Hobbyhorse Read online

  “Look at her!” she said to Stevie, jerking her head in Amelia’s direction. Red started the game over, with all the young riders at the rail. Amelia was much better than an average beginner. She kept her hands soft and her legs steady, and she was listening carefully to both Red and Delilah. Delilah, in turn, was listening to Amelia.

  “She’s an awfully considerate rider,” Lisa said. Beginning riders were often inconsiderate of their horses, not because they meant to be, but because they didn’t yet have good balance and couldn’t control their legs and hands well enough. Amelia seemed both balanced and gentle.

  “I’m glad to see that she’s considerate about something,” Stevie snorted. Privately she thought that she had never met such a self-centered, manipulative whiner as Amelia. And considering my brothers and their friends, Stevie thought, that’s really saying something.

  By the time the lesson was over, Stevie and Lisa felt rejuvenated. As they walked their horses to cool them, they discussed what to do about Carole and Amelia.

  “Poor Carole,” Lisa said. “I mean, we can ride and feel better, but with Starlight lame she can’t even do that.”

  “I don’t want to upset you, Lisa, but I think this is more Amelia’s fault than Carole’s, no matter how the accident with the bucket happened.” Stevie looked around. Amelia was walking Delilah near the Pony Tails and their ponies.

  “Oh, I completely agree,” Lisa said. “I’ll make her shape up if I can. But whatever we do, we’ve got to fix things between Carole and Max.”

  “We need to talk to Carole,” Stevie said.

  “That’s right,” Lisa agreed. “We’ll figure out something.” She looked toward Amelia and the Pony Tails again. “Are they arguing? I can’t believe it!”

  “I can,” Stevie said.

  AMELIA HAD RUN UP Delilah’s stirrups and loosened her girth and was hand-walking her up and down the driveway. She passed the Pony Tails, who were walking their ponies the opposite way.

  “You did well in our lesson,” Corey said tentatively. “You won two times out of five.”

  Amelia smiled. “That’s just because I was riding Delilah. She’s such a nice horse, she makes everything easy.”

  “Good horses are like that,” May said.

  “Yep. It’s too bad about your pony, Corey.”

  “What do you mean?” Corey asked.

  “Well, I mean, he’s so funny-looking,” Amelia said. “And my cousin Lisa told me he was really strange.”

  Corey’s mouth dropped open.

  “He is not funny-looking,” May retorted hotly. “You’re funny-looking.”

  Amelia’s eyes filled with tears, but then she blinked them back and took a deep breath.

  “And I bet Lisa never said that,” May continued.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Amelia said calmly. “Anyway, Max gave me Delilah because he recognized what a superior rider I am, even though I haven’t been riding as long as some people. My cousin Lisa said Delilah was the best horse in the barn and only very special people get to ride her.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Jasmine said. “You just make stuff up. Delilah is a great horse, but you don’t have to be someone great to ride her. I rode her for my very first lesson ever.”

  Lisa walked up just in time to hear what Jasmine said. She sighed. She could guess that Amelia was bragging about herself, her riding skill, and her horses again, but she decided to ignore it. She’d been thinking during her lesson, and she’d decided that what she really needed to do was somehow inspire Amelia to behave. The problem was, she couldn’t come up with anything inspirational to say.

  To her amazement, Amelia turned on her before she could even open her mouth. “You lied to me!” Amelia said. “You said Delilah was a great horse, just like Star!”

  “She probably is like Star,” Lisa said. “And what difference does it make? You liked her, and you had a nice ride. And while we’re on the subject of lying—”

  “You’re not nice, Lisa! I’m going to get you for this!”

  “Oh, brother,” Lisa said. “Who cares?”

  “Not me!” Amelia pulled on the reins and led Delilah into the stable. Lisa stared. After only one day in Amelia’s company, she was entirely drained of energy.

  Stevie walked up and shook her head. “Is she going to have to be a Saddle Club project?”

  Lisa nodded. “Is she ever.”

  BY THE TIME Lisa got Prancer untacked and settled, her mother had arrived to drive her and Amelia home. Lisa was silent during the trip. She wanted to tell her parents all about Amelia’s behavior, but she wasn’t comfortable bringing it up in front of Amelia. The girl would probably start World War III, and Lisa didn’t have the energy for combat just then.

  She wished she’d had a moment to talk with Stevie before she left. She hadn’t come up with any good ideas for dealing with Amelia, but Stevie’s creativity could usually be counted on.

  “I’m going to change,” Amelia said, running up the stairs of Lisa’s house. Lisa followed more slowly. Amelia shut the door of Lisa’s room and locked it.

  “Hey!” Lisa shouted. “Let me in!”

  “I’m getting dressed!” Amelia called back.

  “I want to change, too!” Lisa pounded on the door. “Let me in!”

  “Just a minute!” Amelia shouted.

  Lisa’s mother came up the stairs with a basket of clean laundry. “Here,” she offered, “take some clothes and use the bathroom. Don’t worry about Amelia.”

  Lisa locked herself in the hall bathroom and yanked a clean sweatshirt over her head. If she found her reading her letters again, or messing with any of her stuff, Amelia was going to catch it good.

  Lisa washed her hands and face and combed her hair. When she heard Amelia leave her room and go downstairs, she sighed with relief and began to plan. First she was going to tell her parents how Amelia had behaved in the pasture. Then she was going to call Carole. She went downstairs and poked her head into the living room to see if her mother was there.

  Lisa gave a squeak of horror. Amelia was climbing onto the hobbyhorse!

  “Get off that!” Lisa shouted. She rushed across the room and grabbed Amelia, lifting her just as she was about to sit down. “I told you not to play with it! You’ll break it.” She tried to pull Amelia away.

  Amelia resisted. “I want to! Leave me alone!”

  “You can’t!” Lisa said. “Nobody is allowed to play with it.” She tugged at Amelia’s arm, but Amelia tugged back. “It’s made for really little kids,” Lisa said. “You’re too big.”

  “You just don’t want me to play with it because you don’t like me,” Amelia retorted. “You don’t want me to have any fun at all. You hate me!”

  Lisa gave Amelia’s arm another jerk. She was thoroughly fed up. “What do you expect?” she asked. “After the way you acted toward Carole, one of my best friends? After the way you talked to the Pony Tails? After the way you carried on about Prancer? You’re the biggest brat I’ve ever met!”

  Amelia let out an anguished howl and threw her weight backward, tearing herself out of Lisa’s grasp. She stumbled against the hobbyhorse, and it crashed to the floor under her. “Ow!” Amelia cried.

  Lisa rushed to Amelia’s side, but she was much more concerned about the hobbyhorse. Sure enough, the worst had happened. One of the hobbyhorse’s legs had snapped in two. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said.

  “Did it really break?” Amelia asked, scrambling to her feet.

  Lisa nodded. She touched the fresh, jagged edge of the wood. “Right above the hock,” she said, fighting back tears. The beautiful hobbyhorse! Lisa remembered the day they’d found it in an antiques store in London. She’d been so happy that her parents had bought it, and she’d loved it so much. She couldn’t believe Amelia had broken it.

  “Lisa! Amelia!” Mrs. Atwood came into the room. “What was all that noise and yelling?”

  “Oh, Mom—” Lisa started to cry. So did Amelia.

 
“The horse broke!” Amelia sobbed. “We were playing, and Lisa pushed me, and the horse broke!”

  “I did not!” Lisa said, through her tears.

  “My arm hurts,” said Amelia. “And the poor horse—”

  “It was her fault, Mom—”

  “It really hurts—”

  “Girls!” Mrs. Atwood said sternly. “That’s quite enough!”

  “And it’s broken!” Lisa wailed.

  “That’s enough! I can see that it’s broken, Lisa. It’s a real shame.” She herded the girls into the kitchen.

  Lisa expected a serious lecture about carelessness and destroying another person’s property, with perhaps a sermon on the side about telling lies. Since she was always punished when she did something wrong, she was sure Amelia would be punished now. So would she, probably, since maybe she was partly to blame. If she had gotten Amelia away from the horse quickly enough, she might have prevented the accident.

  But Lisa’s mother didn’t say a single word about the broken horse. She took a pot out of the cupboard and set it on the stove.

  “Did my mom call yet?” Amelia asked softly.

  Mrs. Atwood took out a packet of cookies. She gave two to Lisa and two to Amelia, then patted the younger girl’s shoulder. “Not yet. I’m sure she knew how busy you’d be today. So tell me how you liked Pine Hollow.”

  Lisa didn’t understand her mother’s lack of reaction to the broken hobbyhorse. Was Mrs. Atwood simply too angry to discuss it? Was she feeling sorry for Amelia? Or did she really believe the accident was Lisa’s fault? Lisa didn’t know what to think. She crossed her arms and braced herself for Amelia’s version of the day at Pine Hollow.

  Amelia’s sulky expression cleared. She smiled at her aunt. “Max is the nicest person,” she began. “And so is Red. He taught my lesson. He was really good, and he said funny things, and he told me I did a good job on my walk-canter transitions. I rode Delilah. She’s not the best horse, but she did okay.”

  “Sounds like you had fun,” Mrs. Atwood said with a smile.

  “Oh, I did! Pine Hollow is an awfully nice place, you know. They take really good care of the horses. You can tell by how happy the horses look.”

  Lisa blinked. Everything Amelia was saying was absolutely true, but it was only part of the truth. Amelia was giving Mrs. Atwood the Dr. Jekyll version of the day.

  I should tell Mom the truth, Lisa thought. I should tell her that Amelia lied and whined and cried, and that I can’t stand being near her one second more. But she felt too beaten down by the events of the day to say a single word.

  “Lisa rode Prancer today, and they looked really good when they were jumping,” Amelia continued. “They went over an oxer that was almost three feet high! Prancer looked great. I’m probably going to ride her on Monday.” Amelia smiled sweetly at her cousin. “Lisa can ride Delilah.”

  “I’m going upstairs,” Lisa said. She locked herself in her room and looked for evidence of Amelia’s continued snooping. When she didn’t find any, she took a blob of petroleum jelly and mixed it with some purple ink from her stamp pad. She smeared the mixture on the inner side of all her drawer handles. If Amelia opened any of them, she’d be caught purple-handed.

  AT DINNER NOT a single word was said about the broken hobbyhorse. It had disappeared from the living room, and Lisa’s parents seemed ready to pretend it had never existed at all. Lisa wanted to tell her side of the story, but she didn’t. She knew how upset she would be if her parents believed Amelia instead of her. Lisa was already afraid that they did.

  Finally, after dinner, she locked herself in her father’s study and conference-called Stevie and Carole. First she told them about the hobbyhorse. The rest of The Saddle Club was as upset as she was.

  “I always liked to imagine that some fancy lord and lady had it made for their children,” Carole said.

  “They probably did,” Lisa said. “When the kids outgrew the hobbyhorse, they were old enough for a real pony. And now it’s ruined.”

  “The word ruined comes to mind when I think about today,” Stevie said. “Amelia—well—”

  “—should be kept in a zoo,” Lisa finished.

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” Stevie said, “but I agree. If you could find a zoo that would take her, that is.”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said, relenting a little. “Sometimes I’m almost sorry for her. She looks like she doesn’t know how to belong anywhere, except maybe on the back of a horse. But then she does something so awful, I can’t be sorry for her. Carole, what happened today? Stevie and I were so worried about you. Are you okay?”

  “We know you didn’t do anything wrong,” Stevie put in quickly. “You don’t even have to explain.”

  “Thanks.” Carole’s voice quavered. “Wow, it was really a lousy day, wasn’t it? I guess maybe I should have stayed and talked to Max—”

  “He shouldn’t blame you for anything, not for a second,” Lisa said.

  “—but I was just so upset,” Carole continued. “If Starlight were sound I would have taken him on a trail ride, but since I couldn’t, I just wanted to go home. I watched the video of National Velvet twice. It hardly helped at all. I didn’t knock that bucket off the post, Lisa. Amelia threw it.”

  Stevie sucked in her breath.

  “Oh, I can’t stand her,” Lisa said. “I should have known. It wasn’t an accident at all.”

  “Max could have been killed,” Stevie said.

  “Or one of the horses could have been hurt,” said Carole. “Especially Patch. I don’t think Amelia knew what was going to happen, but that doesn’t excuse her.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lisa said.

  “The thing that upset me most, once I knew that Max was okay, is that all the little kids have always liked us before,” Carole continued. “And at first I thought Amelia did, too, because she really seemed to listen to everything I told her about horses. That’s part of why I thought this assistant instructorship was going to be so much fun—I like helping kids. I guess I like knowing they look up to me. So when Amelia accused me of spooking Patch—on purpose, no less—I was really shocked. I didn’t even think about defending myself. I didn’t think I had to.”

  “Max asked us to tell you that you can still be an assistant instructor,” Lisa said reluctantly. “He said all you have to do is apologize to Amelia—not because you did anything wrong, Max knew better than that—but because your ‘accident’ frightened her.”

  There was a long pause. Stevie snorted.

  “Please don’t take any offense at this, Lisa,” Carole said politely, “but I’d rather eat a bucket of live beetles than apologize to your cousin for something she did. Even being an assistant instructor isn’t worth that. Amelia should be the one to apologize.”

  “I agree.” Lisa felt miserable. “I don’t blame you at all. It’s just … tomorrow we’re going to another relative’s house, you know, so I won’t be at Pine Hollow anyway. But Monday and all the rest of the week—especially with Amelia here—I don’t know what Stevie and I will do without you. We’ll miss you so much.”

  “Who says I won’t be at Pine Hollow?” Carole was indignant. “I won’t be an assistant instructor, that’s all. Gosh, Lisa, Starlight’s leg needs to be soaked twice a day! I went back to Pine Hollow this evening already to do it.”

  Carole felt a wave of grief wash over her. Starlight had seemed more lame than ever.

  “I’m sorry,” Lisa said. “Of course you’ll be there. I wish so much that Starlight weren’t hurt, but I’m glad you’ll be around.”

  “Starlight will be okay,” Stevie said. She had heard the misery in both her friends’ voices. Stevie knew Lisa was upset about Amelia. Now Stevie thought about how upset Carole was over Starlight.

  “You know, abscesses are pretty common,” Stevie said. “I’m sure that’s what it is. Starlight is going to be fine.”

  “I hope so.” Carole’s voice quavered. “I don’t know. If it’s navicular—Judy still has
n’t been to see him. Some horse got tangled in a barbed-wire fence, and she spent the afternoon in surgery again. She says she’ll be out as quickly as she can.”

  “It’s the first time he’s really been hurt,” Lisa said soothingly, “so I’m sure you’re worried. But most horses have little problems sometimes. He’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know,” Carole repeated. “There’s no cure for navicular disease.”

  There was a moment of silence on the phone. “What do you mean, no cure?” Stevie asked hotly.

  “It’s a progressive condition, like arthritis,” Carole said. “We could give him pain medicine, but we’d never be able to make him right.” She bit her lip to keep from crying. “He’d never be able to jump again. He’d get worse and worse. Usually it happens in older horses, but sometimes young ones get it, too.”

  “He doesn’t have it,” Stevie said fiercely. “Not Starlight. I bet it’s not even as serious as an abscess. I bet he just sprained his ankle a little, the way you did that one time getting out of the car.”

  “Whatever it is,” Lisa said, “we’ll help you in any way we can.”

  “Thanks,” Carole said gratefully, after a pause. “I—I may really need you guys.”

  “And Lisa, we’ll help with Amelia,” Stevie promised. “We’ll be at Pine Hollow on Monday when you get there.”

  “Thanks,” Lisa said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you two. Another day like today will do me in.”

  Lisa said good night and hung up the phone. She went upstairs. The door of her room was unlocked; inside, Amelia was already sound asleep in Lisa’s bed. Lisa turned the closet light on so that she could find her pajamas. Amelia didn’t stir. She snored more loudly than ever. Lisa crept to her cousin’s side. Carefully she examined Amelia’s hands for telltale purple marks. Amelia’s fingernails were dirty, but that was all. Lisa looked at her own fingernails, which were also dirty. She guessed Amelia hadn’t snooped yet.

  Lisa dropped Amelia’s hand back onto the bedcovers. Amelia didn’t move. “If you can sleep this soundly,” Lisa told her, “you don’t need to worry about the guest room being scary. You won’t be awake long enough to feel frightened.”