The Girl Who Rode the Wind

by Stacy Gregg

  Mr Azzaretti waited for me to say something while I looked down at my hands. There was a long silence between us and then he gave a sigh and pushed his chair away and stood up. He came right around and perched on the edge of the desk beside me. He was a tall, angular man. He always wore a shirt and tie, but he kept his sleeves rolled up as if he had proper manual work to do, like a groom at the stables instead of a middle-school principal.

  “Lola.” He said my name, and my heart sank. It was the softness of the word, the kindness in his voice, that made me realise I was in real trouble. “Do you know how much it concerns me to see the smartest kid in this school, a student I consider to be scholarship material, being called in because of this sort of behaviour?”

  I could feel my eyes getting teary. “I’m sorry, Mr Azzaretti.” I wiped them with my sleeve, noticing the bloodstain as I did so. That blood wasn’t mine.

  “You know I’m going to have to call this boy’s parents?” Mr Azzaretti said. “And your dad too, obviously?”

  I felt a flush of pleasure at the idea of Jake Mayo having to explain to his dad that a girl had broken his nose. It almost made it all worth it.

  “My dad’s asleep. He turns his phone off in the afternoons.”

  “All right,” Mr Azzaretti said. “Then you’ll give him this as soon as you get home and ask him to call me, OK?” He handed me an envelope. “Tell him you’ve been suspended from school until further notice.”

  It was fourth period and everyone else was in math. I cut around the back of the science block and across the playground at the back of the school. I squeezed through the gap in the mesh fence and out onto Sutter Avenue. Usually I turned left here, towards Rockaway, but I could feel the weight of that note from Mr Azzaretti in my backpack. So I headed right instead, following the green mesh fence line behind the houses, making my way towards the Aqueduct grandstands.

  My problems with Jake Mayo had started at the beginning of the term. Before then, I don’t think he even knew my name. He hung out with the populars – Tori and Jessa and Ty and Leona - and I hung out with no one. Weird Lola Campione, the brainiac girl always with her nose in a book. Because if you have no one to hang out with in middle school then you need a book to read, because it stops you looking so lonely. I sound like I feel sorry for myself, but I don’t really. I don’t know why but I don’t make friends easy. I’m shy, I guess, and I never know what to talk about with other kids because my life is all about horses.

  Our family, we’re “Backstretchers”. That’s what they call us on account of the fact that we spend our whole lives at the racetrack in the backstretch, the underground neighbourhood behind the grandstands at Aqueduct.

  There are some backstretchers who actually live right there at the track twenty-four seven. They sleep in hammocks slung up in the loose boxes and eat all their meals in the bodega.

  We don’t live far from the track, just on the other side of Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. Our house has four bedrooms, one each for Dad and Nonna and another for my two brothers, Johnny and Vincent. I share the downstairs bedroom with my big sister, Donna. She’s nineteen and a total pain in the neck. She’s got Dad wrapped around her little finger, so he treats her like a princess even though she is the only one who does nothing to help out with the family business. Johnny and Vincent both dropped out of school the day they turned sixteen to ride trackwork. So I only have four years to go. Except Dad won’t let me quit school.

  “Sweetheart,” he says. “A clever girl like you, you could be a doctor or a lawyer or anything you want. You’re going to stay in school and get a scholarship and go to college, Lola. There ain’t no way you’re gonna wind up like me.”

  Except I wasn’t going to get a scholarship now, was I? Even Donna, who was always in trouble, had never actually been suspended. I didn’t know how I was going to explain this to my dad. He was gonna hit the roof.

  That morning I’d gone to Aqueduct as usual. I earn pocket money cleaning out the stalls. I stayed longer than I should have done because Fernando was settling in a new horse so I had to do his mucking out too. I was going to go home and get dressed for school, but I had no time, so I just changed my T-shirt, which was sweaty, and kept the same jeans and boots. I figured that was OK. The boots were my riding boots, scuffed brown leather, which I wore every day at the track. I gave them a wipe on the straw before I left the loose box to clean them off a bit and then ran the whole way to school.

  By the time I got to the gates I was sweaty again and the bell had already rung. I like to arrive at class early because I have this favourite desk in the front row, but on this day all the desks up front were filled and the only spare seat left was near the back next to Jake Mayo.

  I would have done anything to find another seat. Jake was in all my classes, but we’d never spoken, not once. Due to my terminal uncoolness I guess.

  I excused my lateness to Miss Gilmore, flung myself down into my seat and opened my textbook as she began writing up stuff on the white board.

  Jake was looking at me funny.

  “Hey!” he hissed.

  I ignored him.

  “Hey, Campione!”

  I looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Where’s your horse?”

  There was laughter from Tori and Jessa who sat in the row behind us.

  “Hey, Campione!” Jake leaned over towards me. “You know you smell of manure, right?”

  I looked down at my boots. They were dirty from the stables I guess, but I hadn’t really noticed. I would have changed them if I had time. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it now. I pretended I hadn’t heard him and began furiously copying down the lesson from the board.

  Then suddenly, in front of everyone, Jake flung himself across his desk and began convulsing, coughing and spluttering like he was going to die or something. The whole class was watching him and Miss Gilmore stopped writing on the board.

  “Are you all right, Jake?” she asked, looking concerned.

  Jake stopped performing and sat up.

  “Sorry, miss,” he smirked. “It’s like I can hardly breathe in here because of Campione! She stinks of horse poo!”

  The whole class fell apart laughing at this and Jake gave me a look of satisfaction. His humiliation of me was complete.

  I thought it would end there, but it didn’t. At lunch he gave a whinny as he walked by me in the cafeteria and made a big deal of holding his nose. I could see him at his table with the other populars, all of them looking over and laughing about it.

  I walked home that day and for the first time ever I couldn’t wait to get out of my riding boots.

  I didn’t want to talk about it, but Nonna has a way of winkling things out of you. She could tell something was wrong and that night after dinner she sat down on my bed and we had a big talk.

  “He’ll have forgotten you by tomorrow, you’ll see,” my nonna said. “With a bully, you have to ignore them, like you don’t care. Then this boy will give up and start on someone else.”

  “I am!” I insisted.

  I kept on ignoring him, just like Nonna told me. But it didn’t stop. The next day Jake managed to get the seat next to me again and spent the whole class whinnying at me, doing it under his breath, just quiet enough so the teacher couldn’t catch him. He did the same thing in the playground every time he walked past me, and by the end of the week all the other kids were doing it too.

  “Do you want me to talk to one of your teachers about it?” Nonna offered.

  “No!” I was horrified. “No, honest, I’m fine. Just forget about it …”

  I stopped talking about Jake at home. I was worried that Nonna would tell Dad and then the next thing I knew he’d be marching into school to “sort him out”. I was desperate to avoid this happening – almost as desperate as I was for Jake to stop picking on me.

  Dad worried about me in a way he’d never done with Johnny and Vincent, or even Donna. She had been a popular when she was at school. Now she was stud
ying to be a beauty therapist, which accounted for the fact that she spent all her time at home practising her make-up in the mirror and painting her nails. We shared a closet – half each. Her half was overflowing. My half was all T-shirts and jeans.

  “Can I try on one of your skirts?” I asked Donna.

  “Why?” she looked suspicious.

  “Because.”

  “As long as you don’t ruin it.”

  I pulled out her blue skirt with the black spots.

  “Can I wear this to school?” I asked.

  “Since when do you wear skirts?” Donna arched her over-pencilled brow at me.

  “Please, Donna?” I went red in the face.

  “OK,” she sighed. “I don’t like that one anyway – you can have it.”

  I tried it on.

  “It feels strange to have bare legs,” I said.

  “You have lovely legs,” Nonna said.

  “She has legs like hairy toothpicks!” Donna shot back.

  “Donna, be nice to your sister!” Nonna Loretta warned.

  “You need some shoes to wear with it,” Donna pointed out.

  I looked at myself in the mirror.

  “All the populars wear white trainers,” I said.

  “Trainers?” Nonna asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like white sports shoes.”

  I looked at the shoes in my half of the closet.

  “I can wear these I suppose.” I fished out my usual shoes – a pair of battered old red Converse and put them beside the skirt in my half of the closet.

  The next morning, when I got home from helping Dad at the track, Nonna Loretta was waiting for me. She’d made me lunch and there was a box beside it on the kitchen table.

  “What’s in the box?” I asked.

  “Take a look,” she said.

  They were white tennis shoes.

  “I got them in a sports store on special,” Nonna told me. “That’s what they wear at school, yes?”

  “They’re not the same,” I said. “These are tennis shoes.”

  Nonna didn’t see the difference. “Try them on.”

  They fitted me.

  “There! They look very nice,” Nonna said.

  On Monday I wore my new outfit to school. The skirt was a bit big so I put a belt on it. The shoes were so white they positively glared in the sunlight. I had English first period. I made sure I was early and got my usual seat at the front, but on the way out of class Jake caught up with me.

  “Hey, Lola. Cool shoes.”

  I felt sick. He was being totally sarcastic.

  How could I have been so dumb? The shoes were totally wrong! I wished I could have just taken them off and walked around in bare feet, but that wasn’t allowed at school.

  At lunchtime, I decided the best thing to do was go to the library so that no one would see my dumb white shoes. I was on my way across the playground when Jake spotted me. He was with Ty and Tori and Jessa. They began to walk towards me. There should have been a teacher on duty, but I couldn’t see one.

  “Hey, Campione!” Jake cocked his head so that his hair flopped to one side then he pushed it back coolly with his right hand. It was his trademark gesture, like he thought he was in a boy band. He was so vain about that hair; you could tell he spent hours on it each morning before school. It was shaved short up the back and the fringe was long so that it grazed perfectly against his tanned cheekbones.

  “Where’d you get your shoes?”

  I kept my eyes down. I tried to keep walking past him, but he stepped in front of me and blocked my way.

  I stepped to the left and Jake did too. Then to the right, and he matched me, like we were dancing. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment.

  Jake stepped in real close to me and then he gave an exaggerated sniff, wrinkling up his nose.

  “You might want to change those shoes again, Campione.” He grinned. “Because you still stink of horse poo!”

  I heard the laughter buzzing in my ears and saw the smug look on Jake’s face. And that was when I threw the punch that broke his stupid nose.

  Dad broke eleven bones in his racing career. You could see how his collarbone stuck out funny from the time when a horse went up on its hind legs in the starting gate and crushed him against the barrier. Another time he spent a week in intensive care after a three-year-old he was breezing spooked at a car horn. Dad fell and another horse running behind him struck him with a hoof on the head, shattering his helmet into pieces and knocking him out cold.

  He fit right in with the other jockeys in the bodega, sitting around shirtless, comparing battle scars as they drank endless cups of black coffee. Most of them were on crazy diets to keep thin enough to make racing weight. Dad liked to “mess with their heads” by sitting right beside them at the communal dining table and ordering a big breakfast from Sherry who ran the kitchen – sausages, beans, eggs and fried bread. You should have seen the half-starved look on the jockeys’ faces as Dad sat there and ate his way through it all, groaning with pleasure and savouring every bite. He thought it was hilarious.

  “I punished my body harder than any of them back in the day,” Dad would say. “Taking saunas for hours before a race to sweat out the water weight and drinking those disgusting diet shakes.” He would shake his head in disbelief. “Sometimes when I sat on a horse I was so weak from hunger I couldn’t even hold him back. No wonder I fell so many times.”

  When I was little, instead of bedtime stories, I would get Dad to recount the tales behind all of his broken bones. He made a real drama out of it, acting out the whole race for me. He could recall every name of every single horse and its jockey, all the details of how he rode the race and where he was in the field at the moment he fell.

  The best story by far was the one about the missing fourth finger on his left hand.

  “The horse was called Forget-me-not,” Dad would begin. “And when I got given the ride on him, Lola, I was punching the air with the thrill of it! He was this big, black stallion, pure muscle and power, and he was the flat-out favourite in the Belmont Stakes. My cut of the purse would come to enough money to buy my own stables.”

  He would be telling me this as he sat on the side of my bed and I would be propped up on my pillows beside him in my pyjamas, wide-eyed, waiting for the rest of it as if I had never heard it before, even though I’d been told the story a thousand times.

  “Anyway,” Dad would continue, “the week before the race I’m breezing Forget-me-not, working him alongside a couple of other horses to get his blood up, when he gets crowded on the rail and panics, and I don’t know what gets into his head, but all of a sudden he tries to jump the barrier! He breaks the whole railing and I must have been knocked out cold, because the next thing I know they’re wheeling me into the hospital and I can feel this real sharp pain in my left hand. So they take me straight up to x-ray and the doctors take a look and it turns out my finger is broken in three places. Must have hit the rail as I went down.”

  I look at the missing place where Dad’s finger used to be.

  “So they cut it off?”

  Dad shakes his head. “Not straight away. They tried strapping it up with tape, and said it just needed time to heal. But I had the Belmont the next week and that tape was no good. Even with a glove over the top I couldn’t close the finger and grip the reins without screaming in pain. So I went back, told the doctors I needed painkillers, but the drugs they gave me, all they did was make me woozy. So I went back to them again, and do you know what I said?”

  I did know, because I had heard this story before. And not just from Dad. I’d heard it from the other jockeys in the bodega. In the version my dad told me, he walked into hospital and insisted they remove his finger so he could ride.

  But the way the other jockeys told it was even more gruesome. They said the surgeons refused to amputate and so my dad went back to the stables and got a wood block and a splitter axe and cut the finger off himself. Then, with his hand wrapped in a
gamgee horse bandage, he caught a cab back to Jamaica Hills, showed the doctors the bloodied stump and told them to go ahead and stitch it up.

  Dad rode in the Belmont Stakes that weekend minus his finger. Forget-me-not came in dead last.

  I’m telling you this because you need to know the sort of man my dad is. So now you’ll understand why I couldn’t bring myself to go home and admit to him I’d been suspended from school.

  Fernando was sweeping out the aisle between the loose boxes when I reached the stables.

  “Lola!” he gave me a friendly wave. “You lookin’ for Ray? He’s long gone.”

  Dad finished working the last of the horses by midday. He’d have been up since four a.m. and he’d be home having his afternoon nap by now, just like I’d told Mr Azzaretti.

  “I came to see the horses,” I said.

  Fernando looked at his watch. “No school today?”

  “I finished early.” This wasn’t exactly a lie. “Can I help muck out the stalls?”

  Fernando leant against his broom. “Maybe you can take out Ginger? I was gonna put him in the walker. You can do it while I finish up here?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  In the tack room I threw down my backpack on a chair and gave it a sideways glance, thinking about that note, shoved down deep against my textbooks. Then I went over to the wall where all the halters were lined up and grabbed one.

  Ginger had his head out over the door of the stall, waiting for me.

  “Hey, Ginge.” I gave him an affectionate scratch on his muzzle, but he flinched away from me. He wasn’t very friendly. Most of the horses in Dad’s stables were grumpy, to tell the truth. Ginge was the worst of them all – he was a biter. Last week he had bitten Tony the groom’s finger when he went to slip on his halter, pretty much taking the skin clean off with his teeth. Dad said Tony had screamed like a girl – which I found insulting because I don’t scream.