Horse Play

by Bonnie Bryant

  After a few minutes, the activity subsided. All three girls lay back in the water and floated contentedly, gazing up at the blue sky, brushed white here and there by some clouds.

  Carole turned over and lifted her head out of the water. She looked closely at Stevie. “Has any of this cleared your foggy brain?” she asked.

  Stevie nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “Two weeks is out of the question. How about three?”

  Carole was about to pounce on her and dunk her when Alex, Stevie’s twin brother, yelled from the house.

  “Lisa, phone for you! It’s your mother!”

  Of course it’s Mother, Lisa thought to herself. She pulled herself out of the pool with a sigh, wrapped herself in her beach towel, and proceeded into the kitchen, dripping as little water as she could manage.

  Five minutes later, she stomped back to the pool. Lisa, normally cheerful and optimistic, looked very angry.

  “What’s the matter?” Carole asked.

  “Bad news?” Stevie asked.

  “My mother is the bad news,” Lisa said, grimacing. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She was phoning from down the block, just to ask me if I had put on any sunscreen. Can you believe it? I’m thirteen years old and I don’t need to be told what to do every second.”

  “Maybe she’s just showing she cares,” Carole said.

  Lisa regarded her carefully. Carole’s own mother had died when she was younger and Lisa didn’t want to hurt her friend’s feelings. Lisa hadn’t met Carole until after Mrs. Hanson’s death, but she was pretty sure Carole’s mother would never have pulled a stunt like that.

  “Maybe,” Lisa said. “But enough is enough!” Lisa was a little surprised to hear herself saying that. For years, she’d always done exactly what her mother wanted her to do. That was why she started riding in the first place. Now that she’d discovered riding and The Saddle Club, she didn’t want her mother to interfere. “There’s caring and there’s being a bother—which rhymes with mother.…” she mused. “Sort of, anyway.”

  “Four weeks?” Stevie said, interrupting Lisa’s thoughts. “Think we could be ready then?”

  “Maybe,” Carole said. “It’s a possibility, anyway. Let’s see.”

  Lisa used her towel to dry her hair and then sat down again and began putting sunscreen on her arms.

  “Think Max will let us do it?” she asked.

  “We won’t tell him,” Stevie said. “He’ll be so surprised!”

  “Shocked might be a better word,” Carole said. “We’re going to have to tell him sometime. And, after all, he’s going to know that we’re practicing and he’s going to have to help us, isn’t he?”

  “We can worry about that later,” Stevie said, dismissing the problem lightly. “For now, let’s see what we can remember about the drills we were working on. First, there was the cloverleaf.…”

  LISA SMOOTHED HER clean white blouse and adjusted her riding jacket. She stood outside Max’s office with Stevie and Carole. The three of them had arrived early, done their chores, and dressed quickly so they could have a few minutes to ask Max about drill classes before their regular class began. Lisa ran her fingers through her soft brown hair. She wanted to impress Max, though she knew that the only way to impress him was to ride well. She glanced at Stevie and Carole. Carole looked just fine. She always did. Stevie, on the other hand, looked a little bit messy. There was a smear of dirt on her jeans. Her shirt hadn’t seen an iron in several washings, and her boots were dusty. In short, she looked just like Stevie. Lisa smiled to herself, knowing Max wouldn’t care about that at all.

  The door to Max’s office opened. A woman who looked vaguely familiar stepped out. She smiled at the girls as if to say hello and then walked toward the door to the stable.

  Stevie peered into Max’s office.

  “Can we see you?” she asked.

  “What about?” Max asked, sounding slightly irritated. The phone rang. Max answered it and while the girls waited, he scheduled a new rider for a first lesson.

  Max looked at Stevie expectantly as he hung up the phone. There was no time to waste. Max was obviously busy and Lisa knew they’d better not make him late. Lisa nudged Stevie.

  “We want to start our drill team again,” Stevie began. When Max looked interested, Stevie went on. “We got so busy with the gymkhana before that we just couldn’t work on it, but we liked it and we want to do it some more. Can we have drill team practice? Please?”

  “Yes and no,” Max said after a moment’s consideration, but before he could explain himself, the phone rang again. He picked it up. It was another hopeful new student. Lisa noticed that Stevie was smiling when she saw Max write down the name. It must have been one of the people she’d called.

  Max looked up at them again after he’d finished talking on the phone. “I’m glad you want to get back to drill work again. It’s fun and it’s excellent practice. If you had asked me this a week ago, I’d have jumped at the opportunity to teach you. However, just in the last few days, I have been absolutely flooded with new students. I can’t turn these people away, I’m sure you understand.…”

  Do we ever! Stevie thought.

  “Anyway … I’d like you to be able to do drill work. Could we make a deal? Could you check with Mrs. Reg and see if there’s a time when you could use the ring to practice by yourselves and if and when I have a few minutes free I’ll come give you some tips?” He looked at the girls apologetically. “I have a good book here,” he said. “I know it’s not the same thing as an instructor, but if you read it carefully …” He turned around and took a volume from his full bookshelf and handed it to Stevie. “I think you should start by reading the section on beginning drills. The man who wrote the book was a student—” The phone rang again. Max answered it. He listened for a while and the girls waited patiently.

  As they watched, though, Lisa noticed that Max’s face was getting red as it did when he was angry about something. His eyes got steely. She had the awful feeling he was about to explode. But he didn’t. He stayed calm. Too calm.

  “I’ve already told you,” he said, coldly. “It’s an issue of money and time and I don’t have enough of the first and you won’t allow me enough of the second. The answer is no!” He hung up and looked up at the girls. Lisa thought he seemed surprised to see them still standing there. That meant it was time to go.

  “Thanks, Max,” she said, speaking for The Saddle Club. “We’ll see you in class.”

  “Yeah, thanks for the book,” Stevie said.

  The girls glanced at one another and left Max’s office quickly.

  “See what I mean?” Stevie said when they reached the tack room. Lisa saw. So did Carole. It sure sounded like Max was in trouble. Lisa was very glad that they were already at work to help him out.

  CAROLE TOOK A velvet-covered hard hat from the wall where they hung. All the riders were required to wear them at all times when they were working with the horses and riding. She checked the size and put it on. Her friends did the same.

  Then, they turned to retrieve the proper tack for their horses. Each horse had tack that had been specially selected and adjusted to it. It meant that when the rider tacked up the horse, she didn’t have to adjust every single strap—just the ones needed to put on and remove the tack. In the tack room, there were saddle racks and bridle brackets with each horse’s name above the equipment, arranged in the same order in which the horses were stalled.

  As soon as Carole took the bridle off Diablo’s bracket, she knew something was wrong. Diablo was a spirited horse who needed a bit that would get his attention. Diablo would have a picnic with this bit!

  “I think those little Scouts messed up the tack!” Carole said furiously.

  “They sure did!” Stevie responded. “Look at this pony-sized saddle on Comanche’s saddle rack. It would look like a postage stamp on my horse!”

  “There’s no way Max can let those brats ride here if this is what they do when they just come to
visit the place!” Carole said indignantly.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Lisa interrupted the tirade and tried to calm her friends. “Something may be a little messed up, but it can’t have been those girls. In the first place, Red was with them and he wouldn’t have let them mess up. In the second place, the girls were here two days ago. There have been other classes in between. So, it’s just a little confusion. Somebody made a mistake.” Lisa turned to pick up her own tack. “And that somebody also messed up Pepper’s tack. Look at this!” Suddenly all reason fled and she was furious. Lisa held up a Western bridle. It was definitely not the right bridle for Pepper. “Give me a break!” she said, now as angry as her two friends.

  “And only ten minutes until class,” Stevie groaned.

  Carole looked around. “There has to be an answer,” she declared. “We just have to figure out what it is.” She began examining the other tack racks. Although their classmates had already taken their tack, it appeared, from the remaining tack for the horses that wouldn’t be used in their classes, that the tack for the other horses hadn’t been switched around. That meant that somebody had deliberately mixed up the tack on their three horses. This was somebody’s idea of a joke.

  “Some joke,” Carole said, disgustedly.

  “About as funny as mixing up our boots,” Lisa said.

  “That was easy to solve,” Carole reminded her as she began sorting through the extra bridles.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you still had oat dust in your boots,” Stevie said.

  The girls nodded. Somebody had a pretty strange sense of humor and was pulling some mean tricks on them. She wondered if the other kids in the class were having the same kind of jokes pulled on them. She thought she would have heard about it, but since The Saddle Club spent most of their time with one another, they might not always know.

  “Here! I think this is Diablo’s bridle,” she said, locating it in the middle of a large collection of spare bridles. “And this one next to it could be Pepper’s. Do you recognize it?” she said, holding the bridle up for Lisa’s inspection.

  Lisa looked carefully. One bridle looked pretty much like another to new riders, but Lisa was becoming an experienced rider and she could tell the difference.

  “I think that’s it,” she said. “It looks like it, anyway.” She took it from Carole’s hand. Then she saw the nick in the leather of the reins that she’d felt so often and had come to use as a guide for correcting the length of the reins. “Definitely,” she said. “Thanks, Carole.”

  “You’re welcome,” Carole told her, replacing the incorrect tack on the racks. “Now let’s solve Stevie’s problem.”

  “Stevie’s problem is easy,” Stevie said. “I just went to the pony’s tack rack and found the biggest saddle there. It’s Comanche’s. I’ve made the swap and now we’ve got exactly six minutes until class. We’ll never make it on time and Max is going to be really teed off. He cares so much about promptness, you practically have to have a doctor’s note to be five minutes late.”

  WHEN THE GIRLS arrived at the ring four minutes after the start, Max just glared at them. There was no point in trying to tell Max about the mix-up with the tack. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d be sympathetic to. Promptness was very important in Max’s book. Excuses weren’t.

  Embarrassed, they joined in on the exercise. Max was having the class do a sitting trot without using stirrups. For Carole, this was easy. She’d been doing it for a long time. But for the less experienced riders, it was very hard because it required good balance, and good balance was hard at a bouncing gaitlike trot.

  She took the opportunity to look around at her classmates. She watched Veronica, especially. Much as she disliked Veronica, she had to give her some credit for being a better-than-average rider. She wasn’t having any trouble with the exercise either. In fact, she was smiling smugly as her horse circled the ring.

  Then a thought occurred to Carole and she didn’t like it at all. Why is Veronica smiling smugly? Was it because she was well-balanced on her horse? Maybe. Was it because she had just played a mean trick on some of her classmates by switching tack on them and thereby getting them into trouble. More likely, Carole thought. But why? After all, Max would get really angry if he learned about it. But there would be no way he could punish Veronica if her father took over the stable! Carole shivered at the thought.

  No, she told herself. That can’t be the case. Veronica is looking smug because Veronica always looks smug.

  She hoped she was right.

  LATER THAT DAY, Lisa slunk through the back door of her mother’s car and slid down on the seat, hoping no one could see her. The problem was that her mother had come to pick her up after class and when she’d explained that The Saddle Club was having a drill practice, her mother had insisted on watching so she could wait to drive her back home again.

  “That was so interesting, dear!” Mrs. Atwood said.

  Interesting wasn’t the word. The practice had been a disaster. The girls had forgotten everything they’d known about drill work and spent entirely too much time arguing with one another and with their horses. Drill work was supposed to be precision riding, like military marching formations or halftime bands at football games. Their practice had looked more like the antics of the Three Stooges!

  Aunt Maude, seated next to her mother in the front, nodded. “Oh, yes! And how did you get the horses to all come together at the center at the same time?”

  “They weren’t supposed to do that, Aunt Maude,” Lisa said with more patience than she felt. “The horses are supposed to pass in front of and behind one another where the circles cross in the center of the ring.…”

  “Oh, but I liked it the way you did it, dear,” Aunt Maude said reassuringly.

  “And did you like it when Stevie’s horse shied, and mine started bucking?”

  “You stayed on so well! I’m sure the judges would like that,” Aunt Maude said.

  Lisa sighed. “You get points for staying on a bucking horse at rodeos, Auntie,” she said. “In English riding, you lose points for letting the horse buck in the first place.”

  “Oh, dear,” her aunt said. “Then what about the sort of roping thing when one of your friends chased down the other girl’s horse for her? She’d get points for that, wouldn’t she?” she asked.

  Aunt Maude was referring to the lowest point of the practice. Stevie had dismounted from Comanche to pace off her circle, hoping she’d be able to control Comanche’s timing better. Uncharacteristically, Stevie had gotten careless and dropped Comanche’s reins. The poor horse had had about enough of the hopeless practice by then, too, and had walked off toward his stall. Carole had had to intervene. At that point, Comanche had decided to play tag and began running freely around the ring. He’d even come close to jumping the fence, but Carole and Diablo caught up with him just in time.

  “Wouldn’t that be worth a lot of points?” Aunt Maude asked insistently.

  “I guess so,” Lisa said. It was easier to agree than to explain. She looked out the window of the car, wishing she were walking with her friends instead of driving with her mother.

  “As soon as we get home, dear, I want you to change your clothes. You and I are going with Aunt Maude to the decorator store at the mall this afternoon. I want to choose a new wallpaper for your room. What do you think of a turquoise? We can then recover your chair in matching fabric. I’d like a white flounce on your bed and a solid bedspread—or would you like it to match the wallpaper and the chair? How about a sort of English country chintz?”

  What was the matter with her mother?

  “We just redecorated my room last year, Mom,” Lisa reminded her. “I don’t want to do that again. I like it the way it is.”

  “You do?” Mrs. Atwood said, sounding hurt.

  She had an annoying way of making her feel guilty, but Lisa didn’t like to hurt her mother’s feelings. It was time to be tactful. “Yes,” she told her mother. “You did such a nice job of
it last time that it doesn’t need to be done now.”

  That closed the subject temporarily, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the only subject on her mother’s mind. “I heard about a wonderful woman in town who gives computer lessons,” Mrs. Atwood said a few seconds later. “They’re being given at the Club,” she began.

  “Mother, I take computer at school,” Lisa reminded her. “And besides, I’ve already taken ballet, piano, and painting, plus horseback riding. That’s enough.”

  The car pulled into their driveway. Lisa got out of the back seat and escaped to her room before her mother could suggest that they sit and have a “nice little snack” in the kitchen. Lunch was going to be ready in a little while. Lisa didn’t want to spoil her appetite.

  Lisa showered and put on clean clothes. She retreated to her room, and took her book off her beside table. It was a book on riding.

  A moment later she heard a knock. “Lisa dear!” her mother called. “Open up, please. I have something for you.”

  Lisa opened her door. In spite of the fact that she hadn’t wanted a snack, her mother had brought her milk and cookies. Homemade cookies. She smiled polite thanks at her mother, took the snack, and retreated to her bed with a sigh.

  Lisa had a passion for organization and logic. Some of the things going on around her didn’t seem very logical, and it upset her. She went over to her desk and took out a pen and some paper. She wanted to make a list of the possible reasons for her mother to be behaving so strangely.

  “1. Hates horses,” she wrote. Her mother thought girls should know something about riding, just like they should know something about tennis, golf, sewing, and cooking, but that didn’t include being horse crazy. Since Lisa had spent so much time at Pine Hollow, her mother was definitely cooling on the subject of horses.

  “2. Something to do with Aunt Maude.” That had real possibilities. Her mother was often overbearingly concerned with her, but it seemed to have stepped up since Aunt Maude’s arrival. It was quite possible this didn’t have to do with her so much as it did with another family issue, Lisa thought. Then the word “family” echoed in her mind and she had a weird thought.