Horse Crazy

by Bonnie Bryant

  “I thought you’d left already,” Carole said, and then she remembered that Max had talked to Stevie after class in his office. “What did Max want?”

  “Oh, he gave me the usual lecture about paying attention and how Pine Hollow was serious about developing riders and how he didn’t want riders who weren’t serious about learning. You know the stuff. Anyway, I wanted to give you this.” She held out her hand, offering four dollars to Carole.

  “What’s this for?” Carole asked.

  “It’s for Cobalt,” Lisa said.

  “So put it in his bank account—at the diAngelo Trust Company.” Carole laughed at her own joke.

  “No, it’s not for the horse, Carole. It’s for you—for grooming him yesterday.”

  “I groomed him because you asked me to, not for money,” Carole said, a little annoyed that Stevie would think she’d have to pay her for a favor.

  “Well, the reason I asked you to was because Veronica paid me to do it. So the money’s for you,” Stevie explained.

  Carole looked at the money for a moment. “But you’re the one who needs it for the MTO. You keep it.”

  “I did keep some of it—sort of my commission. Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it. You take this because you earned it. And I don’t have time to argue now. Bye.” She slammed the four dollars into Carole’s hand and ran back up the stable’s driveway, where her mother was waiting for her behind the wheel of their station wagon.

  Carole shoved the money into her pocket. “You know, Lisa, I understand horses. They make sense to me. It’s people who are confusing. Stevie wants to go on the MTO so badly, but she’s doing absolutely everything wrong. First, all she had to do was a math project, but no, that wasn’t good enough for Stevie. So then, she decided to earn money, but no, she’s too good to do the work. I never saw anybody so eager to turn jobs over to other people. So then, while she isn’t doing either of those things, she’s busy getting Max so angry with her that he might not let her go on the trip. Some fix she’s getting into.”

  “Listen, you tell me about horses, and I’ll tell you about people,” Lisa said.

  “What do you mean?” Carole asked.

  “I mean, Stevie isn’t so dumb.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stevie just said she was taking commissions,” Lisa said. “Look, how much money does Stevie need for the trip?”

  “Fifty dollars,” Carole said.

  “Okay, well, she’s been very busy, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. She’s been busy on the phone giving away all her money-earning opportunities. At the rate she’s doing it, everybody in town but Stevie will be able to afford the trip.”

  “Oh, no wonder you’re so worried about her! Stevie isn’t giving work away, she’s selling it! Don’t you see, she’s getting a commission on every job she lines up. Somehow, she’s managed to get everyone in town to call her to do work. It’s way more than she can do herself, so instead of doing it herself, she’s a one-girl employment agency. See, she got you to curry Cobalt—”

  “How come you know all this?” Carole asked.

  “She told me about it when she called me to see if I could baby-sit for the Ziegler twins tomorrow, but I can’t—”

  “That’s a good thing,” Carole interrupted. “They are real monsters.”

  “See, you do understand people,” Lisa teased, and then she and Carole laughed together. “Anyway, every time Stevie gets somebody to do a job, she takes a little bit of the money they earned. That’s her commission for getting them the job. She gave you four dollars for grooming Cobalt, right?” Carole nodded, feeling the crumpled bills in her pocket. “Well, Veronica probably paid her five dollars. So you did the work, but she got a dollar.”

  “But that’s just one dollar of fifty she needs. She could have earned five—”

  “Right, but while you were doing that job for her, three other kids were probably doing other jobs for her. And she probably got a dollar for each of those jobs, too. Maybe more. She got to sit home and wait for the phone to ring while she earned four dollars.”

  And if she earned four dollars on one weekday afternoon, Carole thought, then she could certainly earn a lot more on Saturdays and Sundays. She’d be able to earn fifty dollars and go on the MTO if—and it seemed like a pretty big if today—Max would let her go.

  “Don’t worry, Carole. Stevie seems like a person who can figure out all the angles. She’ll make it, I’m sure.”

  Carole wished she were so sure.

  Carole and Lisa arrived at the shopping center and made their way past the supermarket to get to TD’s.

  “Guess what?” Carole asked.

  “What?” Lisa said.

  “This is going to be my treat because I just got four dollars I never expected to have.”

  “You don’t have to pay for me,” Lisa protested.

  “Well, think of it as Stevie’s treat, her way of making up for that stirrup trick your first day, okay?”

  “Well, okay,” Lisa said. “But then I’m going to have to find a way to make up for all those knots in her sneakers.”

  “You will,” Carole told her. “You will.” And she was sure it was true. She was glad she had invited Lisa to TD’s today. She wished she’d done it sooner.

  “TELL ME MORE about the horses at the stable,” Lisa said to Carole. The two of them sat at a corner table inside TD’s. The threat of rain had kept them from the picnic tables behind the shop. Their empty ice cream dishes sat in front of them as they chatted. For the first time since she’d started riding, Lisa was really happy about it. She was getting better at riding, but most important, she had a friend.

  Carole sat across the table from her, talking animatedly about her favorite subject: horses. She smiled as she described the horses at Pine Hollow. “Well, then there’s Comanche. He and Stevie are a perfect match—you know it’s important to match up personalities, don’t you? I mean, you can’t have a flighty horse with a vague rider. A flighty horse needs to be told what to do all the time. Anyway, Comanche is very strong-willed. So is Stevie. And when they both want to do the same thing at the same time—wow!”

  Lisa laughed. “And when they want to do different things?”

  “Stevie’s a good rider,” Carole said. “Comanche follows her orders. Usually.”

  “You mean like when she was changing direction, and he didn’t want to?” Lisa asked. Class always began with the horses going in a clockwise direction. Several times during the class, they switched to counterclockwise so that the horses didn’t get too used to one direction or the other. Stevie was supposed to lead the class across the center of the oval ring to change direction. Comanche had wanted to keep on going clockwise. “I thought she’d just let him go around to the back of the line and let him follow the other horses. He’d have gone counterclockwise then, wouldn’t he?”

  “He probably would have,” Carole agreed. “But then, he would have won the argument, and it’s not a good idea to let a horse do that. So she kept turning him to the left until he finally went.”

  “It looked pretty silly,” Lisa said.

  “Sure it did, but he didn’t misbehave through the rest of the class, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t. Horses are like little children, aren’t they?”

  Carole nodded. “Sometimes they can be pretty bratty, too. But the rider can’t let the horse be in charge.”

  “What do you like best about riding, Carole?”

  Lisa watched Carole’s face while she considered the answer. It seemed to take a long time. Lisa hadn’t thought it was a difficult question.

  “Everything,” Carole said finally.

  CAROLE SAT ON the bench at the bus stop. She had fifteen minutes until her bus arrived and not much to do until then. But she couldn’t wander around. The last time she’d done that, she’d missed the bus and had to wait another half hour.

  She didn’t mind waiting, really. Sometimes she’d see friends, and if tha
t didn’t happen, she could look in the nearby store windows. She stood up to stretch her long legs and wandered over to the display window at Sights ’n’ Sounds. She smiled, remembering the CD she’d bought for her father. He’d loved it. If she’d had enough money on her then, she would have bought another one.

  There was a big sign in the window that read: GRAND PRIZE WINNERS. Something about that rang a bell. Then Carole remembered the contest that Stevie had entered while she was buying the gift for her father. Stevie had spun quite a fantasy about Hawaii, Carole remembered, smiling. Well, the winner had been announced now, and Stevie wasn’t going to Hawaii—at least not in that contest. Below the winner’s name, there was a list of about twenty-five other people—second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-prize winners and honorable mention. Something must have caught Carole’s eye subconsciously because she leaned closer and peered at the small type. And right there, practically at the top of the list, was “Stevie Lake.”

  Carole looked again. Stevie’s name really was there. It hadn’t moved or changed. Stevie had actually won a prize. Her best friend was a winner! It took a few minutes to figure out what “Third Prize” next to Stevie’s name meant: she’d won a portable CD player. So, it wasn’t a trip to Hawaii, or even a fifty-dollar cash award—which would have been perfect!—but it was a prize. Carole was so excited that she wanted to call Stevie right away.

  She pulled some change out of her pocket and looked for a phone. There were phones at the shopping center, but she couldn’t remember where they were. Finally, she spotted one near the supermarket. She dashed across the parking lot, barely noticing the cars. Her phone call was too important.

  She dropped the change into the phone and dialed the number she knew by heart. Busy. She tried again. Same thing. To kill some time, she paced up and down in front of the supermarket. But when she had her back to the phone, a boy and a girl got into the booth to make a call. Carole tapped her foot restlessly, watching shoppers emerge from the supermarket. After the couple had made not one, but three calls, they came back out of the phone booth.

  Carole picked up the phone and dialed Stevie’s number again. It rang. And rang. And then, at the sixth ring, Carole spotted her bus coming into the shopping center. She slammed the phone down and ran for it.

  But the bus stop was all the way across the parking lot from the telephone, and riding boots were not the best running shoes. She clunked along as fast as she could, but all Carole got for her trouble was a faceful of carbon monoxide from the rear of the receding bus.

  Carole growled. Annoyed with herself, she returned to the telephone. This time, she got an answering machine, but it was the wrong number. She slammed the phone down, realizing that now she was out of change. She couldn’t make another call.

  She returned to the bench at the bus stop and promised herself she wouldn’t move until the next bus came. She put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her cupped hands and glared at the world. The afternoon had been going so well, she thought, remembering the fun she’d had with Lisa. Why did it have to end this way?

  “Hi, baby! I thought I might find you here.” Her father’s cheerful voice greeted her from the car that had pulled up at the bus stop. “I had an errand in town and was just hoping to see you after your riding class. I’ll take you home.”

  One of the things Carole loved about her father was that he always seemed to be there when she needed him. She grinned happily and climbed into the front seat next to him.

  “STEVIE! IT’S ANOTHER phone call for you—and if it’s another woman who wants a dog named Fifi walked, get somebody else to do it!”

  That’s how grateful my brothers are, Stevie thought to herself in disgust. She’d been working hours every day to get them jobs so they could earn money, and all she got were complaints. She promised herself she’d get somebody else to do the next job. There were lots of people she could call. She just wasn’t sure who they were.

  Carefully, she laid aside the scraps of paper that had her notes on them. She was in the middle of transferring all the information to her notebook. She had so many customers and so many workers that she had to keep careful records about who owed her money and how much of that had to be paid to the workers. While it wasn’t always clear to her how much was coming in and going out, she knew exactly how much was staying in. She knew what her portion of the earnings was. And the news was great. She had more than sixty-five dollars. She would go on the overnight camp-out after all!

  When the scraps of paper were neatly piled on her desk, she stood up to answer the phone call. Maybe it would be another job. Who would she get to do it? Obviously, not her ungrateful brothers. Her mind raced as she headed for the phone. She still had a few friends left in her class, and she could borrow Chad’s and Michael’s class lists, too; even though she didn’t know the kids, they’d probably be glad for work.

  “Hello?” she said more positively than she felt. She didn’t really like the idea of calling her brothers’ classmates.

  “Stevie, it’s Carole. You won! I was at the mall next to Sights ’n’ Sounds and they’ve got the winners in the window and you won. Remember the contest that you entered when we were there? Your name is in the window!” she finished breathlessly.

  “Huh?” Stevie said blankly. She’d been so concerned with her next job that she almost hadn’t recognized Carole’s voice. What was she talking about? She didn’t remember anything about a contest except—

  “Hawaii? I’m going to Hawaii?!”

  “Oh—no. Somebody else won that. But you won a portable CD player,” Carole said, rushing on. “I mean, your name’s right there in the window. I’ve been trying to call you for hours, but your phone’s been busy or else there wasn’t any answer or … anyway, you have to go to the store to pick up your prize. Can you believe it?”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure! You won something. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Finally, it hit Stevie. “You mean I actually won something in that contest?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wow, thanks for calling. I can’t believe it! That’s great. I’ll go over there right now and get it. Only problem is that I don’t have anything to play on a CD player, portable or not.” Once Stevie’s mind was focused on a problem, her concentration was total.

  “Doesn’t Alex have one? You could borrow some of his discs.”

  “You think I want to listen to the junk he likes?”

  “Well, maybe you could buy a CD for it,” Carole suggested.

  “Maybe,” Stevie said vaguely. “Hey, I’d better go over there. This is fantastic. Thanks for calling, Car.” She slid the phone into its cradle.

  Stevie was almost shaking with excitement. She’d won a contest. She, Stevie Lake, who’d never even won a game of musical chairs at a birthday party, had now won something in a contest. She grinned so happily that her cheeks almost hurt. She couldn’t believe it.

  “I won a contest,” she said out loud. The words sounded very strange to her. She sat on the edge of her bed and took three deep breaths. Was this really happening?

  How could she be sure it was real if she didn’t go over there right away to claim her prize? She had more than an hour until dinner. That would be plenty of time. Sights ’n’ Sounds was a fifteen-minute walk.

  She stood up to leave her room. She’d need identification, she knew. She took her wallet. It had her library card in it as well as all her saved-up money. When she was sure she had everything she needed, she left her room and practically flew down the stairs and out the door.

  “I won a contest!” she repeated to herself, skipping nearly all the way to Sights ’n’ Sounds.

  IT TOOK ONLY a minute to identify herself and collect her CD player. The store owner even knew her, so there was no question of her identification. They took some pictures of her smiling and holding the prize. It all seemed terribly unreal to Stevie and totally wonderful.

  “This is the most exciting thing that’s ever ha
ppened to me, you know?” she said to the store manager, Ms. Weiss.

  “It is pretty exciting,” she said. “Even for us. We hope you’ll enjoy that prize for years to come.”

  That sounded like a great idea to Stevie—except for one thing. She couldn’t enjoy it until she had something to play on it. She needed at least one CD. And there she was, at the store where she could buy it. And she had her wallet in her pocket. And she had lots of money in her wallet. Still almost too excited to think, she walked over to the rock section to choose. She clutched her prize with one hand while she flipped through the discs with the other.

  What a day this was! Stevie promised herself she’d remember it—remember the wonderful feeling of winning—for a long time. She sighed contentedly and began her selection in earnest.

  “I STILL ALMOST can’t believe it,” Stevie told Carole at their Saturday class. “I mean, I really did win a contest. I’ve been listening to CDs all week. You should hear the sound. It’s fabulous!”

  “Stevie!” Max called. The tone of his voice meant trouble. “This is no place for gossip,” he said sternly. “This riding ring is for riding. Now to show the class how you’ve been paying attention, please demonstrate how to change diagonals at the trot.”

  At least Stevie knew how to do that. She squeezed Comanche gently with her legs and the horse picked up a trot. She rose with the trot when his right foreleg stepped forward. It was a completely natural, comfortable movement to her. She’s seen new riders struggle with it—including Lisa—but she was an experienced rider. Changing diagonals was easy for her. As Comanche came through the center of the ring and changed directions (just the way he was supposed to this time), she sat for one extra “beat” of his trot, and rose again, this time when his left foreleg stepped forward. She’d changed diagonals.

  “Nice,” Max said. From him, that was a very big compliment, and it might, just might, make up for his being annoyed at her for talking in class.

  She brought Comanche to the end of the line as the entire class followed her pattern, some better than others. Stevie was glad they were doing something she was already good at. She didn’t have to pay too close attention and could think more about the neat music she’d been listening to since Tuesday. It was hard having at least two things you really liked doing—in this case, riding and listening to rock music—when you couldn’t do them both at once. Then she realized that she’d be able to bring her CD player on the MTO so they could all listen to music at their campsite at night. But which discs would she bring? She couldn’t bring them all, could she? She decided to ask Carole to help her choose. After all, the MTO was only two weeks away.