Ground Training

by Bonnie Bryant

  Pouring herself a glass of orange juice, Lisa did her best not to think about Rafe. With any luck her mother would come to her senses soon, before she got hurt. In the meantime, though, there was another problem to worry about. Whenever Mrs. Atwood wasn’t gushing about her latest date with Rafe, she was harassing Lisa about her decision to attend Northern Virginia University, a local college, the following year.

  Both of Lisa’s parents had known that NVU was on the list of schools she was applying to, but when she’d been accepted early, she had decided all on her own to send back the form saying she would go there. By the time her mother and father found out, it was a done deal. And for some reason both of them seemed to think that Lisa had made a horrible mistake, even though she kept trying to explain that she’d given her choice a lot of serious thought. They just didn’t seem interested in hearing what she had to say about the matter. That was why Lisa hadn’t told a soul when she’d decided the night before to withdraw her applications to several other schools and throw away the blank application forms for two or three more. She’d just done it. That way nobody—not her parents, not her school guidance counselor, nobody—would be able to pressure her into changing her mind.

  Lisa dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster and drummed her fingers on the counter as she waited for the toast to pop. The whole college shebang seemed pretty minor now compared to what had happened the day before. Intellectually, though, Lisa knew that it would all come back into focus once she’d had a chance to get used to the idea that Prancer was gone. Even if just at the moment it felt as though nothing could break through the fog of sadness that surrounded her.

  Lisa had just taken her first bite of toast when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She braced herself, hoping her mother would have the sensitivity to avoid starting another argument about college this morning but knowing that the chances were slim.

  “Good morning, Lisa dear,” Mrs. Atwood sang out as she entered, wrapped in a silky red robe that Lisa recognized as an old Mother’s Day gift from her father.

  Lisa couldn’t answer. She had just spotted Rafe slouching into the kitchen after her mother, twenty-four hours’ worth of dark stubble on his angular chin and her older brother’s ancient terry-cloth robe loosely tied around his waist. “Yo,” he said with a yawn, lazily scratching his neck. “How’s it going, Lisa?”

  Lisa’s jaw dropped. For a long moment, she couldn’t respond. She just stared, hardly believing this scene was real and not some kind of demented nightmare. It was bad enough that the two of them were together at all—having dinner with each other practically every night, calling each other repulsive pet names, sucking face right in front of Lisa or whoever happened to be watching. Now he was spending the night at the house, too? It was too much—Lisa just couldn’t compute the situation at the moment. Not now, when everything else was already so horrible.

  Finally she found her voice again. “I’ve got to go,” she blurted out, pushing her chair back so quickly that it almost toppled over. Before her mother or Rafe could respond, she raced out of the kitchen, leaving her breakfast behind.

  “Could you pass the sugar please, Carole?” Colonel Hanson said, pouring himself a fresh cup of coffee from the pot in the center of the table.

  Carole did as her father asked, not quite daring to meet his eyes. She couldn’t stand the way he looked at her now—as if everything had changed between them, as if he saw her in a whole different way than he had before Saturday. Carole and her father had always been close, and they had only grown closer when Carole’s mother had died of cancer years earlier. Carole had always loved their special relationship. Now she was afraid that, in one misguided moment, she had ruined all that forever.

  Colonel Hanson cleared his throat. “Listen, Carole,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten it’s your birthday today. But I also don’t want to smile and sing and pretend everything is fine when it’s not.”

  Carole blinked. With everything that had happened, she had almost forgotten her birthday herself. “Oh,” she said. “My birthday. Right.”

  “Still,” Colonel Hanson said, leaning over and reaching under the table, “I do have a few gifts I’d already wrapped up for you. So I guess you might as well go ahead and open them.” He set a shopping bag on the table and pushed it toward her.

  “Okay.” Carole felt slightly nauseated. Would her father ever look at her normally again? Or would his face always wear that new, wary, disappointed expression when he met her eye?

  She took the shopping bag and reached inside. The first and largest package, wrapped in pony print paper, contained a new dark green turnout rug with Starlight’s name embroidered on it in block letters. “Wow,” Carole said. “Thanks, Dad. It’s really nice.”

  Wow is right, she thought as she carefully folded the heavy green cloth and set it on the table. Just imagine if I’d gone ahead and sold Starlight like I’d planned. Then what would I have done with this?

  She returned her attention to the shopping bag. There were two more packages inside. Carole unwrapped them quickly, revealing a pair of nice winter riding gloves and a brand-new book by a well-known horse trainer.

  Setting the two gifts on top of the folded turnout rug, she smiled tentatively at her father. “Thanks, Dad,” she said softly.

  He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “You’re welcome,” he replied, not really returning her smile. He glanced at his watch. “Now, hurry and finish your breakfast. It’s almost time for you to leave for school. You want to get there a little early today, remember, so you have plenty of time to talk to your teacher.”

  Carole nodded. How could she forget? Her father had made it excruciatingly clear that he expected her to spill her guts to Ms. Shepard, her history teacher, as soon as humanly possible. Carole forced a few more spoonfuls of cereal down her throat, then carried her bowl to the sink and dumped the rest down the garbage disposal. She didn’t have much of an appetite.

  As she entered the school building a little while later, Carole felt like an unwanted, broken-down old nag walking to the slaughterhouse. After a quick stop at her locker, she took a deep breath and headed down the hall toward her history classroom. There was no sense in putting it off any longer.

  Ms. Shepard was bent over some papers when Carole knocked softly on the door frame. “Excuse me,” Carole said to the teacher. “Um, could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Carole,” Ms. Shepard said, glancing up. “I had a feeling I might be seeing you this morning. Come right in. Just let me finish marking this quiz, or I’ll never remember where I left off. It will just be a moment.”

  “Sure.” Carole was thankful that Ms. Shepard didn’t have homeroom duty. It would have been even worse to make her confession in front of a room full of eavesdropping classmates. Still, she knew it wasn’t going to be easy to say what she had to say even in front of an empty classroom.

  As the teacher quickly ran her pen down the paper in front of her, Carole’s gaze kept wandering to her own seat. She could almost see herself sitting there even now, bending over her backpack and hurriedly flipping pages in her history book, looking up the answers she’d needed to pass that test. It hadn’t really seemed as though she were making a choice at the time, but now she saw that she had. She had made the wrong choice, and she was paying for it in a big way.

  Ms. Shepard finished her grading and put the paper aside, looking up at Carole again. “All right, there we go,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “Now, what do you have to say to me this morning, my dear?”

  Carole gulped and tried to focus. “I—I have something to tell you,” she said as steadily as she could. Then she launched into her now familiar confession.

  Ms. Shepard’s kind face grew stern as Carole spoke. By the time Carole finished, the teacher was shaking her head grimly.

  “Well, well,” Ms. Shepard said severely, leaning forward with her elbows on her desk. “I have to say that I’m shocked, Caro
le. Of course I know now that you were being untruthful when you told me your father was ill to get me to give you that retest. Your father and I figured that out when we ran into each other at the horse show on Saturday.” She shook her head slowly. “But I had no idea about the rest of it. This is a very serious matter.”

  Carole nodded miserably and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Now that the dreaded confession was over, she felt oddly deflated. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I was just so worried about flunking again. I mean, if my grade slipped too much, I wouldn’t be able to ride anymore, and, well…”

  Ms. Shepard blinked. “Oh,” she said. “So that’s what drove you to this. Horses.”

  “Yes,” Carole said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “I’m really sorry about what I did. But riding is really important to me, and I guess for a second there I kind of lost my head. You know, when I thought I might not be able to do it anymore.” She grimaced. “And now I can’t do it anymore anyhow, at least for now, because of what I did. When he found out about this, my dad banned me from the stable.”

  “I see.” Ms. Shepard was silent for a moment, her frank hazel eyes studying Carole’s face. “Well. Now I guess it’s my turn to figure out what to do about this. It’s a tough one, Carole—mostly because I know you’ve never done anything like this before. Right?”

  “I haven’t,” Carole agreed hastily. “I swear, I really haven’t. I’ve never even thought about cheating before.”

  Ms. Shepard ran one hand through her loose brown curls, which Carole noticed were laced with strands of gray. “Yes, well, I wish you hadn’t thought of it this time, either,” the teacher said. “But I appreciate how difficult it was for you to come forward and be so honest with me. I have to commend you for that.”

  Carole wasn’t sure she deserved any praise—after all, she never would have told if her father hadn’t stumbled onto the secret. But she appreciated Ms. Shepard’s gentle words nonetheless. “Thanks,” she whispered.

  Ms. Shepard smiled briefly, then turned serious again. “All right, then. What are we going to do about this?” She glanced down at her grade book, which was in its usual place at one corner of her desk. “The thing is, you have brought your grade up since then—it seems like a shame to give you a zero for that test and ruin your average.”

  Carole held her breath. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that she could actually end up flunking history for this marking period. If that happened, she could kiss Pine Hollow good-bye for a lot longer than six weeks—great worker or not, Max wasn’t going to bend his rules for her.

  Ms. Shepard was tapping her pen thoughtfully against her cheek. “I think I have another idea, though,” she said. “Instead of wasting your time with a lot of detention, why don’t we try to be constructive about this? I think the best way to do that would be for you to write a research paper on the material covered on that test. Twenty pages. Footnotes. Due in three weeks. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds great!” Carole exclaimed without thinking. “Um, I mean, thank you. That seems fair.”

  A hint of a smile flitted across the teacher’s face. “All right, then,” she said. “Three weeks. You can take a day or two to think about topics, and we’ll discuss that when you’re ready. Oh, but of course I’m going to have to report this to Dr. Durbin.” Ms. Shepard looked slightly apologetic. “Even though it’s your first offense, it’s school policy to report every case of cheating.”

  Carole winced. She really hadn’t thought past this talk with Ms. Shepard to imagine that anyone else would have to get involved. She certainly hadn’t supposed that she might have to face Dr. Durbin, the school’s vice principal.

  Yikes, she thought. Dr. Durbin is supposed to be a killer when it comes to stuff like this. With the way my luck’s been going lately, Dr. Durbin will probably suspend me. Maybe even expel me. She cringed at the thought. I’m sure Dad would just love that.

  FIVE

  Callie kicked her backpack under her chemistry lab table and leaned her crutches against the table. Resting her weight on her arms, she pushed herself up onto the battered wooden stool, teetering slightly as the stool’s uneven legs tilted her to one side.

  “Are you okay?” George was already moving toward her. “Let me help you.”

  “I’m okay,” Callie said quickly, regaining her balance and holding up a hand to keep George back. “It’s under control. Really.”

  George didn’t look entirely convinced, but he nodded and lowered himself back onto his own stool. “Hey, just one more week until Thanksgiving vacation,” he commented cheerfully. “So what are your plans for next week when we’re off? I guess I’ll probably see you a lot at the stable, huh?”

  “Afraid not,” Callie replied quickly. She might have mixed feelings about her family’s upcoming trip, but one thing was for sure—she was glad to be getting some distance from George for a little while. Maybe once he wasn’t in her face all the time she could figure out how to deal with him. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re going back to Valley Vista for the whole week.” She shrugged and smiled. “You know—Turkey Day with the constituents.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment was plain on George’s round face. “That’s too bad.”

  Callie decided it would be best not to acknowledge that George looked positively crushed about her departure. To cover for them both, she jumped in to steer the conversation to more neutral ground. “Yes, good old Valley Vista,” she said quickly. “I haven’t been back there since we moved here, you know. It will be good to see the old gang again, check out the hot spots in town and see what’s changed. I still have some relatives nearby—second cousins and a couple of great-aunts and stuff—so that will be nice, too.”

  “But won’t you miss your therapeutic riding?” George asked. “I mean, won’t it set you back, missing a whole week?”

  Callie shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll probably do some riding at my old stable,” she said. “It’s not quite as big as Pine Hollow, but my coach there was really good, and there are a couple of amazing horses I used to use to compete. It will be nice to see everyone again. Anyway, my leg is really a lot stronger now—I’m thinking about getting back to some endurance training soon.”

  “Really?” George’s disappointed expression faded slightly, replaced by a look of interest. “Like what? I have to admit, I don’t know that much about endurance riding. What kind of training do you do, anyway?”

  Callie didn’t particularly feel like discussing her training plans and goals with George. But she figured it was a much safer topic than plenty of others she could think of. “Well, a lot of being a good endurance rider is just being a good rider, period. And first I’ll have to get back to that point. I have to make sure my body is strong enough, that I’m back in shape.”

  George was gazing at her intently, nodding. He was a very accomplished rider himself, so he already knew everything she’d just said. But she never would have guessed that from his rapt expression. “That makes sense,” he said. “What else?”

  Callie shrugged. “Well, I’ve already been working on my balance, of course,” she said. “I mean, it was hard at first because my whole right side was pretty messed up. And you know how important balance is.”

  George nodded again. “Of course. And it must be tough when you have to retrain half of your body.”

  It would have been an innocuous comment from just about anyone else. But Callie couldn’t help wincing at hearing George talk about her body. She didn’t like to consider that he might have been thinking about her body—weak right side or otherwise—quite a lot. To hide her agitation, she kept talking.

  “Anyway,” she said quickly, “lately I’ve been changing the length of my stirrups during my rides. That’s something I do all the time when I’m in training because it helps strengthen all different muscles. Like I usually shorten the stirrups when I’m going to be doing a lot of downhill riding, because it’s good for my
knees and ankles.”

  “Interesting,” George said, glancing down at Callie’s legs beneath her khaki skirt.

  Callie resisted the urge to tug her hem lower. What’s wrong with me? she wondered. George isn’t exactly, well, Duke Elkin. She almost smiled at that. She hadn’t thought about Duke for months. He was a guy she’d dated briefly the year before, back in Valley Vista. She had been taken in by his dark, hulking good looks and his aggressive pursuit of her, but she’d dumped him as soon as she got to know him a little better—especially his propensity for groping her friends whenever he saw an opportunity.

  “Callie?” George said.

  With a start, Callie realized she had fallen silent while thinking about Duke’s roving hands. “Oh!” she said, glancing quickly at George. “Um, what was I saying? Oh yeah, I’ll probably start doing more focused ground exercises, like to stretch my tendons and loosen up my ankles and stuff like that. And then when I’m ready, it will be time to start developing one of Max’s horses so that I can aim toward entering a few easy races a few months down the road. We’ll need to start with some basic ground training—stuff like neck stretches, maybe a little work with the chambon, and then on to schooling in the ring and out on the trail. I’ll probably ask Max to help me decide which horse to use, but so far Barq seems like the best choice—he’s an Arabian, so he’s got a lot of natural endurance. And even though he has kind of a short stride, he’d probably do pretty well after some conditioning. Diablo or Rusty might have some possibilities, too, though I haven’t ridden them myself yet so it’s hard to say for sure. Of course, eventually I’ll want to start shopping around for a real competition horse of my own.…”

  As she spoke, Callie was aware that George was hanging on every pointless word that came out of her mouth, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from babbling on and on. It was a relief when their chemistry teacher came in and clapped her hands to begin class.