Sidesaddle

by Bonnie Bryant

  Stevie and Carole laughed.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Stevie said. “I’ll ride for you without stirrups if you’ll go with my mother to the mall. She’s been grumbling about my wardrobe, using words like disgrace and embarrassing.”

  “Do you suppose that has anything to do with the shirt you’re wearing now?” Carole asked.

  “Why, this is my favorite!” Stevie said. “And it’s barely broken in!”

  Lisa and Carole chuckled, admiring the seven or eight small holes they could see on the front of Stevie’s faded T-shirt. It was her favorite, though. On one side was a picture of a gooey sundae. On the back it read: LIFE IS UNCERTAIN. EAT DESSERT FIRST.

  It was a fine T-shirt to wear at the stable and even at TD’s. It was okay at home, too. It wasn’t so fine anyplace else, especially not at school.

  “Well, let’s just say that perhaps your mother has a point,” Lisa said. “And of course I’ll come shopping with you and your mother. It can’t possibly be as painful as shopping with my mother!”

  “No, I actually meant that you’d go shopping with my mother without me,” Stevie said.

  She was about to launch into a hastily planned scheme to make that possible when the waitress arrived with their orders. Stevie stared at her sundae. There was something unsettling about it, and it took her a second to figure it out. Pink, pink, pink, white fluff, red chips, more white fluff. It looked like a Valentine’s Day treat. It also looked like Tiffani Thomas. What had she been thinking?

  Dismayed, she picked up her spoon and began the task of eating it anyway.

  But when the waitress stepped away and Stevie looked up to thank her, for the first time she took a look at the occupants of The Saddle Club’s favorite booth. They were none other than Tiffani Thomas herself, with Adam Levine—the one boy in the class who had wanted to try out the sidesaddle.

  It wasn’t easy for Stevie to look at Tiffani, but it was harder to look at Adam. He was totally entranced by Tiffani, gazing at her over his untouched dish of ice cream. He hung on every word that came out of her mouth, every sentence that sounded like a question.

  Stevie leaned over and whispered to her friends, tilting her head in the direction of Tiffani and Adam. “I didn’t know boys liked that stuff,” she said. “You know, ail pink and fuzzy.”

  Lisa’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling.

  “Why do you think he wanted to try the sidesaddle?” Carole asked. “He was trying to impress her.”

  “They love it,” Lisa said.

  “Not ones who have any sense,” Stevie said. “I mean, I can’t see Phil spending one second goggling at her the way Adam is.” Stevie’s boyfriend was Phil Marsten. He lived in a nearby town and had his own horse. He was a very good rider, but Stevie couldn’t even imagine him trying out a sidesaddle.

  “No,” Carole agreed. “Not Phil.”

  ON MONDAY AFTER SCHOOL, Stevie climbed the stairs to her bedroom, carrying all her books and her good intentions. She dropped the books on the floor before plopping onto her comfortable bed.

  Her school day had been pretty good. She’d gotten back a history paper with a B, and she’d taken a prealgebra test that she thought she’d aced. That wasn’t what made it a good day, though. It had been a good day because it had been Tiffani-free. Since Tiffani went to Willow Creek Junior High—which was where both Lisa and Carole went—Stevie was guaranteed to be without her for the entire school day.

  Tiffani wasn’t that bad, really, Stevie told herself. She wasn’t mean or anything. She wasn’t a schemer the way Veronica diAngelo was. She wasn’t stupid or boorish or rude. She was just so … Stevie couldn’t find the right word to describe her. Pink was all that came to mind, and it felt odd to describe a person that way. But in Tiffani’s case it seemed to fit.

  Stevie sighed contentedly and reached for her phone. After all, it had been almost twenty-four hours since she’d talked to either Lisa or Carole. That needed to be rectified.

  She dialed Carole’s number first. Nobody was home, which was odd because Carole usually got home before Stevie. Maybe she’d gone to Pine Hollow or something. Lisa would know.

  She dialed Lisa’s number. The line was busy. Fifteen minutes later it was still busy, and another fifteen after that it was still busy.

  Grumbling, Stevie picked up her book bag. If there was nothing else to do, she might as well get some homework done. She opened her history textbook and flipped to the assigned pages about the Roman empire. As Caesar was crossing the Rubicon, the phone rang. It was Lisa.

  “I just got off the computer,” she said, explaining the busy signal. “I found a whole Web site devoted to sidesaddle riding!”

  “Be still, my heart,” Stevie said sarcastically. Either Lisa didn’t hear or the humor was lost on her.

  “Well, you know, I’m always interested in learning something new. I was terrible on Saturday when I was riding Diamond, but I’m sure I could get better if I worked at it. Anything to do with horses is interesting.”

  “I know what you mean,” Stevie said, relenting. “I liked learning how to drive a cart and a sleigh—not that I want to do it all the time, but it was fun. And speaking of fun, I tried to call Carole earlier, but she wasn’t home yet. Any idea what she’s up to?”

  “Yeah,” Lisa said. “She’s meeting Tiffani at the library to work on their report about horse breeds.”

  “Oh,” Stevie said.

  “I’ve got some science homework to get to,” said Lisa. “I’ll see you Wednesday at riding class, okay?”

  “Okay,” Stevie said. She hung up the phone and turned her attention back to Julius Caesar. Before his triumphal march through the streets of Rome, the phone rang again. This time it was Carole.

  “You won’t believe all the stuff we found,” Carole bubbled. “I mean, we’d both brought the books we had at home, and then there was an even better one at the library. We learned all about coldbloods and warm-bloods. Did you know that coldblood refers to the large workhorses like the Friesians and Clydesdales because they do so much work in the cold areas of the world, like Scandinavia and northern Europe? The warm-bloods are mixes of coldbloods and horses from the hot areas of the world, like Arabians, and that’s why warm-bloods have both strength and endurance. And then there are horses like the ones native to Mongolia, which might be the original horse breeds from which all the other horses descended, and those horses have some vague striping on their legs that looks a lot like zebra stripes! Isn’t this interesting? I wonder how much time Max will give us for our report. I couldn’t believe how much of this stuff Tiffani already knew. We looked in our books, all right, but she knew most of it anyway. We made copies of lots and lots of pictures so we can make charts of all the major breed groups of horses and then of ponies. I’m always amazed at how much there is to know. Don’t you just love learning something new?”

  Carole didn’t stop to take a breath. Stevie thought she might talk for hours on the subject of South American breeds alone. Carole was like that. She was famous among her friends for being able to give what they jokingly called twenty-five-cent answers to nickel questions. Stevie was used to that and in fact had often benefited from it. In this case, though, she was finding it a little hard to take. She’d also heard about as much as she wanted to hear about the joys of learning something new—especially when all that new knowledge was attached to Tiffani Thomas. This day wasn’t turning out to be Tiffani-free after all.

  “Hey, stop a second,” Stevie said. “Save some surprises for me until you give your actual report.”

  “Oh, right, yeah,” Carole said. “But there’s so much. We won’t be able to tell it all no matter how much time Max gives us.”

  “Well, whatever is left over, you can tell Lisa and me at our next sleepover.”

  “Deal,” Carole said. “So what are you up to?”

  “Julius Caesar,” Stevie answered. “He’s just come to power in Rome.”

  “I’ll let you get back to it. I’ll see
you Wednesday.”

  “Bye,” Stevie said. She returned her attention to Caesar’s exploits. Somehow they seemed to make more sense to her than either of her friends.

  ON TUESDAY AFTER school, Stevie was denied the luxury of escaping to her room. For some reason her mother was oblivious to the humor in Stevie’s most recent practical joke on her beloved twin brother. It was just shaving cream!

  The net result was that Stevie had to weed the flower bed in front of the house. And she’d been threatened with perpetual raking if she took out so much as one impatiens. If there was anything she hated more than weeding, it was raking. She was being very careful. She was paying so much attention to the flower bed that she hardly noticed when people walked by. But she couldn’t miss Lisa in her riding clothes on her way back from Pine Hollow.

  “Hi,” Stevie greeted her. “How’s Prancer?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t riding Prancer,” Lisa said, almost breathless with excitement. “I tried all of Max’s sidesaddles on her, but none of them fit. It was okay, though, because, as usual, Tiffani was very generous. She let me ride Diamond. It was great. I didn’t do anywhere near as many dumb things as I did when I tried on Saturday. All that reading yesterday really paid off. Tiffani could hardly believe how much better I was. That doesn’t mean I was good or anything, but I wasn’t so obviously a beginner. It’s really fun, you know. You sit a whole different way on the horse, more balancing on your thigh than on your bottom, but it works, somehow. You should try it, Stevie.”

  “I did try it, you know,” Stevie said.

  “I didn’t see you on Diamond.”

  “Not on Diamond. It was a while ago. It was okay, but frankly I’d just as soon stick to regular riding,” Stevie said, yanking out an impatiens.

  “There certainly is plenty more I need to learn about riding astride, so I’m not at all sure I ought to spend much time on the sidesaddle riding, but it was fun.”

  “How right you are,” Stevie said, trying to stuff the bedraggled flower back into the earth. “Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay, bye,” said Lisa, and she continued on her way home.

  CLASS ON WEDNESDAY wasn’t much of an improvement. In the first place, Tiffani was there. She and Carole were buzzing together beforehand, talking about their presentation: Which one of them needed to buy oak tag and where could they meet to glue everything down and practice their speeches?

  That surprised Stevie. The idea of Carole actually having to practice talking endlessly about horses was a bit much. She did that as naturally as she breathed.

  Every time Tiffani did something in class, like change gaits or diagonals or make Diamond back up, Lisa would say something like, “Oh, that’s how it’s done sidesaddle!”

  Even Max seemed a little overcome by the presence of Tiffani and her sidesaddle wonder horse. “You know, riders,” he said, “this new aspect of riding has inspired me. I am going to give you all an assignment to work on by yourselves. I want each of you to learn something new. Pick something you haven’t done before—or that you’ve done only a little of—something you’ve wanted to have a chance to learn more about, and teach it to yourself. I don’t care what it is. Each of you is on your own to pick a topic and learn it. It can be a skill or a research report or anything at all. If you need help, you can get some from me or from your classmates, but the project should be yours alone. We can all share our new skills or information with one another at the Horse Wise meeting in two weeks.”

  It took Stevie exactly two and a half seconds to decide what her new skill would be. She would figure out a way to get a nice pair of new black cotton socks into Tiffani’s laundry so that she’d never have to see those pink jodhpurs again. If she used her own blue bathrobe, it would be too obvious. Socks were good. They were really anonymous. Or a towel.

  “Class dismissed!” Max announced.

  Not soon enough, Stevie thought.

  THURSDAY WILL BE OKAY, thought Stevie, First, no Tiffani at school. Then Carole was doing something with her father after school, so she wouldn’t be able to meet with Tiffani and then tell Stevie all about it. And Lisa was going to the orthodontist with her mother, and that meant no Pine Hollow and no more breathless descriptions about sidesaddle riding. It would definitely be a Tiffani-free day.

  After school, as soon as Stevie finished raking the side yard, she escaped to the relative quiet of her room and the exploits of Julius Caesar, Just as she was getting into the reading, the phone rang.

  “Hi, is this Stevie?”

  “Yes,” Stevie said uncertainly. She wasn’t uncertain that she was Stevie. She was just uncertain that she wanted to talk with the person who was calling.

  “It’s Tiffani!” the person announced.

  “Hi,” Stevie said.

  “You know, I just had this wonderful idea?” There she was, asking questions again. “I was thinking about how my Tennessee walker and your Saddlebred are practically siblings, you know?”

  “Well, sort of,” Stevie agreed.

  “And they just really seem to be getting along like a house afire?”

  “Yes?” Stevie said, irritated that she, too, was asking a question but also hoping that Tiffani would get to her point.

  “Well, I wondered if it wouldn’t be fun if the two of them—and us, of course—could take a trail ride together tomorrow afternoon? I know Diamond would just love to get a chance to see some of the woods around his new home, and Max tells me that there’s nobody who knows the trails better than you do, so it just seemed so utterly natural that we should go together with our horses?”

  Stevie loved to take trail rides on Friday afternoons. It always seemed to make the point that the weekend was beginning. A trail ride was freedom, so different from school and the structure of weekdays, to say nothing of weeding and raking. It was a sort of TGIF release. But with Tiffani?

  “Gee, I don’t know, Tiffani,” she said. “I’ve got a bunch of things I have to do, and I was sort of counting on the afternoon.” Right, like her Christmas thank-you notes. Now that it was April, it was definitely time to get them done. And her mother had been nagging her about doing some shopping. And there was that dentist’s appointment she’d been putting off.… “I just don’t think I can,” she said. “But you go ahead and have fun.”

  “Oh, too bad!” said Tiffani, clearly oblivious to Stevie’s lukewarm response. “I was hoping to get more of a chance to know you. After all, you were so nice to me at the first meeting. I wanted a way to say thank you, too. But if you can’t do it tomorrow, how about on Saturday after Horse Wise and after the class? We should be able to get in a little time together.”

  “Right, sure,” Stevie said.

  “Oh, goody,” Tiffani responded. “I’ll see you then!” And she hung up the phone.

  Stevie sighed. Saturday was a long, long time away, wasn’t it?

  CAROLE AND LISA reached Pine Hollow early on Saturday morning. Carole decided to walk Barq on a lead to make sure his sore foot wasn’t bothering him anymore. She had him in the ring when she saw a familiar car pull into the stable’s parking lot. Phil Marsten stepped out and walked over to the fence.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Well, my mother said something about devoting the day to the mall, and I reminded her that Willow Creek was on the way, so I thought I’d surprise Stevie and come to the Horse Wise meeting. Do you think she’ll mind?”

  “Mind? Are you crazy? She’ll be thrilled. She’s not here yet, so if you want to help, you can take Barq’s lead. I want to watch him from across the ring. Judy said he should be healed by now, but I wanted to be certain.”

  Willingly Phil climbed through the fence and began walking the horse around the ring. A few minutes later, Tiffani Thomas came out of the barn leading her horse, and Carole introduced the new girl to Phil.

  “Tiffani’s staying with her aunt in Willow Creek for the semester,” Carole explained. “She’s just joined Horse Wise because her
horse, Diamond, just arrived. Tiffani, this is Phil Marsten. He’s a friend of Stevie’s. He lives two towns over—or is it three?”

  “It depends on which route you take,” he explained. “Nice horse,” he said, admiring Diamond’s conformation. “Tennessee walker?”

  “Why, you know as much about horses as Stevie and her friends here! You-all are just amazing?”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Phil said. “Here, I think Barq is just fine. Would you like me to take Diamond for a walk so that you can stand back and watch?”

  “Sure thing,” Tiffani said, swapping lead lines with Phil. “Not that I think there’s anything wrong with my darlin’ here. It’s just that it’s been a couple of days since he’s had any exercise, and since we’re going on a trail ride after class, I wanted to be sure he’d be warmed up for it. I sure don’t want him to stiffen?”

  “Good idea,” Phil agreed. He walked the horse for another ten minutes while Carole, Lisa, and Tiffani finished getting ready for the meeting.

  STEVIE WAS TORN. It sometimes happened that something she was excited and happy about was going to occur on a day when there was something she was also unhappy about. Like a dentist’s appointment on the same day as a party. In this case, the problem was that Saturday meant both Horse Wise and the trail ride with Tiffani.

  It took her fifteen minutes instead of the usual five to find a matching pair of socks, and she had to dig all the way through her laundry pile (sometimes also referred to as her closet) to find the shirt she wanted to wear. And then it took another five minutes to locate her riding hat, although it was on the shelf where she always put it.

  Stevie just wasn’t as enthusiastic this Saturday morning as she usually was.

  When she got to Pine Hollow, the meeting was about to begin. She felt a little guilty that she hadn’t gotten there in time to give Belle a grooming and a treat, but she’d have time before class. She smiled and waved at the familiar faces and then looked for Carole and Lisa.