Free Rocking Horse by Bonnie Bryant Page B

said so.”
    “Oh, Max!” Stevie paced the aisle in fury. “He and Veronica are acting just alike! What was it Meg said? She felt like Cinderella? We’re Cinderellas! Don’t you see?”
    Lisa did see, and despite the awfulness of the situation, she had to laugh. “Sure,” she said. “That’s us exactly. Max is the wicked stepmother, Veronica is the wicked stepsister—”
    “Danny must be a toad or something—the ugly toad—”
    “Wrong fairy tale,” Carole cut in. “But it doesn’t matter, because it all means the same thing. We can’t go to the ball.”

T HE S ADDLE C LUB stared glumly at Danny. The horse, looking for another carrot, nosed at them hopefully. The mud didn’t seem to be bothering him, though Carole knew it could irritate his skin if it was left on him for a long time.
    “Do we have to?” Stevie wailed.
    Lisa slumped down onto a hay bale in the aisle. She put her chin in her hands. “There’s ‘have to’ and ‘have to,’ ” she said. “Nobody can force us to clean up that horse—”
    “—and the stall, and the tack—”
    “Right. But I think it’s probably best if we do. Max looked pretty serious.”
    “He
can’t
think that we would do something like this,” Carole said, sitting down beside Lisa.
    Lisa looked sideways at her friend. “Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t even care who did it. Maybe he’s just sick of this stuff going on at his stable, and he wants to stop it, and he thinks this will do the trick.”
    “If Veronica wins here,” Stevie moaned, “she’ll torment us forever. Not that it matters, because as soon as I get to the dance, I am personally going to take her out.”
    “Which brings up another point,” Lisa said. She chewed on the end of her hair, something she tended to do when upset. “How do you think we could actually get
to
the dance, if and when we’re ready to go? My parents are out of town, remember? They went to see my aunt.”
    “And my dad’s supervising weekend maneuvers at some base down in Georgia,” Carole said. Her father was a colonel in the Marines.
    “And my parents will kill me if we call them out of the theater,” Stevie said. “We told them Max would take us home. Where’s Mrs. Reg?”
    Carole shook her head. “Gone. I don’t know where, but if she were here, some of the lights in the house would be on.”
    “Maybe we could walk to the school,” Stevie suggested.
    “Six miles, at night, in my sandals?” Lisa said. “Besides, we’d have to cross a highway. We can walk back to Stevie’s house, but we can’t walk to the school.”
    “The highway means we can’t ride there, either,” said Carole. “It would be too dangerous for the horses.”
    “We could hitchhike.”
    “Stevie!” Neither Lisa nor Carole took that seriously.
    Stevie sighed. “I guess we’re stuck. When’s Max getting back? Where did he go, anyway?”
    Lisa shrugged. “I never heard him say where he was going. If they took Maxi, they can’t be out that late.”
    “Unless they were dropping her off with Deborah’s mom,” Carole said. “Then they could be out all night.”
    “In which case, we don’t have to clean the horse until morning.”
    “Stevie, you know we do. Besides, if we’re stuck here, we might as well start working.”
    They got out their grooming buckets, but Danny was still a hopeless case. The mud on his body hadn’t fully dried, and until it did, brushing it would only drive the dirt farther into his coat.
    “We’ll have to wait until he’s all the way dry, thenwhack the big clods out with stiff brushes,” Carole said. “Then curry and brush him forever to get out all the dust.” She groaned. Grooming was never easy when the horse had rolled in mud, and Carole had never seen an animal more thoroughly coated than Danny. Restoring him to his usual pristine state was going to take forever, even with three of them working.
    “We’ll start on the stall,” Lisa said. “I’ll put him on the