Charlie Franks is A-OK

by Cecily Anne Paterson

  I stopped crying for a second. That wasn’t what I’d meant, but now that Ness mentioned that something might go wrong, I felt sick and angry all over again.

  ‘What kinds of things go wrong? When horses have foals, I mean.’ I gasped slightly to calm myself down.

  Ness walked into the stables. I followed her. There was Fozzles, happy in a stall, with a feedbag in easy reach.

  ‘Well, Fozzles is through one of the dangerous periods. Early on, mares can get an infection that means they lose their foals. But she’s about five months on now, so that won’t happen.’ She gave me a brush and I moved into the stall to work on Fozzles’ mane. ‘Then sometimes, if a birth goes badly, the foal can die as it’s being born. It’s not usual, but it happens. We lost a foal three years ago. Had to call the vet during the birth but it was too late.’

  My roller coaster tummy was back. ‘Is there anything else?’

  Ness laughed. ‘If you were a horse, you probably wouldn’t have made it out of your mother alive. It’s pretty common for twin pregnancies to fail.’

  ‘What if Fozzles has twins?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘How would you know?’

  ‘It’s alright. The vet checked. It’s just one baby in there.’

  I rubbed my hand on Fozzles’ belly. It seemed even bigger than yesterday. ‘Did you think she was pregnant? Is that why you called the vet?’

  ‘I suspected it a week ago at pony club when you couldn’t get the girth done up right. I still can’t figure out how it could have happened, though. I mean, Fozzles was in a paddock with mares. There were no males around her at all, except for George Michael, Molly’s foal in the next paddock. But he was too young and anyway, I told everyone not to let him in there.’

  My eyes opened wide. ‘Do you think George Michael …’ I couldn’t say the words.

  ‘Do you mean, do I think cute little baby George Michael who suddenly grew up is the father?’ smiled Ness. ‘Maybe. I can’t think of any other options. But someone would have had to have not put Fozzles away like they were told for that to happen.’

  I turned away, embarrassed. Coco would have been gagging from start to finish in this conversation, thinking about which horse did what to Fozzles. Poor Fozzles nudged me and flicked her tail, so I patted her neck and pulled my fingers through her mane. ‘Can I ride her if she’s pregnant?’ I asked, in a quiet voice.

  ‘You can ride her for another two months but not too hard or fast. Just go gently.’

  ‘What about jumping?’ I asked again, even more quietly.

  Ness let out a breath. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry to say, no jumping. She looks big already, and you ride her pretty hard when you jump.’

  I swallowed. There it was. That’s what I’d meant when I said it wasn’t going to work out. If my world had tripped over its shoelaces when Mum had said she was pregnant, it had landed flat on its face after Ness had spoken.

  ‘Oh.’ It was all I could manage. I’m not like Coco. I don’t do huge tantrums. I don’t make big fusses. Until then, I would have said I couldn’t see the point in doing that, but then, nothing had really ever gone wrong. Now it had, I could see the point, but I didn’t really know how to do it.

  ‘Oh.’ I said it again, but inside I was screaming.

  ‘We can find you another horse to ride,’ said Ness. She looked over. Her face seemed concerned. ‘You’ll still be able to jump. It just won’t be on Fozzles.’

  And it won’t be with Mum there, I thought, but I nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘We’ll figure something out. You’ll be fine.’

  I wasn’t expecting Coco to be as glum and miserable as I was about the news, but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so excited about it either.

  ‘A bay-beeeeee?’ she screeched with joy. ‘Another one? An actual little baby horse? That’s so cute. So adorable. So awesome.’ She jumped up and down for pretty much a full minute while I just stood there and looked at her, like what are you doing?

  Then she stopped. ‘But you won’t be able to jump her, right?’

  I nodded, still glum and miserable.

  ‘How did she, you know …’ Coco squirmed and made a face. ‘Who’s the father?’

  I itched my nose. ‘Ness can’t figure it out. She thinks maybe George Michael, you know, the colt that was in the paddock next to Fozzles. But only if he suddenly got interested …’ Coco made another face, ‘and if someone put them together.’ I shook my head. ‘But she can’t work out who it would have been.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Coco. ‘George Michael.’ She went quiet and examined her toenails, her hair covering her face. ‘But he’s only a baby. Even if someone had put Fozzles in with him, nothing could have happened, right?’

  ‘Was only a baby. I guess not so much of a baby.’

  Coco looked up at me. ‘How old do horses have to be before they can …?’ She didn’t finish the question before she put her hands over her ears and made a spitting out sound with her tongue. ‘Oh, ick. I can’t believe I even just said that. Forget it. Forget all of it.’

  She looked back at her toes again and then up at me. ‘So you’re going to need a horse to ride.’

  I nodded glumly. ‘I know.’ I flopped onto her bed, despondent. ‘I’ve only just gotten my own horse and now I can’t even jump her.’

  That was when my twin sister made an enthusiastic, cheesy, very-un-Coco-like face at me. ‘Well, that’s easy. You can ride Cupcake.’

  I took a breath in and let it out. Cupcake was not my ideal first choice of replacement horse for my perfect-in-every-way Fozzles. She was difficult; she’d almost been sold by Ness before somehow Coco managed to make a connection with her and start to work her in the round yard. I’d ridden her a few times, but I didn’t like her, and I could tell she didn’t like me. ‘She pig-roots. It won’t work.’

  ‘She won’t,’ Coco said. Her head went down again. ‘I’ll do some work with her. And anyway, she only does it when I’m not around at all. If she knows I’m nearby, she’s fine.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said, but I didn’t guess it at all. In my head, there was no substitute for Fozzles, and if there was, it certainly wasn’t Cupcake. ‘But if she only goes okay when you’re nearby, that means you’ll always have to be nearby. You’ll have to come to training with me, and pony club. And you’ll have to be there at every competition.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Mum usually does that stuff. You never want to come. I just can’t see it working out.’

  Coco bit her lip. ‘But you want to do show jumping, don’t you? And …’ She trailed off and didn’t finish her sentence.

  I nodded. ‘I do. I mean, I did.’ My voice faded.

  ‘You can’t give up.’ She lifted my chin in her hand. ‘You look all hopeless and depressed. Not like normal Charlie, my sister who can do everything. You said you’re going to be the show jumping champion, so you are. You’ve never failed at anything yet. You can’t start now, just because a horse got pregnant accidentally because someone stuffed up. You can’t quit just because your horse is having a baby.’

  ‘My horse is having a baby.’ I still couldn’t believe it. And then a thought hit me. ‘Do you think that means the baby is mine too?’

  Coco stared at me like I was stupid. ‘Yeah, of course.’

  I pictured it in my head for a moment—Fozzles, me and the baby-foal-to-be. ‘We’ll be like a little family.’ My roller-coaster-dropping tummy feeling turned into the sort of warm glow you get inside when you stay in the spa hot tub on a cold day. ‘That’s actually okay.’

  Coco made more rude faces at me. ‘Seriously? You don’t think having a foal is just the most gorgeous thing in the world? I mean, apart from having our own baby sister, of course.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I ignored the baby sister part of what Coco had said, and used my old voice, the confident Charlie voice that had been somehow misplaced for the past twenty-four hours. ‘The most gorgeous.’ I took a deep breath, and a tiny dip on the nervous roller coaster and said, ‘And thanks. I’ll jump Cupcake.
That would be good.’

  ‘Awesome,’ said Coco. She bit her lip and then smiled brightly. ‘I want her to be a champion, so it’s down to you, okay?’ She waved me out of her room. ‘Go away now. I need to do my toenails and you always complain about the smell of the nail polish.’

  I left. She was right. There was no place for me in her room anymore. Instead, I tiptoed down the hall towards my own room, being extra quiet as I snuck past Mum and Dad’s door.

  ‘Charlie,’ a voice called out. It was a weak voice.

  Mum. Darn it. I stopped, hoping she’d think I’d gone on, but she called again. ‘Is that you, Charlie?’

  I pressed my fingers into my hands and flicked my thumbnails, nervous. I didn’t want to see Mum. I wouldn’t know what to say, and she always knew when there was something going on with me. I couldn’t tell her I was angry with her, either. It sounded really pathetic and self-centred, almost like something Coco would have said last year. Six months into her twelve-month ‘I don’t want to move to the country’ tantrum, I’d sworn I’d never ever put anyone through what she inflicted on us all, and I wasn’t about to start. It’d be better to hide it and keep it in than spray it all over the house like she did last year.

  ‘It’s me,’ I called back. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Can you come in here?’

  I took a deep breath, opened the door and went in. The room was half-dark, the blinds pulled to keep the glaring late summer sun to a minimum. It was hot too, but I could feel the fan blowing from the corner. Mum was still in bed; she looked like she’d hardly moved since I saw her the night before, except she looked even thinner and whiter.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked from the door. ‘Do you need a drink?’

  ‘I can’t drink. I throw it up. Just come over here.’

  I stepped closer, quietly and slowly. It seemed that if I made too much noise or moved too fast something might break, and it might be Mum. When I got to the side of her bed and got a proper look at her, something did break. Inside me, the hard rock of anger against Mum I was carrying fell and smashed into tiny pieces. I reached down and touched her hand. ‘You look terrible.’

  She grinned a small smile. ‘Oh, Charlie. Always say what you think, sweetie.’

  ‘It’s true. Is this normal? Do people get this sick? Or are you just turning into some kind of weird, pregnant ghost?’

  ‘I get sick when I’m pregnant.’ She waited a moment. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’

  I knelt down beside her. ‘Sorry? Why? You can’t help it.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your plans.’ She stroked my face. ‘Dad will have to take you to pony club and the competitions. I won’t be able to. I was planning to, but …’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum. You’ll be better soon, then everything will be like it was before.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, and I’ll be able to bring the baby.’

  Some of my tiny anger rocks clogged together again. I wasn’t angry with Mum anymore, but somehow I just knew I didn’t like the baby. I didn’t like it pushing into our lives, wrecking things, making Mum sick, changing everything around. I’d look after Mum, but there was no way I was going to be happy about the baby.

  8

  Chapter 8

  Dad took me to Pony Club on the weekend. It was okay, in a ‘we got there, I rode and we came home’ kind of way, but he didn’t stay like Mum did.

  ‘Jobs to do,’ he said, as he undid the car from the horse float we’d borrowed and backed around and out of the parking area. ‘Oil to get, to finish the deck. See you in a bit, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I waved as he drove away and then turned to Cupcake, who was looking sulky and tense. ‘We have to jump, Cupcake.’

  ‘You can’t talk to her like that,’ said Coco, appearing beside me. She’d been grabbing the tack from the float. ‘You have to be smooth. And kind. Like so.’ She nestled up to Cupcake and leaned in to her ear. I didn’t even hear what she said, but something changed in the horse. She relaxed and pricked her ears up.

  ‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

  Coco shrugged. ‘She just loves me, like you do.’

  ‘Yeah, ha ha.’ I picked up the saddle and swung it over her back. ‘Because you’re so lovable. Whatever.’

  Coco made a face at me and came around to do up Cupcake’s girth. ‘Just take it easy with her, okay? At first, I mean. Don’t go trying to do everything all at once like you usually do.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Of course not. Don’t worry.’

  Coco watched from the side as I took Cupcake through her paces. We started off slowly, just walking and trotting, then we went through some of the easy beginner jumps. She pigrooted once, which shocked me a little bit, but Coco jumped up and came over, and she didn’t do it again.

  After a few goes around the yard, up and over the beginner jumps, we started on the bigger ones. I was the only one doing them as the rest of the kids who were there that day were still on small ponies and only jumping forty centimetres or so. Cupcake wasn’t smooth and we didn’t seem to move together, like Fozzles and I, but it didn’t feel terrible.

  ‘Come on, Cupcake,’ I whispered to her. ‘Let’s do the next level.’ I took her back around and went for the run up. We went over together and kept going. It didn’t feel like flying, but it wasn’t bad.

  I patted Cupcake on the neck. ‘Good job, girl.’ Her ears pricked up. ‘We might be okay after all.’

  From the side of my eye I could see Coco clapping, so I rode over to her.

  ‘Awesome. Well done,’ she said. ‘You guys are going great.’

  I hopped down, pulling my helmet off and wiping the sweat off my forehead. ‘Thanks. She’s good. I think it might work out.’

  Coco gave me a hug. ‘Yay.’

  ‘The only thing is, you don’t get to ride if I’m on her.’ I’d been worried about this all week. It didn’t seem fair. It also didn’t seem normal that Coco was being so overly nice to me. Not that I was complaining, of course, but still, I just couldn’t figure it all out. It was like she was desperate to have me ride. ‘I mean, don’t you want to do pony club too? You love Cupcake as much as I love Fozzles.’

  Coco’s eyes went to the side and then back to me. She shrugged. ‘I just … I mean, yeah, of course I love her. That’s how come I know how bad you must feel that Fozzles is having a baby and you can’t jump her. Anyway, it’s not your fault she’s pregnant.’ She scratched her head. She seemed confused, or something else. I didn’t know what.

  I opened my mouth to ask her another question, but she swivelled around suddenly. ‘Oh look!’ Her voice had a note of relief in it. ‘Isn’t that Baylor?’

  A huge black four wheel drive was driving down the gravel road, towing a huge, shiny black horse float behind it. It was definitely Baylor. My face suddenly felt itchy and I gave it a rub.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Coco poked me in the shoulder. ‘Stop rubbing your face.’

  I stopped, but I gave her a look that said, Stay out of my itchy face, it’s none of your business. She stepped forward and waved at the black car that had now pulled up in front of us. ‘Hey, Baylor.’

  I raised my hand too. ‘Hey, Baylor.’

  Baylor slid neatly out of the front passenger seat of her car. She looked nearly as shiny as the horse float and I gazed at her curiously. Something else was the same, but I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t until Coco opened her mouth that I realised. Baylor’s outfit matched the colours on the horse float.

  ‘Oooh,’ gushed Coco. ‘Love your jacket. So cute. And such a nice cut.’

  I looked again. It was just a jacket, even though it was red and black. Could a jacket have a nice cut? What did that even mean? For me, a jacket was a back, two sleeves and two flaps at the front. Oh, and a collar. Bam. Done. Easy. I had no idea how Coco could say one jacket was cuter than another. And ‘cuter’? Puppies are cute. Foals are cute. Baby bunnies are cute. Jackets are not cute.

  ‘Thanks,’ I heard Baylor say. ‘I love your sho
rts. Adorable.’

  I coughed and rubbed my eyes again. Honestly. Adorable shorts? Puppies, foals and bunnies, yes. Shorts? No.

  I looked around to see what the other riders were doing. It was definitely time to get out of there when the clothes conversations started.

  I went to lead Cupcake back out to the grounds, but Baylor’s voice stopped me. ‘Charlie? Where’s your other horse?’

  I looked over at her, all matchy-matchy and cute and perfect. Her mum was getting her horse out of the float and he looked as shiny as everything else.

  ‘She’s pregnant. Just found out.’ I made a face. ‘We didn’t know.’

  Baylor’s eyes went wide. ‘Really?’

  Coco jumped in to the conversation. She was speaking quickly. ‘Yeah, it must have happened before we even got our horses. From the place they were living before. Somehow Fozzles got into a paddock with a colt who grew up a bit too quickly. No one knows how it happened.’

  Baylor blinked a couple of times. She looked almost shocked. ‘None of our horses get pregnant unless it’s planned. We have a breeding program. The stallions get selected. It’s all done properly.’

  Coco looked away. I laughed. ‘Well, it looks like Fozzles did it the old fashioned way. But this is Cupcake. And she’s great too. Are you jumping?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Baylor. Her voice sounded like she meant to say, What else would I be doing? Her mum saddled up her horse and brought it around, and Baylor buckled up her helmet, put her foot in the stirrup and swung up like she’d been doing it all her life. I watched her trot out into the ring and soar easily over the small jumps. Her seat was great; she knew just how to move with the horse and she looked comfortable, like it was the easiest thing she’d ever do.

  When she’d finished a round, she came back to Coco and me. She’d hardly even broken a sweat.

  ‘You’re really good.’ I nodded a few times to make the point. ‘You have a great seat.’

  ‘I’ve been doing this since I was four.’ She sat up straighter and shook her ponytail back. ‘I should be.’