Best Friends (13 page)

“Canter!” Stevie declared.

Prancer knew the word and responded immediately to Lisa’s slight signal. Her mane lifted farther. Moving with the smooth rocking gait of this former racehorse, Lisa felt as if she were flying.

“Way to go, Lisa!” Carole called out.

But it wasn’t really just Lisa who was going. It was Lisa and Prancer, moving as one, in complete unison as they circled the ring.

“Walk, and return to center,” Stevie said, declaring the end of the show class.

“No doubt about who gets the blue here,” said Carole. “Lisa, you and Prancer have never worked together better.”

“It’s the Total Horse Day experience,” said Lisa, laughing. She felt good, too, because she knew Carole was right. And maybe it did have something to do with Total Horse Day.

Next was the dressage class. Naturally Stevie and Belle would excel at that. Lisa found the work tiring, complicated, and difficult. Prancer, still a relative newcomer at schooling, simply didn’t have the discipline for it.

Lisa and Stevie had expected to register for the dressage class, but all three of them had practiced the routine. Carole went first.

Starlight seemed more cautious, more contained, than usual, as if the snow itself held his spirit but not his skills in check. He relied more on Carole than usual for signals.
Carole suspected he was distrusting his own instincts in the very unusual circumstances of the stable’s being practically buried in snow.

It turned out that the very fact that he was less independent, more reliant on Carole’s aids, and a little unsure made him do better on the dressage test than he had ever done before.

“Good job, Carole!” Lisa said, and Carole knew she was right.

“Not me, though,” she said. “It was all Starlight.”

“Maybe,” Stevie said. “But I think you’ve been learning from my excellent example.”

Carole laughed. “Was that Veronica I heard talking?” she teased.

“Perish the thought!” Stevie said. Then she amended her comment. “Obviously, you’ve been working very hard on your dressage techniques.”

“Thank you,” Carole said graciously.

Lisa went second and she did fine. She was working well with Prancer, though Prancer didn’t seem to be in the mood for a highly structured exercise like dressage. Carole clapped when she was done, and Stevie did, too. Lisa was pleased. It had been a pretty good performance for both of them, at least better than usual.

Stevie went next, but her skills seemed to have slipped.
Or maybe Belle’s had. Dressage was such a partnership between horse and rider that it was often difficult to determine where a problem lay when there was a problem. Stevie seemed to be doing everything right. Then Carole realized it was Belle. The horse was clearly edgy, uncomfortable in the cold, probably stressed by the storm. It was as hard for a horse to concentrate when she was stressed as it was for a person. Under the circumstances, Belle was doing pretty well.

“Nice, Stevie,” Carole said when Stevie completed the exercise.

“I don’t think so,” Stevie said. “Belle’s as nervous as a yearling. You’d think she’d never done a dressage test before, much less this one.”

“I think she doesn’t like snowstorms,” Carole said. “Starlight’s behaving a little strangely, too. Let’s see how he does with jumping.”

Setting up the jumps was a challenge, since most of the equipment was in the shed next to the schooling ring. They managed to find a couple of cavalletti and perched them on some benches that they pulled out of the gallery area of the ring. The result was two jumps about eighteen inches high, not a great challenge for any of the three of them or their horses. They decided that the course would involve going over each twice, from each direction. It would do.

Carole went first. Stevie watched, hoping to learn something, as she almost always did when she watched Carole and Starlight on a jump course. Watching them circle the ring in a warm-up before the first jump, Stevie thought Starlight looked tense. His muscles flexed uneasily as if this were all new to him, which it most certainly was not. Every time Carole shifted even slightly, the horse seemed to shiver in response. It was very unlike Starlight.

Starlight made it over all the jumps, but his movements were jerky and insecure. It was not a blue-ribbon performance.

Lisa and Prancer did better. Then Stevie circled Belle, hoping to loosen her up. She needn’t have. Belle was already plenty loose, somehow super relaxed, which was part of the reason she hadn’t performed very well at dressage. What had hampered her dressage performance aided her jumping. She responded gloriously to the freedom of cantering around the ring and soared over the jumps as if they weren’t there at all. At first Stevie thought she and Belle were making the beginner mistake of overjumping—going too high over a low jump—but that wasn’t the case. She and Belle were working together as if they’d been champion jumpers all their riding lives.

“Blue!” Carole decreed when Stevie and Belle came to a halt.

“No doubt!” Lisa greed. “That was really nice.”

“Looks like a little snow changes our horses’ personalities,” Stevie said. “Belle was just great!”

“So were you,” Carole told her.

“And it’s not a little snow,” Lisa reminded them. “It’s a lot of snow.”

Having finished their show, the girls took their horses back into their stalls and talked about the next event in Total Horse Day.

“Maybe we could do some driving,” Lisa suggested.

“That ring’s too small,” said Carole, trying to imagine even the pony cart circling the indoor ring.

“But the rest of the horses and ponies seem jealous of the fact that Belle, Prancer, and Starlight have all had a ride,” Lisa said. “We’ve got to do something with them.”

“Then we should ride them,” said Carole.

“All of them?” Lisa asked.

“Every single one,” said Stevie.

So they did. It took them the rest of the morning and all afternoon, but every horse and pony got a little workout, and each of the girls got to ride ten horses until all thirty occupants of the stable had gotten some exercise in the indoor ring. Stevie admitted to feeling a little silly, sitting on the Shetland pony, Farthing, but Farthing was as worthy of a workout as any and didn’t seem at all bothered that his
rider was about twice the size of the five-year-olds who usually rode him.

Outside the snow finally ceased, leaving four-foot drifts all around the stable. Sound carried well across the snow-covered world, and even from inside the barn they could hear the sound of plowing on the nearby roads.

By late afternoon, when the last of the horses had been exercised, groomed, watered, and fed, the girls knew the sound was getting closer to them.

“I’m not sure I want this to end,” Carole admitted.

“I might get a teeny-tiny bit bored with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, if that’s all we had for the rest of our lives,” said Lisa.

“Not me,” said Stevie, slathering super chunk onto another piece of bread. “As long as the milk holds out.” She took a bite and smiled with satisfaction.

“Imagine eight hours of riding every day,” said Lisa.

“I think I’m going to be a little sore tomorrow,” Carole confessed.

“You?” Stevie asked.

“Even me,” Carole confirmed. “That was a lot of riding.”

“But it was good,” said Stevie.

“It was the best,” said Lisa.

“We should have a Total Horse Day at least once a year,” Carole said.

“I’ll order up the snow,” Lisa promised.

“Yeah, but next time, there’s just one thing,” said Stevie.

“What’s that?” Lisa asked.

“Make it on a school day,” Stevie said plaintively.

Lisa laughed. Naturally Stevie would want that. “Pass the milk,” she said. Stevie did.

There was a loud noise. The girls looked up. Nothing seemed to have changed. They were sitting in Max’s office in the dim late afternoon light. Then they realized that something had hit the window.

They turned and looked at the window in time to see something else coming. It was a snowball.

“Who let my brothers come over here?” Stevie asked.

“Not me,” said Carole. She went to the window. What she saw made her laugh. Lisa and Stevie joined her.

There, standing about ten yards away, on the hillside that led up to the house, was a person so totally wrapped in snow clothes—to say nothing of the fact that she was standing in three feet of snow—that she was almost unidentifiable except for the way she held her arms akimbo. Unmistakably that was Mrs. Reg, who often stood that way just before she reeled off a list of tasks that idle riders could start doing before they began collecting dust.

Carole waved to Mrs. Reg but realized the woman probably
couldn’t see through the steamy window. So she unlatched it and pushed it open.

“Girls?”

“Yes?” Carole called back.

“You okay?”

“Yes, Mrs. Reg,” Stevie told her.

“We can’t get through to you yet.”

“We’re fine,” Lisa called.

“The plows’ll be here in the morning.”

“We’re really fine,” said Carole. “The horses are fine, too.”

“Food?”

“Plenty for us,” Lisa called back.

“And for the horses,” Carole assured her.

“Warm enough?”

“Yep,” said Stevie.

“Judy got word to me and your parents,” Mrs. Reg said. “Thanks for letting her know.”

“No problem,” said Lisa.

“It’s getting cold with the window open,” Stevie said.

“Then close it!” said Mrs. Reg. She waved to the girls and then climbed back over the drifts, heading back to her house.

It was early, not yet six o’clock, but in midwinter that
meant it was completely dark: They didn’t know how long the batteries would last on their flashlights. At least the horses were all cared for, and the girls had finished their own dinner, such as it was, and washed up. There was really not much else to do except go to sleep.

The three of them climbed into their sleeping bags.

“You know, we should have been sleeping in a barn somewhere in North Carolina tonight,” said Carole. “On our way to the horse show.”

“Where we would have been forced to do everything one Veronica diAngelo ordered us to do.”

“I’d rather be here,” Lisa said.

“Any day,” said Stevie.

“Every day,” Carole corrected her.

L
ISA WOKE UP
to the sound of a plow. Carole stirred when she heard a shovel approach the door outside Max’s office. Stevie woke up when her friends shook her.

“Stevie, they’re coming for us!” Carole told her.

“We’ll have a real breakfast,” said Lisa. “No more peanut butter!”

She looked at her watch. It read 7:15. She couldn’t believe they had all slept about twelve hours, until she remembered everything they’d done the day before.

“Oh, my aching back!” Stevie said, rolling over.

“Oh, my aching bottom!” Lisa declared.

“Oh, my!” was all that Carole said. Her friends laughed, knowing she didn’t want to admit that anything to do with horses ever hurt but also knowing that it did.

The three of them climbed out of their sleeping bags and hurried to the window. They were quite unprepared for the sight that greeted them. There was a plow, there were four people with shovels, and there were six cars behind the plow: one belonging to each of their families (two for Lisa), a car from the local television station, and a car from a Washington newspaper.

“We’re going to be in the news!” Stevie said.

Lisa began rolling up her sleeping bag. “Is there a photographer?” she asked.

“Two,” Carole told her.

“Okay, then, it’s time.”

“For what?” Stevie asked.

“If we’re going to have our pictures taken, we can at least be well dressed for the occasion. Does anybody have a nice new sweater to put on?”

T
HREE DAYS LATER
everything had changed. A warm spell had hit Virginia and melted most of the snow.

“Does it seem possible that there was a four-foot drift there day before yesterday?” Lisa asked Stevie, pointing to the big double doors of the stable they’d fought so hard to close in the middle of the night.

“No, because I think it was a five-foot drift anyway,” Stevie said. “But there’s nothing like sixty-degree weather to change all that.”

“Weird,” said Lisa.

“Definitely,” Carole agreed. “But the really good news is that Max said yes.”

“He did?” said Stevie.

“To what?” asked Lisa.

“A trail ride.”

“What a brilliant idea,” Stevie said admiringly.

The three of them were tacked up and ready to go in just a few minutes, and their horses seemed as pleased with the notion as they were. They trotted contentedly across the open field that led to the woods. Nobody had to ask where they were going. As long as they could make it across the snowy patches, they were headed for the creek.

It turned out they couldn’t make it that far. As soon as they reached the woods, they found snow that was too deep to be safe. They turned back, but instead of going into the barn, they rode to the crest of the hill across from the schooling ring. In the summertime it was their favorite place for a picnic between Pony Club meetings and afternoon riding classes. They couldn’t exactly spread a blanket and chat, but they could sit in their saddles and enjoy the view. Besides, there was only a little bit of snow left on the hill, and it was easy on the horses to get up there.