Horse Love

Lisa explained. “Carole and Stevie are my best friends. We do almost everything together You’d love them. They’re great.”

Tec smiled, lighting up her world again with his dimples. “I bet I would.”

“Although they might not like you, because I don’t think they’re very happy with me at the moment. See, Stevie had this great idea—Stevie has a lot of great ideas, only sometimes they’re not actually great, but they usually turn out okay, as long as Carole and I help, but I can’t help this time because I’m here and the stable is a zillion miles north. On the other hand, Stevie said Phil would help and I’m sure he’ll do a better job than I would, so I shouldn’t worry, and maybe Red was going to help, but I know Veronica would be useless.…”

Lisa realized she was blathering. She interrupted herself. “Am I talking too much?”

“Absolutely,” Tec said. “And you should stop because I want to kiss you, and it’s very hard to kiss a girl who’s talking.”

Lisa stopped talking.

L
ISA
A
TWOOD OPENED
one eye. It was Saturday morning. One eye was all that was necessary. She glanced at her clock and her mind registered the fact that there was no rush to get up. She closed the eye again, shifted her pillow, and settled back down for a few minutes.

Not only was it Saturday, but it was also spring vacation. She had ten whole days to sleep late, spend time with her friends, ride horses, and just plain enjoy herself. Not that she didn’t do some of those things when school was open, but she could do more of them this week.

Lisa reopened her eye to check the weather. It was going to be a nice day—a good day to ride. She opened the other eye. Thinking about riding made her think about wanting to get up. She was going to meet her two
best friends, Carole Hanson and Stevie Lake, at Pine Hollow Stables, and the three of them were going to do something together.

Normally, Saturday meant a meeting of Horse Wise, their Pony Club; but their instructor, Max Regnery, was taking a vacation, so there wouldn’t be any Pony Club for the next two weeks. They’d have their regular riding class, but there was no rush to get to it, since class wasn’t until the afternoon.

Well, maybe there was a reason to hurry, just a little. Stevie had said something the night before about a project. Specifically what Stevie had said was “I have a great idea.” It sometimes made Lisa nervous when Stevie made that kind of announcement. Stevie often had ideas, and some of them were great. Others, however, tended to fall into the harebrained category. A few were just downright disastrous.

Lisa, Stevie, and Carole were best friends because they were all totally horse-crazy, not because they were alike in any other way. In fact, they all knew it would be almost impossible for them to be more unalike. Stevie, for instance, had a wild imagination; she was flamboyant; she was impulsive; she was sometimes even a little weird. She was a practical joker who occasionally forgot to consider the consequences of her humorous escapades. She could be sharp-tongued with people who displeased
her—usually her brothers or Veronica diAngelo, Pine Hollow’s chief snob-in-residence. Stevie lived life on the edge, running a little late for everything and garnering grades at school that just got her by. She sometimes said it was her teachers’ fault: If they wouldn’t send her to the principal’s office so often, she wouldn’t miss so much class time. That was what Carole and Lisa referred to as Stevian logic. It wasn’t logical at all.

Stevie also had a heart of gold. She would go way out on any limb for a friend, risking
days
in the principal’s office, grounding at home, and even restricted riding privileges at Pine Hollow. She had a strong sense of justice and loyalty. These were qualities that endeared her to her friends almost as much as her wacky sense of humor, and it made them willing to help her when she needed it—which she often did.

Lisa could not have been more different from Stevie. She was cool and rational, never impulsive. She planned her days and weeks well in advance so that she could accomplish all she needed to do. She never handed in a school assignment late. In contrast, Stevie had once had to explain to a teacher that the reason a lab report hadn’t been completed had to do with a brother filling her pen with disappearing ink in retaliation for a phone call Stevie had made to his girlfriend, telling the girlfriend that he had bad breath.

Lisa was always neatly dressed in clean, freshly ironed clothes. Stevie’s idea of clean was something that came off the
top
of her dirty laundry pile. When Stevie got herself and often her friends into a pack of trouble, she was the one who would come up with a wild scheme that might, just might, work. Lisa, with her naturally analytical mind, was the one who would come up with a sensible way to solve the problem.

Carole was as different from Stevie and Lisa as they were from each other. While all three girls were horse-crazy, Carole was the horse-craziest. She’d begun riding when she was just a toddler living on Marine Corps bases where her father, now a colonel, was stationed. She’d been devoted to ponies and horses since that first day, and one of the few things of which she was absolutely sure was that she’d be with horses all her life. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do—be a vet, a trainer, a competitor, a breeder, or an instructor. Sometimes she thought she’d be all of those things, and then some.

She was so horse-crazy that everything else took a backseat. On a day when she had school and a riding lesson, she might leave her school backpack with books and assignments at home, but she would never, ever forget to take her riding clothes. If a horse stumbled and the rider fell off, Carole would ask someone else to look
after the rider while she checked to make sure the horse was okay.

Since the girls shared a love of horses and a willingness to help one another out, they’d decided to form a club of their own and call it The Saddle Club. The only requirements for membership were those two things. The girls often extended the rule about helping one another to helping others, and that was what Stevie’s great idea had been about. She hadn’t elaborated, just assured Lisa it was going to be wonderful, even if it meant a little work.

Stevie’s idea of “a little work” often meant a gigantic task and usually one that someone else had to do. Lisa was definitely nervous about Stevie’s plan—whatever it was. She closed her eyes again.

She could hear her mother puttering in the kitchen downstairs. Actually, it wasn’t really puttering. The coffeepot hit the counter a little too loudly and a glass landed in the sink with a clank.

From the hall near the door, Lisa heard her father ask, “What’s going on?”

“As if you didn’t know!” her mother called back.

Lisa pulled the covers over her head.

She heard her father walk down the stairs and into the kitchen. She couldn’t totally muffle the conversation, nor could she hear it all. They were annoyed
with one another. That had been happening quite a bit lately.

Lisa’s father was traveling a lot for his job, and her mother often complained about it. Lisa didn’t like to know that her parents were arguing, and she especially didn’t like to get any details about the arguments from her mother. Lisa understood, though. Her mother was lonely. She loved to travel, but she had a job, and a daughter, that kept her home. Lisa’s father got to travel. And even though he said that his business travel wasn’t much fun, Mrs. Atwood felt left out.

And the night before at dinner, Mr. Atwood had told them that he had a business trip to Europe coming up. Mrs. Atwood had been grumbling ever since. It gave Lisa a chill.

The phone rang. The noise was loud enough to convince Lisa that she wasn’t going to go back to sleep. She climbed out of bed, deciding to get dressed and go over to the stables to find out what Stevie’s great idea was.

She washed up and slipped into some jeans and a shirt and a sweater, packing her riding pants, boots, and hat into her stable bag. Then she went downstairs to get some breakfast.

Her parents were sitting at the kitchen table when she got there. There was a smile on her father’s face, and her mother wasn’t looking grumpy at all.

“Guess what?” her mother asked.

“What?” Lisa countered.

“We’re going on a trip!” said her mother.

“Oh, really? Where are you going?” Lisa asked, suspecting that her father had arranged to take her mother along on his trip to Europe.

“No, I mean
we
. All of us,” her mother said.