Then, when Tiffani brought out Diamond with his sidesaddle on, the six students she’d been working with all had their turns going around the ring sidesaddle. None of them was very good, but they all stayed on, and Diamond responded to their aids just right.
There was more applause.
“Well done, class,” Max said. “So well done, in fact, that I think I’ll have you do this more often!”
The range of things that people had decided to learn was amazing, Max said. “I am truly impressed with your determination and your success. Every single one—No, there’s someone missing.” He turned his head until his gaze rested on Stevie.
“Ms. Lake?”
“Yes?”
“Did you learn something new for today?”
This was not a moment Stevie had been looking forward to. She’d learned something new, all right, but she wasn’t eager to share it with the class.
“It’s kind of rough,” she said.
“Very few things worth learning can be learned quickly,” Max said. “Nobody expects expertise. Just show us what you’ve done so far.”
There was no getting out of it. She was going to have to do it, just the way everybody else had. And, after all, it was pretty special, and she had done it all by herself, even if she hadn’t done it very well.
“I’ll be back,” she said. She was hoping it would take her hours to tack up Belle and that everybody would have given up on her by then, but when she returned with the sidesaddle on Belle, they were all waiting, exactly as she had left them.
“Why Stevie, you could have used Diamond!” Tiffani said.
“I wanted to use Belle,” Stevie said. “She’s my horse.”
She led Belle to the mounting block and began what she later considered the most humiliating ten minutes of her life. She and Belle were exactly as good in front of the whole class as they had been by themselves. The only thing that went right was that she didn’t fall out of the saddle while she was mounting. After that, there was no good news.
Belle took her usual rightward step when Stevie tried to get her to walk. She finally began moving at a walk and refused to trot. She moved forward, but when Stevie signaled for a left turn, she turned right. She backed up when Stevie tried to stop her, and she trotted when Stevie tried to back her up. Every single attempt at giving Belle an aid backfired, side-fired or front-fired. It was a disaster. Finally, trying to get Belle back to where she could honorably dismount and signal the end of her pitiful demonstration, Stevie kicked her too vigorously. Belle did the only natural thing she could in response. She bucked. Stevie flew out of the saddle, up and over Belle’s head, and landed rear-first in the dirt. A perfect end to a perfect demonstration—as long as the title of the demonstration was “Terrible Riding.”
Stevie didn’t move for a minute, hoping that while she was there on the ground a big hole would open up in the earth and swallow her. That was the only way she could think of that she might not have to face any of her friends or classmates or boyfriend or instructor ever again, which was exactly when she’d be ready to see them.
No hole opened up. Instead she found herself surrounded. Usually Max was the first person to reach a rider who’d been thrown. This time, however, he’d been outpaced by his newest student: Tiffani Thomas.
When Stevie opened her eyes, her gaze was met by Tiffani’s pale blue eyes.
“Oh, Stevie!” Tiffani said. “You were wonderful!”
“Huh?”
“Now, don’t move,” Tiffani said, though Stevie already knew she was to stay still for a while anyway. “Does anything hurt?”
“Nope.”
“Can you wiggle your toes?”
Obediently Stevie wiggled her toes and then nodded.
“Stay still and listen to me,” Tiffani said. “I know you’re fine there, but while you rest a second, I want you to know that you should be really proud of yourself.”
“For making an idiot of myself?” Stevie asked.
“No, silly,” said Tiffani. “For trying so hard. Everybody else who wanted to learn sidesaddle riding came to me for help. You didn’t. You were determined to do it yourself.”
“And I really did it, didn’t I?” Stevie asked sarcastically.
“You were doing everything right!” Tiffani said.
“Was not!” Stevie protested.
“Well, maybe not exactly right, but you’d figured out what you needed to do and you and Belle were working at it. That sweet ole mare would do just about anything for you, wouldn’t she?”
“Like buck me off?” Stevie retorted. She wanted to stand up and get away from this irritating girl. The trouble was that she’d been winded and shaken by the fall. She was all right—nothing was broken, she didn’t have a concussion or anything—but she was a prisoner of her own injury for a few minutes and there was no escaping Tiffani.
“You don’t understand, do you, Stevie? What you did was brave! Sidesaddle riding is different, and it’s a difficult skill for a lot of people. Trying to learn it on your own was a fine thing to do. You learned a lot, too! Oh, sure, what you did here this afternoon wasn’t good riding, but you are a good rider and one day you’ll be a fine sidesaddle rider. It’s a skill, like any other. It takes practice and perhaps some good instruction now and again. I mean, I just happen to be good at it, the same way Max tells me you’re good at dressage. I’m a failure at dressage, aside or astride. Tell you what, Stevie, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll teach me what you know about dressage, I’ll teach you everything I know about sidesaddle.”
Stevie blinked and then relaxed back onto the dirt. “You want me to teach you?”
“Would you?”
Now, there was a question. Stevie was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that all her friends had apparently come to almost the moment they’d met Tiffani Thomas. There was a lot more to this girl than pink jodhpurs. She really knew a lot about horses and really wanted to learn a lot more. She wasn’t making it up. Oh, sure, she made statements into questions, but that was mostly a matter of where she came from. She wore funny clothes, but that was who she was, just as Stevie was torn jeans and T-shirts.
“On one condition,” Stevie finally answered.
“Name it,” said Tiffani.
“That you don’t teach me any more about sidesaddle riding.”
“Did you hate it?” Tiffani asked.
“Every minute,” Stevie told her.
“Some people just do, you know.”
“Like me,” said Stevie.
She sat up then, and Tiffani gave her a hand to stand up. The class applauded. Carole walked over, leading a bashful Belle, and handed Stevie the reins.
Stevie thanked her and then turned back to Tiffani. “You could do one thing for me,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Hold the reins while I remount. Max’ll kill me if I don’t get back in the saddle.”
It took only a minute. Stevie mounted, let Tiffani lead Belle in a small circle, and then dismounted. Both she and her horse were ready to return to Belle’s stall to remove the hated sidesaddle for a final time.
STEVIE DROPPED THE SIDESADDLE off in the tack room, promising it she would polish it another time. Right then, all she wanted and needed was some time to herself.
It wasn’t easy finding a private corner at Pine Hollow. The stable was filled with pumped-up Pony Clubbers. Max’s Learn Something New project had been a grand success, and everybody was chattering about what they’d learned or what they wished they’d learned or what someone else—Stevie, mostly—hadn’t learned. The barn was no place for quiet contemplation.
Stevie fled to the grain shed.
She found a bale of hay in a corner and sat on it. Thinking always seemed easier on a bale of hay. The first thinking she did was to take a quick physical inventory. That fall had been a hard one, and although she was convinced nothing was badly hurt, she knew she was shaken.
Shaken because she’d fallen? No, she fell off Belle
fairly regularly. All riders fell off their horses from time to time, and it was no big deal
It wasn’t all that often that she had a chance to fall so spectacularly in front of a large crowd of people. Maybe that was it. She dismissed that, too. It was embarrassing, but everybody else there had done the same thing. Was she embarrassed because she’d been such a miserable failure as a sidesaddle rider? Maybe a little. On the other hand, none of the other sidesaddle riders had excelled. They hadn’t been as bad as Stevie, but they were all riding a horse that was experienced. Riding aside was new for both Stevie and Belle. Everybody there knew that. So what was shaking her up?
Stevie ran her fingers through her hair to pull it back from her face. It felt funny. It took her a few seconds to realize that it felt funny because it was all curly. She stood up from the hay bale and walked over to a little mirror that someone had tacked to the wall a long time before.
She barely knew the girl whose reflection greeted her. What was this cloud of curls? Where did the pink sweater come from? Did anyone know who this girl was?
She wasn’t anyone Stevie Lake knew, and then Stevie understood that she wasn’t anyone that Lisa, Carole, or Phil Marsten knew, either. If Phil liked the real Stevie Lake enough to have been her boyfriend all this time, how could he possibly care about curls and pastels? With a shudder, Stevie sat back down on the bale. She didn’t want to see that image in the dusty mirror anymore. And she didn’t think anybody who mattered to her did, either.
“I’VE LOOKED EVERYWHERE,” Lisa said to Carole. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Belle’s back in her stall, but she hasn’t been groomed,” Carole said.
“That’s a good sign,” said Phil, meeting up with Lisa and Carole in the tack room
“How?” asked Carole.
“It means she’s still planning on going on the trail ride with us.”
“Or that she’s so crazed she didn’t groom her horse,” Lisa suggested.
“Think positive,” Carole urged her.
“Okay, then, let’s look again. She didn’t disappear into thin air!” Phil said.
The three of them went back to the usual starting point for everything at Pine Hollow—the locker room. And there was Stevie, leaning deeply into her locker so that all they could see was her backside, now clad in riding jeans instead of the neatly pressed fawn-colored riding pants she’d had on earlier.
“Stevie?”
“It’s me,” she said, standing up and turning around. “I knew this was in here somewhere.” She had a T-shirt clasped in her hand. “Excuse me a second.” She ducked into the bathroom and emerged a few seconds later, wearing the T-shirt and proudly displaying its message: THE HORSE IS THE ONE WITH THE POINTY EARS. “Did someone say ‘trail ride’?” she asked brightly.
“Everybody did,” said Phil. “Come on, let’s get Belle tacked up. You want her usual saddle, don’t you?”
“Absolutely!” Stevie said, following Phil into the tack room.
When they were out of earshot, Lisa turned to Carole. “Maybe it was the fall that shook it loose,” she said.
“Shook what loose?”
“The alien spirit that took over her body for a while.”
Carole slung her arm across Lisa’s shoulders. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. Our Stevie is sometimes subject to wild swings. This was just one of the wilder ones.” She looked at the pink sweater, now abandoned on the bench. That seemed to be a good place for it to stay.
Carole and Lisa met Phil and Stevie at Belle’s stall. Tiffani was across the aisle, giving Diamond a final brushing.
“Hey, I’m glad to see you’re okay. You disappeared so fast after class, nobody had a chance to help you?”
“I’m fine,” Stevie said. “Thanks for coming to my rescue. Say, would you like to come along on our trail ride? We can show you some more of these woods this afternoon.”
“Oh, no thanks,” Tiffani said. “I’ve got to get back to my aunt’s house. My parents are coming home soon, and I want to get some new clothes to welcome them. My aunt says the mall is great, but I don’t know any of the stores there. Have you got any suggestions?”
Without hesitation, and in a single voice, the three girls answered. “Simpson’s,” they said.
“It must be some store!”
“It is,” Stevie assured her.
Carole and Lisa left then to get their horses and told Stevie and Phil they’d meet them at the good-luck horseshoe. Carole also said she’d bring Barq, the horse Phil would be riding, because he was already tacked up.
Stevie slipped the bridle into Belle’s mouth and then, smoothing down the reins, found herself on the same side of the big mare as Phil. They were on the far side of the stall door in a rather private corner.
Phil dropped the brush into Belle’s grooming bucket and turned to face Stevie. He put his hands on her shoulders, sweeping her hair back from her face.
“You gave us a scare out there,” he said.
“It wasn’t much of a fall,” she said.
“That wasn’t what scared us—me, especially. It was all that … oh, I don’t know. That un-Stevie stuff. You’re so special just the way you are that when you start wearing fluff and pink, I don’t know what to do.”
“I confused you?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I sort of confused myself, too,” she said.
“I bet you did.”
“But I don’t think I’m confused now.”
“I hope not.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’m about to kiss you, and I wouldn’t want to be seen kissing someone who was confused.”
“Definitely not confused,” Stevie promised.
A few minutes later, as they walked toward their rendezvous with Carole and Lisa, Stevie asked the question that had been bugging her for a while.
“If I’m the girl you like, how come you were flirting with Tiffani?”
“I was?”
“Definitely,” Stevie said.
“You’re right, I was. But it didn’t mean anything.”
“Not to you, it didn’t.”
“But it didn’t mean anything to her, either.”
“Well, it meant something to me,” Stevie told him. “And it hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it just happened. You see, there are some girls who flirt the way other girls breathe. It’s totally natural. And it comes naturally to boys to flirt back, but it doesn’t mean anything and it certainly doesn’t mean I like her better than I like you, or as well as I like you, or even that I like her at all. It just means that we were flirting, playing a game.”
“How do you feel about flirting with me, then?” Stevie asked.
“I love it and it means something,” he said.
“That’s not logical.”
“Neither is the way I feel about you. Want to duck into another stall so that I can remind you?”
“Later, maybe,” Stevie said.
Stevie hadn’t felt this good for weeks. Not since the day Tiffani arrived. Even though the sky was overcast, she would have sworn the weather was perfect. Even though Belle was still moody after her unsatisfactory stint as a sidesaddle horse, Stevie would have sworn she was the nicest, most obedient horse in Virginia. And even though the trail ride lasted more than an hour, Stevie would have sworn it flew by in less than fifteen minutes.
The friends rode all around the hillside and then came down to their favorite spot by the edge of the creek. By the time they settled onto the rock, where they resisted the temptation to dangle their toes in the too-cold water, their conversation turned to shopping.
“Poor Tiffani,” Lisa said. “She’s not going to find a thing left for her at Simpson’s!”
“Aw, c’mon,” Stevie protested. “My mother didn’t let me buy everything. Remember the mint outfit?”
“I don’t think mint will go with her pale blue eyes,” Carole said.
Stevie gave h
er a withering look.
“Well, if she has trouble finding things there, I might have a few items in my wardrobe I could share with her.”
“You mean like your LIFE IS UNCERTAIN. EAT DESSERT FIRST T-shirt with the rip in the sleeve?”
“How about the green one with the big red paint smear on it?” Lisa suggested.
“It’s not a big smear,” said Stevie. “You can barely see it.”
“Not unless you happen to be looking at the shirt from within, say, fifty yards,” Carole said.
“Okay, what would you give her?” Phil asked.
“I have this white angora sweater,” Stevie said. “But it’s really worn out.…”
“Holes?
“Nope.”
“Rips?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘worn out’?” Phil asked.
“Well, it’s not worn out so much as just plain worn. What I mean is that it’s gotten all the wearing it’s going to get from me!”
Lisa, Carole, and Phil all reached to give Stevie hugs at the same time. It was nice to have her back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BONNIE BRYANT is the author of more than a hundred books about horses, including The Saddle Club series, Saddle Club Super Editions, and the Pony Tails series. She has also written novels and movie novelizations under her married name, B. B. Hiller.
Ms. Bryant began writing The Saddle Club in 1986. Although she had done some riding before that, she intensified her studies then and found herself learning right along with her characters Stevie, Carole, and Lisa. She claims that they are all much better riders than she is.
Ms. Bryant was born and raised in New York City. She still lives there, in Greenwich Village, with her two sons.
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