Horse Power Page 7

  In the rest room, Lisa ran a comb through her hair, applied some lip gloss, and looked herself straight in the eye. Since all three movies playing at the Triplex had just begun, the rest room was mercifully empty, so she could have a serious conversation with herself.

  “Yikes!” she began. “That is the most awful, boring, gory movie I have ever seen and ever want to see.” Saying it out loud made her feel a little better. Ever since Chad had told her his choice of movie, she’d felt uneasy, and now she knew she’d been right.

  Chad was sweet in his way. She’d liked the way he’d asked her out, and she’d liked the way he’d announced to Carole and Stevie that they were going out. He wasn’t in the least bit uncomfortable with it and that was nice. She’d been more ill at ease with her friends than he had been.

  The problem was that Chad was nice enough, but he’d made a terrible mistake with her; if this was the kind of movie he liked, there was no way she’d ever go out with him again: At the same time, it was as clear to Lisa as it had been to her friends that Chad’s motive in joining the riding class was to be near her. He didn’t seem to like riding much more than she liked horror movies.

  But there were other things she liked, she reminded herself. She liked ballet, she liked reading and schoolwork. Maybe the two of them had other areas of common interest. Common Interest was something she’d read a lot about in articles about dating. It was important for boys and girls who were dating to have Common Interests. Otherwise—Lisa sighed, looking at herself in the mirror once again—the girl will spend all their movie dates in the rest room, pretending her hair needs a combing, and the boy will spend all their horseback-riding dates pretending he cares which end of the horse goes first.

  “What we have here,” Lisa said, once again addressing the mirror, “is a serious lack of Common Interests.”

  Lisa returned to the lobby of the theater. The movie would be over in twenty minutes now, so she would just wait for Chad. There was no way she could return to the scene of the chaos in the mummy’s tomb. In the meantime, she had twenty minutes to figure out how to tell Chad she didn’t want to go to another movie with him.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary at all. Chad came bounding out of the theater with worry written on his face. As soon as he spotted her, she stood up.

  “You didn’t come back,” he said. “I guess you didn’t much like it, huh? I’m sorry.”

  “Chad, I have the feeling I liked it about as much as you like horseback riding,” she said.

  His face flushed with embarrassment. “You could tell?” he asked. She nodded. “I thought if somebody as nice as you liked it, I would, too,” he said. “Even though Stevie likes it,” he quickly added.

  “That’s what I thought about the movie when you first told me what you wanted to see.”

  “No fun for you at all?”

  “None,” she told him honestly.

  “Well, I guess we were both wrong. I won’t convert you to mummy movies, and you won’t convert me to horseback riding. Since you know why I did it and everybody knows how bad I am at it, I’ll just drop out.”

  Lisa nodded absently, more than a little sad that both of their plans had failed. This wasn’t the kind of first date she’d been dreaming about for so long. First dates were supposed to be fun. It didn’t seem fair.

  “I’ll just clear out my locker at the stable tomorrow,” Chad continued.

  “What do you mean, clear out your locker?” Lisa asked. What Chad had said about quitting had finally registered.

  “It’s time for me to quit riding,” he explained.

  For a second, Lisa was going to agree with him, but then she remembered what would happen if he did quit riding. It would break up The Saddle Club’s gymkhana team. It might even mean they’d have to drop out altogether, since all the students were now assigned to teams, and, like theirs, had probably been practicing already as teams.

  “You can’t do that!” she burst out.

  “Why not?”

  She explained what would happen with their team and how awful that would be, especially since his own sister had practically invented the gymkhana for the stable.

  Chad’s face fell. “But I’m so awful at it.”

  That was certainly true. He wasn’t very good and Lisa was tempted to agree with him, but the fact was that no matter how he rode, and dropped eggs, he was better than nothing. This was going to call for some diplomacy.

  “Chad,” she began, “all of the teams have been carefully balanced with experienced and inexperienced riders. Although no two riders have the same skills, the teams are as equal as Max could make them.”

  “You mean that because Carole is the best rider at the stable, your team got me—the worst?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Listen—you can stop riding anytime you want to. After the gymkhana. Until then, you’re going to have to stick with us. Besides, you may not be much on a horse, but you’re absolutely terrific with a water pistol. How do you do it?”

  “Years of practice,” he told her, and she knew it was true. Water pistols, mummy movies. Chad was a nice boy, but he wasn’t for her.

  They left the theater together and began walking home. Since they lived near each other, they had about fifteen minutes to chat. Lisa quickly exhausted her list of conversation topics. Chad dismissed each in turn with a shrug or an okay. Finally, she resigned herself to letting him tell her the plot of the movie she’d just missed.

  Her occasional nods and uh-huhs seemed to satisfy him and freed her to ponder her failed first date. If this was a date, she really wasn’t looking forward to her second. She’d enjoyed her anticipation of her first date, though. Why should she let all that fun daydreaming go to waste? If this time with Chad was such a bust, then it couldn’t possibly be a date. That meant that she still had her first date to look forward to!

  That was something to smile about. She was grinning with her secret by the time she and Chad went their different ways. Very different ways.

  LISA, CAROLE, AND Stevie were each assigned a different chore the next morning. Afterward, while Carole and Stevie were in their jumping class, Lisa was on the trail with the newer riders. The girls didn’t have a minute to talk with one another until lunchtime.

  Carole and Stevie were practically bursting with curiosity by the time they sat down together on the knoll overlooking Samson’s paddock. They waited expectantly while Lisa removed the foil top from her yogurt and opened up her fruit juice. Stevie tore the foil off her peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, keeping her eyes on Lisa all the while. Carole munched on a celery stalk, watching too.

  “Well?” Carole said finally.

  Lisa sighed. “It was a mistake,” she said simply. “We went to the movie, which was awful, as far as I was concerned, but he loved it. I tried to talk about things that interest me. He couldn’t care less. What I mean is that it just wasn’t any fun.”

  “What you mean is that my brother’s not good enough for you!” Stevie said in a huff.

  Carole looked at her in astonishment. “You’re defending your brother—the one you’ve called a jerk, dweeb, creep, and idiot, to name just a few—in our hearing?”

  Stevie blushed. “Well, but he’s my brother. I can call him those names. Nobody else can.” She looked at Lisa accusingly.

  “Nobody else did,” Carole reminded her.

  “And that’s not the way I felt about him,” Lisa said. “He was really nice to me, and I was nice to him. But I don’t think that’s what a date is supposed to be like. We just didn’t have anything in common.”

  Stevie cooled off as quickly as she’d heated up. She was like that, and her friends knew it. Lisa started describing the afternoon with Chad and, by the time she’d gotten to the second episode of gruesome murder in the pharaoh’s tomb, Stevie was giggling.

  “Oh, he has the most rotten taste in movies!” she admitted. “Okay, so he’s not your
dream date. Now you know why he’s such a pain as a brother.”

  “You said it, not me!” Lisa teased. “Anyway, I accomplished one really important thing yesterday.” She explained that Chad had wanted to quit riding and how she had convinced him to stick with it through the gymkhana.

  “A mixed blessing,” Stevie said.

  “Not at all!” Carole told her. “We would be eliminated without him. Max told us that the teams are absolutely final. There are no extra riders at all. In fact, Max is trying to find somebody to help with the setup for the gymkhana. Know anybody who might be interested?”

  Almost all gymkhana races and games required a lot of props, like eggs, water, targets, and hooks. Unless there were people who could help lay out the props, it could take ten times as long to set up the races as to run them.

  “I could ask my brother Alex,” Stevie said, and then grimaced. “On second thought, I’ve got enough brothers in on this deal now, haven’t I?”

  Carole and Lisa nodded, grinning. The three girls ate their lunches quietly, thinking. As Lisa finished her last spoonful of yogurt, her eyes lit up.

  “I’ve got it!” she said. “Kate! I bet Kate would help. Even though she doesn’t want to ride anymore, she said she still liked being around horses, didn’t she, Carole?”

  “Hey, that’s a wonderful idea,” Stevie chimed in. The broad smile on Carole’s face signaled agreement.

  “I’ll call her tonight,” Carole said. “The minute I get home.” She finished her vegetables and began eating her salad. “You know, there’s something funny going on here,” she told her friends.

  “No more smart remarks about my brother,” Stevie joked. “That’s for me to do, right?”

  “Well, not exactly a smart remark about your brother,” Carole said. “But what’s funny has to do with him. Here we have two people, Chad and Kate. One of them—if you will excuse me saying so, Stevie—has no business being at Pine Hollow, and the other one has no business not being at Pine Hollow. Everything is upside down.”

  Stevie and Lisa nodded in agreement.

  “Well, pretty soon, Chad will leave,” Lisa reminded her.

  “And since we’ve pledged to do our best to get Kate back riding again, maybe we can turn something else rightside up,” Stevie said. “When the three of us team up to do something, it seems like we’ve got a lot of power. We can accomplish almost anything!” she announced triumphantly.

  “Maybe it is us,” Carole agreed philosophically. “But maybe it’s really horse power.”

  AS CAROLE HAD promised, she called Kate that night to ask if she would lend a hand with the gymkhana. At first Kate just said no.

  “Well, I guess I can understand,” Carole said. “It’s a lot of work and not much fun, but I wanted to talk to you anyway, so I thought I’d ask.”

  “What did you want to talk with me about?” Kate asked, curious.

  “Oh, right. It’s a problem I’ve been having with one of the ponies—the one I’m supposed to ride for the gymkhana.”

  Suddenly, Kate was interested. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “I can get him to move his legs faster,” Carole explained, “but I’m having trouble getting him to lengthen his strides.” This was a fairly common problem, and a relatively simple one when a horse was being a little lazy. The best way to have any horse pace efficiently was to have him take longer steps so that each stride covered more ground. For example, the difference between a slow trot and a fast trot was often more a difference between the length of the strides than the number of them.

  Carole was fibbing to Kate. She wasn’t having any trouble with this at all on her pony, but she wanted to get Kate involved, even if only on the telephone. Carole knew that there were a lot of ways to get a horse to lengthen his stride, and that Kate would have lots of ideas for her.

  They traded ideas back and forth for about ten minutes, trying to decide on the best approach with this particular pony. Finally, Kate said, “Look, I’ll be there tomorrow to help with the setup and if you’re still having a problem, we can work on it together, okay? I think the most important thing is for the pony to take you seriously, you know? You’re going to have to keep a leg on him and encourage him to use all his horse power for you.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Kate,” Carole said, giggling to herself that Kate had used the very words she’d used earlier. “I think I can get him to respond more now. Thanks for the suggestions.”

  “No problem,” Kate said cheerfully. “Glad to help. See you tomorrow afternoon.”

  Carole cradled the phone and smiled to herself. She knew that Kate’s life was Kate’s life and if Kate didn’t want to ride anymore, well, that was her decision. In the meantime, however, Carole was determined to change Kate’s mind for her, and she had a feeling it was going to work.

  She lay back on her bed lazily and stared up at the ceiling. Snowball jumped up on the foot of the bed, sat down, and stared at her.

  “You’re the one who gave me the idea,” Carole informed the kitten. “Sometimes when you want somebody to do something, you have to start them out in the wrong direction first, right, Snowball?”

  She tapped her stomach to encourage the kitten to come closer so she could pat him. Snowball stood up and hopped down off the bed.

  “Just what I mean,” Carole said.

  SOMEHOW, JUST HAVING Kate Devine at their next gymkhana practice seemed to make things go a little smoother. Not only did she have good suggestions for all of them on how to ride better, but she also knew some of the tricks of the trade when it came to gymkhanas.

  “Hey, coach!” Stevie said. “Any pointers for the costume race?”

  “Oh, sure,” Kate said. “The problem with the costume race is that you have to get off your pony to put on the costume and then get back up again. You want that to be as easy as possible, so try lengthening your stirrups a couple of inches.”

  Each of them tried that and it did save mounting and dismounting time.

  “I think I feel a blue ribbon in my future,” Carole said, “thanks to you, that is.”

  “Did I hear someone say ‘blue ribbon’?” Max asked as he strode into the ring, where they were practicing.

  “We’re just dreaming, Max,” Lisa explained.

  “Well, you’re certainly working hard enough on it,” he said. “Dreaming that way can get results.” That sounded like a compliment to the team members, and since compliments from Max were as rare as July frosts, they were pleased. “Anyway,” he continued, “I thought you’d like to know that I’ve just accepted a challenge from Watermill Stables. Our best gymkhana team will compete against their best as well as other local teams. Think you are up to it?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure! When do we go?” Stevie asked, almost breathless with excitement.

  “I don’t know that you will,” he said. “The team that wins here will go there. Think you can win here?”

  The girls answered with a resounding “Yes!” Chad looked dubious, very dubious, Lisa noticed.

  “We’d better get back to work right away,” Carole told her friends as Max returned to his office.

  The team hopped back on their ponies and resumed their practice. It went pretty smoothly this time, except when Chad kept dropping eggs, and when Lisa couldn’t hit the target with her water gun, and when Stevie’s pony kept wandering in circles when they were trying pin-the-tail-on-the-pony, and when Carole kept tripping over her pirate sword in the costume race.

  On the whole, things were not looking good, but Lisa was an optimist. “I think we’ve taken some big steps today,” she reassured her friends as they walked their ponies to cool them down before stabling them for the day.

  “Yeah,” Stevie agreed sarcastically. “All backward.”

  “If you want my advice,” Kate interrupted, “I suggest that you put the horses away and take the weekend off and just forget about the whole thing until Monday. Then you can start fresh.”

  “You mean we shouldn�
��t even think about the gymkhana all weekend?” Lisa asked.

  “Not at all,” Kate told her. “Oh, well, maybe you might pick up a squirt gun at the five-and-dime and try to improve your aim, and Chad, you should try balance exercises, like—”

  “Stop!” Stevie said. “I think you were right in the first place. Let’s take the weekend off. Deal?”

  “Deal!” they all agreed together. It was, Lisa noted, just about the first time they’d ever all agreed on anything.

  “NOW WATCH HOW the rider brings her horse into the turn at the corner of the ring,” Carole told Lisa and Stevie. The three girls were sitting in the audience at the dressage test—the first day of the three-day event. Lisa realized that she’d been so focused on their gymkhana, which would begin that afternoon, that she’d almost forgotten about the adult activities.

  Dressage, as Carole had explained earlier to her, was the portion of the three-day event in which the horse’s manners and training were being tested. Of course, that meant evaluating the rider’s performance, too, but the horse’s response to the rider’s instructions was the key in this part of the competition. In a way, it was like the school-figures part of a figure-skating competition. Each of the competitors walked, trotted, and cantered her horse through the same exercise, which included diagonals, circles, and straight lines, measured precisely in the dressage ring.

  “Uh-oh, look at that,” Carole remarked quietly.

  “What?” Lisa asked. She thought the rider was doing a pretty good job.

  “Well, she let her horse slow down the pace, and now, oh, no, look at that corner.”

  Lisa watched carefully. Then she saw what Carole meant. The rider had let the horse cut the corner. “Points off, huh?”

  Carole nodded.

  No matter how hard Lisa watched, she couldn’t see as many mistakes as Carole could. She sometimes couldn’t even tell when things were being done right. Kate, sitting to her right, tried to help her see the fine points of the performances.