Sale Horse (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 5)

by Claire Svendsen

“No,” she cried. “You should totally go because my trainer, Todd, wants to take a bunch of us to that one too and we’ll get to see each other and it will be awesome.”

  “But I don’t really feel like riding,” I sighed. “Even though I do want to see you and Topaz.”

  “Listen,” she said, sounding serious. “I thought you wanted to ride in the Olympics. I thought you wanted to stand on that podium and get your gold medal and then gallop around the ring with the blue ribbon on your horse’s bridle and the crowd cheering.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Well then you’re going to have to buck up. Bad stuff happens but we have our riding. It’s the glue that holds us together. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  And I knew that she was most definitely right.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Esther seemed pretty happy that I agreed to go to the show. Something about keeping the name of the barn out there and recruiting new clients. I had to admit that I felt a little taken advantage of. After all, I was going to compete for my own sanity, not to be the flagship of the barn but as long as Esther was happy then my life was easier so I just smiled.

  “So it’s thanks to you that we are being dragged to this show, is it?” Ethan said.

  Esther had informed him that both he and his sister would be competing as well, I guessed as the second tier flagship.

  “Hey, I never said anything about you guys,” I said. “And your sister had better stay away from my pony.”

  “You have about as much chance of that happening as winning the lottery,” he said. “She plays this online game and do you know what the name of her horse on the game is called?”

  “Fester,” I said.

  “You wish. No, it’s Bluebird. All we hear is Bluebird all day and all night.”

  “You do realize,” I said. “That if I ever let her actually ride him she wouldn’t like him so much because he probably wouldn’t do anything she asked. She’s not ready for him.”

  And I wasn’t ready to share my pony with anyone else either but I didn’t tell Ethan that.

  “I know,” he sighed.

  Just at that moment Faith dutifully walked by, leading Princess out to the ring for the group lesson. She had a big grin on her face and her head was swelling at an alarming rate due to the fact that she was the best rider in the group.

  “I know what you’re up to kid,” I told her.

  “No you don’t,” she said, tossing her braids as she went.

  “She’ll probably make it to the Olympics before all of us,” I groaned.

  But having something to focus on like the Rose Gate show actually turned out to be the perfect distraction. I didn’t have time to think about Mickey in the hospital or stupid not quite Sound of Music Liesl. There were other things that filled my days like re-clipping Bluebird because he seemed to think that the second winter was coming and his coat had grown back accordingly. Then his mane needed to be pulled and his whiskers trimmed and somehow all my pads and wraps needed washing. I was stuffing them into the washer when Cat appeared, looking disgusted.

  “That’s gross,” she said as I shoved an especially sweaty pad in.

  “And your point is?” I said.

  “My point is why would I want to wash my clothes in there after all that gross stuff has been inside with all horse poop on it and everything?”

  “Washing machines are self-cleaning,” I said, dumping in a double load of detergent.

  “It’s still disgusting,” she said.

  “Well why don’t you run along and tell your father then since you’re all such best friends?” I said.

  She opened her mouth to say something and I caught sight of a tongue stud that I hadn’t noticed before. Then she closed her mouth and stormed off. I hung around until the washer finished and then shoved all the wet stuff into the dryer and annoyingly it turned out that Cat was right. Washing machines weren’t self-cleaning after all. There was a dirty ring of hair and grime that I had to scrub off with an old towel. What a rip off.

  Later that evening there was no mention of the washing machine but of course Mom had to bring up the other thing that I was trying to forget. Mickey.

  “Would you like me to take you back to the hospital?” she said.

  “Can’t,” I shook my head and tried to swallow the food in my mouth that now tasted like cardboard. “I have this show to get ready for and as it’s kind of like a last minute deal, I have a million things to do.”

  “Things more important than visiting your sick friend?” Cat asked, giving me the evil eye. I knew that she was only trying to stir the pot because of earlier.

  “She’s not sick,” I said. “She’s in a coma and she doesn’t know whether I’m there or not so what difference does it make?”

  “Emily,” Mom said. “That’s not true. We talked about this. Of course she knows that you’re there.”

  “That’s not what her mom says,” I said. “Or what her doctors say.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they think. It matters what you think,” Mom said.

  “Well I don’t know what to think,” I put down my knife and fork. “But I know that Mickey’s mom doesn’t want me there because I remind her of horses and riding and all the bad things that have happened. So it’s probably best that I just stay away. Besides, I’m still taking care of her horse. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Let the kid do whatever she wants,” Derek sighed.

  I looked at the man who sat at the end of the table in the chair that my real father would be sitting in if he was still here. I couldn’t remember the last time he yelled at me. Now he saved all his rage for his own daughter, which I kind of liked. It felt like payback only for what I didn’t know and if I wasn’t fighting with him then how was I supposed to act around him? I didn’t know that either.

  “May I be excused?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “Just don’t forget that you promised to clean your room.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Anything to keep the peace, even though I was pretty sure that I promised no such thing. And of course my room was currently as messy as my mind. In fact it was an obstacle course just getting from the door to my bed. I’d constructed an elaborate routine of leaps and bounds to get over the stuff I’d dumped on the floor and never picked up. The old mom never would have let it get that bad but I knew she was just trying to be nice because of Mickey. By now she would have most definitely screamed at me that I was a slob and that she was not my maid.

  I threw clothes into the hamper and shoved stuff into drawers but eventually got distracted by a horse book that Mickey lent me. It had pictures in it of girls leaping over five foot fences wearing non regulation helmets, their braids flying out in the breeze. It had been printed in the seventies and Mickey had found it at the flea market that her mom liked to drag her to sometimes on the weekends. We laughed so hard at those photos but I’d also been envious. No one seemed to have any fear in those days. I wanted my life to be like that and looking at the book just made me sad so I shoved it under my bed.

  Then I fell asleep on my half made bed and dreamt that Liesl was chasing after me at the Rose Gate show, riding Harlow over the same course I was and laughing as he began to limp. I woke in a cold sweat, knowing that if she ever dared show her face at the barn again, I was going to have to get rid of her for good.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I want you to ride Hampton,” Esther said.

  I was in the tack room, digging through the trunk of stuff that used to belong to Bluebird’s original owner Sally and now belonged to me. I was pretty sure that I had seen a sheepskin half pad that would drive Hampton nuts. I had wraps in one hand and a noseband in the other when Esther interrupted me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You heard. I want you to start riding Hampton.”

  “Why?”

  Since I’d first offered to ride Hampton for the prospective buyers, Esther had turned me down and I was actuall
y kind of glad. It was working. Hampton was doing a bang up job of disappointing everyone who came to ride him. He didn’t really need my help at all. But itchy boots and saddle pads certainly didn’t hurt either.

  “Because we’re taking him to the show,” she said.

  “What? No,” I jumped up, the wraps tumbling to the floor, unravelling as they went.

  “Don’t be difficult about this,” Esther said. “There is a girl coming to the show who wants to see him. She may even end up riding him herself so you might not have to but he needs some proper work and he needs to be entered. That is where you come in.”

  “But,” I said, desperately scrambling to come up with an excuse.

  The last time I rode Hampton, he’d gone better for me than he had for Mickey. She’d been really mad about it and I swore to myself that I would never ride her horse again.

  “Mickey won’t even know,” Esther said.

  “She’ll know when she wakes up,” I grumbled.

  But I’d talked my mom into calling Mickey’s mom to find out how she was and it turned out that she wasn’t getting any better. In fact, the doctors said that the longer she was in the coma, the less chance there was of her waking up at all.

  “Please don’t give me a hard time about this,” Esther said. “Tack him up and I’ll give you a lesson.”

  “Alright,” I said, shoving my stuff back into the trunk.

  Hampton pinned his ears as I went into his stall.

  “I know,” I told him. “I don’t like it any more than you do but this is just the way it’s going to have to be. Neither of us have a choice.”

  He sulked while I groomed him and tacked him up, leaving off all the itchy boots and wraps. I didn’t need them. No one was there to watch but what about at the show? Could I really sabotage my own career by riding Hampton wrong and therefore making both of us look bad just so someone wouldn’t want him? Things were starting to get complicated fast.

  But as I took him out to the ring and swung up onto his broad back, I felt like part of me was suddenly connected to Mickey. As though she was sitting on his back with me, smiling. Even Hampton pricked his ears forward when I asked him to pick up the walk.

  “See?” Esther said. “He’s glad to have someone on his back who finally knows what they are doing.”

  I asked Hampton for the trot and then a canter and I couldn’t help but smile. I’d forgotten how smooth and graceful he was compared to the mad dash that was Bluebird. Esther set up a simple hunter course of five jumps and Hampton cantered over them like they were nothing.

  “Good job,” Esther called out. “But don’t over ride him. He’s not Bluebird. This is supposed to look elegant.”

  Esther made us do it again until she was satisfied that we were quiet and calm enough for the hunter classes.

  “Who is this girl who wants to see him?” I asked Esther, jumping to the ground and patting Hampton.

  “I forget her name,” Esther frowned. “But she rides with Todd from Riverdale Equestrian Center and he’s bringing a bunch of students to the show.”

  “But that’s Becka’s trainer,” I said. “I bet she probably knows who it is.”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas,” Esther called after me as I dragged Hampton back to the barn.

  “I won’t,” I called back.

  It was a blatant lie. Of course I was getting ideas. Becka could help me put this girl off buying Hampton just like she helped me at the clinic with Jess. If anyone could sabotage something, it was Becka. She was even more devious than I was.

  “I mean it,” Esther shouted.

  But I wasn’t listening.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Somebody from your barn wants to buy my friend’s horse,” I snapped at Becka that night on the phone.

  I hadn’t meant to but the more I’d thought about it, the madder I’d got and instead of asking her to help me, I was now accusing her of being the one who set it up in the first place.

  “Who?” she asked, ignoring my tone.

  “I don’t know. Esther wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Because she doesn’t want you to wreck the sale?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But of course you will.”

  “I know.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “You don’t think it was me, do you?” Becka finally asked. “Because I would never do that. Todd is always looking for horses to sell his kids. I bet he probably saw the ad somewhere online.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll figure this out. I bet it’s one of his lesson groupies. The ones who don’t have horses but wish they did. They are always bugging Todd about trying out sale horses.”

  “But Hampton is really expensive, like a really great ready-made hunter. He won’t be cheap. It has to be someone whose parents have bucket loads of money.”

  “That narrows it down to all of them,” Becka sighed. “Parents with pre-loaded check books are in abundance at my barn.”

  “Nice. Can I come and ride with you?” I said, suddenly realizing that I had less in common with Becka than I first thought.

  “Look, don’t worry about it. There is no way I’m going to let someone from my barn walk away with your friend’s horse. Okay? And if the worst comes to the worst, you can always wreck the ride.”

  “I already thought of that,” I sighed. “But what if some big name trainer is there and sees me ride badly? What if word gets back to Miguel? I really don’t want to blow my chances of getting on the junior jumper team but I don’t want someone to buy Hampton because I rode him well either. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “And you know what you should really be worrying about?”

  “What?”

  “How you are going to beat me in the pony jumper class,” she laughed.

  “That’s the last thing I’m worried about,” I said but suddenly that seemed really important too.

  Sitting on the back of Hampton after a disastrous jumping round, it also seemed impossible. I could ride one horse well on one day and one on another but trying to go from galloping Bluebird around in the fastest time to sitting pretty on Hampton was proving to be harder than I thought.

  “I’m not a hunter rider anymore,” I moaned.

  “You should be able to do both,” Esther snapped. “You’ve just become sloppy, that’s all. In fact I think this will be good for you. Maybe you’ll learn a little restraint.”

  “Restraint doesn’t win jumper prizes,” I whispered to Hampton as I nudged him into a canter.

  His rocking horse pace felt a million miles slower than Bluebird but I thought of what Mickey used to say when she rode him. That he was just like a big, comfy armchair and that it was best to just sit back, enjoy the ride and let him do all the work. And she was right. Having literally just got off Bluebird, I was now over riding Hampton. Once I stopped doing that, he obliged by putting in a textbook round.

  “Better,” Esther said.

  “I don’t see why you won’t tell me who it is who is coming to the show to see Hampton,” I said.

  “Because I don’t know,” Esther said. “Todd and I go way back. He said he’s bringing a student who is interested in purchasing Hampton and that is good enough for me.”

  Becka hadn’t been able to find out either. She said it had to be one of the new girls that she didn’t know very well and she was going to do some digging around to try and find out more. Only I hadn’t heard back from her.

  To make matters worse, at school I was sent to the principal’s office and this time it wasn’t only because of my bad grades.

  “We are all so sorry about your friend, dear,” Mrs. Wilbur said.

  “Thanks,” I sat down in the big chair opposite her desk.

  I had been worried that maybe I was in trouble since I’d been far more inattentive in class than usual but Mrs. Wilbur was cool. She used to ride horses and she understood what it was like to h
ave them matter more to you than anything in the whole world.

  “We were all thinking that maybe it would be nice to put together some sort of tribute for Mickey,” she rubbed her double chin thoughtfully.

  “A tribute?” I said, sounding doubtful.

  I already had enough going on in my life without having to cheerlead a tribute full of weeping people who didn’t even really care about Mickey in the first place.

  “Well, more like a sort of fundraiser. To help out with her medical expenses, and her horse expenses.”

  “Her parents are selling her horse,” I said darkly. “And I don’t really have time to organize a tribute or fundraiser or whatever. I have this big horse show coming up and that sounds like it would take a lot of time away from my riding.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “I do think it’s a good idea,” I said. “I just don’t think I’m the right person for the job, if you know what I mean.”

  Mrs. Wilbur was starting to look at me like I was the kind of person who didn’t care about anyone but herself. But she had to know that saving Hampton would mean more to Mickey than a stupid fundraiser full of people she didn’t even like, fake crying over her demise.

  “Can I think about it and get back to you?” I asked. “Maybe, after the horse show?”

  “Very well,” she sighed.

  I was almost out of the office when she called after me.

  “You know, Emily,” she said. “There are more important things in life that horses.”

  “Not in my life,” I whispered as I ran back to class. Mrs. Wilbur obviously didn’t know me at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “A tribute?” Ethan said when I told him. “That makes it sound like she’s dead already.”

  “I know, right?” I replied, fiddling with Bluebird’s reins.

  We were both in the ring and Esther was trying to use Ethan as an example of someone who could successfully do both hunter and jumper classes and even did it on the same horse.

  “But I hardly ever win,” Ethan whispered to me. “So I’m not exactly a shining example, am I?”