The a Circuit (12 page)

Tommi had almost forgotten about their summertime tradition of Tuesday-night post-lesson pizza. For a second she was tempted to beg off, wanting to head home and wait for her father. But why bother? He’d call or text her when he was ready to discuss it. Might as well distract herself in the meantime.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m in.”

“Cool.” Fitz grinned. “I was just telling Zara about it. She’s not sure she wants to hang out with us losers, but I think I’ve almost convinced her to give it a try.”

Tommi knew he was just joking around, but that didn’t stop her stress from spiking as she glanced at Zara. “I don’t know, doesn’t really seem like her kind of scene,” she said. “The press won’t be there to cover it or anything.”

“Funny,” Zara shot back with a scowl. “That the best insult you could buy with all your daddy’s billions, Tommi?”

“Shut up.” Tommi glared back. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Ditto.”

“Guys,” Kate spoke up, sounding nervous, “take it easy, okay?”

“Yeah,” Marissa put in. “Let’s just order the pizza and have fun.”

Fitz nodded. “Zara, you like mushrooms?”

Zara didn’t answer right away, and for a second Tommi thought she was about to storm out. But then her mouth twisted into a humorless half smile. “Yeah, but not on my pizza,” she said. “Pepperoni for me.”

Tommi rolled her eyes. However long it took for Zara’s antics to get her kicked out of the barn, it couldn’t be too soon.

ELEVEN

Kate was thinking back over everything she’d done wrong in the lesson when Fitz slid onto the bench beside her. “What’s up?” he asked, nudging her with one elbow. “Something wrong with your pizza?”

“Huh?” Kate blinked at him, then glanced down at the untouched slice in her hand. “Um, no. Just not very hungry, I guess.”

She set the pizza down on the bench and wiped her hand on a napkin. The tack room had turned into a party. The pizza boxes sitting on the big bandage trunk in the center of the room were half empty. Summer and Marissa were over by the bridle wall laughing at something Zara was saying, while Dani was leaning against a saddle rack talking to Tommi. Hugo, Chaucer, and a couple of the other dogs were circling like sharks, hoping for their share of the pizza.

Fitz crammed the rest of his slice into his mouth. “Food of the gods,” he pronounced after he’d chewed and swallowed. “So you and Fable ready to kick the eq world’s ass, or what?”

Kate grimaced. “If I keep riding like I did today, I couldn’t even win a short-stirrup class.”

“Come on.” Fitz licked tomato sauce off his fingers. “You did fine. Even Jamie would’ve had his hands full when Fable was in that kind of mood.”

“I don’t know about that.” Kate stared into space, in too serious a funk to pay much attention to the way Fitz was leaning toward her, their shoulders almost touching. “I feel like Jamie has all this faith in me, but I’m not sure I can live up to it, you know?”

“Jamie’s not a moron,” Fitz said, tossing a stray bit of crust into Hugo’s eager mouth. “If he thinks you can do this, who are you to question him?” He grinned.

Kate forced a weak smile. “I guess. But everybody’s wrong sometimes, right?”

“Ah, Kate. So beautiful and yet so down on yourself. It’s tragic.” Fitz shook his head. “I think maybe it’s time for a reality check. You weren’t around yet when I started doing the eq, which means you didn’t get to see me the time the judge called for us to ride without stirrups in the flat phase and I fell off. At the walk.”

“Really?” Kate stared at him, not sure whether to believe him or not. “What’d Jamie say?”

“He pretended he didn’t know me. For like a week.” Fitz grinned and stood up just long enough to grab himself another slice of pizza. “Then there was the time I had to do a rollback to a skinny vertical. My horse decided it would rather swerve past the second jump and jump the first one again, backward this time. I ended up hanging halfway off his neck over the top, and on the other side he bucked me off into a bunch of flower pots that were decorating another jump.”

This time Kate was pretty sure he had to be exaggerating at the very least. But Marissa had turned to listen. “I remember that,” she said with a laugh. “You looked like some kind of cartoon character with those flowers on your head.”

“No way. I looked sexy. Daisies are totally masculine.” Fitz took another bite of pizza. “But wait,” he said through a half-chewed mouthful, “I almost forgot about the time I mounted my very first Short Stirrup pony backward. Rode half the course before I realized my mistake.”

By now everyone else in the room had turned to listen, too. Kate laughed along with the others. Okay, so she was pretty sure that last story wasn’t true. But weirdly enough, Fitz’s tall tales were already making her feel a little better.

Yeah, she’d been less than stellar today. So what? It wasn’t the first time she’d felt like she didn’t know what she was doing. And it wouldn’t be the last. That was life with horses. She’d just have to work harder and ride better next time.

Halfway across the room, Zara wasn’t thinking much about riding. She’d put the bad lesson out of her head as soon as it ended. Why dwell?

“Fitz is a riot, isn’t he?” Dani said as they listened to him start another long, humorous story about embarrassing himself in the ring. “Only like half of what he says is true. But all of it’s usually pretty entertaining.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty cool.” Zara watched Fitz gesture wildly along with his story. She noticed he was sitting awfully close to Kate and wondered if he had something going with her. “Do you know if he’s seeing anyone?” she asked Dani.

Dani rolled her eyes. “Always,” she said. “He’s a total player.”

“Oh, yeah? You know that from personal experience?”

Dani giggled. “You could say that. He’s a lot of fun as long as you aren’t looking for anything serious.”

“Interesting.”

Dani shot her a sidelong look. “Go for it, Zara,” she said. “It’s practically, like, a rite of passage to ride here.” She giggled again. “Once you’ve been Fitzed, you’ll totally be one of us!”

Zara laughed. Okay, maybe this girl wasn’t a bitch after all. In fact, everyone was being pretty nice to her. Maybe trying to make up for Tommi’s freak-out before the party.

She shot a look at Tommi, who was standing by herself sucking on a soda. Her eyes were a million miles away. Zara shrugged and tuned back in on Fitz.

“… so after that disaster, I had to lie low for a while, since nobody here would talk to me, or admit they rode with me,” he was telling Kate.

Summer’s eyes opened wide. “Seriously?” she said. “That’s sooo mean!”

Marissa giggled. “He’s lying, Summer,” she said. “You know how you can tell when he’s lying?”

“His mouth is moving!” Dani called out. She traded a high five with Marissa.

“I’m hurt, ladies.” Fitz put a hand to his chest, clearly enjoying every second of the attention. “Truly wounded to the core.”

“So how long have you all been riding here, anyway?” Zara asked. “I mean, the way you guys are talking, it sounds like most of you have been with Jamie since you were still making wee-wee in your diapers.”

“Just about,” Marissa said. “I think Fitz and Tommi have been here the longest, right?”

“Almost ten years,” Fitz confirmed.

“I started a couple of years after that, and then Dani came,” Marissa went on, stroking Chaucer’s big round head as she talked. “Summer and Kate have been here about two or three years.”

Summer nodded. “I used to ride at this totally lame barn on Long Island,” she said. “But Jamie’s way better. You’ll love it here, Zara.”

Zara shrugged. “Well, the pizza’s pretty good,” she said. “But I’m not sure about the trainer yet.”

“Don’t be too hard on Jamie, Zara,” Kate said with a smile. “He can be tough, but only because he wants us all to be our best.”

“Hmm.” Zara wasn’t too sure about that. But she had to admit it was kind of sweet to hear the way they all talked about Jamie and the barn. Different. Maybe sort of weird. But sweet.

Dani wandered off to get another soda, and Zara walked over to join Marissa and Summer. They were talking about some show that was coming up soon.

“If Jamie makes me do the eq at that one, I’ll probably die,” Marissa moaned. “I get soooo nervous at the bigger shows! Hunters is about all I can handle. At least there I know the judge is looking at the horse, not me.”

“Don’t worry. If you fall off, I’m sure your boyfriend Javier will be there to pick you up.” Summer smirked as Marissa blushed.

“Javier?” Zara said. “You mean that groom who, like, never has anything to say?”

“He’s probably just not totally comfortable speaking English yet,” Marissa said. “He only moved up here from Mexico like three months ago.”

“Marissa’s taking Spanish in school, so that means they share two languages,” Summer said. “Español, and the language de amor!”

“Hey, go for it.” Zara shrugged. “He’s not exactly Señor Personality, but he’s cute.”

Marissa sighed happily. “I know, isn’t he adorable?”

Zara was distracted by seeing Fitz leave the room. “Yeah. Be back in a bit,” she told the other girls. “I need to make a pit stop.”

“You know where the bathroom is, right?” Summer asked eagerly. “I can show you if you don’t.”

Zara shook her head. The girl was such a puppy dog it was pathetic. “Stay put,” she ordered before Summer could get up. “I’ll find it.”

Slipping out of the tack room, she looked up and down the aisle. No sign of Fitz. She wandered toward the bathroom, figuring he was probably making a pit stop himself.

While she waited, she found herself looking around the barn, which somehow seemed very different at this time of the evening. It was getting late; the horses had been fed, and most of them were turned out for the night. Jamie had long since disappeared to his house on the hill behind the grass jumping field.

She could hear an occasional burst of laughter drifting out of the tack room halfway down the aisle, but otherwise the barn had a quiet, peaceful feel to it. Not like her old barn. There had been so many people at the busy, crowded equestrian center that it was never still and empty like this. Sort of like New York City—it was the barn that never slept.

But this place was different from that one in a lot of ways. Some of them good, some not so hot. Some she wasn’t sure what to think about yet.

She heard a door swing open and snapped out of her reverie. Glancing down the aisle, she saw Fitz emerge from the bathroom.

Zara smiled as he looked up and saw her. Okay, this was one way her new barn had it all over her old one. Wetting her lips, she sidled toward him.

“What do you think, Tommi?”

Tommi blinked and stared at Marissa, realizing she had no clue what the girl had just said. “Um, what?” she asked. “Sorry, guess I spaced out for a sec.”

Marissa shrugged. “We were just talking about the Hounds Hollow show,” she said. “Think they’ve improved the footing in the warm-up rings?”

“Oh. I dunno, probably. A lot of people complained last time.” Tommi couldn’t care less about the footing at the upcoming show. All her focus was still on her talk with her father. Had it been a mistake to propose buying Legs for resale? Could she really pull off something like that?

Tommi wasn’t the type of person to doubt herself. In fact, she got frustrated with Kate sometimes for being so wishy-washy and insecure about her own abilities.

But right now, she had an inkling of how Kate must feel when she got like that. Because Tommi had never felt so uncertain about anything in her life. Was she being silly to think she could do horses as a career? Wouldn’t it be easier to go off to some great college like her family expected and just ride on the side? She wasn’t like Callie—she could make it all work if she was devoted enough.

She realized Marissa was talking to her again. But by now Tommi was too worked up even to fake interest. “Excuse me,” she blurted out. “I just remembered I—I think I left my gloves in the wash stall.”

Soon she was out in the quiet of the main aisle. She wandered along without any particular destination in mind, wishing that Legs was in so she could go visit him, remind herself what this was all about. But he was turned out in the cool night air along with the rest of the horses.

Most of the other horses, anyway. Tommi heard a sudden thump from a stall up ahead. That was a little weird. Especially when it was followed by another thump, and then a weird groaning sound. Was a horse in there colicking or something?

Suddenly worried, Tommi hurried forward. The door to the stall in question was standing open, and she glanced in, expecting to see one of the grooms or maybe the vet in there with the ailing horse.

But no. There was no horse in the stall at all. Just Fitz and Zara making out like porn stars!