldn’t be keeping you out late.”

  “It’s fine. I hardly ever get out of the city.”

  “I know. I was just thinking how awesome breathing is out here.” Now that we were sitting here, I felt weird about the reason I’d made this stop. So I waited until we’d shot the shit for a while and then brought it up, clumsily as Collingsworth trying to walk from his bed to his food bowl.