A Summer Without Horses

I called my friends and told them I’d hurt my bottom and I couldn’t sit down.

“You mean you can’t
ride
?!!” Carole said. Of course, she got it right away. So did Lisa.

“Oh, no, how are you going to get into a saddle?” Lisa asked.

I explained that I couldn’t. We talked about how awful that was for a long time. See, it’s very awful, so there was a lot to talk about.

The next day, we met at Pine Hollow.

By the time I reached the stable, I was crying all over again. Carole and Lisa immediately hugged me and they took me into the grain storage room.

“It just isn’t fair that one of us can’t ride,” said Lisa.

“Right,” said Carole.

I was still crying when Lisa turned to me. “I promise, Stevie, that as long as you can’t ride, I won’t ride.”

“Me, too,” said Carole.

I could hardly believe how nice my friends were being. When I think back on it, it was the craziest thing any of us had ever done, but at the time, it seemed totally logical.…

I
T ALL STARTED
when one of my two best friends, Stevie Lake, fell out of a tree.
Slid
down is probably a more accurate way to put it. She was straddling a branch and slid down it, backside first. Unfortunately for Stevie, her three brothers were there at the time and they thought the scene was hilarious.

But Stevie wasn’t exactly laughing when she ended up on the ground, fifteen feet below where she’d started from. She had an excruciating pain where she sat down (except she couldn’t sit down because the pain was too excruciating).

The doctors said she had bruised her coccyx. For some people, that’s not a tragedy. It just means you can’t sit down for a while. But for Stevie, it was the worst possible news—if you can’t sit, you can’t ride a horse. And she,
along with me and our other best friend, Carole Hanson, are the three most horse-crazy people I know. In fact that’s why we formed The Saddle Club. It’s our club and there are only two rules: Members have to be horse-crazy and they have to be willing to help one another out whenever it’s necessary. It seems as if it’s often necessary, especially this summer, but I’m getting to that.

Stevie can be more than a little dramatic. She told us that when the doctor said she couldn’t ride for at least three weeks, her life had ended. Then, she relented a little and told us that her summer was over. I opened my mouth and said it really wasn’t all
that
bad. That was the wrong thing to say because Stevie immediately turned to me and said if I didn’t think it was so bad, I should try it, too. That shut me up in a hurry.

Carole was the one who suggested it first. When Stevie showed up at Pine Hollow one day crying about not being able to ride, we both felt so bad that Carole said maybe none of us should ride until Stevie could. It was a nice offer, and I’m sure Carole expected Stevie to say it wasn’t necessary, but instead the opposite happened. After Carole said it, Stevie turned to her. Her eyes were round with disbelief. “You mean, you guys would actually do that for me? You and Lisa would really give up riding for three weeks? I can’t believe you two. I always knew you were great friends, but this …” She came over to give each of us a hug.

It was a good thing Stevie hugged me just then. It was
the only way to cover up my horrified expression. At first I wanted to kill Carole, but by now Stevie was so grateful that I started to get the feeling it was the right thing to do. After all, The Saddle Club was supposed to stick together in times of trouble, and this certainly qualified.

And, after a while, I sort of got into our pact. It’s like a challenging homework assignment, I told myself. And I decided to come up with a way to seal the promise.

I suggested to Stevie and Carole that if we really meant what we’d said about sticking together and not riding for three weeks, we had to find some sort of dreadful consequence. Stevie really liked that idea.

“What’s the worst thing you can think of happening?” Stevie asked me eagerly.

I don’t know why I said it. It just popped into my head: “Inviting Veronica diAngelo to join The Saddle Club.”

Carole and Stevie both looked at me in awe, as if I’d just said the most important thing in the world.

“That’s it,” Stevie said.

“Absolutely the worst,” said Carole.

And that was the deal. We each swore on our honor that if one of us—any one of us—rode a horse during the next three weeks, we’d have to invite the snobbiest, wormiest, laziest, vainest girl in the whole county to join our club.

Veronica diAngelo is the kind of person who believes, really
believes
, that the rest of the world was invented for her convenience and comfort. The three of us can’t stand
her, and just the thought of her joining our club was horrifying. It was everything we needed to stick to our guns.

The very next day, everything started to change for me. It was summer, of course, and there was no school, so I was going to Pine Hollow. That’s the stable where we ride. Just because we couldn’t ride didn’t mean we weren’t going to spend time around horses. There’s always a lot to do at a stable and Max Regnery and his mother who own the place like to have everybody pitch in. They are always saying it’s to keep their costs down, but the fact is that riding a horse is only a very small part of what horsemanship is about. The majority of the time with horses is spent taking care of them, grooming them, feeding them, watching them for symptoms of illness, and picking up after them. Riding was a lot of fun and the other things are a lot of work, but because they have to do with horses, they are fun work.

I was on my way out of the house when my mother walked into the kitchen. In her hands she had a lot of paper with scribbled notes. She told me she wanted to talk to me.

“It’s your aunt Alison,” she began. “She’s been very sick, you know, and she’s not getting any better.”

I knew. Alison is my mother’s aunt on her mother’s side. I had met her once when I was about eight, and I remembered thinking she was a really nice person. Now she was sick and it didn’t sound good.

Mom told me that Aunt Alison was in a nursing home in California, near Los Angeles. Mom had decided to go visit her. She didn’t say “one last time,” but I knew that was what she meant.

“Los Angeles?” I said, thinking quickly about all the summer days in front of me without riding. The truth is, I wouldn’t have been nearly as interested in my mom’s trip if I’d been planning to ride for the next three weeks. “Can I come with you?”

“I was hoping you would,” Mom replied.

“Can I visit Skye Ransom, too?” I asked.

Mom smiled. “I had a feeling that would be your next question. Sure—if you can reach him.”

I’m sure you’ve heard of Skye Ransom. Everybody has. I have a friend at school who has eight Skye Ransom posters on her ceiling—one for every movie he’s starred in. I don’t have any Skye Ransom posters because Skye is a friend of mine—actually of the whole Saddle Club—and I even get to see him sometimes. We met Skye while we were at a horse show in Manhattan and once he even came to Pine Hollow, to shoot a movie. It had been one of the most exciting things that had ever happened.

When I got to Pine Hollow and told Stevie and Carole about the trip, they were so excited for me they nearly burst. They are too good friends to be jealous so all they asked was that I give Skye about a million messages when I saw him. Most of Carole’s messages had to do with tips about riding. Stevie’s were more about how much we
missed him and wished he’d do another movie in Virginia. I promised I’d tell him everything for them, especially the parts they hadn’t said about how they wished they could be there with us.

“But we
will
be,” Stevie said. “That’s the thing about The Saddle Club. No matter where we are, we’re never far apart from one another.”

It sounds corny now that I’m telling you about it, but the fact is, it’s true.