Another Kind of Cowboy (3 page)

Suddenly Mr. Ford sat upright and shook his head.

“Colette, Ms. Reed. I'd like you to meet my son. He's a fine horseman,” he said. “A cowboy.”

The red-haired lady gave Alex another insincere smile and he grimly gave one back.

“Okay, Dad. So are you ready?” Alex went to help his father up but was stopped when the woman put a hand on his arm.

“I live just down the road from you.”

Alex nodded, not really listening. He wished she'd take her hand off his arm. Once his father was standing he was relatively easy to maneuver. Getting him up was a trick.

“You know,
I
have a horse that needs riding,” the lady continued, her hand still on Alex's arm. “I simply don't have the time anymore. Of course, he's a dressage horse and you ride Western so you probably wouldn't be interested.”

Now she had his attention.

“He's a very nice boy. A Dutch Warmblood.”

Alex kept his face impassive.

“One of these days you and your father should come and see my horse,” she said, batting her short, spiky eyelashes at Mr. Ford, who didn't notice.

“Sure, okay. Thanks,” said Alex. He gave his father a nudge and was happy to see him rise unsteadily to his feet.

“I'm on Willowbank Road. Not five minutes from your place,” continued Ms. Reed. Alex looked at her more closely. She did look familiar. He realized that he'd seen her face on half of the
COMING SOON
signs around Cedar. She was a realtor who specialized in selling vinyl-sided tract housing built on filled-in wetlands and negotiating deals with private landowners
that enabled developers to clear-cut the last remaining pockets of forest around Nanaimo, making room for mini-malls. She finally took her hand off his arm and spoke again to Mr. Ford.

“Good-bye, Brian.”

Alex's stomach dropped as his father abruptly swooped down to kiss Ms. Reed's hand. He gave an involuntary sigh of relief when his father completed the move without collapsing on her.

“I will see
you
later,” said Mr. Ford to Ms. Reed, throwing her what was probably supposed to be a charming wink but looked more like a gnat had flown into his eye.

Colette Reed smiled coyly.

“This way, Dad,” Alex said, propelling his father toward the exit. As he passed by, he glanced at his aunt, who gave him a thumbs-up.

SEPTEMBER 7

I NEVER SHOULD
have let my mom make me switch from plastic horses to real ones. I started collecting model horses when I was a little kid. By the time I turned twelve I had over two hundred of them: bays, chestnuts, palominos, grays, blacks, duns, Thoroughbreds, Appaloosas, Arabs, Morgans, paints, and quarter horses. I had mares, stallions, foals, and yearlings. In my fantasy, I was a veterinarian who'd rescued the horses from abusive owners and nursed them back to health.

My dad, who is a movie producer and director, had the props people from the studio build all these accessories for my horses. I had fences, stables, a racetrack, even miniature trees.

One day my mother met someone at her tennis club, a lady who sent her daughters for riding lessons at a stable out in Lakeview Terrace. The lady, who just happened to be the wife of a studio head, told my mother that the lessons were “wildly expensive.” That was all my mom needed to hear. A day later I was booked at the same barn for twice-a-week lessons. One would assume that since I loved plastic horses, I'd have been completely thrilled at the thought of riding real ones. But I wasn't what you'd call an athletic person. Our house had a pool, two housekeepers, and a TV in almost every room. I had my own plastic horse sanctuary. Who'd want to leave?

The day before my first lesson at Performance Ponies Stables, I heard my mom on the phone with the owner.

“I understand that yours is the best school in this area for young
equestriennes
.” My mother really drew out that last word and put a heavy French spin on it. “You've come
highly recommended
. Cleo is horse crazy. Simply
mad
about horses. I'm sure you're accustomed to that.”

There was a pause.

“Experience? Cleo has read a
lot
of books. She even
collects
horses.”

Another pause.

“No, not real horses. Plastic ones. That's right. So, no, I wouldn't say she was a
total
beginner.”

Another pause.

“Been around actual horses? Well, no. I don't think so. But she's
always
reading that book about the racehorse. Consuela says she's read it at least a dozen times.”

Pause.

“
Actually ridden?
Well, no. Not that I'm aware of.”

My mother covered the receiver with her hand and whispered, “Have you ever ridden? At school or anything?”

I shook my head. I'd never been on a horse before. I'd never even been on the same
block
as an actual horse. I was not an agricultural person.

“I'm quite confident she'll have no problems. She comes from a long line of
naturally gifted athletes
.”

I had to leave the room. My mother is convinced that weighing only slightly more than a poor quality T-shirt and belonging to a tennis club makes her a two-sport Olympian. She's
delusional
on the point. But that's my mother for you.

When we arrived at the barn for my first lesson, I got out of the car and looked around. The driveway
was paved with little red bricks and the barn reminded me of the houses we'd seen when we went on our school trip to Germany. The matching house was dark brown with white trim. It didn't look very California at all.

Chad rolled down the driver's side window.

“You want me to wait for you, C.?”

Chad worked for the car company my parents used. He had genuine sun streaks in his adorably messy surfer hair and crinkly blue eyes. The back of his head was so devastatingly handsome I could barely answer him when he spoke to me. If I'd been smart, I would have kept it that way. It was my increasing ability to say things to Chad that actually landed me in the position I'm in now. But that day I was all about not letting Chad think I was timid, even though there are mice who are much braver than me.

“No thanks,” I told him.

“Okay, hon. I'll pick you up in two hours.”

My knees buckled a bit at the word
hon
. I must have had a strange expression when I watched the black Lincoln pull away because when I looked up I found a woman watching me with an amused look on her face. She was thin and elongated—like God had meant her to be five feet tall but she somehow
got stretched an extra foot—and she had small, bright green eyes and wore no makeup. She had no-nonsense written all over her. She wore rubber boots.

“You're on your own?” the woman asked.

I nodded. My parents had left that morning. They'd be gone for at least three months.

The woman didn't seem concerned. “I'm Dawn,” she'd said. “Welcome to the wonderful world of horses.”

Dawn taught her students basic equitation, as well as show jumping, hunter-jumper, and dressage. Most of the girls chose to focus on some form of jumping as soon as they finished the basic equitation classes. Not me. I cried all the way through my first two jumping lessons, which involved riding one of the most docile school ponies over trot poles. After that, Dawn decided it would be best if I focused on dressage. That was fine with me. I liked the predictability of dressage and was pretty good at it, at least when I rode Dawn's ponies.

I rode with Dawn for four years. I rode with her until I made the mistake that got me sent here, to Stoneleigh Girls' Equestrian Academy a few weeks ago.

Rather than dealing with me by sending me to military school or therapy, like
normal
parents, my
mother and father sentenced me to a riding academy in Canada.

My mom heard about Stoneleigh from some director friend of my father's. The school is one of the only private, girls-only riding academies in North America, located on Vancouver Island, which is 286 miles long and around 50 miles wide, according to the Stoneleigh brochure. There is a city called Victoria at one end, and a bunch of small and medium-sized towns that run down the length of the island. Stoneleigh has low academic standards
and
extremely high tuition—a perfect match for my educational needs! My mother seems convinced that since Canada is so far north I won't be able to get into any trouble here. She seems to have confused it with Switzerland or something. My parents didn't tour Stoneleigh before they enrolled me or they might have realized that they aren't getting what they're paying for.

My parents bought me my own horse right before they shipped me off to Stoneleigh Girls' Equestrian Academy, conveniently located here in Nowhereville, British Columbia, Canada. My new horse, Tandava, is a seventeen-hand Holsteiner mare. Holsteiners are this breed of German sport horses bred to be very
good at jumping and dressage. She's a warmblood, but her temperament leans more to the hot-blooded side of things. Some might even say the completely crazy side.

On the sales video my mom got, Tandy was described as an “extravagant mover with international potential.” She's also what people sometimes refer to as
a lot of horse
, which is the polite way to say better handled by a professional and definitely too much horse for a sixteen-year-old who's only been riding for four years. Today I am supposed to ride a third-level test, my first in competition. The third-level test is my lousy coach's idea. And it would be a fine idea except for the fact that I am a first-level dressage rider. On my good days. And I haven't had a good day since I got here to Stoneleigh Academy, not quite a month ago. Add to that the fact that I'm scared of my new horse and you can see why I wasn't in any big rush to get going.

“Hello? Hello? Earth to Cleo?”

Phillipa's voice penetrated my thoughts like a drill bit. “Sorry?” I said, looking up from the blank page in my Journal of Despair (J.O.D.) that I'd been staring at for at least five minutes.

“Aren't you going to get ready? You're on in like forty minutes. You haven't even tacked up.”

Phillipa and I sat in the school's royal-blue camp chairs with the Stoneleigh Academy logo printed on the back at the end of a row of stalls. We might not be the best riders at the Fall Fling Horse Show at Beban Park, but we definitely had the nicest folding chairs. As soon as we sat down, Phillipa started giving me a running commentary on everyone who rode past. I'd been pretending to make notes in my J.O.D. and fantasizing about being somewhere else. Anywhere else, actually.

“Cleo? Are you listening to me?”

Relentless. The girl was relentless. I was hoping to just sort of miss the class, pretend I forgot my time or something. But Phillipa, with her constant thoughtful reminders, was making that impossible.

This was my first show on Vancouver Island and so far it reminded me of every other show I'd been to, except that the arena and rings and barns and stuff were a bit more downscale and the people weren't quite as tan. Or thin. Other than that it was the same basic scene: tidy girls in shiny boots bitching out their parents, people fussing around with their horses, dust, and hot dogs.

The main difference is that here I felt like an outsider. Not only because I just moved here, but because I go to Stoneleigh, which seems sort of isolated from the rest of the riding community. Even Phillipa is treated like a Stoneleigh interloper, and she grew up on the island.

Phillipa is the only other dressage rider at my new school, and so far, she's my only friend. She's been attending Stoneleigh since she was in Grade Five and I think I may be her only friend, too, which is verging on tragic. We started hanging out as soon as I got here.

“I can't believe Svetlana didn't even come,” Phillipa groaned. “She is the worst coach ever.”

I couldn't disagree with her. Phil says there are lots of good coaches in the area, but they refuse to teach at Stoneleigh because Phil and I are the only ones who take dressage lessons regularly. Half the time coaches arrive to find that dressage lessons have been canceled for a jumping event or they have to try and teach in a ring filled with jumps and poles. It probably doesn't help that Stoneleigh's only two dressage students aren't very good.

Phillipa has a decent seat and hands, but she's kind of passive. It's obvious that she'd rather be
braiding her horse's mane than riding him. If her horse, Hernando, wasn't so good-natured she'd be in real trouble because she's the opposite of a disciplinarian.

“Have you seen my mom?” asked Phillipa. “She said she'd be here by now. She's bringing me my boots.”

That was enough to get me out of my chair. Phil's mother is competitive enough for both of them. She's as skinny and hard as Phil is plump and gentle. She comes to school every weekend to watch Phil ride and she spends half her time lobbing underhanded insults at the competition (me) and the rest of her time gossiping. It's enough to make me appreciate my own absentee parents.

From what I can tell, Phil's parents aren't that well-off and they've had to make lots of sacrifices to send her to Stoneleigh. As much as I want to be supportive of the working class and everything, they are totally wasting their money. Phillipa isn't ever going to the Olympics and Stoneleigh may be expensive, but that doesn't mean it provides some superb education or anything. It's not like my old school, Marlborough, which was all about academics. As far as I can tell, the majority of the girls at Stoneleigh
are okay students and very serious riders. Then there are the screwed-up rich girls who just happen to be somewhat into horses. They've been sent to Stoneleigh in an attempt to keep them on their horses and out of jail. It doesn't take a genius to figure out which category I fit into. But at least I fit in somewhere. That's more than poor old Phil can say.

As I walked over to Tandava's stall I wiped at my face. I could feel my hand shaking. Why was I so nervous? I used to love shows, but that's because Dawn was there, handling everything. In California I competed on Dawn's perfectly trained school ponies. I was like Attila the Hun in the ring—you know, I conquered everybody in sight. On Tandava, I'm going to be more like the villagers Attila slaughtered.

All my black thoughts disappeared when I saw Tandava's head poking over the stall door. She nickered a greeting and reached for a treat. Even her head was gorgeous.

“This is the kind of horse that could take you all the way,” the voice-over on her sales video had said. Yeah, all the way to Christopher Reeve–ville if I'm not careful.

The day Tandava arrived at Stoneleigh, she bolted as she was backing out of the deluxe air-conditioned
trailer that my parents hired to bring her to school. The driver, barn staff, and students spent an hour tracking her before they finally found her in the parking lot of a small liquor store in a mini-mall a few miles away. She was surrounded by nervous shoppers and a couple of those Canadian RCMPs, who didn't seem to know whether they should take out their guns or their lassoes. Poor horse. I sympathized with her. I wanted to run away the first day I got here, too.

Since then she's expressed her feelings about the move by bucking me off a few times, kicking holes in her stall, and biting the horse in the paddock next to her. If my parents hadn't thrown the headmistress a few bucks for the new indoor arena fund, I bet we'd be looking for a new home for her. And for me.

According to Phil, Stoneleigh girls have a reputation for having too much money and not enough supervision. The locals don't seem to find that a winning combination. They don't want their kids getting mixed up with us. You'd think that with Phil and me being dressage riders and not jumpers, people might cut us some slack, but so far no one was breaking any legs coming over to say hello.

I caught some other girls around my age giving Tandava an intimidated look when I took off her sheet. She's a spectacular-looking horse, but if anyone around here had seen me ride her before they wouldn't look so concerned.

After running a cloth over her to remove every last speck of dust, I looked down at myself. I was a disaster. As usual. There was a big black smudge on my white breeches, the kind that would just get worse if I tried to rub it off.