Love Story(63)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Suit yourself,” Tommy said, “but you’ll have a hard time avoiding the party tomorrow night. It’s here.”

He backed down the hallway. I heard the door close and watched the truck pass in front of the house, toward the mansion. In a few minutes the truck passed again, headed for the interstate. Tommy was in the passenger seat and Hunter was driving.

Now that they were gone, I looked around. I was sitting on Hunter Allen’s bed. Eat your hearts out, girls in Gabe’s class! And I saw why Hunter had looked so horrified at the idea of me staying in his house. The walls were covered in glossy posters of fast cars and movie starlets wearing thongs. This shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d probably tacked them up when he was fourteen. It surprised me anyway to discover that Hunter was a teenage boy after all, and that he was—what was the word he’d used in his comment on my first story?—gauche.

I crawled to the head of the bed, taking way more pleasure than I should have from the sensation of his rough bedspread rubbing my skin, and got a closer look at his walls. Taped between the posters were certificates for his academic awards. First place, seventh-grade math tournament. First place, tenth-grade science fair. Senior-class valedictorian. He’d won everything but the writing contests. Those were mine.

I sat back against his headboard, as he must have sat up reading every night, and surveyed the whole wallpaper of white diploma-like rectangles superimposed on the larger images of trashy pop culture. That’s when I saw the cardboard sun, six feet across, behind his dresser where a mirror should have been, with the tiny planets floating in front of it, Earth the size of his thumbnail.

14

Bundled against the cold wind, I walked up the lane, past my grandmother’s mansion, and over the hill to the stables, built a hundred years before of solid wood and limestone and covered in ivy, picturesque to a tourist who didn’t know better.

Most of the staff had gone to Churchill Downs. Only a skeleton crew was left to care for the horses that weren’t racing. I slipped easily into the office and changed into the riding clothes I’d left in the closet, and my helmet. Very important: always wear a helmet. I could feel that my clothes were looser than they’d been when I left, but luckily the office didn’t have a mirror. I transferred the apple I’d snagged from Tommy’s refrigerator from the pocket of my overcoat to the pocket of my riding coat.

I walked through the rest of the front stable where we kept the money-making horses we liked visitors to see, the race winners and their parents and offspring, through the large gravel courtyard empty but for a few pies that kept their smell to themselves in the cold air, into the back stable and around the corner.

Blinked at the white horse in the corner stable. Either I’d forgotten the layout of the barn in five months away, or Boo-boo was missing.

Digging my fingernails into the apple in my pocket, I walked quickly through the cold barn, glancing at the horses that peeked out of their stalls, searching for a stable hand. When I found a new guy grooming a brown gelding, I tried to keep my voice calm but it came out a croak. “Where’s Boo-boo?”

He looked around at me, startled. I watched the realizations march across his face: this was a stranger, this stranger had red hair like Mrs. Blackwell, this was the prodigal granddaughter everybody had been talking about, the one dragged back from college by Tommy Allen’s boy. Then a touch of fear that the stables had sold off the girl’s favorite horse and she would have a fit. This man looked like he’d been slapped by a spoiled brat before.

“Boo-boo,” I said impatiently. “High and Mighty. By Rocky Mountain High out of Might Is Right.”

“Oh!” As he realized he was not in trouble, his shoulders relaxed. He pointed with his grooming brush toward the other end of the back stable. “Rock Star has taken a shine to her. We moved her next to him because she calms him down. Want me to saddle her up for you?”

“No thanks,” I said, hurrying toward my horse. The new guy had not gotten the memo that nobody saddled horses for the old lady’s granddaughter. Tommy had seen to that. He’d taught me that if I wanted something done right, I had to do it myself.

Relief flooded me as Boo-boo poked her head out of her stall to see who was coming, ears pricked up. When she saw me, her ears moved forward. If I’d been twelve, I would have sworn to anyone who would listen that Boo-boo recognized me and loved me. However, I was eighteen. I knew better. I was holding the apple out in front of me.

The time in the stall was always the hardest for me. My body tensed, waiting for the horse to rear, and my brain kept replaying the accident I hadn’t seen.

Boo-boo was a thoroughbred, looming and nervous like all of them. But she was relatively sweet tempered. Tommy had picked her for me when my grandmother insisted that he put me back on a horse a week after my mother died. Boo-boo’s soft, surprisingly nimble lips plucked the apple out of my palm. As she chomped, I stroked the side of her head firmly, as Tommy had taught me. Cooing “Boo-boo-boo-boo-boo” to her, I squeezed the terror out of my brain. The way to stay safe was never to let a horse know I was afraid. I wiped the apple juice on my jeans and put up my hand to make sure I was wearing my helmet before I ventured farther into the dark stall to find the tack.

Riding was dangerous, with the constant threat of being thrown and trampled, but ironically, once I was up in the saddle and away from Boo-boo’s legs, I felt safe. I directed her out of the stable—she was in great spirits today, kicking up her heels and shaking her head as if bragging to the other horses that she was going for a run and they were not, ha ha, so there—and I trotted her across the paddock to the back pasture. Then I loosened the reins and let her go. She loved to run.

Normally I loved it, too, the green grass flashing past, the bright fall trees, the cold wind in my face, the always foreign feel of a huge animal galloping underneath me. Today I was sore. Every step of the horse jarred my hip and sent a ripple through my back. Even my fist gripping the reins was sore after grazing Hunter’s hard jawbone. After a few minutes of riding I grew used to the pain and settled in for a long ride. Usually Boo-boo and I dashed out for a gallop after school, and then I had friends or homework or reading to occupy me. Today I decided we would explore every corner of the farm. I had nothing else to do besides study history and calculus, and I might never be back.

Something inside me died that long afternoon while Hunter was at the races. I finally lost all hope in my dad. He was not coming for me. He did not harbor a secret wish to become reacquainted with me. He was not dying to complete our family but was prevented from doing so by foreign spies. He had left me to bury my mother and my grandmother to raise me, and he had moved on with his life. If he had anything to do with it, I would never hear from him again.