Rocking Horse (9 page)

He turned on his heel and started walking toward the door. The girls looked at each other in stunned silence. “But we’re going to a dance,” Stevie said quietly.

“No,” Max said, without turning around, “you
thought
you were going to a dance. I’m afraid you have work to do.” The stable door shut behind him with a click, and the girls could hear the car pulling away. They looked at each other hopelessly.

“He can’t really think—” Carole said.

“He does,” Stevie said. “Wow. He really thinks we did it.”

“He’s just so angry right now,” Lisa guessed. “He might listen to us later—like, in about a week or three.”

“Right. But what about tonight?”

They surveyed Danny in silent gloom. He looked truly horrible. Mud made his mane stand up in tufts like a punk rocker’s hair. “Poor boy,” Carole murmured, patting the one non-muddy spot on his nose. “Who would do something like this to you?”

“I guess we have to clean him up,” Lisa said with some reluctance. She felt sorry for Danny, but she didn’t like being blamed, even temporarily, for something she didn’t and wouldn’t do.

“You guess?” Stevie said. “Do you want to have Max come back and see this horse like this again? He’d kick us out of the stable forever, if he didn’t kill us first.”

“Plus, it’s not fair to Danny,” Carole said. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

Lisa blew out her breath. She looked at her new white sweater. “Let me go see what else I can wear,” she said. Unfortunately, she’d cleaned her cubby out that afternoon, and, like her two friends, had taken most of her grubby old clothes to Stevie’s house. They were in the Lakes’ washing machine at this very minute.

“Oh, no,” Stevie said, realizing what Lisa was thinking. “That was lousy timing, wasn’t it? And I felt so virtuous, putting all that laundry into the machine.”

It was true. Even combining all that they had in their three cubbies, plus everything they could drag out of the lost-and-found box, they couldn’t do much to protect their party clothes. Stevie found some crusty socks and exchanged her sandals for cowboy boots, but she was still stuck in a skirt. Lisa put on a pair of Carole’s old paddock boots instead of
her sandals, and Carole managed to exchange her leggings for a pair of breeches, but that was all.

They had just gone back to Danny’s stall when they heard the main door open. Carole’s first thought was that it was Max, back already, and he was going to be furious. But it was worse than Max. It was Veronica. She was wearing an ivory satin ensemble, dance shoes, and tons of jewelry, and she flipped her lustrous hair in The Saddle Club’s direction as she walked to Danny’s stall.

“My,” she murmured, raising an eyebrow at them, “he is a mess, isn’t he? When Max phoned, I was so … surprised. But then, I’d been getting ready for the dance all afternoon. I took a mud bath—so good for my complexion.” She grinned.

Lisa heard a strangled noise that she guessed was Stevie trying to hold her temper.

“It’s such a shame that you girls won’t get to come to the dance,” Veronica purred. She held a carrot out to Danny, and he took it. “But then,” she continued, giving The Saddle Club another glance, “I can see by the way you look that you weren’t really planning on going. Stevie, those boots are adorable—and that skirt is just right for cleaning stalls.”

Stevie lunged toward Veronica, but the other girl was already tripping back toward the door. “Mustn’t keep the chauffeur waiting,” she said. “Toodleoo.
And don’t forget, I like all my tack oiled except for my saddle.”

“I’ll kill her,” Stevie spit. They heard Veronica’s car pull away. “Did you see her face? And that comment about mud baths? She set this whole thing up! She did it! I hate her!”

“We don’t have a choice,” Lisa said grimly. “We have to clean Danny up. Max said so.”

“Oh, Max!” Stevie paced the aisle in fury. “He and Veronica are acting just alike! What was it Meg said? She felt like Cinderella? We’re Cinderellas! Don’t you see?”

Lisa did see, and despite the awfulness of the situation, she had to laugh. “Sure,” she said. “That’s us exactly. Max is the wicked stepmother, Veronica is the wicked stepsister—”

“Danny must be a toad or something—the ugly toad—”

“Wrong fairy tale,” Carole cut in. “But it doesn’t matter, because it all means the same thing. We can’t go to the ball.”

T
HE
S
ADDLE
C
LUB
stared glumly at Danny. The horse, looking for another carrot, nosed at them hopefully. The mud didn’t seem to be bothering him, though Carole knew it could irritate his skin if it was left on him for a long time.

“Do we have to?” Stevie wailed.

Lisa slumped down onto a hay bale in the aisle. She put her chin in her hands. “There’s ‘have to’ and ‘have to,’ ” she said. “Nobody can force us to clean up that horse—”

“—and the stall, and the tack—”

“Right. But I think it’s probably best if we do. Max looked pretty serious.”

“He
can’t
think that we would do something like this,” Carole said, sitting down beside Lisa.

Lisa looked sideways at her friend. “Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t even care who did it. Maybe he’s just sick of this stuff going on at his stable, and he wants to stop it, and he thinks this will do the trick.”

“If Veronica wins here,” Stevie moaned, “she’ll torment us forever. Not that it matters, because as soon as I get to the dance, I am personally going to take her out.”

“Which brings up another point,” Lisa said. She chewed on the end of her hair, something she tended to do when upset. “How do you think we could actually get
to
the dance, if and when we’re ready to go? My parents are out of town, remember? They went to see my aunt.”

“And my dad’s supervising weekend maneuvers at some base down in Georgia,” Carole said. Her father was a colonel in the Marines.

“And my parents will kill me if we call them out of the theater,” Stevie said. “We told them Max would take us home. Where’s Mrs. Reg?”

Carole shook her head. “Gone. I don’t know where, but if she were here, some of the lights in the house would be on.”

“Maybe we could walk to the school,” Stevie suggested.

“Six miles, at night, in my sandals?” Lisa said. “Besides, we’d have to cross a highway. We can walk back to Stevie’s house, but we can’t walk to the school.”

“The highway means we can’t ride there, either,” said Carole. “It would be too dangerous for the horses.”

“We could hitchhike.”

“Stevie!” Neither Lisa nor Carole took that seriously.

Stevie sighed. “I guess we’re stuck. When’s Max getting back? Where did he go, anyway?”

Lisa shrugged. “I never heard him say where he was going. If they took Maxi, they can’t be out that late.”

“Unless they were dropping her off with Deborah’s mom,” Carole said. “Then they could be out all night.”

“In which case, we don’t have to clean the horse until morning.”

“Stevie, you know we do. Besides, if we’re stuck here, we might as well start working.”

They got out their grooming buckets, but Danny was still a hopeless case. The mud on his body hadn’t fully dried, and until it did, brushing it would only drive the dirt farther into his coat.

“We’ll have to wait until he’s all the way dry, then
whack the big clods out with stiff brushes,” Carole said. “Then curry and brush him forever to get out all the dust.” She groaned. Grooming was never easy when the horse had rolled in mud, and Carole had never seen an animal more thoroughly coated than Danny. Restoring him to his usual pristine state was going to take forever, even with three of them working.

“We’ll start on the stall,” Lisa said. “I’ll put him on the cross-ties.” She haltered Danny gingerly, then led him out to the aisle. Danny rubbed his head enthusiastically across Lisa’s shoulder. “Oh, Danny!” Lisa cried, looking at the streak of mud running down her new white sweater. “How could you!”

“Simple,” Stevie said, coming out of the stall with Danny’s grimy water bucket. “Mud itches, and you looked good for a scratch.”

Lisa was fighting back tears. She’d had such hopes for this night. “See how many jokes you make when it’s your clothes that get ruined,” she spit at Stevie.

Stevie put down the water bucket and displayed a muddy skirt. “I can never take down full buckets without leaning right against them,” she said. “And, of course, I always splash water on myself.”

“I’m sorry,” Lisa mumbled. “It’s just mud, after all. It’ll wash out. Only—I keep thinking—Bart finally decided to go to the dance—”

“I know,” Stevie said. “I keep wondering what Phil is going to think when I don’t show up. I hope he won’t be angry.”

“He won’t be angry at you,” Carole said. She was handling a wheelbarrow very gently to try to keep her own shirt clean. “He might get worried, but he’ll understand once you tell him what happened. How are we going to get the mud off the walls in here?”

Stevie and Lisa went into the stall. “Maybe brushes?” Lisa suggested. “A broom?”

“A power water hose,” Stevie said.

Carole raised her eyebrows. “That would do it, but where would we get one? I guess a broom is our best bet.” They started whacking at the dirt smeared on the sides of Danny’s stall. The brooms did remove it pretty well, but instead of just falling to the ground, the dirt seemed to fly up into their clothes, faces, and hair. Soon they all looked as though they’d been dipped in powdered dirt. Lisa sneezed.

From the office, they could hear the phone ringing. It sounded very far away. “Just ignore that,” Lisa said. “It’s after hours; the answering machine will pick up.” The phone stopped ringing, but after a moment it started again.

“It’s Max checking up on us,” Stevie decided. She ran down the aisle and caught up the receiver. “We’re still here,” she announced.

“What I’d like to know is what you’re doing there
in the first place,” Phil said. “Though when you didn’t show up here at the dance, I knew you couldn’t be anywhere else. Belle’s not sick, is she? Are you okay?”

At the sound of his sympathetic voice, Stevie nearly dissolved. “Oh, it’s so awful!” she wailed. She told him the whole story.

“That really stinks,” he agreed. “I’m using the pay phone at the corner of the school, and I can see Veronica from here. She’s dancing with some eighth-grader—some stylish-looking red-haired guy.”

“I know him,” Stevie said. “Carole and Lisa told me all about him. His name’s Stone or Rock or something like that. Apparently he’s new in town, and all the girls have this huge crush on him. He’s rich, too. I can’t believe it. Not only does she get to go to the ball, she even gets the town prince.”

“What?” Phil asked.

“Never mind.”

“Well, I wish I could help, but I don’t see how I can, aside from pulling down the whole tent on their heads. In a few years, when I have a driver’s license and a car—”

“—we should be just about finished cleaning this horse.” Stevie laughed despite herself. “It’s so hopeless. You have no idea.”

“I’ll see what I can do about the tent,” Phil promised. He hung up, and Stevie trailed dispiritedly back to her friends.

“I’m glad he won’t be worried about us,” Carole said.

“Did Bart come?” Lisa asked.

Stevie put her hand over her mouth. “I forgot to ask. I’m sorry!”

Lisa snorted. “What difference does it make? It’s not like it changes anything. I’m here, no matter where Bart is.”

Half an hour passed. They decided the stall walls looked as good as they were going to look. “He’ll need fresh bedding,” Carole said. She grabbed the wheelbarrow again.

Lisa ran her hand along the top of Danny’s back. “He’s still wet. It’s amazing how thick this mud is.”

“Come on,” Stevie said to her. “We can get started on the tack.”

They went into the tack room but ran back out when they heard Carole scream, “Danny!”

“I was the only one of us who looked even halfway clean,” Carole said. “Now look!” Danny had blown green horse slime across the front of her sweater. “He’s ruined it!”

“If you sort of look sideways at it and squint,”
Stevie offered, “the green looks like part of the pattern.”

“Oh, it does not,” Carole said crossly. “This whole evening is a disaster.”

“I know,” Stevie said. “What we really need is a fairy godmother.”