Stevie (28 page)

I couldn’t help gloating a little over that. And I couldn’t help saying something to Miss Fenton about it. “So,” I said casually, wanting to be subtle. “Does this mean my report was better than, say, any other special assignments you’ve read lately? Say, today?”

I guess I wasn’t quite subtle enough. She must have followed my gaze to Veronica’s paper and figured out what I was driving at. But instead of getting mad or stern or something, she just looked sort of sad. Or sympathetic, maybe.

“It’s really too bad,” she murmured. At first I thought she was mad at me for peeking. Then I realized she seemed to be talking mostly to herself. When she noticed I was listening, she seemed to come to some sort of decision. She
hemmed and hawed a little, but finally, after swearing me to secrecy, she told me about Veronica.

After the first few seconds I was so shocked and stunned by what I was hearing that I don’t remember exactly how Miss Fenton explained it ail. But the upshot is that Veronica’s grandmother has been pretty sick lately. In fact, until just this past weekend they were pretty sure she wasn’t going to make it.

But that’s not all. Apparently Veronica and her grandma are really, really close. So that’s why Veronica has been having so much trouble in school lately—and why she’s been acting so weird. She was worried about her poor sick granny!

I can imagine what you’re thinking as you read this, Dinah. Like me, your first thought is probably that Veronica just invented some fake granny to weasel her way out of trouble. But after nosing around a bit during the rest of the day, I found out that it’s the truth! Veronica has been spending all her free time visiting her grandma in the hospital over near Cross County. She’s been giving her extravagant gifts (like this really expensive scarf that Lisa saw her buying), calling her twenty times a day (including a few times from Pine Hollow), and generally moping around alone and being miserable (instead of making everyone else’s lives miserable like usual). The more I found out, the more the pieces fell into place. It explained why she had been missing a lot of school and Pony Club meetings. And all her other weird behavior, too.

So here’s the million-dollar question: Could Veronica
diAngelo, the snob we both know and despise, actually have a human side to her personality? A soft, sympathetic, and (shudder)
likable
side that actually cares so deeply about a sick relative? It hardly seems possible, and yet …

I managed to push the whole topic out of my mind during the trail ride with my friends, but I’ve spent most of the last twenty-four hours thinking about it. Two days ago I couldn’t have imagined feeling the slightest bit of sympathy for Veronica, ever. But now I’m not so sure.

Luckily, Veronica’s granny is on the mend. I checked on it by calling the hospital and pretending to be Veronica (though I had to hang up fast when the nurse tried to put me through to the patient’s room). So at least the sympathy is unnecessary now.

Still, it makes me feel kind of weird—almost queasy, actually—to think about what this all means. So I’ve decided not to think about it ever again after I finish writing this e-mail. And I’ve vowed never to breathe a word of it to anyone in Willow Creek, even my best friends. Actually, make that
especially
my best friends. They’re already much quicker to forgive or ignore Veronica’s rotten behavior than I am. If they knew she might actually be human, they’d probably never go along with one of my brilliant practical jokes on her again.

And then how would I manage to have any fun at all?

Bonnie Bryant is the author of more than a hundred books about horses, including The Saddle Club series, Saddle Club Super Editions, the Pony Tails series, and Pine Hollow, which follows the Saddle Club girls into their teens. She has also written novels and movie novelizations under her married name, B. B. Hiller.

Ms. Bryant began writing The Saddle Club in 1986. Although she had done some riding before that, she intensified her studies then and found herself learning right along with her characters Stevie, Carole, and Lisa. She claims that they are all much better riders than she is.

Ms. Bryant was born and raised in New York City. She still lives there, in Greenwich Village, with her two sons.