Wild Horse Spring (3 page)

“Someone needs to go after her, Lynn. She could get lost in the woods.”

“I don’t think she’ll go so far that she’ll get disoriented. Diana has an excellent sense of direction. Remember the way she found her way around the ranch last summer?”

“Right after sneaking out in the middle of the night.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure she won’t try that again, aren’t you?”

“Not sure at all, Lynn. I wouldn’t put it past her to try it again. And Stephanie will go along for the ride.”

“You have to trust her more, Norm.”

“I will when she gives us a reason to trust her.”

I stood on the steps, holding my breath, my hand on the banister. Making a decision, I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt, and then, taking a deep breath, I walked downstairs as loudly as I could.

“All unpacked?” Lynn said brightly.

“Yep,” I said. “I’ll go look around and find Diana.”

“Well … okay,” Lynn said, glancing at Daddy.

“Don’t go too far,” Daddy said.

“Okay.” I went down the steps and through the yard, following the hoofprints of the horses in the sand. The beach grass waved in the breeze, and blowing sand hit my legs, stinging lightly.

The sound of an engine floated toward me from the beach. A boy on a beat-up, red ATV came over the dune and stopped on the path. At the summit of the dune, he took off his helmet and shook it, maybe to get sand out of it. Even from this distance, he looked very cute, with a tanned face and glasses. If he had been at my school, all the girls would have been crazy over him. He looked a little older than me.

Someone my age!

He glanced over and caught me staring. For a split second, our eyes met.

The boy replaced his helmet and pulled down the visor, then roared right by me. The wheels of the ATV blew sand on my legs. I waved at him and smiled as he drove by, just to be friendly. Then he followed the path into the woods.

As I headed for the stand of trees, the sand squeaked under my flip-flops. The trees were gnarled and squat, with long, sinuous limbs and shiny leaves. Twigs grasped at my skin, and there were burrs on the sand and prickles on every branch of every bush.

I craned my neck to see between the trees, but it was dark and tangled. The path the boy and Diana had followed turned a corner beyond a crooked tree, and I couldn’t see where it went. I glanced back at the house.

Daddy was standing out on the front steps, watching me, his hands on his hips. I plunged into the woods and started down the path.

I
followed another turn in the path and ducked under a low-hanging pine branch. When I came out into the open, there they were, fifty yards away, gathered on a shaded grassy slope between two dunes. I stayed still and tried not to move or scare them.

They were shaggy, all right. Sturdy looking, with slim, graceful necks. Norm had said they were descendants of mustangs that swam ashore from Spanish shipwrecks. It reminded me of my favorite movie,
The
Black Stallion
. He’d been shipwrecked on that island with the boy. I thought about how the boy got to know the wild horse, and how they formed this intense relationship one tiny step at a time. Could I do that with one of these horses?

They were sorrel, chestnut, bay, and black. One of the sorrels looked almost like a palomino, light red with a blonde mane and tail. The stallion was black, like his foal. He stood highest on the dune, keeping watch, while the four mares grazed on the sea grass. The foal had his head under his mother’s flank, nursing. The horses swung their long tails as if they were sweeping the ground, almost in unison, back and forth, back and forth. Such an amazing and peaceful scene. I pinched myself to make sure this was real.

I thought about picking a number for my mood and chose a four. Just about perfect.

“Hey there,” I said quietly, under my breath. “How are you guys doing?”

Their ears moved a bit, but none of them laid their ears back, so I felt like they weren’t that scared of me.

I thought I’d sit here in the sand watching them for a while, then slowly move closer and closer. That was what the boy in
The Black Stallion
had done. They’d get used to me being here and know I wouldn’t hurt them. Maybe by the end of the week, I’d be able to ride one of them. That would be the coolest thing ever.

I watched them stand and graze, their tails swaying back and forth like metronomes, and then amble slowly from one section of grass to another.

I’d probably need to bring food to coax the horses into trusting me. I was sure Mom had brought carrots and apples.

For a long time, I just sat and watched, sliding closer every few minutes or so until I was about fifteen feet away. I was close enough to see the grass tremble near their nostrils as they grazed. The foal, my favorite, had begun to nurse again.

The sun shone in my eyes. Seagull cries wafted through the air. The rhythmic crunch of the horses eating the grass filled my ears, and the scent of the horses floated over to me. I picked up a handful of sand and let it fall through my fingers like an hourglass. Was it possible to be any happier?

Then I heard a noise behind me. I turned around. Stephanie!

I held my finger to my mouth. “Shhh!”

Stephanie’s mouth was hanging open. She didn’t come any closer at first, and I could tell the horses scared her. Well, too bad. I turned back to watch them, trying to think of a name for the foal. Maybe a Spanish name, since the horses were descended from Spanish mustangs.

“Diana!” Stephanie whispered. She came a few steps closer and knelt on the sand. “I came to get you. Daddy and Lynn didn’t know where you were.”

“Tell them I’m right here.”
Duh
.

“They want you to come back. They want you to unpack your stuff.”

The horses’ ears twitched. Gradually they started moving away from us. Though you could hardly notice the slow, casual way they drifted away.

“You’re making them leave!” I hissed at her.

“Sorry.”

The horses were even farther away now.

“I might not ever see these horses again. This might be my only chance.”

“I’ll stay just a minute.” Stephanie shrugged and sat down beside me. “Aww, that foal looks like a little angel,” she said. “A little dark angel.”

“Dark Angel,” I said. Stephanie could be annoying, but I grudgingly admitted that was a pretty good name.

But now the stallion decided he wanted to move the herd. He walked behind the others with his head lowered and urged them ahead. I had seen the geldings at the barn do this with mares, and Josie, our barn manager, had explained it to me. The horses’ compact bodies slid between the trees, and in a few minutes the whole herd had disappeared into the forest. Dark Angel too.

I yanked up some grass and threw it on the ground. “Thanks a lot, Stephanie.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” Stephanie said. “I don’t want Daddy and Lynn to get mad at us.”

I stood up, kicking sand. I headed back toward the house without looking back at her. She caught up with me. “I just don’t want things to be bad on our vacation.”

“Leave me alone!” I stomped through the stand of pines and prickly bushes, pushing branches out of my way, trying to leave her behind.

Before we went back to school, Stephanie really tried hard to get along with me. But once she got to school and started making new friends, she stopped trying as hard.

One of the things I always heard people saying about Stephanie was that she was nice to everyone, and that was true. I’d never seen her be mean. And sometimes that drove me crazy. Sometimes I just felt crummy and felt like being mean. How could she be nice all the time? And then I wondered, is she just being nice to me because she’s always nice, or does she really care about me? Last summer, when we’d helped the wolves, I had been pretty sure she really cared, but after watching her with people at school, I wasn’t so sure.

When I told Dr. Shrink about it, she said maybe the
reason I thought people didn’t like me was because of my insecurities about my dad, since he was always letting me down. So I was always waiting for other people—like Stephanie, and my mom—to let me down too. “Diana, do you think that maybe sometimes you are testing people?” Dr. Shrink asked once.

I thought about it a minute. “What if I am?” I asked. But now, at last, Dad wasn’t letting me down. I was really going to visit him in just a few days. And it was going to be different this time.

Stephanie and I headed out of the woods and into the open just as the sound of motors bore down on us, increasing in volume. And then two ATVs screamed by, both carrying guys in jeans. They weren’t wearing helmets. One guy had a buzz cut, and the other had wavy blond hair.

“Whoo-hoo!” both riders yelled when they saw us. The first guy lifted the front two wheels of his vehicle a few inches into the air.

“Whoa!” Stephanie cried as we jumped back to keep from getting pelted with sand. Then we dashed down the path, back toward our house, scraping our arms and legs on the prickly bushes. We ran until we were gasping for breath. Finally we slowed to a walk.

“Well, that was rude!” Stephanie said.

Now we were coming more out into the open, close
enough to see the rooftops of the two houses in our little area, and we heard a motor approaching again.

Around the corner, from the direction of the beach, careened another sandy, mud-splashed, red ATV. This rider was thin and was wearing a gray T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. He passed us, the roar of the ATV motor exploding in our ears, sand churning out behind him in an angry cloud. His helmet made him look like a bird of prey.

“Him again,” said Stephanie, wiping sand off her arms.

Looking at the curve of his back as he went by, I could practically count his ribs through his T-shirt. The bottoms of his jeans were wet, so he must have been riding in the surf.

“That’s a different guy,” I said.

“I know. I saw him when I started looking for you.”

We continued past a grassy dune and down the sandy, rutted road toward our house. The boy had pulled up beside the yellow house next to ours and took off his helmet.

“That must be where he’s staying,” Stephanie said.

He had wavy, black hair and wore glasses. Something about the slimness and curve of his neck reminded me of the wild horses. He looked a little older than we were.

When we walked by, Stephanie waved at him, and
after a second’s hesitation, he waved back. Then he turned away, hooking the helmet under the seat of the ATV.

“I guess you’re friends already?” I said sarcastically. When we were at the mountain ranch, Stephanie had met a guy in, like, five minutes.

“No, I just think it’s nice to wave, that’s all.” Stephanie glanced at me with a look of surprise. She pulled a long piece of her dark hair over her shoulder and twirled it between her fingers. “I think he wants to get to know us. Otherwise, why did he drive so close to us and spray us with sand?”

“Because he’s a jerk?”

Stephanie laughed and danced a little beside me. “I think he’s cute.”

“Stephanie! He looks older than us.” I looked at the sand beneath my feet, watching my flip-flops. I realized the little dance had been for the boy’s benefit.

“So?”

I could feel her beside me, still acting like she thought he was watching her. I was so embarrassed! I could feel myself turning red and was glad when we had passed safely by.

The sun dropped lower in the sky, and the shadows on the sand grew longer. We climbed the stairs to our house, but both of us, at the same time, looked back
in the direction of the boy before we went inside. He was gone.

“There you are,” Mom said as soon as we got inside. She folded empty grocery bags and put them in a drawer. “You can’t run off like that, Diana.”

“I just wanted to see the wild horses.”

Norm came out of the bedroom carrying the camera bag. “Diana, this is not a very populated area, especially since we’re here in the off-season. You shouldn’t wander around following those horses without telling us where you’re going.”

“That’s right, sweetie,” Mom broke in. “Who knows what could happen, and we don’t even know if our cell phones work.”

“Mine does,” Stephanie said. “I checked.”

“Everyone is unpacked except you, Diana,” Norm said. “Why don’t you unpack your stuff?”

I walked over to the window and stared out at the sand and water. Just because Norm said I had to do something didn’t mean I had to do it.

“I’ll do it later,” I said.

I didn’t look at him, but I could feel the waves of anger coming off of him. I just stared out the window, pretending he wasn’t there.

“Why don’t you do it now,” he said. But it wasn’t a question.

Now he was turning this into a standoff. What difference did it make if I unpacked now or later? All he wanted to do was show that he had power over me. I couldn’t stand that. Nobody had power over me. If only I could be like the wild horses, going wherever I pleased whenever I pleased.

I waited for Mom to intervene, taking my side, the way she usually did, but instead she took his side, which was humiliating.

“Come on, Diana,” she said. “Go upstairs and unpack your stuff.”

“We can either have a good vacation or a bad vacation; the decision is up to you,” Norm said.

“Thanks for bringing her back, Stephanie,” Mom said.

Mom tapped her temple in the signal we’d developed with my doctor to tell me to think about what I was doing. I pretended I didn’t see her do it. Of course, Stephanie was their perfect little daughter, and I was the bad one.

More and more, Mom and Norm were ganging up on me.

“Come on, Diana, I’ll go upstairs with you,” Stephanie said. “I picked one of the rooms, but see which one you like better.”

Without talking to anyone, I started up the stairs
with my suitcase. I would show them. Maybe they’d wake up one morning here at the beach and find me gone. Maybe I’d go live with the wild horses. Maybe they’d have to call the police and comb the beach for miles around. Or maybe I would just go live with Dad. Norm would feel guilty for being so hard on me. Stephanie would wish she’d been a better stepsister, and Mom would be heartbroken.