Emma and the Cutting Horse (3 page)

“That’s not fair,” Emma said, glancing in the
direction that Katie indicated. “I barely touched her. She can’t be
that desperate for someone to bad mouth.”

“Hope you’re right,” Hannah said, “but I’ve
heard that most kids are careful not to cross her. Her name is
Candi Haynes, in case you’re interested.”

Just then Joe came into the cafeteria, and
Emma’s possible problem took a backseat while Katie recounted every
word Joe had spoken in class that day. None of the words had been
directed at her.

Emma passed by Candi Haynes and her friends
when she took her tray to the cafeteria window on her way out. She
forced herself to look straight ahead, but in her peripheral vision
she could see the girls elbowing each other. As she handed the tray
through the window a chorus of whinnies followed her. Emma felt her
ears reddening and struggled to keep from hurrying out the door.
Cascades of laughter reached her as she headed down the hall to her
locker. A red cloud of humiliation and rage rose in Emma’s chest.
Maybe instead of an accidental bump she should have smashed Candi
Haynes over the head with her backpack; then at least Candi would
have a
reason
to harass her.

* * *

Katie stopped Emma in the hall between
classes the next morning.

“Come check out your name on the bathroom
wall,” she said. She guided Emma into the girls’ restroom and
pointed to a message just above one of the sinks.

“For a GOOD time on the farm, call Emma,” it
read. Her phone number was written under the message.

“There’s another one in the last stall.”

Emma had to wait for the stall to empty. The
girl who came out was someone she knew from P.E. class.

“Yikes, Emma, you must have gotten crosswise
with somebody,” she said.

Emma went in. This one was written in huge,
angry letters with a black marker:
EMMA IS A HEIFER
.

“Do you know who’s doing it?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Emma said
crossly.

“You should get your dad to drag her off to
jail,” Katie snarled between her teeth. “He could file charges of
harassment or verbal abuse or something. Having a dad who’s a
deputy sheriff ought to have
some
perks.”

On the bus ride home, Emma sat alone in one
of the back seats. The incident with Candi Haynes buzzed around in
her mind like a swarm of angry bees. Sometimes she wished she were
back in the safety of her small middle school. There were lots of
kids she didn’t know in high school, and some of them seemed to be
growing up a lot faster than she was. A few treated other girls
like freaks if they didn’t move in the fast crowd. One or two were
downright scary, using filthy language and smoking in the bathroom.
She would never be allowed to wear the clothes some of those girls
wore, even if her parents
could
afford them. Skin-tight
pants and miniskirts were taboo at Emma’s house. So were men’s
sleeveless underwear shirts and short tops that showed your midriff
when you bent over or reached up to the top shelf of your locker.
Emma’s dad had always been a take-charge kind of guy. Once he had
made up his mind, there was little point in arguing. Now that Emma
was in high school, she didn’t feel relaxed and safe at school like
she had at her old middle school. Lately she had begun to think of
herself as two different people, the quiet, withdrawn Emma everyone
saw at school, and the real, outgoing Emma she became at home. This
whole scene with Candi could have been avoided if she had just kept
her mouth shut like she usually did at school.

Chapter
Three

“Emma...Emma...this is your stop,” the bus
driver hollered as he sat with the door open waiting for Emma to
get off.

“Oh, sorry,” Emma mumbled, grabbing her
backpack and heading for the door. “I guess I was daydreaming.”

As soon as Emma got off the bus, the incident
with Candi Haynes began to recede to a small dark corner at the
back of her brain. Since daylight savings time ended, she had to
hurry down to the horse pens and feed and water the horses as soon
as she got home. If she didn’t, darkness caught up with her before
she was finished. Filling water tubs and scooping out feed was just
that much harder when you couldn’t see what you were doing. There
were only four horses in the small pens below the house: Scout, her
father’s roping horse, Ditto, the new mare, and Camaro, a
two-year-old filly that Emma had fallen in love with on the day of
her birth.

The daughter of Taffy, a mare her dad had
ridden for many years, Camaro was born with a buttermilk coat, a
wispy black mane and tail, and an independent attitude that
exhausted her patient mama. Before she was two hours old, she
wandered away from her mother’s side to tickle Emma’s neck with her
curly whiskers as Emma knelt on the ground. By the following day,
she galloped ahead of her mama in the pasture as Taffy trotted
behind, whinnying for her to stop.

As she rinsed out the water tubs, Emma heard
her mother’s car coming up the lane. By the time she finished with
the horses her mom would have changed out of her scrubs and started
supper. Her dad didn’t get home until after dark, so he took the
morning shift with the horses. Most mornings he was out before
dawn, hauling large round bales of hay to the cows with the
tractor, and feeding the horses so Emma wouldn’t have to go out
before school.

The phone was ringing when Emma finished and
pulled off her boots on the back porch. She heard her mom say,
“Hello...hello?”

“Who was on the phone?” Emma asked as she
came in the back door.

“I guess it was a wrong number. It sounded
like somebody was there, but then they hung up.”

For a moment, the specter of Candi twitched
in the back of Emma’s mind, but then she dismissed the idea. Candi
wouldn’t be dumb enough to start bothering her at home. She was
making a big deal out of nothing.

* * *

Hannah and Katie occupied a new place on the
bleachers the next morning. It took Emma a minute to spot them,
waving at her from the far end of the 9th grade section. She walked
toward them, weaving through the milling students who stood at the
bottom, looking for an empty seat.

“We decided to put some distance between
ourselves and the social elite,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes as
Emma climbed up to sit with them. “We were afraid your vicious
backpack might get out of control again.”

Emma grinned and felt a rush of affection for
Hannah. It was great to have friends who knew you well enough to
tease you and always took your side.

Emma glanced over toward the spot where Candi
sat with her friends. To her horror they were looking at her. A
smug smile spread across Candi’s face when she caught Emma’s eye.
Above the din of hundreds of voices Emma heard a high-pitched
whinny followed by gales of laughter.

“She makes me sick,” Katie spat. “Don’t give
her the pleasure of seeing that she’s getting on your nerves.”

Emma forced herself to turn toward Katie. “I
can’t believe she’s still mad. It’s not like she was really hurt or
anything.”

“She’s not mad,” Hannah said. “As a matter of
fact, I think she’s very happy. She’s chosen another victim, and
you’re it.” Sensible Hannah, with her long, dark hair and serious
brown eyes, always seemed to see straight to the heart of the
matter.

When the bell rang, Emma gave Candi plenty of
time to get on her way to class before she got up and started for
her locker. Rounding the corner to the 9th grade wing, she noticed
a group of girls talking in the hall. When Emma approached her
locker, they stopped talking and watched her pass by. A prickly
sensation swam up the back of her neck. Taped across her locker
door was a large, hastily drawn picture of the rear end of a horse.
Its wide rump filled the page, its tail hanging down between
stick-like hind legs. “Emma”, was written in huge black letters
across the horse’s butt.

Angrily, Emma ripped the picture from the
door of her locker, wadded it into a ball and threw it on the hall
floor. When she looked over at the group of girls, they quickly
looked away, but not before Emma saw embarrassment and something
else that could have been pity on their faces. Tears sprang to her
eyes, and she clenched her teeth together tightly to keep them
back.

“You girls get to class, now,” Emma’s algebra
teacher said as she stepped out into the hall to pull the classroom
door shut. The group of girls gave Emma one more sympathetic glance
and scurried away.

“Is something wrong, Emma?” the teacher
asked.

“No, ma’am,” Emma muttered as she pulled her
algebra book from the stack in her locker. But she was lying.
Something was wrong. Real wrong.

* * *

A week passed before Emma’s dad found time to
work with Miss Dellfene. Winter’s short days didn’t allow much time
for working with horses except on weekends, and Emma knew her
father planned to “tune up” Scout before the local rodeo taking
place just after the first of the year. One of her dad’s friends
had talked him into entering the team roping and Scout hadn’t
practiced since early fall. A bright leopard Appaloosa, Scout
towered above the other horses and had the weight needed to stop a
galloping steer when it hit the end of a rope.

Emma’s father asked her to come down to the
pen and help him with Miss Dellfene. In spite of the extra time to
settle in, the mare still eyed them with suspicion. When they came
in the gate, she retreated to the far corner, snorting loudly at
them. Emma’s dad slipped a halter and lead rope over his shoulder
and began to approach the mare slowly, talking softly to her. She
stood perfectly still with her head up until he got almost close
enough to touch her, and then pivoted with cat-like grace and raced
away, bucking and snorting like a just-penned mustang.

“Stand outside the pen, Emma,” her father
said, “at least until we’re sure she’s not going to run over
anybody.”

The next few times he approached, the mare
repeated the same maneuver; but Emma’s father wasn’t one to give up
easily. He asked Emma to hand him his lariat, built a large loop,
and tossed it over her head as she dashed past. When she reached
the end of the rope and felt the noose begin to tighten, she turned
to face him. She seemed to know that the game was over and gave up
without a fight. Emma’s dad walked up to her slowly, but when he
reached out to put the halter on her, she jerked her head away. It
took several attempts to get it on.

Emma came back in the gate bringing a brush
and curry comb. She handed one to her father.

“Easy, girl,” Emma said soothingly. “You’re
going to like this part.”

The mare was so tense she jumped every time
Emma touched her with the brush. She was especially unnerved when
they got on each side of her, and she stepped around to avoid the
unwanted attention.

“I wonder why she’s so nervous,” Emma said.
“Do you think somebody’s been mean to her?”

“I doubt it. She probably just hasn’t been
handled much. That surprises me, though, coming from the ranch
where she was raised.”

When they had cleaned her up a bit, Emma’s
dad tied the mare to the fence and brought Emma’s saddle down from
the barn. It was lighter than his saddle and would be easier to
lift on, so it always got called into service the first few times
young horses wore a saddle.

“We might as well see what happens when I put
this on her,” he said. “She was supposed to have been saddled by
the former owner before the sale.”

He untied Miss Dellfene and asked Emma to
come in and hold the rope so the mare wouldn’t panic and pull back
on the halter. Slim and wiry, Emma had hung on to lots of colts
that didn’t want to be held. She stood to one side of the horse
like her father had taught her, out of the range of striking
hooves, while he rubbed the saddle blanket along Miss Dellfene’s
back and neck. She flinched each time he moved the blanket. Finally
he left it on her back and lifted the saddle up gently. The mare
sidled away, but he followed her with it until the fence interfered
with further retreat. The mare’s eyes widened when he set it on her
back, and she jumped when the cinch slid down on the far side. He
reached carefully behind her front legs and found the cinch ring,
threading the latigo through it and tightening it up slowly, a
little at a time. The mare seemed frozen, with every muscle tensed.
There was an arch in her back that made the rear of the saddle
stick up several inches. Moving slowly, he took the lead rope from
Emma, removed it from the halter and snapped on a lunge line. Then
he took a pair of leather gloves from his hip pocket and put them
on—protection against rope burns.

“Go outside again,” he said. “I think there’s
about to be an explosion!”

For several seconds nothing happened. Then
Emma’s father tugged lightly on the line, and Miss Dellfene
launched herself into space. She let out a bellow, put her head
down between her knees and began to buck wildly. Emma’s father let
her have lots of slack in the rope so she could get it out of her
system, and she put on a performance that would have done credit to
a rodeo bronc. She jumped into the air and landed stiff-legged,
desperately trying to get rid of that thing on her back. She
whirled and kicked and turned her head around to try to grab the
saddle with her teeth. Although the day was cool, she was quickly
soaked with sweat. Finally, she reared high in the air on her hind
legs and fell over backwards, landing on her side in the dust, the
wind knocked out of her. While she lay on the ground, Emma’s dad
stepped behind her and pulled her nose up off the ground with the
rope. In this position, she couldn’t get up. She laid there, her
sides heaving, while Emma’s dad talked to her reassuringly. After
several minutes, he walked around her and loosened the rope. She
jumped to her feet, but seemed a little dazed, and her nostrils
flared as she tried to catch her breath. While she was standing
still, Emma’s dad walked up to her and gave her a hearty pat on the
neck.