Free Centaur Rising by Jane Yolen Page A

these days, because it’s sure not on your riders and our horses, but I shouldn’t have done it because, as Mr. Angotti always says, ‘Don’t threaten what you’re not gonna do!’”
    Martha rumbled, “Hold your horses, lady!”
    That’s when I noticed Joey’s hair.
    He has the same hair as his mother’s, only without the white bits. This morning he had pieces of straw stuck on the left side, so he looked like he had the part of Scarecrow in a school play of The Wizard of Oz .
    Straw , I thought, suddenly really worried.
    Mrs. Angotti took another short breath. And then she was off again, speaking in that run-on way.
    â€œSo we up and came back here just to check on things, even though I’d already said we weren’t coming back and Mr. Angotti said we should stay at home, but I knew Joey wanted to say good-bye to Bor, ’cause he dearly loves that horse so much, and Angela at first decided not to come, she has a boyfriend she needs to talk to twenty times a day, which ties up the phone line for hours! You should see the way she lies on the sofa and twists the cord up around her shoulder! But I told her that if we were gonna move her horse, that Marzipan, who sometimes acts like a snooty prom queen and needs our full attention, she had to be on board with it—Angela I mean, not Marzipan, who just needs a good pull and a slap on the behind, and she’ll do as she’s told, Marzipan I mean, not Angela, ’cause these days, even if I wanted to lift a hand to her, which I don’t, I’d hardly get her to do anything if I got physical, which is what happened to my dad when he used his belt or the back of his hand on any of us, ’cause I can’t actually move Marzipan alone, you know. And after Joey and I saw Bor—and by the way, that stall’s not very clean, not your usual standard—I said we had to leave, and he said in a minute and took a carrot out of the bag and ran back, and I thought he was going to give it to Bor, on account of how much he loves that horse, but he’s like his father and can’t ever do what he’s told or what he should, gets awfully distracted, you know—and suddenly he’s back again with a face white as my mother-in-law’s pasta—which is something you should try, put some real meat on those bones of yours, and on your girl, too—saying something about a freak!”
    She took a big breath this time.
    â€œHe didn’t !” I gasped. No one calls my brother names. And that was when everyone noticed me.
    Mom was up on her feet, a hand to her mouth. Dr. Herks had gotten up, too, holding on to Mom’s arm. Martha had started forward toward Mrs. Angotti. And Robbie dropped his book on the floor, his face scrunched up as if he was trying hard not to cry.
    But nothing was going to stop Mrs. A now. She was like a horse with the bit between its teeth.
    â€œI should’ve,” she said, “slapped him for fibbing, except the one thing Joey doesn’t do is tell lies! He’s not above really stretching the truth now and then for effect, only we call it storytelling, and as Mr. Angotti likes to say, ‘Just because it isn’t so doesn’t mean it isn’t true,’ which makes sense the longer you think about it! So I let Joey lead me over to the other stall, the one that’s quarantined—which is a strange word, but so are most q words, like quince and quota , which will get you a lot of points in Scrabble—and I looked where he was pointing in the stall when he twitched the blinds aside.”
    While I was puzzling over all these new revelations about Mrs. Angotti, as well as her sentence structure, Mom interjected, “You didn’t !”
    That was unfortunate, because it gave Mrs. Angotti the chance to take another really deep breath, and then she was off again, hands waving about as she talked.
    â€œI did, and a good thing I did, too,