I didn’t care that Princess was like this every winter. If something happened to her on my watch then it would be my fault.
“Please hurry,” I said before hanging up.
Princess seemed to have temporarily given up the notion of rolling and stood dejectedly in the cross ties while I searched through Esther’s vet box for the medication. I finally found it in the bottom of the box and hoped that it was still good as I squirted the pre-marked amount into Princess’s mouth. She didn’t like it very much and tried to spit it out but I kept stuffing it back in until she swallowed and her mouth was covered in white paste.
“It will make you feel better,” I said as I took her back outside.
I walked her in circles and squares and ovals, from the front of the property to the side and back again but we stayed near the barn. I didn’t want to run into Jess on the back side of the property and I wanted to be near when Dr. Delta finally arrived.
As we walked I sang, stupid songs from my childhood that seemed to keep Princess more interested in me and less interested in rolling. Every now and then she’d paw at the ground but I’d urge her on until she stopped. Then, just as Dr. Delta’s blue truck was pulling into the drive, she lifted her tail and let out a giant fart.
“That was good, right?” I cried, rushing her over to the vet. “I’ve never been so happy to hear a fart in all my life!”
“It’s a start,” he said.
Princess got the full treatment, a tube oiling and some more medication and by the time Dr. Delta left she was standing quietly in her stall, no longer interested in rolling.
“Just hay tonight and a bran mash,” he said. “Call me if she takes a turn for the worse.”
“I will,” I said. “Thank you.”
And just as he was driving away, Princess grunted out a large, smelly poop.
“You silly mare,” I told her, more relieved than mad. “How could you scare me like that?”
I was afraid to leave her stall in case she took a turn for the worse like Dr. Delta had warned but the other horses were at their gates, waiting to come in and eat their extra late lunch. I dash back and forth, putting them into their stalls and each time I went past the stall where Princess was I peeked inside. She seemed to be okay but what did I know? This was the first time I’d actually seen a colic first hand. Everything I knew about them, I’d read in books and they had painted a pretty grim picture about what could happen. I tried not to think about all the worst case scenarios like surgery, which I was sure Esther couldn’t afford.
I managed to make it through the day with no more catastrophes and by the time Dr. Delta called to check up on Princess, she was munching on the small flake of hay I had given her with three more piles of manure in her stall. He was cautiously optimistic that she had cleared whatever was causing her trouble and I felt like it was okay to finally breathe a sigh of relief.
There was a chill in the air by the time I fed dinner and blanketed the horses for the upcoming cold night. Then I rode away, slightly sick to my stomach that when I can back in the morning Princess would have taken a turn for the worse, rolling and twisting her intestines while no one was there to see.
That night, I wanted to call Mickey and tell her all about what had happened. Crazy Linda Green who nearly found out that we were all alone and poor, sick Princess but every time I reached for the phone, I remembered how she was the one who had left me. I never would have done that to her. Ethan was different. He was a boy and boys couldn’t be relied on, I knew that. But Mickey? My best friend? She should have done everything she could to get out of her mom’s stupid plans.
I cycled to the barn as fast as I could the next morning, worried about what I might walk into but the only things I found were frost on the grass and Esther standing in the barn aisle, suitcases at her feet.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She turned and smiled and I wanted to run and hug her but I couldn’t. I felt betrayed. She’d abandoned us. Left us in charge of things we never should have been in charge of. How could she have done that to us?
I walked past her to check on Princess, so worried about the black pony with the long forelock that I’d hardly slept a wink last night. She was on her feet, sticking her tiny nose through the bars, looking for her breakfast.
“Glad to see you’re okay girl,” I told her.
“What happened?” Esther asked.
She had come to stand beside me but I couldn’t look at her.
“She colicked yesterday,” I said. “I was here by myself.”
“You what?” she said. “Where is Helga?”
“She left. She said you told her that when school was out, she could go and that we would take care of things. Then both Mickey and Ethan had things that they couldn’t get out of yesterday and so it was just me.”
The words came spilling out, even though I hadn’t meant them to.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m sorry,” Esther said.
“You should be,” I said. “It wasn’t fair.”
“I know. It was wrong, the whole thing was wrong.”
For the first time in a long time, I thought about Jess and her father. How they’d almost ruined everything. We had to get them back somehow. Plot an awful revenge that would make Jess pay for what she had done.
“How did they manage it?” I asked. “Jess and her father?”
“What do you mean?” Esther looked at me curiously.
“Well they were the ones who had you kicked out of the country, right? I know it was all their fault.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” she started to laugh. “They might run things around here but they don’t have that kind of power. No,” she shook her head. “Sadly it was a paperwork error but it’s been taken care of now. I won’t have to leave again.”
She reached out to put an arm around me but I stepped away. She was just the latest in a long line of people who had left me for one reason or another and though I may forgive, I knew that I wouldn’t forget.
“Now that you’re back and I know that Princess is okay, I have to go home,” I said. “My mom is planning her Christmas wedding and I’m supposed to be helping.”
“But what about the Snowball Cup? Did you qualify at the last show? I have so much to catch up on.”
“I’m not going to the show,” I said, backing down the barn aisle. “And there is a black ledger on the desk in the office that will fill you in on everything that has happened since you’ve been gone.”
I heard her calling out after me but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She had returned and she could have her barn back with all its scary responsibility and crazy boarders. I wanted no part of it.
“You’re back already?” Mom said when I walked into the kitchen and dumped my back pack on the floor.
“Yeah,” I said, grabbing an apple from the bowl. “I just had to check on something but now I’m done.”
“What, no riding? No staying there from dawn until dusk?”
“No,” I said.
It wasn’t exactly that I was sick of the barn. It was just that I needed a break. I’d have to remember in the future that sometimes Esther would need a break too and now that Ethan and Mickey and I had proven ourselves responsible enough, maybe it would be nice to give her a day off every now and then, when I’d stopped being mad at her of course.
“Where is Derek?” I asked, noticing the house was eerily quiet. Usually when Derek was around there was some kind of sport playing in the background as though a crowd of cheering people were locked in a closet somewhere.
“He went out,” Mom said. “He had to take care of some business.”
“Accounting business?” I said, feeling the sarcasm creeping back into my voice.
“No,” she said. “Wedding business.”
“Oh,” I crunched on my apple, feeling suddenly morose.
There was a pile of bills on the counter and Mom was shuffling through them. I noticed several of them had final noti
ce plastered across the front in angry red ink and my stomach dropped. Things had always been tight but my mom and I were frugal. We ate pasta and leftovers and sometimes just sandwiches for weeks on end but since Derek had been around there had been steak dinners and fancy wine that he’d drunk much more of than my mom had. I’d assumed that he was pitching in with the bills since moving in but apparently not. He was loafing off my mom and we were starting to drown in debt.
“Things are going to be okay once you get married, right?” I asked. “I mean, Derek is going to pay for stuff and help. We’ll be better off than we were when we were alone, won’t we?”
“That’s the idea,” Mom said wearily and suddenly it all fell into place.
Mom had realized that two paychecks were better than one. She met Derek and maybe felt something for him or maybe not but she’d seen security in him. Someone to help us so that she wouldn’t have to do this alone and it had backfired.
“It’s not too late,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “Forget about the wedding. Put it off for a while. Why don’t you just wait and see what happens?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to not worry about money for a change?” she said. “Don’t you want that new blanket for Bluebird and money for lessons and shows?”
“Yes, of course,” I cried. “But it’s not working out that way is it?”
“Maybe if we just give him a chance,” Mom said. “He is a nice guy and I do like him very much.”
“But you don’t love him?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Mom, that’s great,” I cried, jumping up and hugging her. “Things can go back to the way they were. It can be just the two of us again. We don’t need anyone else with their extra bills and their annoying sports channels. The only thing we need is each other.”
“I had forgotten how annoying it was to have football on twenty four hours a day,” she laughed. Then she pulled me away and I watched as her serious face slipped back into place. “But he’s already here. He moved in. Gave up the lease on his own apartment. I can’t just kick him out. And I do want things to work out between the three of us. I really do.”
And right then and there, I knew that I had lost her. For a moment it had just been the old Mom, the one who I could talk to about anything and everything just like before. But Derek was like a tick that you just couldn’t pick off. He’d dug his little pincers into my mom and somehow she now believed that she needed him. Obviously I wasn’t going to change her mind about that. As I picked up my bag and walked out of the kitchen, she called after me.
“Maybe Derek and I could come to your big show?” she said. “He’s been asking about it. I think he’s really interested in getting to know you better and figure out what all this horse stuff is about.”
“Don’t bother,” I said over my shoulder. “I’m not going.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“What do you mean, you’re not going?” Mickey asked.
“Exactly that. I’m not going.”
“But you qualified. You’re in. It’s just down to you and nine other riders. The money is practically in the bag.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said, rolling over to look out the window.
Gray rain splattered against the glass and it was cold, really cold. I thought of Bluebird standing huddled in his field and felt bad.
“If I was you, I’d be going,” Mickey threw a pillow at me.
“No, you wouldn’t,” I threw it back and it bounced off her head. “Because you’d be so nervous that you’d probably be throwing up by now.”
“Exactly. You’re not like that so why don’t you just go and win the money and stop moping about?”
I hadn’t talked to Mickey or Ethan for three days and I hadn’t been out to the barn either. I hung around the house and pretended to enjoy helping my mother with the final arrangements for the wedding. Despite our little chat, things seemed to be going full steam ahead. I guess when you’re half way through planning a wedding and you already have the dress and the church booked and you’ve paid for the flowers and cake, you can’t exactly tell everyone that you’ve changed your mind. So I tried to be extra nice to my mom because I was mad at everyone else, only it didn’t really make me feel any better.
“Have you even seen Bluebird lately?” I asked, watching as a particularly strong gust of wind knocked a flower pot off the little wall in their back garden. It hit the ground and smashed into a million pieces, dirt and broken flower stems spilling out everywhere.
“He looks alright to me,” she said.
“Liar,” I sighed. “He’s as hairy as a goat and I can’t clip him because he doesn’t have a blanket and he won’t go in a stall. I can’t just show up at the final leg of the Blizzard Challenge with a pony that looks like I just pulled him out of a field.”
“Yeah,” she groaned. “I guess not. Maybe we could work on getting him to go into a stall again?”
“And have him run off like last time and maybe get injured?”
“But that was during the stupid storm. He might be better on a regular day.”
“Maybe,” I said.
I knew that Mickey was right. Bluebird really needed to learn to go in a stall but I’d nearly lost him last time. I couldn’t go through that again.
We spent the afternoon eating cookies and watching really bad TV shows. Mickey was obsessed with one in particular where all the girls seemed to care about was who had the best clothes and dating the hot looking guys in school.
“How is this even remotely realistic?” I groaned as one girl parked her shiny Porsche in the school parking lot and the star quarterback of the football team ran over and swept her up in his arms.
“It’s not meant to be realistic,” Mickey said. “It’s meant to be entertaining.”
“Okay then how is that entertaining?”
I threw a cookie at the screen as they continued to make out in front of the whole school.
“Because, it’s romantic,” Mickey said softly.
I knew I’d never get through to her. While horses were one hundred percent of my entire world, they were more like fifty percent in hers, maybe less. She liked to shop and wear dresses and do her nails. If she didn’t put her foot in her mouth every time she opened it to talk to a guy, she’d probably have some hot football boyfriend by now too and Hampton would be up for sale.
The show about the girl with the Porsche finished and Mickey changed the channel to another one where the kids were normal by day and vampires by night. They went around in capes, ridding their city of evil and again seemed to have all these expensive clothes and cars that they couldn’t possibly pay for unless they stole them or their parents were millionaires. I lost interest and pulled a horse magazine out from under Mickey’s bed.
We couldn’t afford magazine subscriptions so Mickey usually gave me hers when she finished with them but this one must have slipped out of sight. The cover was crumpled and as I attempted to flatten it out I saw a gorgeous, muscled chestnut flying over a huge triple oxer. The guy in the saddle had flyaway hair and a cheeky grin on his face.
“It’s him,” I screamed at Mickey who dropped her glass of soda.
“It’s who?” she asked, mopping up the mess with a napkin.
“Miguel Rodriguez.”
“Who?” she asked again.
It wasn’t her fault. She had posters of actors and musicians pinned to her walls. I, on the other hand, had showjumping legends. Beezie Madden and Authentic, Mclain Ward and Sapphire and Miguel Rodriguez with Interstellar, the big chestnut with the crooked blaze. I’d been so focused on winning the prize money to buy Bluebird a winter blanket that I forgot all about the rather more important prize, a weekend riding clinic with a world class show jumper.
“Oh yeah,” Mickey said as I shoved the magazine at her. “I meant to give that to you but I guess with all the craziness at the barn, I sort of forgot.”
“I have to go to the barn,” I said.
“What, now?” Mickey said. “It’s almost dark. And it’s raining.”
“Okay then, first thing tomorrow. Do you think your mom could take us?”
“I’m sure she won’t mind. She does owe me after that awful day of shopping.”
“And you owe me too,” I said.
“You’re never going to let me live that down are you?” she groaned.
“Not for a really long time,” I grinned.
She flicked through the magazine until she got to a full two page spread of Miguel and Interstellar leaping over a ginormous water jump.
“He won the World Cup you know,” she said. “And would have gone to the Olympics if he hadn’t injured his ankle.”
“I know,” I said.
“So what exactly is he doing giving a clinic to kids?”
“Giving back to the community? Helping aspiring young riders? I don’t know and I don’t care. All I care about is being the one who goes. Do you know how great this would be for me and Bluebird? For my riding career? What if he decides to take me under his wing and train me?”
“And then marry you and you guys can travel around the world together, winning at all the big shows and live happily ever after.”
“Ewwww, gross,” I laughed. “He’s like, really old.”
And he may have been old but I also thought he was kind of amazing. That night I didn’t sleep a wink because all I could think about was getting to the clinic and showing Miguel Rodriguez how I was the best up and coming rider he had ever seen.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It was cold the next morning. The sort of cold that chills you to the bone. The sort of cold that people who live in Florida just aren’t used to.
“Are you girls really sure you want to go to the barn this morning?” Mickey’s mom asked as we sat in the kitchen, scoffing down our toast.
“No,” Mickey sighed.
I kicked her under the table so hard that a piece of toast popped out of her mouth, bounced across the table and landed on the floor where their dog Poppy snapped it up.
Winter Blues (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 3) Page 9