Horse Play

by Bonnie Bryant

  Stevie eyed her friends. “You get the list and stick with the kids. I’ll do the sales pitch,” she said.

  Lisa and Carole swung into action. The first thing they had to do was to stop one of the little girls from using their cart as a weapon to ram unsuspecting customers. Carole grabbed the front and stopped it just in the nick of time, before it upset a young mother with two toddlers clinging to the sides of their own cart.

  Lisa glanced at the shopping list, clutched by one of the scouts, scribbled out in nearly illegible elementary school handwriting.

  She squinted at it. “Five pounds of rice,” she decoded. “First one of you to find the package gets to ride on the back of the cart!”

  The girls shouted with glee at the challenge and soon cleared the aisles, leaving Stevie to do her thing.

  “Imagine how much they’d all enjoy riding lessons,” Stevie said to the Scout leader. “And how much they’d learn about responsibility and caring. And how easy it would be for you to just sit and watch while the stable owner, Max Regnery, does all the work.”

  “What’s the phone number?” the woman asked. Stevie hastily scribbled it for her.

  Convincing the Scout leader turned out to be a whole lot easier than helping the little girls finish their shopping. It took Lisa and Carole another half hour to round up the ingredients on the list—and fifteen minutes after that to round up all the Scouts.

  “Poor checkout lady,” Stevie remarked, watching the girls pile their purchases on the counter. One of the girls was trying to ride on the conveyor belt.

  “More to the point, poor Max,” Carole said.

  “I’ve got to go now,” Lisa said. “You want to come over to my house for a while? My mom’s made some brownies.…”

  “I don’t think I could look at another brownie for at least a week,” Carole said, “in or out of uniform!”

  “I know what you mean,” Lisa said, “but there’s no escape for me. I’ve got to get home now.”

  “Me, too,” Carole said. “Here comes my bus. What about you, Stevie?”

  “I have a few more ideas I’d like to try,” Stevie said, rather mysteriously. “I’ll see you on Wednesday at the next class.”

  They waved to each other and went their separate ways.

  ON WEDNESDAY, WHEN it was time to leave for her next riding class, Lisa sneaked out the front door of her house. Her mother was in the kitchen, and Lisa was sure if she showed her face, her mother would insist on driving her over to the stable. Lisa didn’t want her mother to drive her. She liked to walk; besides, she might run into Stevie, and they could walk together. Stevie’s mother almost never drove her over to the stable. She never even offered to drive her. Stevie was lucky.

  “Hey, there!” Stevie greeted her at the corner of their street.

  “You sound awfully cheerful,” Lisa remarked. “What’s up?”

  “Business,” Stevie said. “I think we’re about to see a remarkable surge in business at Pine Hollow.”

  “What have you done?” Lisa asked.

  “Oh, I made a few phone calls. Talked to some people,” Stevie said casually. “I think Max will be pleased.”

  “Enough to save Pine Hollow?” Lisa asked.

  “I don’t know,” Stevie told her frankly as they walked along the field that bordered the road to the stable. “I don’t know how much money Max needs, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to have some new students.”

  “Great!” Lisa said. “You’re really terrific, Stevie, you know?”

  Stevie smiled proudly.

  “I mean it,” Lisa assured her. Stevie already believed it. “A lot of people wouldn’t have the vaguest idea what to do in a crisis like this. You always know what to do. Max is going to be so happy.”

  “Oh, but we can’t tell him.…”

  “He’s going to find out,” Lisa said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Not from me, you, or Carole,” she said. “See, The Saddle Club is sort of like the Lone Ranger. We do good, but we have to do it anonymously.”

  “Maybe more like Robin Hood,” Lisa suggested. “Veronica is sort of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Her father is the greedy Prince John.”

  “And I’m Maid Marian!”

  Lisa shook her head. “No, you’re Robin Hood, remember?”

  “I remember,” Stevie said. “Sometimes, though, I’d like to be the damsel in distress, you know?”

  Lisa regarded her friend carefully. “No way,” she told Stevie. “There’s nothing helpless about you. You can’t even fake the part.”

  Stevie shrugged. “I guess you’re right. I’d never had made it in those days. It would have been a total waste of a good coat if Sir Walter Raleigh had laid his jacket across a puddle for me. I’d just back up a bit, run for it, and leap the puddle by myself.”

  “Yes, I know,” Lisa said. “That’s exactly what you’d do.” She smiled, thinking about Stevie’s independence and individuality. It was one of the things Lisa liked about Stevie.

  A car was pulling into the stable’s driveway as the girls walked up to the door. The window rolled down. “Yoo hoo, Stevie!” the driver called. Lisa sort of recognized the woman’s voice, but she wasn’t sure how. She turned to look.

  “Hi!” Stevie cried out with delight. Lisa saw that the driver of the car was the waitress from TD’s.

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said to Stevie.

  “What tip?” Lisa asked Stevie.

  “The tip that she should try riding lessons,” Stevie said with a wink.

  • • •

  “THEN I TOOK my little brother’s homeroom address list,” Stevie said to Carole and Lisa as the three of them were dressing for class. “I called all the mothers of all the girls and told them about Pine Hollow. Three of them said they’d definitely sign their daughters up for lessons.” Stevie tucked her blouse into her pants and smiled impishly. “I’m something, aren’t I?” she asked, reaching into the deep recesses of her cubby for her boots.

  “You certainly are, and the question is what,” Carole teased. She pulled on one boot, but it didn’t seem right. She looked down at her feet, puzzled.

  “Something wrong?” Lisa asked.

  “I think so,” Carole said. “But I’m not sure what.” She tugged harder. The boot wouldn’t go on.

  “Maybe your feet got swollen in the hot weather?” Lisa suggested.

  “Maybe,” Carole said, tugging even harder.

  Lisa reached for her boots. The right boot went on just fine, but when she got to her left boot, she knew something was definitely wrong. Her foot slipped into it and then slid around on the bottom.

  “We must have gotten our boots mixed up,” Lisa said, solving the mystery. “I’ve got one of yours; you’ve got one of mine.”

  Carole nodded and the girls exchanged boots.

  “Now I feel like Cinderella,” Lisa said, slipping on her other boot. It fit just right.

  “You two!” Stevie said, teasing her friends. “You’re the neat ones. I’m the slob. How could you mix up your boots?”

  “Well, we all know who the practical joker is in this place, don’t we?” Carole said, glancing at Stevie, who was famous for such things.

  “Not me,” Stevie said as she began pulling on her own boots. Then, almost as if it were proof of her innocence, Stevie found that her boots were filled to the bootstraps with oats!

  “What’s this?” she asked furiously. “Did you two do this to me and cover up with that dumb switch?”

  “I was about to ask you almost the same thing!” Carole snapped back.

  “No way!” Stevie said. “I might, repeat might switch your boots, though I didn’t, of course. But there’s no way I’d put oats in my own. It’s going to take me days to get all this dust and stuff out of them!” She stood up and carried both of her boots over to the grain bin and emptied them.

  Carole and Lisa knew that the dusty remnants of the grain would be in Stevie’s boots for a long time and that she would never have d
one that to herself.

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry,” Carole apologized. “I know you wouldn’t have done that. You might be tempted to pull a silly trick like boot switching on your friends, but you’d never do a mean one on yourself!”

  “You know, I never thought of boot-switching,” Stevie joked. “It’s a kind of neat idea. I wonder …”

  Lisa looked over at Carole. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get her dressed and off to class before she comes up with some bizarre scheme that will get her thrown out of this place!”

  Carole helped Stevie to wipe oat dust out of her boots. Lisa folded her own street clothes neatly and was about to put them in her tote bag when she saw there was a small package at the bottom of it. Lisa unwrapped the envelope and discovered six chocolate kisses and a note from her mother saying she hoped she had a wonderful riding class.

  “What’s that you’ve got?” Stevie asked when she noticed Lisa clutching the little bag from her mother.

  “It’s just some candy I brought for us for after class,” Lisa said, stuffing the note into her pocket. She wanted to share the candy with her friends, but she didn’t like the idea of them knowing how her mother still treated her like a baby.

  “Yipes!” Carole said, glancing at the clock. “Eight minutes to class and we haven’t even tacked up yet. Let’s go!”

  Eight minutes later, the three girls appeared at the entrance to the outdoor ring, breathing hard from all the effort it had taken to get the horses ready for class in such a short time. It was practically a miracle they’d made it at all.

  “Mount up!” Max said. Carole and Lisa brushed the good-luck horseshoe and quickly mounted.

  “Have you got a problem?” Max asked, seeing that Stevie hadn’t mounted Comanche.

  “Sort of,” she said, hiding her head behind the horse’s neck. Lisa had the feeling that Stevie was trying to hide something.

  When Lisa looked carefully, she realized exactly what she was trying to hide. Stevie had been in such a hurry to get to class that she’d forgotten Comanche’s bridle! He still had on his halter and a lead rope. The whole class looked over and saw her mistake at the same time. Everybody, including Max, burst into laughter. Stevie was laughing the hardest.

  Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it is still the silly season. Lisa thought to herself.

  “I’M GLAD TO to see you’ve finally begun turning your practical jokes on yourself,” Veronica simpered to Stevie after class. “I really liked the no-bridle trick.” Veronica was standing near The Saddle Club as they changed into their street clothes. Stevie glared at Veronica. Although it had been very funny at the time, the look on Veronica’s face made it seem stupid and embarrassing.

  Stevie turned to Carole and Lisa. “Some people,” she said, “have all the personality of a fingernail scratching a blackboard.”

  Veronica spun on her heel and returned to her own locker.

  “Way to go!” Carole said, patting Stevie on the back.

  Stevie grinned impishly. “No, the way to go is to my house where my swimming pool awaits. You did bring your suits, didn’t you?”

  “Of course we did,” Lisa said. “We might not have too many good days left—”

  But she was interrupted as the locker area was invaded by a large group of young Scouts. They were the same girls they’d seen in the supermarket.

  “It worked!” Stevie declared proudly, jumping up to stop two of the Scouts from dismantling a harness in the tack room. The rest of them flooded over to the box where the stable’s latest litter of kittens was trying to get some sleep.

  “Ooooooh, cuuuuuute!” the little girls cooed together.

  “How’d your rice concoction come out the other day?” Lisa asked the girls.

  “Oh, it got burned, it was gross and disgusting!” one of the kids told her.

  Lisa suppressed a smile. She hoped the little girls would be more successful as riders than they were as cooks. If not, pity the poor horses!

  “Time to go,” Stevie announced, flinging the rest of her clothes into her backpack and heading for the door. Lisa took a final look at the little girls. Red O’Malley, the head stableboy, was trying to explain to them what tack was. The girls weren’t listening at all. One of them started braiding some stirrup leathers together.

  Lisa and Carole exchanged glances and fled after Stevie. There were plenty of times when they’d be willing to do extra chores at the stable, but the thought of spending another minute around the little brats was just too much.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE how well your crazy scheme is working,” Carole remarked to Stevie. The three girls had changed into their suits and Carole was trying to make her beach towel lie flat on the lawn so she could stretch out on it. Every time she lifted it up, the breeze twisted it.

  “And I can’t believe Max is going to let those little monsters ride our poor horses!” Lisa moaned. “Could you believe that one braiding the stirrup leathers?”

  “We were bratty little kids at one time, too,” Stevie reminded her.

  “Never like that,” Carole said. “Max is going to have his hands full!”

  “It’ll be better than having them empty, which is exactly what will happen if he runs out of money and Mr. diAngelo takes over Pine Hollow!” Stevie reminded her friends.

  “You know,” Carole said. “We’re trying to help Max, but I’m not sure it’s working. When I was rinsing Diablo’s bucket today, I heard Mrs. Reg tell Max that ‘that man’ called again. Max said he hoped she’d hung up on him. That’s no way to treat a diAngelo!”

  They nodded in solemn agreement.

  Carole sighed, then turned and lay on her stomach, soaking up the late summer sunshine. As usual, Stevie was talking nonstop. She chattered about how she could call other people and tell them about Pine Hollow, then suddenly switched to the subject of Veronica diAngelo.

  “On a scale of one to ten, I hate her twelve and a half,” Stevie said.

  “Fifteen,” Lisa said, without lifting her head from her towel.

  “Yeah, fifteen,” Stevie agreed. “Maybe more.”

  Carole listened, amused by her friends. She thought about Pine Hollow and how much it meant to her—to all of them. “You know what I’d really like to do,” she said, interrupting the auction, which by then had advanced to twenty-five on the hate scale. “I’d like to find a way to show people all the really good things they can learn at riding classes.”

  “You mean a horse show?” Lisa asked, propping herself up on her elbows.

  Carole turned over and sat up. “Maybe, I guess,” she said. She tugged a piece of grass out of the lawn and began chewing on it methodically. “Sort of.”

  “But the stable already had a horse show this summer,” Lisa reminded her.

  “And our gymkhana!” Stevie added. “Don’t forget that. Wasn’t that good enough?”

  “Oh, it was great, especially when we won,” Carole said quickly. “But those things were more for people who already know about Pine Hollow. The only people in the audience were our families and other riders. No, I was thinking of, like, a demonstration for other people in the town so that they might decide to come ride at Pine Hollow.”

  Stevie swung around and sat up, too. “I think she’s on to something,” she said to Lisa. “Can you see it now? Our names in lights!”

  “Actually, I was thinking more of posters,” Carole said. “Like if we come up with a neat idea for a show of some kind, we can put posters all over town.”

  “And we can charge admission and get money for Pine Hollow that way,” Stevie said.

  Carole shook her head thoughtfully. “We can’t charge admission,” she said. “The whole idea would be to make people want to come for fun—not because they have to pay.”

  “Well, they’ll have to pay to take lessons,” Stevie thought aloud. “And they’ll want to once they see our demonstration.”

  “Of course we’ll do something,” Lisa said. “It’ll be so neat.”

  “Ye
ah, but what? That’s the question,” Stevie said.

  “How about a drill team performance?” Carole said.

  “Do you think we could do something worth watching?” Lisa asked dubiously.

  “Why not?” Carole answered. Then she turned to Stevie. “You never did get to ask Max about starting the team up again, did you?”

  Stevie shook her head. “I got too upset about that phone call, but we can all go together before our next class.”

  “I really liked those practices,” Lisa said. “Even when we all ended up practically bumping into each other. But it was fun—and with a little bit of imagination, you could see how good it could be.”

  “Could be if we practiced like crazy,” Carole added.

  “Well, why not?” Stevie asked. “We’re crazy, aren’t we? Horse crazy, anyway, right?”

  “We’re going to have to practice a lot,” Carole continued. “Drill routines are awful if they’re not done right. At least three times a week until … When are we going to do this?” she asked Stevie.

  “Two weeks?”

  “Never mind horse crazy, you’re just plain crazy,” Carole announced. “Lisa, I think we should throw her into the water until her head clears.”

  Lisa’s eyes lit up. “Great idea,” she said.

  The two of them stood up and grabbing Stevie’s hands, began pulling her over to the pool. Stevie laughed a lot and didn’t put up much of a fight, but just before her friends began to push her into the water, she jumped, yanking them into the pool with her. The three of them made a tremendous splash, landing in the waist-deep water. Carole and Lisa were so surprised that they couldn’t help shrieking when they hit the water.

  Stevie took a big breath and ducked under the surface. Carole and Lisa were standing in the water giggling when Stevie jumped up out at them, splashing wildly.

  The three girls spread out in the water and began splashing each other. Lisa discovered that if she stood in one place and spun around, running her hand on the surface of the water, she could douse both her friends at almost the same time. They discovered the same thing. Soon it was almost impossible to tell who was splashing whom, but it felt wonderful.