I don’t know what to do. My mom always says to ignore kids like this but if I walk away it will look like they’ve won and maybe they’ll throw a rock at the back of my head. My dad says to fight them with humour. Being under pressure, all I can come up with is a weak joke.
“Better a pygmy chimp than a gorilla,” I say and then laugh to show that I’m kidding and that I haven’t taken offence because truly I would rather be a pygmy chimp than a gorilla.
“Who you calling a gorilla?” says Amber. She steps menacingly towards me but Logan Losino grabs her arm.
“Oh leave her alone,” he says. “She’s not hurting anyone.”
Amber whirls to face him. “Says who?”
Logan bows his knees and holds his arms out from his sides and hoots. “Says me, and I’m the king of the jungle.” He hops up and down, gorilla-like.
Amber laughs and shoves him on the shoulder. He staggers backwards and falls, a bit too easily from what I can see, but everyone is laughing now and trying to pick him up but he keeps hooting and falling and I make my escape. I feel exactly like Tootsie, that poor pony that none of the other horses liked. I wonder if the girls in my class can tell that there’s something wrong with me and that’s why I’m so unpopular. Maybe I’ve been wrong blaming the change in my social status on the arrival of the Wonder Twins. Maybe it’s the arrival of puberty that’s done it and the differences between me and everyone else are finally becoming obvious, or even subconsciously obvious. The only one who hasn’t noticed is Logan Losino. I feel a warmth in my chest when I think about the way he came to my rescue. Logan Losino. Maybe he still likes me a little.
The rest of the day drags. I keep an eye on my watch all afternoon. When the bell goes and we’re dismissed I’m out the door like a shot, before Amber can set up an ambush. I unchain my bike and pedal off to Kansas.
I’m almost run over by a gravel truck loaded with dirt exiting her driveway. It worries me that the gate is open until I notice the fence is finished so there’s a separate paddock beside the driveway. I can’t see any horses though. On the other side of the barn an excavator is digging out and leveling off the field where Kansas is going to put the riding arena. There’s a huge hole in the field, kind of like a sunken hockey rink.
Kansas is supervising. I’ve never seen her so happy.
“Hey Sylvia! Look, I’m trading topsoil for footing! Can you believe it? I’m going to save thousands!”
“Oh. Great.”
“You know what a good all-weather outdoor riding ring costs? Ten thousand dollars. Mine is going to be half that. Can you believe my luck?”
“Wow.”
I guess I don’t put enough enthusiasm in my voice because she says, “You okay? Have a bad day?”
I’m afraid to say anything because suddenly I know that if I open my mouth I’ll cry.
“Hey, how about you come back to the trailer and help me make a pot of tea? I could use a break, I’ve been supervising all afternoon.”
I leave my bike leaning against the barn. Each of the horses is in a stall and I say hi to Hambone before I follow Kansas around to her little trailer. It’s about the size of the entrance hall in our house.
“I inherited this too,” says Kansas climbing the metal steps and opening the door. “It was my dad’s. When he died I got everything—his travel trailer, his truck, and a whole bunch of money the sneaky old codger had squirreled away. That’s how I could afford to buy this place. Well, that and my lifetime savings of two grand.”
“You had savings? My dad says that all young people have these days are debts.”
“I’ll have you know I had savings as well as two horses. Though probably the horses cancel out the savings.”
I step inside behind her and she points me to a table with corner bench seats. I slide in. There isn’t much room. I have to shove over a basket full of clean, folded laundry.
Kansas fills the kettle and puts it on the stove. She turns on the burner, then peers under the kettle. “Damn. Pilot light’s gone out again.” She turns off the switch and gets a box of matches from a drawer; she strikes a match, turns the switch, pokes in the match and there’s a blue poof as the gas ignites.
She rinses the teapot and throws in two tea bags. “I don’t have herbal. Do you drink black tea?”
“Oh sure.” This is sort of true. Auntie Sally lets me have black tea. Mom says it’s full of stimulants I don’t need.
There’s a pamphlet on the table in front of me. I don’t want to look like I’m being nosey so I read it upside down: U.S. Dressage Federation Guidelines for Arena Construction.
From a tiny cupboard over the sink Kansas extracts two mismatched coffee mugs, which she puts on the table. “What do you take in it? Milk? Sugar? Cookies on the side?”
She’s better equipped than I imagined she would be. I tell her milk for my tea, and cookies would be good. I’m expecting something nutritious like oatmeal raisin but she produces a pack of digestives and slices open the plastic with a carving knife.
“Don’t suppose you know anywhere around here I could get some limestone aggregate?”
My heart races. I remember her telling me in my dream that we all need limestone fortifications. These crossovers from my dreams are exciting but also scary, and I can’t talk to her about it because in my dreams she has warned me against making bridges. I have to be careful. If I accidentally conjured up a unicorn here in the daytime I’m sure my head would explode.
“What do you need limestone for?” I ask very quietly. I’m hoping that the word limestone isn’t a bridge because she used it first.
“What?” she says, so I repeat myself, but louder this time.
“I need limestone aggregate as a base for my dressage arena,” she says.
“Can’t you Google it?” I’m looking around her trailer, mostly to be sure a unicorn hasn’t popped up anywhere, but also for her computer.
“No room for a computer in here.”
“You’ve got room for a laptop. Or a BlackBerry.”
“Actually, Sylvia, I don’t believe in computers.”
I stare at her. She couldn’t have told me anything more shocking. My perfect Kansas. “How do you look things up?”
She points to the pamphlet on the table. “I read. I take out books from the library.”
Well, maybe she doesn’t understand computers, maybe that’s the problem. “The library has computers. Someone could show you how to use them.”
“I suppose,” she says with bland disinterest. She pulls a phone book out of a thin drawer beside the sink. “Maybe the yellow pages will tell me who has limestone.” She flips through some pages. “What do you think I should look under?”
“I don’t know. Google always knows. You put in anything and it figures it out for you.”
“I guess I’m just a technological dinosaur,” says Kansas. She stops leafing. “Here—Trucking. Hey, the guy who’s taking my topsoil should know. He’s bringing pit run to fill up the hole, he’ll know where to get limestone for the next layer.”
I am trying to imagine a life without computers, where you have to look things up in books and get advice from people you don’t know. “You can come and use our computer, Kansas. I can help you look things up.”
“Thanks, but that’s not necessary. I need to get this ring finished, build my business and start conditioning the horses for the show season. I don’t have time to sit in front of a computer.”
Of course, without computers I also wouldn’t be so confused. I wouldn’t have found out about hermaphrodites or bisexuals. “But if you have high-speed you can watch on-line videos of horses for sale. And performances on YouTube.”
She shakes her head.
“Or you could write down what you need to know and I could look it up for you and bring you the answers.”<
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The kettle whistles and Kansas fills the teapot. Steam covers the inside of the windows of the trailer. She doesn’t wait for the tea to steep, like Auntie Sally does. Kansas stirs the teabags around in the pot with a spoon, then squeezes the bags against the sides, pushing out all the caffeine and tannic acid. “Come on,” she says, filling the mugs. “Let’s take our tea outside and watch what those guys are up to.”
But by the time we leave the trailer the guys have shut down their equipment and gone home. The excavator sits in the middle of the hole in the ground looking like a big dead insect.
Kansas balances her mug of tea on top of a pile of dirt and hops down into the hole. There’s some water seeping in from the walls. I don’t want to follow her because I’ll get my shoes too muddy. Kansas is having a great time in her rubber boots. She runs over to the excavator and climbs in the cab and wiggles the control levers. She yells back to me, “I’ve always wanted to drive one of these!” She’s like a big kid.
I stand and sip my tea until she clambers back up out of the hole beside me.
“Let’s go put the horses out, they’ve been in their stalls all day,” she says.
I want to put a halter on Hambone but Kansas won’t let me.
“You can take Electra. I’m still working on some dominance issues with old Hambone. He thinks he’s the herd leader. Actually he’s more like a dictator.”
“I thought stallions led herds.”
She cups a hand beside her mouth away from Hambone and whispers to me, “He thinks he’s still a stallion. Probably he never saw the post-surgical report after he was gelded.”
“Oh.” But I’m thinking, I rode a horse that thinks he’s a stallion? My knees get weak and wobbly but Kansas doesn’t notice.
“Actually, in the wild many stallions aren’t herd leaders the way that Hambone tries to be. Often it’s a boss mare who’s in charge of finding food and water. The stallion is there to protect the mares from predators—and from other stallions of course. What’s interesting to me is that when a mare’s in charge of a herd the horses spend more time grazing and relaxing.”
Kansas enjoys sharing her horse knowledge with me; her voice gets all perky. It’s different than when Mom tries to teach me about life and psychology, partly because I’m truly interested in horses but also because with Mom there’s this heavy seriousness that isn’t there with Kansas. I trust Kansas completely. I could tell her anything.
But then I realize that of course I haven’t told her everything.
We put out Electra and Photon and then Kansas goes back for Hambone, who is kicking the heck out of the back wall of his stall. Kansas stands in front of his door with her arms folded. “You stop that and I’ll let you out.”
Hambone kicks the wall again and Kansas takes a step backwards away from him. He stares at her, then walks to his stall door and hangs his head out.
“Okay then,” says Kansas. She puts a halter on him, clips on the lead rope and before she takes him out she tells me to stay well out of the way. But he walks like a perfect gentleman out to the paddock and it’s not until she’s slipped off the halter and set him free that he flattens his ears, spins and takes off screaming after his mares, driving them to the far end of the pasture, all of them bucking and kicking and striking like maniacs.
“Don’t they mind being treated that way? Electra and Photon, I mean.”
Kansas shrugs. “It’s herd dynamics.”
Hambone bites Photon on the bum and a chunk of fur flies into the air. She squeals and kicks and he bites her again. Kansas laughs and shakes her head. “He is such a moron. When Electra and Photon were together at my last place, Electra was boss mare, and she could move Photon across the pasture with the flick of an ear. Hambone goes way overboard. Makes me wonder if he’s not proudcut.”
“Proudcut?”
“Well the technical term is crypt orchid. In some stallions only one testicle drops and when they are gelded the other testicle is left up inside them. So—crypt, as in hidden, and orchid for testicle.”
I think I am never going to know all the gender variations that nature has to offer. It seems that so many things can go wrong, it’s something of a miracle if everything turns out the way we think it’s supposed to.
The mares want to graze; they stop, lower their heads and grab a bit of grass, but Hambone isn’t finished yet. He runs at them with ears pinned, rears, then pushes them down the fence line.
“How’d you like to ride that?” says Kansas, following Hambone’s trajectory with her eyes.
I lean on the fence beside her and take a deep breath. She might as well know. “Well, actually, I have ridden him.”
“You have?” She’s not mad like my mom would be. She’s more just surprised.
“Before you got here. I put my skipping rope around his neck and rode him in the field. Not very much. It was too scary.”
“No kidding.” Now she sounds impressed.
“He didn’t want to go. But he understood English, so when I figured that out he did what I asked him.”
“Well I’ll be damned. There’s more hope for that horse than I thought. And you!” She puts a gloved hand on my shoulder and looks at me with admiration. “Well you’re full of surprises too!”
“I wore my bike helmet.”
“Well that’s good. But you have to promise me that you won’t do it again.”
I shake my head. “No way. Not now that I’ve seen what he can be like.”
“Hey,” says Kansas looking around. “Where’s my tea?” She spies it on the dirt pile and strolls over to retrieve it. A swell of warmth comes over me as I watch her, realizing how she didn’t make a big deal of my riding Hambone without permission. Mom would have turned it into a two-hour safety lecture.
Kansas comes back to the fence and drinks down her tea in a couple of gulps. It can’t be very hot. She wipes her lips on the back of her sleeve, then pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket. I couldn’t be more shocked if she’d grown horns, sprouted wings and flown away. This is even less understandable than her not wanting to use computers.
“You smoke?”
“Not often.” She flicks a lighter and draws on the cigarette.
“But cigarettes cause cancer. Everyone knows that.”
“I’m working on it.”
“My Uncle Brian used to smoke. My mom told him he had to quit, and he did, but it was too late and he died anyway.” This is only partly true, because it’s never been totally clear to me that Uncle Brian died from smoking, but I’m desperate. I can’t take a chance on Kansas dying of lung cancer.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” says Kansas.
“Maybe I could help you quit, maybe if I reminded you . . . ”
Kansas shakes her head, then takes a drag on her cigarette. She turns her face away and blows a thin stream of smoke into the paddock. “Thanks, Sylvia, but I don’t expect that would work very well. I’m a boss mare kind of person. No one’s ever been any good at telling me to do anything.”
I try to smile at her. I try to think of something else that might change her mind. I tell myself it’s none of my business but then I’m overwhelmed with this horrible sense of helplessness as I see how little control I have of my life and of anyone else’s life, how I can’t make bad people stop doing mean things and I can’t make good people stop doing dumb things and it’s so hard to be fourteen and I can’t imagine fifteen being much better and a huge lump forms in my throat and my eyes fill with tears and a ridiculous embarrassing sobbing noise erupts from my chest.
“Hey,” says Kansas.
And she looks at me and I don’t even cover my face with my hands, the tears stream out of me as I stand there like an idiot.
“Hey, okay, I’ll put it out. I was going to quit anyway, one day. Why not now?�
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That night after dinner we have one of our dreaded family conferences because Mom and Dad can’t agree on whether to go to a family therapy session with John and they want my “input”.
Dad says he doesn’t like John, and Mom says that doesn’t mean he isn’t a good therapist. Dad says we should be seeing someone from outside of Mom’s agency and Mom says she wouldn’t know who to pick because every day she sees a new refugee from another counselling practice. Dad says that of course all she hears are bad stories because if someone is happy with their therapist they never leave them or better still they are cured and don’t need to go see someone else. Mom says Dad is frightened and there’s nothing to be frightened of because we have a good family and Dad says in that case why do we need to go? At which point they both look at me.
“I’m fine,” I say.
They look at me some more.
“I don’t need a therapist. I have you to talk to—both of you.”
“What if there was something you didn’t want to talk about with your parents?” says Mom. “Something about boys or—”
Before she can add anything more embarrassing I say, “I could talk to my friends.”
There’s a long silence and my mom says, “What friends, Pumpkin?”
“Kansas.”
They look at each other.
“Who’s Kansas?” says Dad.
“My new friend.”
“Is Kansas a . . . a . . . boy?” says Dad.
My nose wrinkles. “No,” I say, bewildered. Why would I want a boy friend? Boys aren’t interested in horses.
“Is this someone new in your class?” says Mom. “Because we haven’t heard about her before.”
I don’t want to tell them, but it has to come out sooner or later. I try to tell them carefully so they don’t find reasons for objecting to my friendship with Kansas. I don’t tell them that she used to smoke cigarettes, or that her clothing looks second-hand, or that she lives in a trailer behind a barn. “She’s really nice. She says she’ll give me riding lessons if I help out at her stable. She’s on the way to school.”
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