Show Days (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 32) Read online

  “Just stay out of her way and she’ll stay out of yours,” Shelby said. “It’s the best way really. Now come on, did Rae say we needed two buckets per horse or three?”

  But staying out of Jessica’s way was a bit difficult when quarters were cramped and we were practically living on top of each other. Still, I got a bit of satisfaction out of the fact that Rae had asked me to ride that evening and she hadn’t asked Jessica, even if I still did wish that I was taking Bluebird instead.

  I’d been trying to get to know the black horse a bit better since I rode him, asking the other girls if I could be the one to feed him, turn him out and clean his stall. I thought that if he saw me as his food carrying human then maybe he would like me a bit better but it hadn’t really worked out that way. Now he just thought he could bully me. Julio shook his head as he saw me fighting with the horse. I was trying to braid his mane for the show. Last time I’d bribed him with alfalfa but it had been early in the morning and the barn was quiet. Now it was too busy and Rags couldn’t have cared less about hay when his stall mates were coming in and out and people were bustling up and down the aisle.

  “You won’t get it done now,” Julio said. “Might as well admit defeat.”

  “I never admit defeat,” I said.

  But in the end I had to. Rags was getting more and more upset and he nearly rammed me into the wall. Braiding his mane wasn’t worth getting killed over so I just made sure that it was neat and even and that his coat had been groomed until it shone. I knew that Rae would understand but I still felt pretty disappointed in myself.

  “Got everything?” Rae asked.

  “I think so,” I said, looking in the trailer one last time.

  “You’d better be sure,” she said. “Or you’ll be the one riding back in the dark to get it.”

  The trail through the woods was nice enough in the light of day, shaded by the trees and cooled by a little stream that you had to cross but I wouldn’t want to ride it at night. There would be alligators in the swampy land and bears in the woods. Snakes lurking in the grass and spiders ready to drop out of the trees and land on my head. Just the thought sent a shiver down my spine.

  “I’ll double check,” I told Rae.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We trailered the horses over as the sun began to set. It was red and orange all splashed across the sky as we found a place to park that wasn’t too crowded. But it turned out that everyone was keen to show under the lights and avoid the dreaded heat and even I had to admit that I’d rather battle the mosquitos than the heat. Rags wasn’t so sure though. He barreled out of the trailer like a crazy horse and stood there snorting.

  “Has he ever been shown under the lights before?” I asked Theresa but she just shrugged.

  “Great,” I said as I tied Rags up to the trailer and hoped he would stay that way. “She is trying to kill me.”

  But I didn’t have time to babysit the big horse because I hadn’t been excused from my work duties so this time I had to get ready to show and help everyone else at the same time.

  “Isn’t this exciting?” Marty said. “I’ve never shown at night before.”

  She brought her mare Roxy, who was pretty laid back and had been on the show circuit for a while. I knew that she would take care of her rider, unlike Rags, who now looked like he was about to blow fire out of his nostrils.

  “For goodness sake, take him over there and lunge him for a while,” Rae told me as Rags swung back and forth and nearly kicked one of the client’s horses.

  “Yes, okay,” I said, relieved to take Rags away from all the action.

  I found a flat piece of grass over by the trees. It was quiet and dark and I let Rags gallop around because there wasn’t really much else I could do. I couldn’t control him. I didn’t think anyone could. I was just glad that it was dark so that no one could see. I knew that he was excited but he was going to have to tone it down a notch if we were going to get round in one piece. I didn’t even know what class we were riding in. Hopefully not a very technical one. And I thought of Jessica and how she would laugh at me if I failed and say that I should stick to riding ponies so I had to do well to prove to her that I was more than just a pony rider. And to prove it to myself as well. My life back home seemed so far away now. The horses I rode and the classes I’d won. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was proving myself here and now.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Did he find his brain?” Shelby asked when I finally walked a sweaty Rags back to the group.

  “No,” I said. “But he’s too tired to worry about it now.”

  “He looks disgusting,” Jessica said. “I hope you don’t expect to show him like that.”

  “Of course not,” I said, thinking of the bath I gave the horse before we left and how all that effort had been for nothing.

  I took Rags over to the wash rack and hosed him off.

  “It’s a good job you’re not gray,” I told him. “And don’t you even think of rolling.”

  I took him back to the trailer and tied him up with a hay net but he still fussed.

  “I think I’m going to have to hold him,” I told Shelby. “But I can’t do that and my work as well.”

  “I’ll cover for you,” she said. “It’s not fair that you should have to think about riding and working at the same time.”

  “And it’s not fair that we should have to do all the work while she gets a free pass,” Jessica said. “If you help her, I’ll tell.”

  “What, are we in pre-school now?” Shelby said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’ll figure something out.”

  In the end it turned out that Rags was happy to be tied up, he just wasn’t happy about it if he had to be near the other horses. There was a tree a few yards away and I hung his hay net on a big branch and then tied him up. I stood there watching him for a few minutes, making sure that he wasn’t going to do anything stupid like try and pull the tree out by its roots and drag it behind him but the tree was huge and Rags wasn’t that strong. He was stupid though and I didn’t want him to hurt himself. I fetched him a bucket of water, wishing I could dunk my head in it. The sun may not have been beating down but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t still hot. The ground gave off the heat that it had absorbed during the day. I could feel my feet burning through my boots.

  “Do you think you could cook an egg on the ground?” I asked Shelby.

  “Probably.” She nodded. “We should try it tomorrow. Or we could just throw one at Jessica. Do you know what she told me? She said that I was tacking Roxy up wrong. I’ve only been helping Marty with her horse for two years, I think I know what I’m doing.”

  “We’re going to have to watch our backs,” I whispered. “I don’t trust her.”

  “I don’t trust her either,” Shelby said. “But Rae seems to like her.”

  We watched as Jessica handed off Infanta to Rae and said something. Rae smiled and then laughed. I’d never been able to get her to laugh like that. I wanted her to like me and I knew that it was childish but I didn’t just want her to like me. I wanted her to like me the best.

  I watched as Rags tossed his hay net around and ate his hay, calm and cool now. I wanted Rae to notice that I’d figured out how to calm the horse but she was too busy talking to Jessica. I wondered if she was telling her that she’d be able to ride Rags instead of me if I did badly. Or that she’d be able to ride her own horse because even though Rocket wasn’t the best looking horse in the world, he still looked like more of a jumper than my pony did and I was still left feeling like the outcast again, all cactus and prickly just like Jordan told me I was.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My nervousness about showing a clearly unhinged horse was washed away by the excitement of being at a big show at night. The classes in the large ring were being shown on the JumboTron. We hung on the fence and watched as Rae galloped her gray mare Infanta around a big course of jumps. She had an unlucky rail at the last fence and we
all groaned as she came out of the ring because we knew that meant she wouldn’t make it to the jump off.

  “Next time,” Rae said, handing her horse off to Julio but not before patting her neck. “You can’t win them all.”

  “I think that you can win them all,” Jessica mumbled under her breath.

  Shelby and I looked at each other. We knew that Rae had a very clear motto. That hard work and dedication to the sport was what mattered. She’d been on that golden throne once upon a time, the one where she’d had the best horses handed to her on a silver platter and all she’d had to do was steer them around a hunter course and looked pretty. She’d also had that life taken away from her. In fact, I had more in common with Rae than I’d ever realized, except for the fact that I hadn’t fallen as far as she had because I’d never actually been that high but still, it made me want to be like her. Jessica obviously didn’t though.

  “See,” Shelby whispered as we ran back to the trailer. “She won’t last.”

  But I thought that Shelby was wrong. Where Jess was loud and brash and said whatever she wanted, Jessica was cunning. She wasn’t like that around Rae and would never have said anything about winning to her face. She was sneaky and the sneaky girls were the ones you had to watch out for.

  I helped a couple of clients get their horses to the ring, dousing them with a double coating of fly spray before they went in. The mosquitos were bad. It was like they’d just showed up for an all you could eat buffet and our horses were the meal. Apparently we were too.

  “Do you think this stuff will kill me if I spray it on myself?” I asked Shelby, holding up the bottle and seeing the tiny warning printed so small that you could barely read it. “I’m pretty sure it says this stuff is toxic or something.”

  “If it’s good enough for the horses, its good enough for us,” she said. “Give it here.”

  We sprayed each other with the citronella scented spray and inhaled a good cloud of it in the process.

  “If I die, I’m blaming you,” I told Shelby.

  “If you die it won’t be my fault,” she said. “It will be that crazy black horse’s.”

  She pointed to where Rags had twisted himself around the tree to the point where he was about to hang himself.

  “Great,” I said. “Stupid horse.”

  I ran to rescue him and after I’d untied him, Rags stood there looking all innocent like he didn’t know what had happened.

  “You know what you did,” I told him. “I know you do.”

  Luckily it was time to warm up for my class so I tacked him up and rode into the warm up ring where Rae was schooling Marty.

  “Are we in the same class?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Rae said. “It’s a nice easy low jumper class so hopefully he won’t go crazy.”

  She looked at Rags like she was kind of embarrassed that he was representing her barn. Or maybe she was just embarrassed by me and the fact that I couldn’t control him as well as she’d hoped I would. I just wasn’t sure which it was.

  “You’ve got it in the bag,” Marty said. “I’m so nervous, I might puke.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I told her. “Look at how relaxed Roxy is.”

  The mare was standing there swishing her tail lazily. If I was sitting on a horse like that, I wouldn’t have been worried at all. As it was Rags seemed to have forgotten the meaning of the word stand. He was too distracted by the shadows that the lights made on the ground and the other horses trotting and cantering by him. I patted his neck and tried to soothe him with my voice but his muscles felt like coiled steel and I was pretty sure he couldn’t even hear me.

  “Your job is to go in there and push your mare forward,” Rae told Marty. “No lazy bones tonight. I want to see a nice forward stride to every fence. Got it?”

  “Right.” Marty nodded.

  “And your job is to keep Rags calm and quiet,” Rae told me.

  I wanted to ask her how exactly I was supposed to do that but since she hadn’t offered any kind of explanation I didn’t think I should ask for one. After all, I didn’t want to look dumb. What if next time she really did ask Jessica to ride instead of me.

  “All right,” Rae told us as a trainer walked away from a red and white vertical. “Let’s claim this one and see you guys go over it a couple of times.”

  Marty looked at me and gave a nervous smile. I gave one back. Both of us had completely different objectives going into the ring and yet both of us were just as nervous and scared.

  “I thought showing was supposed to be fun,” Marty said.

  “It is,” I told her. “Look on the bright side, at least your horse isn’t trying to kill you.”

  “True,” she said. “But if Roxy grinds to a halt in front of a fence, I think Rae will be just as disappointed as she will be if Rags barrels straight through one.”

  “We’ll just have to make sure none of those things happen then won’t we,” I told her. “Don’t worry. We’ve got this.”

  I raised my hand and gave her a high five before circling Rags away. I wasn’t sure we had this at all but they said that confidence was half the battle so I had to at least believe that we did.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Marty and I walked the course with Rae while Shelby held our horses. I knew that she was really giving her advice to Marty, who was the paying client, so I tagged behind and counted my own lines. Having shown Rags once before, I knew that he had a big stride and was more than likely to get to the fences quicker than I thought he would. That meant that even though the goal was to go slow and steady, I still had to have a plan in place for if I couldn’t slow him down.

  And the ring was spooky. We were in the middle ring, which didn’t have the distracting and potentially horse eating JumboTron but it also had less lighting. This meant that there were spooky shadows at the base of nearly every jump and the corners were bathed in them, hiding the crowd and the people hanging out on the fence to watch. I winced as some kids ran past screaming and laughing. I was going to have to tune all that out but would Rags be able to? As soon as we got out of the ring I ran to the trailer to find some cotton balls and stuffed them into his ears. Rags shook his head a couple of times but then seemed to settle.

  “You should put an ear net on him too,” Shelby said. “You know, so he doesn’t toss them out.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  I ran back and fetched one, a black crochet net with gold piping. I wasn’t sure who it belonged to but it was laying with the communal stuff that was supposed to be available for everyone to use so I just hoped that I wouldn’t get in trouble. I couldn’t help thinking that Rags did look especially spectacular. I’d put a black saddle pad on him because it was the only clean one I could find and with the black and gold ear net and the tiny gold beading that ran along his browband, he looked like a million bucks.

  “I’d pay big money for this horse,” I said as I took the reins back from Shelby.

  “I would too,” she said. “If I didn’t know any better.”

  “He just needs someone who doesn’t mind his quirks,” I said.

  “I don’t think such a person exists,” she said, shaking her head.

  But I understood his quirks. He was a little more off the rails than I would have liked and I knew that I couldn’t trust him, not for one second. But I understood him and that had to count for something.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Marty had a slow round. She didn’t use her leg like Rae had told her to and Roxy ambled around the course like she was out for a stroll with an elderly lady. At one point she practically ground to a halt and then jumped from a standstill, unseating Marty who clung to her neck for dear life. For a moment I thought she was going to push herself back into the saddle but when she slipped sideways, I knew that it was all over. She flopped to the ground and Roxy just stood there looking down at her as if to say, what on earth are you doing? She was up on her feet again in seconds, unhurt but embarrassed and the crowd gave her a round of ap
plause for walking out under her own steam and not needing an ambulance.

  “Bad luck,” Shelby said.

  “It’s because I didn’t use enough leg,” Marty replied, looking rather downtrodden.

  “You’ll get it next time,” I told her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking defeated. “I think I’m getting too old for this.”

  I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t have had a safer mount and the fact that Roxy just stood there and waited for her made her worth her weight in gold and also made it worth Marty’s time to be a better rider for her.

  “If Rags dumps me off, he’ll be out of the ring before I’m even back on my feet,” I whispered.

  “You’d better not fall off,” Shelby replied. “Rae hates it when people fall off. She won’t go after Marty because she’s paying her but you’re not so you’d better make sure you stick in the tack no matter what.”

  “I wish I’d worn my breeches with the suede butt patches,” I said with a sigh. “But it’s just been too hot.”

  “Want me to rub some glue on your butt?” Shelby asked.

  “If you think it will help,” I said.

  We watched a couple of the other riders go. The course was easy. There was no reason why we couldn’t do well but it wasn’t the course that was the problem, it was Rags. He was the wild card. But I thought about all the difficult horses I’d ridden over the last few years. The ones who had all taught me something different. How I now had an arsenal of tools to use, knowledge that I could adapt and shape to fit any horse. It didn’t mean that I was some kind of miracle child rider or that I was better than anyone else. It just meant that I was blessed with good riding genes and had put in a lot of hard work. Hours in the saddle every day that was now paying off.

  “That’s you,” Rae told me as they called my number. “Remember, slow and steady tonight.”