Sidesaddle (5 page)

Stevie loved to take trail rides on Friday afternoons. It always seemed to make the point that the weekend was beginning. A trail ride was freedom, so different from school and the structure of weekdays, to say nothing of weeding and raking. It was a sort of TGIF release. But with Tiffani?

“Gee, I don’t know, Tiffani,” she said. “I’ve got a bunch of things I have to do, and I was sort of counting on the afternoon.” Right, like her Christmas thank-you notes. Now that it was April, it was definitely time to
get them done. And her mother had been nagging her about doing some shopping. And there was that dentist’s appointment she’d been putting off.… “I just don’t think I can,” she said. “But you go ahead and have fun.”

“Oh, too bad!” said Tiffani, clearly oblivious to Stevie’s lukewarm response. “I was hoping to get more of a chance to know you. After all, you were so nice to me at the first meeting. I wanted a way to say thank you, too. But if you can’t do it tomorrow, how about on Saturday after Horse Wise and after the class? We should be able to get in a little time together.”

“Right, sure,” Stevie said.

“Oh, goody,” Tiffani responded. “I’ll see you then!” And she hung up the phone.

Stevie sighed. Saturday was a long, long time away, wasn’t it?

C
AROLE AND
L
ISA
reached Pine Hollow early on Saturday morning. Carole decided to walk Barq on a lead to make sure his sore foot wasn’t bothering him anymore. She had him in the ring when she saw a familiar car pull into the stable’s parking lot. Phil Marsten stepped out and walked over to the fence.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Well, my mother said something about devoting the day to the mall, and I reminded her that Willow Creek was on the way, so I thought I’d surprise Stevie and come to the Horse Wise meeting. Do you think she’ll mind?”

“Mind? Are you crazy? She’ll be thrilled. She’s not here yet, so if you want to help, you can take Barq’s
lead. I want to watch him from across the ring. Judy said he should be healed by now, but I wanted to be certain.”

Willingly Phil climbed through the fence and began walking the horse around the ring. A few minutes later, Tiffani Thomas came out of the barn leading her horse, and Carole introduced the new girl to Phil.

“Tiffani’s staying with her aunt in Willow Creek for the semester,” Carole explained. “She’s just joined Horse Wise because her horse, Diamond, just arrived. Tiffani, this is Phil Marsten. He’s a friend of Stevie’s. He lives two towns over—or is it three?”

“It depends on which route you take,” he explained. “Nice horse,” he said, admiring Diamond’s conformation. “Tennessee walker?”

“Why, you know as much about horses as Stevie and her friends here! You-all are just amazing?”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Phil said. “Here, I think Barq is just fine. Would you like me to take Diamond for a walk so that you can stand back and watch?”

“Sure thing,” Tiffani said, swapping lead lines with Phil. “Not that I think there’s anything wrong with my darlin’ here. It’s just that it’s been a couple of days since he’s had any exercise, and since we’re going on a trail ride after class, I wanted to be sure he’d be warmed up for it. I sure don’t want him to stiffen?”

“Good idea,” Phil agreed. He walked the horse for another ten minutes while Carole, Lisa, and Tiffani finished getting ready for the meeting.

S
TEVIE WAS TORN
. It sometimes happened that something she was excited and happy about was going to occur on a day when there was something she was also unhappy about. Like a dentist’s appointment on the same day as a party. In this case, the problem was that Saturday meant both Horse Wise and the trail ride with Tiffani.

It took her fifteen minutes instead of the usual five to find a matching pair of socks, and she had to dig all the way through her laundry pile (sometimes also referred to as her closet) to find the shirt she wanted to wear. And then it took another five minutes to locate her riding hat, although it was on the shelf where she always put it.

Stevie just wasn’t as enthusiastic this Saturday morning as she usually was.

When she got to Pine Hollow, the meeting was about to begin. She felt a little guilty that she hadn’t gotten there in time to give Belle a grooming and a treat, but she’d have time before class. She smiled and waved at the familiar faces and then looked for Carole and Lisa.

There they were—and sitting right next to them was Phil! Stevie smiled broadly and waved eagerly as she
made her way through the seated Pony Club members to join her friends.

That Phil was there was good news any day, but today it was A-1, perfect, wonderful, terrific, great news. As long as her boyfriend was making a surprise visit, anyone, even Tiffani, would understand why she just had to cancel the trail ride.

With a warm, happy feeling, Stevie settled down onto the floor of Max’s office just as Max called the meeting to order.

This was a mounted meeting, which meant that soon most or all of the members would be on their ponies and horses. Max wanted everyone to gather in his office first for announcements. His main announcement was actually more of a question.

“I’d like to know, if you can tell me, what each of you has decided to take up in our Learn Something New project. I’m asking this question primarily because I will need to know if you need any extra equipment or a special setup next week for your demonstrations. The other reason I’m asking, of course, is that I’m curious.”

The riders laughed at his honesty. Max looked around the room for someone to volunteer.

“I’m trying to learn something about sidesaddle riding,” said Jessica, one of the younger riders.

“Me too,” said another.

Lisa nodded as if in agreement.

It didn’t surprise Stevie that that was Lisa’s project.
Lisa had been excited on Tuesday after she’d ridden Diamond. And then she’d talked about the Web site.

It did surprise Stevie, however, that Tiffani had inspired about a quarter of the riders to take up sidesaddle riding. Maybe that was just because it wasn’t all that hard. If you were going to learn something new, it might as well be something easy.

“Cart driving,” said another rider. Two other members raised their hands on that, too.

“Bareback riding,” said Meg.

“Good for balance,” Max said approvingly. “But don’t forget your riding helmet.”

“I promise.”

“Research on the Bureau of Land Management,” said Joe Novick, referring to the care the government gives to horses and burros living in the wild on federal land in the West.

“Good,” Max said.

“Polo,” said Veronica. There were a few snickers. Although polo was a very rugged sport that required excellent horsemanship and athletic skills, it was usually reserved for the extremely wealthy—people who could afford to own a lot of ponies. Although Veronica was very wealthy, she wasn’t
that
wealthy, but she clearly wanted to be.

“I think she means Ralph Lauren,” Phil whispered to Stevie. That made Stevie smile. Veronica was definitely fashion-conscious.

“Carole and Tiffani, I guess your horse breed report will qualify as something new, right?” Max asked.

“That’s what we were hoping you’d say,” said Carole. Carole was never one to avoid learning about horses, but the time for one project was all she could devote outside her schoolwork.

Max looked at Stevie then. Stevie had been so interested in everybody else’s projects that she’d hardly had time to notice that she didn’t have one of her own. Even if she was still working on the black-socks-in-the-laundry prank, and even though she was pretty sure Max would welcome the end of the pink jodhpurs, she wasn’t convinced that he would think that qualified as learning something new.

Stevie cast her eyes to the dust on her riding boots. Max didn’t say anything else.

“Okay, now, let’s all get tacked up. We’re going to work on very specific skills today: We’re going to play games!”

There was a general round of applause. Mounted games were pure fun for everybody. Stevie decided that although the day had begun with a giant cloud over it, everything was turning out rosy. Phil was there, she didn’t have to go on a trail ride with Tiffani, and now she’d even have a chance to beat Phil at games.

Max had a long list of games for the meeting, and he even let the games run over into the class time, since everybody seemed to be having so much fun. The only
cloud came when Tiffani had difficulty picking up a flag on the right side. Leaning over so far made her lose her balance, and she tumbled out of her sidesaddle.

Stevie didn’t mind that part at all because Tiffani wasn’t hurt in the least and it got a gigantic mud smear on her usually clean jodhpurs. What did bother Stevie was that almost everybody else in the class immediately rode over to help her.

“Are you all right?”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“Are you cut anywhere?”

“Ooooooh, that must hurt!”

All that sympathy for one little fall seemed more than excessive.

Tiffani seemed to think so, too, and simply said, “I’m fine,” and climbed back into the saddle as quickly as she could. She was embarrassed, as, Stevie thought, she should be. Nobody should fall out of the saddle doing something so simple!

Finally, after the meeting turned into class and after the class was over, Max dismissed the riders. It was time for a late lunch—fortunately Phil was prepared for that—and then …

“Well,” Tiffani declared, placing her sandwich neatly on the napkin she’d laid out on the ground in front her. “We should be able to start our trail ride in about an hour. That’s a nice time, because it’ll give my Diamond
and his cousin Belle a chance to rest before we go off into the woods.”

“Well, gee, Tiffani,” Stevie began, smiling at Phil. “You know Phil is here for the whole afternoon—”

“I know, he told me while he was walking Diamond for me this morning. Isn’t that just great?”

“Sure, but I guess that means we can’t have our trail ride.”

“Why, didn’t he tell you? He’s comin’ along! And I was so sorry that you hadn’t had a chance to invite Carole and Lisa along with us, so I just took the bull by the horns—or should I say, the horse by the mane—and told them it wouldn’t be the same without them. Right?”

“Right,” Lisa agreed. “And Max told me I should ride Comanche because he knows one of the sidesaddles fits him, so I can try that out on the trail. What do you think of that?”

For the second time that day, Stevie didn’t have an answer to a question.

I
T WOULD BE HARD
to stay disagreeable, Stevie thought. Although she was on a trail ride with Tiffani, who was all sidesaddled up and everything, she also had her three favorite people in the whole wide world right there with her. Carole, Lisa, and Phil would be plenty of cushioning against anything Tiffani had to dish out to her.

“Oh, Stevie, Belle is such a lovely horse!” Tiffani said.

Stevie smiled and nodded. There was hardly any way to disagree with that. “And Diamond is, too,” Stevie told her. Her mother had instilled good manners far too deeply in Stevie for her not to feel obliged to return the compliment.

“Say, Stevie, what are you doing for Learn Something New?” Lisa asked.

That seemed like a pretty neutral topic, but of course Lisa didn’t know about the sock plan. Before Stevie could answer, Carole added, “I was thinking you might do something about reining.”

“Maybe,” Stevie said noncommittally.

“Well, I’m planning some historical research,” said Lisa, clucking her tongue so that Comanche, who seemed slightly nonresponsive to one-sided aids, would keep up with the other riders while they crossed the field. The trails were in the woods on the other side.

“I thought you were studying sidesaddle riding,” said Stevie, nodding to the tack on Comanche.

“Oh, no, that’s just to try something out. I don’t really think of it as learning something new. I wanted to study up on some of the things that Carole’s talked about—the history of horses in the military and the influence that has had on the way we ride today.”

“Even down to mounting the horse on the left,” said Carole.