“If we were talking about anyone but A.J. here,” Alex said slowly, “the first thing I’d think is that maybe he’s gotten himself mixed up in drugs or drinking or something like that. But he isn’t that kind of guy.”
“No way,” Phil said quickly. “He’s never even taken a swig of beer at a party, as far as I know.” Then he paused. “Still,” he said, “I guess we have to put it on our list, right? I mean, just to be thorough or whatever. Right?”
Stevie didn’t answer. She didn’t even like to think about the possibility that A.J. could be involved in anything like that. “What else?” she asked. “How about some kind of health problem? Maybe he just found out he has cancer or something horrible like that.”
Alex nodded thoughtfully. “Could be, though I hope not. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be anything as bad as cancer, though. Maybe it’s something minor, like he’s never going to get any taller, or he’s allergic to girls or whatever.” He grinned. “Not that that last one would be minor.”
Stevie rolled her eyes. “I guess it’s possible it could be something medical,” she said dubiously. Even though she had brought it up in the first place, the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a long shot. Still, she supposed they had to consider every possibility. “What else?” She turned to Phil. “Has he been having any trouble at school lately?”
“You mean his grades?” Phil shrugged. “As far as I know they’re the same as always.”
“I was thinking more of the other kids,” Stevie said. “You know—bullies or whatever.”
“Oh.” Phil thought about that for a second. “I haven’t noticed anything. But A.J. used to have some trouble with that because he’s always been short and skinny. Maybe it has started up again.”
Alex was looking skeptical. “Bullies? Grades?” he said. “Come on. Do you really think any of that would totally change his personality? You might as well suggest that he just developed embarrassing body odor. I mean, unless you guys are exaggerating—”
“We’re not,” Stevie interrupted firmly. “A.J. is totally weird. But you’re right. It would take something huge to do that to him.”
She paused, trying once again to imagine what could make a person like A.J. change so dramatically. Was there anything that could make her change that much? She didn’t think so. As long as she had her family, her friends, her health—and as far as they knew, A.J. still had all those things—what could really be so horrible?
“I hate to say it,” she said reluctantly, “but I can’t think of anything more likely than what you guys said before. You know. Drugs.” She had to force the word out, and it tasted sour on her tongue. “If we’re going to rule out alien abductions, there’s really not much else it could be, is there?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t suggest he’s just having trouble with his horse,” Alex teased, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. He sighed. “I can’t believe A.J. could be into something so stupid. It’s not like him.”
“Nothing about him is like him anymore,” Phil reminded Alex, his face more white and strained than ever. “I think we have to be realistic here. We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions, but I think we’ve all seen this movie of the week before, right?”
Alex nodded. “So what do we do now?”
Stevie was already thinking about that. “I think we have to try to talk to him again,” she said slowly. “Someone has to try to get through to him, especially if he is mixed up with drugs. And the sooner the better. Do you think we should try going over there again?”
Phil shook his head. “I have a better idea,” he said. “Let’s try to get him out of his room and into the real world. Maybe then we’ll have a better shot at making him listen.” He stood up. “I’ll call him, see if I can convince him to come hang out at my place with the three of us tomorrow.”
“Good idea,” Alex agreed. He grinned weakly, clearly not looking forward to the confrontation. “Maybe we can get a bunch of his friends together, you know, sort of like a surprise party.”
“Or an intervention!” Stevie blurted out. She sat up straight, surprised that she hadn’t thought of it sooner. “You know—like you see on TV sometimes. We gather everyone A.J. knows in one room, then when he gets there and sees a whole crowd instead of just a couple of people, and he finds out how worried we all are, he spills his guts.”
Phil looked interested. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “He couldn’t possibly ignore all of us, right? I’ll go call him right now.” He hurried through the arched doorway into the kitchen, and a moment later he was speaking urgently into the phone.
Stevie leaned back against the sofa cushions, not even bothering to strain her ears to hear what Phil was saying. She was sure he would manage to talk A.J. into coming over to his house somehow. Besides, she was busy feeling pleased with her own brilliant plan. As soon as she’d thought of it, she had been positive it would work. I’m really on a roll this week, she thought giddily. First I help Callie bond with her oldest pal, and now this …
Phil was back a few minutes later. “That was easier than I thought,” he said, looking more optimistic than Stevie had seen him in weeks. “He’s coming over tomorrow after school. Well, actually it will be after he gets out of detention.” He shook his head grimly. “It seems he skipped a few classes last week that I didn’t know about. Anyway, I didn’t even mention that you two would be there, just said something about shooting some hoops.”
“Good.” Stevie rubbed her hands together eagerly. “Once he’s there, we won’t let him leave until we know the score. Now all we have to do is make sure everyone else shows up. Let’s start calling people.”
“I’ll call Lisa,” Alex volunteered quickly.
Stevie smirked. “I don’t know,” she teased. “We have a lot of other people to call, and we can’t have you tying up the phone with all your lovey-dovey smoochy-poochy talk all afternoon.”
“Very funny,” Alex said sourly. “I’ll be right back.” He headed for the door, but instead of stopping by the wall phone in the kitchen, he continued straight on through to the front hallway.
“Where’s he going?” Phil asked in surprise.
Stevie grinned. “He doesn’t want us to listen to him sweet-talking Lisa,” she said. “He’s probably heading for the extension in the living room. Just for that, we should go listen in on the kitchen phone.”
“I have a better idea.” Phil turned and wrapped his arms around her. “Since we seem to have a few minutes alone …”
Stevie giggled and fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Whatever could you be thinking of, handsome sir?”
Just then Phil’s gaze shifted back to the entrance to the room. “Oops,” he said, pulling away quickly. “We have company. Hi, Michael.”
Michael hovered in the doorway, looking slightly embarrassed. “Uh, hey,” he replied with a quick nod at Phil. “Urn, I was just wondering if you guys were planning to, you know, go anywhere.”
Stevie glared at her younger brother, annoyed at his untimely interruption. “What are you talking about?”
Michael shrugged. “You know, today. Aren’t you guys going out to that stupid stable or the ice cream place or anything?”
“Sorry, buddy,” Phil said with a wink at Stevie. “We’re not going anywhere anytime soon. So I guess your wild party will have to wait, unless we’re invited.”
Michael rolled his eyes. “Ha, ha,” he said sarcastically. He tugged at the lock of hair that hung down over his eyes. “I was just wondering if you were going anywhere, that’s all. No biggie.”
“Well, you can stop wondering,” Stevie told him. “Like Phil said, you’re stuck with us. We’ve got stuff to do here. Anyway, Mom and Dad specifically asked Alex and me to stay here and babysit our baby brother until they get home from work.” She grinned, knowing that would bother him, even though he knew as well as she did that it wasn’t true.
“You’re soooo funny, Stevie.” Michael scowled and rolled his eyes again. T
hen he turned and hurried out of the room.
Phil gazed after him, looking curious. “He really seemed anxious for us to leave,” he commented. “Wonder what that’s all about?”
Stevie snuggled against him. “Who cares?” she said. “But now that he’s gone, where were we again?”
Phil grinned. “Right about here,” he said, pulling her closer and bending to kiss her.
Their lips had barely touched when Alex raced into the room, panting. “Yo, break it up,” he said briskly. “Stevie, I just got off the phone with Lisa.”
Stevie glanced at her brother and saw that his face was flushed and he looked distressed. Her heart jumped. “What is it?” she asked immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“Lisa’s really upset,” Alex reported, sinking into the big easy chair near the couch. “She just got home from the stable. It sounds like she and Carole had some really huge fight. Lisa claims she’s never going to speak to her again, says Carole lied to her face and betrayed her, called her uptight and a bunch of other stuff, and there was something about Prancer in there, too—”
“What?” Stevie was already on her feet. “I can’t believe it. Are you sure?”
Alex shrugged. “Hey, I’m not saying she was totally coherent,” he said. “But something’s going on, and since it has to do with Carole …”
“Thanks.” Stevie immediately understood what he was saying, and she appreciated it. She knew her brother was very protective of Lisa, but this time he’d realized that Stevie should be the one to try to help her. “I’ll go call her right now.”
She raced into the kitchen and grabbed the phone off the hook. But a voice squawked at her from the other end. “Hang up!” Michael said peevishly. “I’m on the phone.”
“Where are you?” Stevie snapped. “I need to make a call.”
“I’m in Mom and Dad’s room, and I don’t care.” Michael sounded defensive even through the phone wires. “You know the rule. You can’t make me hang up unless I’ve been talking more than twenty minutes, and I just got on like two seconds ago.”
Want to bet I can’t make you hang up, you little squirt? Stevie thought grimly. But she didn’t bother to repeat the threat out loud. She didn’t have time to fight with her brother right then—she had to find out what had happened between her two best friends. She slammed the phone down and headed for the back door. Lisa lived only half a block away, and from the sound of things this might be a story she needed to hear face-to-face. “I’m going over there,” she shouted to Alex and Phil on her way out. “I’ll be back when I can.”
TEN
A few minutes later Stevie was sitting on the edge of the four-poster bed in Lisa’s room. The room hadn’t changed much in the years Stevie had known Lisa. It was still tastefully decorated in white and pale, subtle shades of rose, with large windows and wide wooden floorboards. Everything from the desk to the bookcases to the bedspread looked neat and tailored and tidy, just as Lisa herself usually was. At the moment, however, Lisa wasn’t looking quite as together as she usually did. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, and her hair looked windblown and tangled.
Stevie was frowning. Lisa had just given her a quick description of her fight with Carole, and Stevie was having trouble understanding what the big deal was. “Okay, let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re never going to speak to her again because … why, exactly? What am I missing?”
Lisa blew out a breath, looking frustrated. “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “She lied to me. She kept Prancer’s pregnancy a secret and pretended not to know anything, even when I asked her about it.”
Stevie was still pretty surprised about Prancer’s twin pregnancy, but she pushed that thought aside for the moment. First she had to straighten out this thing between Lisa and Carole. She took a deep breath. “Okay, I can see how that’s kind of … well, kind of annoying or whatever. But look, she didn’t tell me anything, either. So it’s not like she was keeping a secret just from you. Max probably asked her not to tell anybody. And you know Carole hates breaking promises and stuff like that.”
“That’s not the point.” Lisa’s eyes were watery. She blinked and let out a loud sniffle. “Even if Max did that, Carole should have talked him into telling me. She knew how upset and worried I was. I mean, I really thought Prancer must be d-d-dying or something. And she just let me s-suffer. Would a real friend do that? Would she just stand by and not even try to help?”
That made Stevie stop and think. She remembered how worried Lisa had been the other day when she’d confided her fears about Prancer’s health. Suddenly she started to understand why Lisa was so upset. It wasn’t just the fact that Carole had kept something from her. It was that her secret had actually been harmful, had caused Lisa serious anguish and fear—anguish and fear that a few simple words could have prevented. That wasn’t like Carole at all, which made it even stranger, more horrible. Carole must have realized that Lisa would wonder and worry about Prancer’s mysterious near-quarantine—Lisa was a worrier by nature, and Carole knew that. She should have seen that Lisa would manage to come up with every awful, fatal ailment in the world and imagine that Prancer had them all.
“You’re right. I can’t believe she did that,” Stevie murmured thoughtfully, shaking her head. “She knows you’re not blind. You obviously knew something was up with Prancer—”
“Of course she did,” Lisa snapped, rubbing at her eyes with her fist. “I told you. I talked to her about it—more than once. Including just yesterday at school.”
“Really?” Stevie frowned, trying to make sense of what she was hearing, to fit it into some pattern of behavior she could understand. What was going on with Carole? How could she have treated one of her best friends this way?
Thinking about it just didn’t seem like enough all of a sudden. It was time to take action. Stevie hopped off the bed and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Lisa asked.
Stevie paused and turned, her face grim. “I’m going to have a little talk with our friend Carole,” she said. “I want to see what she has to say for herself.”
Carole hooked Starlight’s water bucket to its metal ring on the back wall of the stall. “There you go, boy,” she told her horse as he curiously stuck his nose into the bucket, snuffling at the water and making a light spray fly out and splash Carole’s arm.
She smiled automatically at the gelding’s antics. But her mind wasn’t really on Starlight. Earlier, after that unpleasant encounter with Lisa, Carole had been so disconcerted that she had no longer been able to concentrate on her grooming job. Instead, she had left Starlight half groomed and moved on to something she knew would distract her—Samson’s training.
That had done the trick. The big black horse always seemed to be able to take her mind off her problems, and today, by the end of their strenuous sixty-minute workout, Carole had felt almost giddy.
That had ended when she’d put Samson away and returned to Starlight’s stall. She had finished his interrupted grooming and was now making him comfortable for the evening. But all the while, her mind had been busily turning over what Lisa had said to her earlier, the horrible things she had accused her of. The worst part was, she hadn’t even let Carole try to explain …
As Carole brushed the droplets off her arm and turned away from the water bucket, she was so lost in thought that she hardly heard the rapid footsteps approaching in the aisle outside. But she could hardly miss Stevie’s red, sweaty face as it appeared over the top of the stall’s wooden half door.
“What’s the big idea?” Stevie demanded without preamble.
Carole glanced at her in surprise. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem a little out of breath.”
Stevie brushed aside the comment without bothering to respond. She had run all the way to Pine Hollow from Lisa’s house, turning a fifteen-minute walk into a five-minute sprint. But that was the last thing she felt like discussing at the moment. “I just came from Lisa’s place. She’s
really upset.”
“She’s not the only one,” Carole muttered with a grimace.
Stevie hesitated, surprised. She had expected Carole to be either clueless or contrite about what had happened. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
Starlight had turned to snuffle at Carole’s shoulder, and she reached up to put an arm around the gelding’s neck, seeming to take strength from the horse while playing absently with his mane. “I suppose she told you what happened.”
“She said you knew about Prancer’s pregnancy for ages and you didn’t tell her. She said she was worried sick, but when she tried to talk to you about it, you brushed her off and let her keep worrying.”
Carole frowned, her cheeks deepening to an angry red. “Well, there’s some stuff she didn’t tell you,” she said. “I know that, because she didn’t stick around long enough to listen to my side of the story. Should I even bother to tell you, or have you already made up your mind, too?”
“Oh.” Stevie felt a twinge of shame, realizing that Carole’s accusation was hitting pretty close to home. Stevie had made up her mind, and that wasn’t fair. There were two sides to every story, and as clear-cut as Lisa’s grievance seemed to her, Carole deserved to be heard, too. After so many years of living in a house with two lawyers as parents, Stevie should have known better. “Okay. Sorry,” she said penitently. “What happened?”
Her words seemed to calm Carole down immediately. She gave Starlight one final pat, then stepped forward and let herself out of the stall so that she was facing Stevie in the stable aisle. “I did know about Prancer’s condition. Max told me a few weeks ago,” she began evenly. “From the beginning, I had trouble keeping it to myself. I really wanted to tell you guys—especially Lisa, for obvious reasons.” She took a deep breath. “But Max is my boss. And you know I take my job here seriously. He really didn’t want anyone else to know that early, since it was Prancer’s first pregnancy and there’s no telling what can happen with twins. If word got out, there’s no way we could keep her from getting mobbed by concerned Pony Clubbers, and Judy thought it was important to keep her calm, and—well, you get the picture. I could sort of tell that Lisa was wondering, and that made me feel really bad, but I—”
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