Tight Rein

by Bonnie Bryant

  Lisa came around the corner toward the pole grid. In front of her, Starlight and Belle swept through effortlessly.

  Barq trotted in. Clank, clank, clank. He stumbled over the last pole, and Lisa had to grab his mane to keep her balance. She felt her face flush.

  “Don’t worry, Lisa, this is hard for him,” Max said. “Try it again.”

  But no matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t get it. Belle would go through the grid, then Starlight, both beautifully. Barq would whack every rail.

  Lisa knew she could have gotten Prancer to lengthen her stride easily. The Thoroughbred would have sailed through this exercise, not staggered and stumbled like short-strided Barg.

  If I had my own horse, Lisa thought, this would be easier. Lisa was not the youngest member of The Saddle Club, but today she felt as if she were. She knew her feelings weren’t Carole and Stevie’s fault. It wasn’t Carole and Stevie’s fault that they had their own horses, either, or that she didn’t. Still, she felt miserable.

  “NOTHING’S WORSE THAN riding wet,” Stevie declared as she unsaddled Belle. “I’m going to get even with Chad. I mean it. Right now.”

  “You can’t get even with him right now,” Lisa reminded her. “You guys are coming to my house from here, aren’t you?” They had planned a sleepover at Lisa’s. “You won’t have to worry about Chad there,” she told her friend.

  “Of course I remembered that we’re going to your house,” said Stevie. Suddenly she whirled around, almost dropping her saddle and causing Belle to prance on the cross-ties. “Ohmigosh! I just remembered something else! Mark’s spending the night at my house, with Chad!”

  “While you’re at Lisa’s you won’t have to worry about Mark either,” Carole said.

  Stevie shook her head. “It’s obvious that you two have no experience with siblings,” she said. “Don’t you see? Mark and Chad will have the whole night to plan their next attack on me, and I won’t be there to stop them!” She shook her head. “We have got to do something,” she said. “We can’t let him get away with it.”

  “WELL,” LISA SAID, suppressing a giggle, “I definitely don’t think this is a smart idea.” She was standing up to her ankles in one of Mrs. Lake’s petunia beds. It was around ten o’clock the same night, and it was cloudy and very dark. To her left, Lisa could see a faint shimmer from the Lakes’ swimming pool, as well as several shrouded humps that she guessed were lawn furniture. Shadows lurked around the edges of the fenced yard.

  To her right, Lisa couldn’t see anything, because she was standing against the side of Stevie’s house. Straight ahead she could see Carole, also trying not to laugh, and between them she could see the ladder they were holding steady while Stevie climbed it.

  “Definitely not a smart idea,” Lisa repeated.

  “Shhh!” Stevie said from above.

  They had put the ladder directly under the window of Chad’s bedroom. Stevie was certain Chad was plotting something evil, and she was determined to know what it was. No stinking older brother was going to take advantage of her!

  It was a short walk from Lisa’s house to Stevie’s. The girls had crept out as soon as it looked really dark. Lisa’s parents had been playing bridge with friends in the den, so Lisa was pretty sure they’d never even notice that The Saddle Club was gone.

  First the girls had strung toilet paper all over the bushes in front of the house. Eight rolls were all they could come up with on short notice, but they’d made the best of what they had. Stevie had brought her water pistol and sprayed all the TP, making it stick to the bushes like soggy oatmeal so that it would be seventeen times harder to remove. The rule in the Lake house, Stevie had explained, was that if your friends made the mess, you had to clean it up. Since Stevie was staying at Lisa’s, she was pretty certain that the blame for this job would rest solely on Chad’s friends—and therefore on Chad. Of course, Alex might catch some of the blame, too, but that was okay.

  Stevie had even spelled WE LOVE YOU, CHAD in the middle of the lawn with pink TP. Not only would that be a false clue leading directly to Chad, but it would make Chad think that some girl actually loved him.

  While Stevie had decorated the grass, Lisa and Carole had thrown the remaining rolls of toilet paper through the trees, until streamers hung from all the branches and wafted in the breeze. When they were finished, the front of the Lake house looked decidedly festive.

  Then they got a ladder from Stevie’s father’s shed and propped it against the back of the house. Now Stevie was climbing the ladder as quietly as a cat to spy on her brother. She knew he was up to something.

  “What if Chad and Mark are in the basement?” Carole whispered. She felt something pricking the backs of her legs. A rosebush, maybe? She knew she was standing on some sort of plant. The smell of crushed petunias hung heavy in the air.

  “What if they’re making popcorn?” Lisa whispered. She shook with silent laughter. The ladder trembled.

  “Shhh!” Stevie hissed. “I can see them! They’re in there.” Lisa and Carole could hear her take a final step up the ladder. “They’re giggling,” Stevie murmured. “I don’t like it … they’ve got Super Glue.…” Suddenly Stevie’s screech tore through the silent night air. “They’ve got my riding boots again!”

  Carole and Lisa jumped and nearly dropped the ladder. “Shhh!” they said in unison.

  Through the window Stevie could see that Chad had spotted her and was laughing. His clammy, troll-like hands were on her beloved new boots. She hammered her fist against the window frame. “Those are mine!” she bellowed. “Mine! Put those down! I’ll get you for this, Chad Lake! You won’t get away with it this time!”

  Inside the house, Chad and Mark guffawed and pointed at Stevie. Stevie tried to open the window, but it was locked from the inside.

  “Stevie!” Lisa cried. “Your parents will hear!” Mr. and Mrs. Lake had been watching TV in the living room—the girls had peeked in before starting to TP the lawn. Mr. Lake liked to have the TV loud, but it wouldn’t be loud enough to drown out Stevie’s bellowing.

  “Get down from there!” Carole urged.

  “You cretinous, lard-bellied fool!” Stevie shouted. “You miserable, slack-jawed, booger-brained moron.!” She pounded the window frame in helpless fury. Inside, Chad and Mark dangled her boots inches from the glass, laughing hysterically.

  “C’mon, Stevie! We’ve got to run for it!”

  “Boggy-bottomed, zit-faced toad!”

  “Stevie!”

  Carole and Lisa could see lights coming on inside the house. They were running out of time, but they couldn’t leave Stevie on the unsteady ladder.

  “Stevie!” Lisa called again.

  Stevie finally recognized the peril of their situation. She scurried down the ladder and jumped the last few feet. She stumbled, landing in her mother’s small vegetable garden. Ripe tomatoes exploded under her feet. An eggplant squished against her chest. “I’m caught,” she said, thrashing among the bean vines and tomato stakes.

  “I’ll take the ladder—you get Stevie!” Lisa said to Carole. She pulled the ladder down and swung it around. The front end caught on the umbrella table by the swimming pool. Desperately Lisa tried to yank it free.

  Carole was on her hands and knees pulling Stevie loose from the garden. When she saw Lisa struggling, she got up and jerked the ladder free. It shot out of her grasp and tore through the mesh on the back screen door.

  “Oh, no!”

  The porch lights went on. The pool lights went on. The girls dashed around in panic. Carole, fighting to free the ladder from the screen door, lost her footing and fell into the pool. The ladder fell in after her. Lisa screamed. Stevie, still trailing bean vines, tripped over a lawn chair and skidded into the last remaining flower bed.

  Above them, they heard wood screech as Chad opened his window. He stuck his head out and blew a raspberry at the girls.

  “Stevie! What do you think you’re doing!” Mr. and Mrs. Lake rushed out the back do
or, but Stevie didn’t hear them. Sprawled in a bed of crushed pansies, she glared with dark fury at her brother.

  “I’m going to kill you, Chad Lake!” she screamed. “I’ll get you for this if it’s the last thing I do!”

  “WOW.” CAROLE SHOOK HER HEAD dejectedly. “This is just awful. I mean, awful.” Beside her, Lisa nodded. Carole slumped against the side of the stable wall. It was Sunday afternoon. The two of them had just met at Pine Hollow, and now they were sitting outside the stable, watching the horses in the pasture grazing in the warm sunshine. It would have been a wonderful day, Carole thought, if they all hadn’t been in such big trouble.

  “So how mad were your parents?” she asked Lisa. “Were they as angry as they looked last night?”

  Lisa slumped against the wall beside Carole. “Oh, no,” she said. “When you saw them last night, they were still being polite. They were much angrier than they looked.”

  Because all the girls were supposed to have been spending the night at Lisa’s, one of the first things Mr. and Mrs. Lake had done, after helping Carole out of the pool, was to call Lisa’s parents. Needless to say, Mr. and Mrs. Atwood were not delighted to have their bridge game interrupted by the call. They had come to get Lisa and Carole, whose overnight bags were still at Lisa’s house. Colonel Hanson had picked Carole up from Lisa’s house within half an hour. The sleepover had been over without anyone’s having slept at all.

  “No, my parents weren’t very happy,” Lisa repeated. She picked up a twig and used it to draw a design in the dirt. “Apparently covering the neighbor’s lawn with toilet paper is not what my mother considers ladylike behavior. Neither is sneaking out of the house and then using a ladder to spy on other people.”

  “Chad’s not other people,” Carole said. “He’s Stevie’s brother.”

  “I know, but my mother wasn’t in the mood to see the difference.”

  Carole nodded sympathetically. She had to admit, once the Lakes had turned on all the outside lights by the pool, the crime scene had looked pretty disastrous. Most of Mrs. Lake’s flowers were not going to survive, and Carole had her doubts about the tomato plants.

  “The strange thing is, I have a brother,” Lisa continued. “But he’s so much older than me, I hardly know him. I mean, I don’t know him well enough to fight with him. In a way that’s kind of sad. My mother seems to think that most families are like ours—she doesn’t understand why Stevie would fight with her brothers at all. She said our actions were ‘totally uncalled for.’ Her words exactly.”

  “I think my father thought it was funny,” Carole said. “I mean, he’d never say so, but he gets this little look in the back of his eyes.”

  “So you’re not in trouble, really?”

  “Oh, no, I’m in plenty of trouble, really.” Carole sighed. Just because her father was amused didn’t mean he was going to let her get away with anything. “I’m on KP for the next month.”

  “What’s KP?”

  “Kitchen Police. I have to cook, and wash all the dishes.” Carole looked up at Lisa and grinned. “Still, I suppose it could be worse.”

  Lisa shook her head. “Not for Stevie.”

  Carole’s grin vanished instantly. “You’re right,” she said.

  “The worst part,” Lisa continued, “was that it was our fault just as much as hers, but she’s getting most of the blame. We went along with her. We thought the whole thing was funny. And you know the TP’ing was my idea.” The thought weighed heavily on Lisa’s conscience. She was supposed to be the well-behaved one. For once she had led Stevie astray, not the other way around, and now Stevie was paying for it.

  “If you hadn’t thought of TP’ing, Stevie or I would have thought of something just as bad,” Carole said comfortingly. “We were all to blame.” She yawned.

  “Are you sleepy?” Lisa asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Me too. Getting up at seven A.M. to take toilet paper off bushes isn’t exactly my idea of fun.”

  They had spent two hours at the Lakes’ that morning, cleaning the front lawn. Stevie’s idea of watering all the TP didn’t seem so inspired when they were the ones picking off each individual shred from each individual leaf from each individual tree and bush in the yard. Stevie had helped them, but she had been absolutely forbidden to speak to either of them—and since Mrs. Lake had sat on the front porch the entire time, reading the Sunday paper and supervising them, Stevie hadn’t tried.

  All three members of The Saddle Club were going to have to share the cost of replacing the torn screen door and the trampled flowers. Stevie was going to have to replant the flowers. None of that seemed too bad—in fact, it seemed fair.

  “But camp!” Carole groaned suddenly. “How can they do that to Stevie! When she’s hardly ridden all summer!”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I can’t believe her parents would be so cruel.”

  Stephanie Lake had been absolutely, positively, and completely grounded for the next two weeks. She was not allowed out of the house, except to replant the flowers. She was not allowed to go even once to Pine Hollow. She was not allowed to speak to the rest of The Saddle Club—she couldn’t even phone them.

  She was not allowed to go to camp.

  Carole felt her heart twist. This was the worst of all possible punishments. Carole would gladly have done KP for years if it meant Stevie could go to camp. She would have listened to her father’s lecture on responsible behavior thirteen million times.

  “My mother sat me down for a little talk this morning,” Lisa said. “She said she doesn’t know what to do with me, but she’s going to start by having me perform community service. Her women’s auxiliary has a vegetable garden, and they send all the produce to the county homeless shelter. I’ve been made the chief weed-picker.” She sighed. “I’d pick all the weeds in Willow Creek if it meant Stevie could go to camp with us.”

  In the pasture Delilah, a palomino mare, suddenly squealed and bucked. She ran down to the far corner and galloped back. It looked like pure good spirits to Carole—the mare was having fun. Carole wished she felt like that. She wondered if she ever would again.

  “It’s so totally unfair,” she said to Lisa. “When you consider how little time Stevie’s gotten to spend on horseback this summer—or with Phil …” Carole’s voice trailed off. She’d never had a real boyfriend, so she didn’t really know what it would feel like to be separated from one. But she could well imagine what it would feel like not to ride. “If I couldn’t see Starlight for two whole weeks, I would just die.”

  “The worst part,” Lisa said bitterly, “is how that brat Chad got away totally scot-free.” It was true. In all the commotion, Stevie’s parents had never noticed Chad making faces out his window, and by the time they’d gotten back inside, Stevie’s riding boots had been sitting in their usual place in her bedroom closet, buried under her dirty breeches just the way she’d left them. Chad had put them back, of course, but he claimed he’d never touched them.

  Carole and Lisa knew that Chad, not Stevie, was lying. Unfortunately, Stevie’s parents didn’t.

  “We’ve got to find a way to make Stevie’s parents change their minds,” Lisa said. “We’ve just got to. Camp won’t be any fun without her.”

  “We need to get even with Chad, too,” Carole said. “We can’t let him get away with this.”

  Lisa looked at Carole. She smiled for what felt like the first time in days. “We need to out-Stevie Stevie,” she said. “What we need here is a Stevie plan.”

  AFTER WATCHING THE HORSES graze for a few more minutes, Lisa and Carole went back into the stable. They stopped outside Belle’s stall.

  “Poor Belle,” Carole said, patting the mare’s soft nose. “We should groom her, since Stevie can’t.” They took Belle out of her stall and brushed her until her coat gleamed. Lisa carefully combed her mane and tail. When they were finished, Carole put the grooming bucket away. Lisa took a piece of paper out of her pocket. It was a sign reading PLEASE TAKE GOOD CARE
OF MY HORSE WHILE I’M GROUNDED. Stevie had handed it to Lisa that morning.

  Carole came back just as Lisa was taping the sign to the front of Belle’s stall. “I told Max about Stevie,” she said. “He said he’d make sure Belle got turned out regularly. I told him we’d handle the grooming.”

  “I think we should keep the sign up anyway,” Lisa said. “That way Red will know, too. I haven’t seen him yet today.” Red O’Malley was Pine Hollow’s stable hand.

  Carole nodded glumly. “Well,” she said with a sigh, “should we go on a trail ride?”

  “I guess so,” Lisa said. Even though she loved trail rides, she didn’t feel very enthusiastic about going on one today. Trail rides weren’t the same without Stevie.

  Even out in the beautiful green woods, Lisa’s spirits failed to lift. When she wasn’t thinking about the disaster of the night before, and the horror of Stevie’s not being with them at camp, she found herself thinking about her failure in the lesson the day before. If only she’d been able to get Barq to lengthen his stride! Lisa was still upset about her shortcomings as a rider. Today she was riding Prancer again. She thought about asking Prancer to lengthen on the trail, but she wasn’t sure it would make her feel better even if Prancer lengthened perfectly.

  In the first place, Lisa knew that Prancer did the movement much more easily than Barq. In the second place, Lisa wasn’t sure it was fair to ask the mare to work hard when they were supposed to be having fun on the trail. And in the third place—Lisa reluctantly admitted to herself—she didn’t want to try the exercise in front of Carole. Carole would know right away what Lisa was doing, and why, and no doubt she’d know exactly what Lisa’s problem was, too, and be able to tell her how to fix it. Lisa didn’t want to be faced with further evidence that Carole was a better rider.