Chocolate Horse (9 page)

“So what’s his name?”

“Phil,” Stevie said. “Phil Marsten. We met at riding camp last summer, and he’s so funny and so nice …”

She told Beverly all about Phil, and when she was talking about Phil, she also started talking about Lisa and Carole and Pine Hollow and Max and Mrs. Reg. She even told Beverly about Veronica diAngelo. Then she began discussing all the horses at Pine Hollow. It seemed as if she couldn’t stop talking. Beverly just listened, very hard.

Stevie paused every few minutes as she talked, glancing into Alex’s room to see if he was off the phone yet, but he wasn’t. At that moment his life seemed to be his telephone, his television, and his video game. He wouldn’t want to hear what Stevie had to say right then, anyway, so Stevie kept on talking to Beverly.

“And what about the dance tomorrow night?” Beverly asked. “What are you going to wear?”

“Oh, it’s a barn dance—you know, a square dance,” she said. “I’ve got a real cowboy shirt that I bought when I went out to the dude ranch with Carole and Lisa. I got a hat then, too. It’s a little battered, but that’s
the way they’re supposed to be. I mean, if you don’t have any dust or dents on your hat, everybody just thinks you’re a dude. My hat is battle worn. That proves that I’m a real cowpoke, at least that’s what Eli says. He’s the wrangler. He even wears a bandanna that he puts over his mouth and nose so he looks like a bank robber, except that it’s really just to keep the dust out of his lungs.”

“Will you wear one of those, too?” Beverly asked.

“No, of course not,” Stevie answered. Then she paused, looking over at her brother, who was still chatting on the phone. “In fact, I won’t be wearing any of it, because I’m not going to the dance.”

“Why not?”

“Him,” Stevie said, pointing at her brother. “A whole bunch of relatives are coming into town for the weekend to see him, and then he’s coming home on Sunday, so I have to be home. I can’t be thinking of myself all the time, can I?”

It was a pretty good question, and Beverly took a minute to think about it before she answered.

“Not all the time, no,” she said, speaking slowly, thoughtfully. “I guess not. But—”

Beverly’s answer was interrupted by the beeper that called her to another patient. Stevie knew the answer though.

She couldn’t keep on thinking about herself. She had to think about Alex. She had to think about her mother and her father and her other brothers. She shouldn’t think about Phil, Carole, Lisa, horses, riding, dances, fun, laughter, enjoyment, tricks, practical jokes, tall tales, or anything else she’d ever liked in her whole life. She had to think about school and homework and Alex. Alex. Alex. The frustrating part was that there he was, not even caring that Stevie was there to see him, that she’d been there to see him for hours every day since he’d first gone into the hospital. She’d sat in that hall and done more boring homework assignments than she ever could have imagined. And he didn’t care. All he cared about was a video game and his friend Josh and a stupid old
Star Trek
that he’d already memorized.

Stevie felt totally overwhelmed as she had never felt before. Her world seemed a mass of homework and resentment. Then she felt bad about feeling resentment. Then she felt worse about all the fun she was missing. Then she felt worse still about feeling bad about all the fun she was missing.

She stood up from the bench, grabbed her jacket, and walked, leaving the mess of papers, books, and undone assignments just where they were.

She had to get out of the hospital. Alex didn’t need
her then. Nobody needed her. She had to leave. She had to go home.

She walked through the hospital door and into the chilly late afternoon before she realized it. She walked all the way home. It was a long walk, more than five miles, but she never noticed any of it. Her parents, Chad, and Michael were all eating dinner when she arrived.

“Stevie, I was going to bring you—” her mother began.

“I don’t want any,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“How’s Alex?” Chad asked.

“He’s gotten to the seventh level of Maxx Racer.”

“Stevie, are you—?”

“I’m tired,” Stevie said, cutting off her father’s question. “I’m going to bed.”

“Yo, dork, it’s only seven o’clock!” Michael teased her, a little surprised by his sister’s behavior. “What are you—some kind of a baby?”

“Then it’s almost past your bedtime,
baby
brother,” she shot back. It wasn’t a very good put-down, but it was the best she could come up with on a second’s notice, and it felt good to deliver it to a deserving little brother.

Without further word Stevie ran up to her bedroom and threw herself on her bed. The tears came back
then. She was utterly confused by her feelings and even more confused by her confusion. At the time when she should be happy that Alex was getting better, she was getting angry at him for being sick! Or was she angry at him for getting better? Or was she angry at herself? She had no idea. All she knew for sure was that she had spent all her time with her brother, who didn’t seem to care, and no time at all with her friends, who seemed to care only about her brother. She wanted everything to be the way it used to be. She wanted to be with Carole and Lisa, and she wanted to be with Phil.

She wanted to go to the dance. She wanted to forget that she’d been sad and worried. She even wanted to forget that she’d done every single assignment from school since Alex had gotten ill!

She reached for her pillow and hugged it tight until the tears slowed down. Then she lay on her bed, exhausted and spent. She looked around her room. Everything there seemed familiar, but not comforting. She’d cried all right, but it hadn’t changed anything. She was still unhappy and confused. She looked at her horse posters and the model horses on her bookshelves. She loved them, every one of them. Each was special to her. Then her eyes came to the foil-covered chocolate horse. The repair work she’d done on his leg hadn’t held up.
He’d fallen over and gotten even more damaged, smashing his nose when he went.

Stevie stood up from her bed and went to examine him. She’d loved the neat way his ears were so perky and the way his tail fanned out as if brushed by a breeze. A lot of times when people were making horse models of one kind or another, they were sort of phony looking, but not this chocolate horse. He’d been a beauty. Stevie had really loved him. But he didn’t look lovable now. He just looked broken down and even a little melted from when Stevie had left him in the window in the sunlight. That part wasn’t Alex’s fault. She could only blame him for the broken leg. On the other hand, the melted part wouldn’t have been so noticeable if it hadn’t been for the broken leg. Maybe it
was
Alex’s fault. Maybe everything was Alex’s fault. Maybe nothing was.

Stevie lay back down on her bed and, finally, fell asleep, exhausted and still confused.

“W
OW
! W
E
DID
a wonderful job, didn’t we?” Carole asked, walking into the totally transformed feed building. No longer was it a mere shack to hold grains and grass. It was a perfectly decorated old Western dance hall. Everywhere she looked, there were bright red, white, and pink streamers. Red hearts and lanterns hung from the rafters, and the hay bales made perfect benches for kids to sit on when they weren’t dancing.

“And look at the food!” Lisa said excitedly. They hadn’t been in charge of food. Someone else had done that, and they’d done a wonderful job. Everything was red, white, and pink. There were apples, cherries, fruit punch, cupcakes decorated with pink and red frosting,
and even some cookies that had had food dye added to make them pink.

“Not only does it look pretty, it also looks good,” Phil said, leading the way to the refreshments.

“Except for the pink cookies,” said Cam. “I just can’t get too excited about pink chocolate-chip cookies.”

“Until you have a taste,” Carole said, nibbling cautiously at one. “They taste just like the real thing.”

Cam tried one and relented, agreeing that they did, at least,
taste
good.

“Wait until our St. Patrick’s Day dance and they all turn green,” said Lisa. “Those take a lot more courage to taste.”

“I’ll pass,” Cam said.

“All the more for the rest of us,” Phil said brightly.

That remark made Lisa smile. It was exactly the kind of thing Stevie would have said. She missed Stevie. She and Carole had missed Stevie a lot over the last ten days. Lisa loved being with Carole, and Carole loved being with Lisa, but each knew that when Stevie was with them, they had more fun. They also suspected that Stevie had more fun when she was with both of them. Carole and Lisa had talked about it as they were getting ready for the dance that afternoon, and they’d agreed together that, when it came to The Saddle Club, the three of them together were better than each of them
apart. Or, as Lisa had put it, the sum was greater than the parts.

Carole had liked that idea. It was a way of saying how important The Saddle Club was to each of them. Being together had a way of bringing out the best in each of them. Now, however, they weren’t together. They were still apart, and Lisa and Carole both missed Stevie and wished they’d succeeded in talking her into coming to the dance. So did Phil, but there didn’t seem to be any point in dwelling on it.

“Come on, now,” Phil said, as if he’d been reading their minds. “Let’s focus on having fun tonight. And unless my ears deceive me, I do believe I hear a fiddle warming up. I think it’s about time for the first dance to begin.”

Phil was right. They finished their cups of fruit punch and headed for the center of the dance floor, where a lot of kids were getting ready for the dance to begin. The four of them found two other couples and made a square with them.

The caller demonstrated all the moves he’d be calling by, temporarily partnering up with Lisa. It didn’t look terribly complicated until he added: “Of course, you all will be doing this at about six times the speed we’ve just done it.”

In a matter of seconds the dancers started whirling
around the floor, shaking hands, going in opposite circles, swinging around, first one way, then another, ducking under joined hands and skipping every which way. When the music finally stopped, Carole was breathless.

“It seemed like it was going to be impossible,” Carole said. “But it didn’t turn out to be so hard.”

“Except for the part where you were going the wrong way, you mean,” Phil teased.

“Lisa did it first!”

“Yeah, I did,” Lisa confessed. “But I was just testing.”

She had another chance to “test” a few minutes later when they did another dance, this time more complicated, and more fun. It seemed to Lisa that the whole room whirled with the excitement of the dance and the confusion of attempts to follow the caller’s instructions. She loved every minute of it and had to agree with an earlier observation from Stevie that Phil was a marvelous dancer.

Then the four of them sat down on the bales of hay for a few minutes to catch their breath.

“Everybody looks so wonderful,” Cam observed. “And so different.”

It was true. At Pine Hollow almost all the riding that was done was English riding. English riders sometimes had a bad habit of thinking that their way of riding was
“better” than Western riding. The Saddle Club had learned that one way wasn’t at all better than the other. They were really just different. And when it came right down to it, they weren’t even all that different, because they had a lot more in common than not. Looking at the crowd at Pine Hollow that night, Carole and Lisa realized that there was a little more respect for Western styles and ideas than they had thought. It seemed that everybody had jeans, cowboy boots, and a Western shirt on. The girls who weren’t wearing jeans were wearing big circular skirts with puffy crinolines underneath. One of the girls wore a girl’s riding skirt. It had a wide split skirt and was edged with a buckskin fringe.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many string ties in one room before,” Cam remarked, tugging idly with the strings on his tie as he spoke.

“I’m sorry Stevie isn’t here to see this,” said Carole. “She’s always been a big one for costume parties, and this definitely qualifies as that.”

Lisa was going to agree, but she got interrupted when the caller announced the start of a Virginia reel.

For that dance the caller decided to pair everybody up differently. He had the boys make a small circle, and the girls a larger circle outside the smaller circle. They danced in opposite directions until the music stopped and then they were each facing their new partners. Lisa
thought of it as a sort of “Musical Partners.” She’d been having fun dancing with Phil, but she was very aware of the fact that he was Stevie’s boyfriend, and if she danced with him exclusively all night, some people might get the wrong idea. She found herself dancing with Adam Levine for the Virginia reel and then with Joe Novick for the square dance that followed. It wasn’t until almost halfway through the evening that Phil found her and brought her over to the bale of hay that they’d staked out for themselves earlier.