Free Horse Wise by Bonnie Bryant

friends would be having her friends learn about it from somebody else—especially Veronica diAngelo! Lisa had to tell them soon.
    “I will,” she said out loud to the cool evening. “I’ll tell Stevie tonight. Right now, in fact. Then it won’t be a horrible secret anymore and I can stop worrying about it.” Just saying it out loud made her feel better. She was practically skipping by the time she mounted the steps to Stevie’s house, and she was definitely skipping when she climbed the stairs to Stevie’s room.
    “Look at these guys!” Stevie said, proudly showing Lisa one of her radish pots. “I mean look and see what Mother Nature has done here!”
    Lisa dropped her sweat shirt on Stevie’s bed andjoined Stevie at her desk, where the lamp on it was totally focused on “Pot Number One: Light and Water.” At first, Lisa didn’t see a thing. Then, when she took a closer look, she detected quite a few little greenish-white sprouts pushing up through the dirt.
    “They’re growing!” Stevie said. “It’s really working. Aren’t they just so cute you can’t believe it?”
    At first, Lisa thought that cute was a strange word to describe the tiny radish shoots, but the more she thought about it and the more she looked, the more she decided Stevie was right. “Definitely cute,” she agreed. “And how about the other pots?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Great, that’s just the way it’s supposed to be,” Lisa said. “See, I told you it would be easy.”
    “I’ve decided something,” Stevie said. “As soon as this crop of radishes is ready to be harvested, I’ll call you and you can come over and have your choice of the bounty of my science experiment. I’ll even provide the salt—that is, if you like your radishes with salt. All because you’re a real friend.”
    Lisa knew that Stevie said it to be funny and to thank her. Stevie was being so nice that Lisa felt guilty. It was time to be a real friend and tell Stevie her secret.
    Stevie didn’t seem to notice that Lisa had something on her mind. “I was at the stable today,” she said. “I left my backpack in my cubby after Horse Wise on Saturday. So, of course, I had to go get it because Ihad my homework assignments written on the back of The Letter, which was still in the backpack. Anyway, guess who else was there? It was good old Veronica diAngelo. Was she there to exercise Garnet and take care of her, groom her, and things like that? No, she was not. She was there because she wanted to check the color of Garnet’s blanket against samples she had for a new pair of riding pants and jacket. She wanted to match her clothes to the blanket so they’d be color-coordinated when they had their picture taken together. Can you believe her?”
    “No, I can’t,” Lisa said truthfully. “Sometimes it seems like we’ve seen everything, but when it comes to Veronica, I’m afraid we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Some people deserve horses. Veronica definitely doesn’t.”
    Stevie took out the chart she’d devised for noting the progress of her seedlings and carefully measured the tallest of the radish plants. It was three eighths of an inch high. She wrote that down and then wrote large zeros in the other columns. “It feels like a real accomplishment,” she announced, replacing the pots on the windowsill. “I’m actually going to have all the information I’m going to need to do this science project right. You are such a pal.”
    “Thanks,” Lisa said. She didn’t feel like a pal. Stevie’s comment about Veronica and Garnet brought back all of her doubts about sharing her secret. Half an hour later, when Lisa returned to her own room andthe Wars of the Roses, she still hadn’t told Stevie about her parents’ decision to buy her a horse.
    “A N IMPORTANT PART of being a Pony Clubber is keeping your own horse’s health and maintenance book,” Max told the members of Horse Wise the following Saturday.
    He handed each club member