“My tongue doesn’t feel swollen,” I said, grabbing an ice pack and putting it on my wrist. “But I’ll let you know if I’m dying.”
“Okay then,” Cat said, and went back to looking at her magazine.
Although I didn’t like to admit it, the sting hurt more than I expected it to and an angry welt came up with a small pin prick in the middle. If my whole wrist swelled up, how was I going to be able to ride at the show? I’d already had enough setbacks. I didn’t need anymore. It took about ten minutes to find a bottle of antihistamine and by the time I did, my wrist was twice its size. I downed two of the little pink pills and went to lay down. It wasn’t long before I fell into a thankfully dreamless sleep. I already had enough nightmares. I didn’t need to add to the roster with giant swarms of wasps that attacked me.
But by morning my wrist was down to normal size again and Dad had sprayed the tack trunk and killed all the wasps and their nest.
“You okay?” he asked me when I finally ventured into the barn.
“Are they gone?” I said warily.
“They’re gone. Every last one of them. No one hurts my daughter.” He brandished the can of wasp spray with an evil grin.
I wanted to tell him that there were more things than wasps that were hurting me. Things that couldn’t be cured with a can of spray but I was looking forward to the show and trying to stay positive. It was all I could do. My luck had to change eventually, at least that was what everyone said.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
We found a little schooling show at a local farm, which was going to make it easier for Dad to make multiple trips with the trailer. Luckily Molly was out of town that weekend. Or unluckily. She could have helped with the transportation but I wasn’t sure that I was quite ready to be around her bigger than life personality when I was concentrating on not dying or freaking out. As it was, Faith had a meltdown the night before. She was out at the barn trying to get Falcon ready and he wasn’t co-operating. He didn’t want his mane braided and he didn’t want to get a bath. In fact, he didn’t want to do anything.
“What is the matter with him?” Faith said, tears in her eyes as her new pony stubbornly sat back in the cross ties and snapped the bailing twine that we used to string them up so that we wouldn’t have to buy new ties every time a horse or pony did something stupid like that.
“He knows you are nervous,” I told her as I managed to snag the pony before he ran off. “Try to relax.”
“Try to relax?” she squeaked, her voice high and trembling. “I don’t think you know what a big deal this is. I promised my parents that Falcon was the right pony for me and to them that means that he’s a winner. If he doesn’t win something tomorrow, I’m going to be in really big trouble.”
She threw herself down on a bale of hay as I re-secured her pony and told him to knock it off.
“Well your parents have to know that he’s not a sure thing,” I said. “I mean they didn’t pay that much for him. They know how much ready-made champions cost, right?”
I sat down next to her.
“I guess,” she said.
“Well just tell them that Falcon is a champion in the making and sometimes that takes a little time. Even if you bought a seasoned winner, that wouldn’t be any guarantee that you’d win everything your first time out. You’d still have to get used to riding him.”
“But I miss Macaroni,” she wailed. “My cousin posted photos of him on her Instagram and she was hugging him and feeding him carrots and he didn’t even look like he missed me at all.”
“I’m sure he misses you,” I said gently. “But it's good that he’s settled in okay and is happy, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what’s best for him right now. It’s supposed to be so hot tomorrow. You wouldn’t have even been able to show Macaroni if he was still here.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said, sitting up and wiping her tears away. “It would have been too hot for him.”
“And now you have Falcon and he sweats just fine and all you have to do is get to know him a little better, that’s all.” I stood up and held out my hand. “Come on. I’ll help you braid him if you like.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking my hand.
I pulled her to her feet and together we braided the wiggly pony’s flaxen mane and tail and it did take two of us because Falcon somehow thought that having his mane braided was some kind of special torture for naughty ponies, even though we were really careful not to tug on his hair or hurt him at all.
“There,” I said, standing back when we were done. “Now all we have to do is pray that he doesn’t pull them out overnight.”
“Don’t even say that,” Faith cried. “You’ll jinx him.”
But the only thing that was going to jinx Falcon was his own naughty attitude. And I still had three horses of my own to bathe and braid. I looked at them out there grazing, wondering who to pick first. They all looked so happy, munching their way across the fresh green grass that had sprung up with the recent rain. In the end I decided that I couldn’t be bothered. It was only a schooling show anyway and braids weren’t going to win our classes for us. Only me not losing my nerve and a decent helping of good luck would do that.
Instead I went to find Cat. I’d talked Dad into letting her come to the show with Sunny, whose name had stuck because by the time Cat had thought up a new one, the mare suddenly only responded to her old name so it didn’t really seem fair to change it. We’d entered her as Sunshine because it least it sounded more like a show name, not that it really mattered. But Cat wasn’t home from school and she should have been hours ago.
“Have you seen Cat?” I asked Dad.
He was in the kitchen going over the show schedule for the next day. We’d already entered our classes but if there was time, I think he was going to take Canterbury again. The last class of the day had quite a large money prize for such a small show. I’d shied away from entering it as I was still getting my nerve back but if Dad won it with Canterbury then that would cover our feed bill for the next few months.
“Isn’t she in her room?” Dad said.
“No, I don’t think she came home from school,” I said. “I was supposed to give her another lesson just to make sure that she doesn’t lose it tomorrow.”
“I don’t know why you want her to come,” Dad said. “She’s much better off here, keeping an eye on things.”
“But we have Jordan for than now,” I said. “And besides, it would be good for her. She needs something to focus on other than her friends.”
I didn’t want to add that I had a sneaking suspicion that her friends were the ones who were encouraging her to steal. But if I could get her into showing horses then she wouldn’t have time to hang around with her law breaking friends or break the law herself. She needed something positive in her life and I was going to make sure that horses were it. After all, she did live on a horse farm. You couldn’t get away from them even if you wanted to.
“There she is,” Dad said as we both heard a car pull in down the drive. “That is probably one of her friends dropping her off now.”
But it wasn’t one of Cat’s friends at all, it was a police car.
“Um, Dad?” I said. “I think something is wrong.”
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
Cat sat in the back of the cop car, shackled like a common criminal. She looked like maybe she’d murdered someone. She was looking at her feet, her face pale. I knew that she’d been caught red handed. I just wasn’t sure what it was that she’d been doing though I had a sneaking suspicion.
The cop got out of the car and went over to talk to my father. I heard things like legal guardian, ex-wife, troubled girl and caught stealing items from the mall. I knew that Cat had been stealing. It was either that or she’d got herself a rich boyfriend and I knew that no high school kid was going to have a job good enough to pay for all the things that Cat was bringing home. I should have confronted her. Talked to her about it. Made her stop. But deep down I knew that I did
n’t have that kind of power.
Dad looked furious. His face was all red and there was a vein throbbing in his forehead. He went into the house and found my mother, who was summoned to prove that she was Cat’s legal guardian and that no, she didn’t know where her real father was, which was kind of a lie. We all knew that he was back in Wisconsin, probably beating up some new family by now.
I tapped on the window and Cat looked up at me. She’d been crying, her cheeks streaked with half dried tears. I knew that she had to be scared and the sad thing was that the thing she was probably most scared of was being sent back to live with her father. She had a good life here. Sure, we weren’t the perfect family and we were messed up in more ways than one but so was every family. There was no normal, not for any of us and at least here no one was physically or emotionally abused, unless you counted mothers who didn’t talk to you.
“Why did you do it?” I asked her through the glass.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head as more tears dripped down her face.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t know how she felt because I did. All the times I’d longed for the beautiful tack in the catalogues and the riding clothes at the tack store that I’d never be able to afford. Soft breeches and vented coats and helmets with sparkles. I’d wanted them so much that I’d thought about slipping something under my coat more than once. A pretty browband or a new bit, something that no one would miss. But I knew that would be wrong and I knew that there would be a chance that I’d be caught like Cat had been. Then what? I wasn’t sure what happened to teenage criminals. Would Cat really be arrested? Taken to jail or juvenile hall? I had no idea but there was one thing I did know. Cat wouldn’t be coming with us to the show tomorrow.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
Cat was taken down to the station and both my parents went with her. Technically it didn’t have anything to do with Dad but I think he knew that Mom was far too flaky to deal with the situation on her own.
“Did your sister get arrested?” Faith said with wide eyes when they’d left.
I was still standing there feeling kind of shell shocked about the whole thing and had forgotten that Faith was waiting for her mother to come and pick her up. It was just as well she was running late because if she’d seen the police here there was no way that she would let Faith come with us to the show and she probably wouldn’t let her daughter continue to board and take lessons with us either.
“Yes,” I told her, knowing there wasn’t much point in lying. “But can you please not tell your parents.”
“Why?” she asked.
“You want to continue riding with us, don’t you?” I said.
She nodded.
“Then just don’t tell your parents.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “But what did she do?”
“She stole some stuff,” I said. “So let that be a lesson to you.”
Faith nodded solemnly. “I’d never steal,” she said. “It’s wrong.”
But the thing was that she’d probably never have the need to. Her parents had good jobs. They bought her pretty much whatever she needed. She’d never feel that longing that Cat and I did when we looked at things that we knew our parents could never buy for us. The urge I’d felt to grab a candy bar and run from the store back when I lived with my mother and we hardly had enough money for food. But stealing because you were starving didn’t make it any less wrong, which made the world a cold and confusing place sometimes.
Faith’s mother finally came to pick her daughter up with the promise that she would drop her at the show in the morning. I busied myself with loading the trailer, feeding the horses and mucking the stalls. Jordan had gone out of town for a couple of days but was supposed to be back in the morning, which was good because we needed him to watch the farm and feed lunch to the horses that were staying behind. I didn’t know where he had gone and he hadn’t told me. I felt hurt and betrayed by that. I knew that we didn’t really owe each other anything but a friend would have said something. It was things like that which made me think that we weren’t as close as I thought we were.
It was well after dark when Cat and my parents finally came home. Cat stormed up to her room and slammed the door before I could even say anything. My mother followed and did the same, without the slamming part. She just closed her door gently with a soft sigh like it was all too much for her delicate psyche.
“Well?” I said.
“She was booked and charged,” Dad said. “They took her fingerprints and she has a court date.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“It means she’s going to cost us a lot of money.” Dad threw his wallet across the counter.
It skittered along to the edge and then fell off. Patrick caught it in his teeth. I retrieved it from my dog’s mouth, wiping the slobber off before I gave it back to my father.
“I guess she’s not coming to the show then,” I said.
“No, she’s not coming to the show,” Dad replied, still sounding furious.
“But if she did come to the show, it might take her mind off things?” I said hopefully.
“She’s not coming to the show and that is final,” Dad said.
And I knew from the tone of his voice that no amount of pleading was going to change his mind.
CHAPTER FORTY FIVE
I tried to talk to Cat but she’d locked her door and she wouldn’t open it. I thought I could hear her gently sobbing, probably into her pillow. I told her that everything would be okay but of course I didn’t know that for sure. All I knew was that she was in trouble and she needed a friend and that I was going to be there for her as best I could.
Of course I wasn’t going to be there at all the next day but I couldn’t do anything about that. I had my own demons to fight at the show. I’d only just started jumping again and Duncan was right, I had to stick with it and even though I’d managed to jump outside of a show, that didn’t mean that all the bad feelings weren’t going to come flooding back once I actually got there.
I tried to get some sleep but just ended up tossing and turning, which made Patrick mad. Ever since the accident, he’d been allowed to sleep in my room and he was coming to the show with us as well, my doggie security blanket. I hugged him tight as I slipped in and out of bad dreams where I was arrested for crashing and burning at the last show, charged in the murder of a horse even though I knew she was still alive. I screamed as I told them so but no one believed me. I woke in a cold sweat when the first rays of light were just starting to spill over the horizon.
“It’s morning,” I told Patrick. “Show morning.”
Usually show mornings had me excited, a sort of mixture of being nervous and excited all at the same time. A feeling that I never got at any other time, except maybe at clinics where really great trainers were watching me ride. But this morning all I felt was impending doom and maybe just a smidge of excitement.
I threw on my jeans and crept through the house to feed the horses. Cat’s door was still closed and so was my mother’s. Dad’s door was open. His room empty. I guess I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep.
The lights were on in the barn, yellow spilling out into the violet sunrise. Dad had already fed and was mucking stalls. I didn’t say anything, just grabbed a pitchfork and started to help him. There wasn’t really much to say and neither of us were big on small talk, which meant that we’d end up having some deep conversation that neither of us were ready for this early in the morning.
Falcon had managed to keep his braids in, which was a miracle but I still wasn’t sure we should even be taking him to the show. He was young and hard to ride and that difficulty would only be amplified at a show. But I wanted Faith to feel better about her new pony and we couldn’t exactly leave her behind.
My horses were all dirty, having spent the night out in the field. I lined them up and bathed them all, then tied them up in the barn to dry with hay nets to keep them busy so that they wouldn’t get into trouble.
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“What about Sunny?” I asked Dad. “Do we take her now or what?”
“I already paid the entry fee,” Dad said with a sigh. “If we don’t take her, we won’t get the money back. You can ride her.”
“In a walk, trot class?” I said.
“We’ll see if they’ll let us switch her class,” Dad said.
“But I’ve hardly even ridden her,” I said. “I wanted her to be Cat’s horse.”
“Well Cat’s blown her chances now,” Dad said, sounding angry. “You can’t help people like that.”
“You don’t know what she’s been through,” I said, thinking about the scars I’d seen that Cat had received at the hand of her father. She hadn’t had an easy childhood. It wasn’t exactly her fault that she’d turned out the way she had.
“It doesn’t matter what she’s been through,” Dad said. “She broke the law and now she’ll have a criminal record that will follow her around for the rest of her life.”
“I thought they weren’t supposed to do that to kids,” I said.
“Cat is hardly a kid,” Dad said. “She’s old enough to know better and considering the amount of stuff she’s stolen they are hardly likely to be that forgiving. Get the rescue horse ready. Who knows, maybe we’ll find someone who wants to buy her at the show.”
I pulled Sunny from her paddock, feeling sad. It was Cat who should have been getting her ready, not me. I’d wanted that for my step sister. I’d wanted to share this life with her. Now it looked like I wouldn’t get to. And I didn’t want Dad to just sell Sunny either. Patrick jumped around her legs and the mare put her head down so that they could sniff noses. We’d rescued them together. We couldn’t pull them apart now. But I knew that Dad would try and sell the horse just to teach Cat a lesson.
Lead Change (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 29) Page 9