Free The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter by Holly Robinson Page A

looks for a test run. “Tell your brother I have a crush on him,” I told Katy.
    We had been lying next to each other at the pool, turning every ten minutes for an even tan, though my face wasdoomed to be pale because I always held a book up and read while sunbathing. Now I put the book down and watched as Katy, a big-boned blonde whose bathing suit never quite covered her fleshy behind, sauntered over to her equally big-boned blond brother and told him of my true and undying feelings.
    Her brother squinted down at me from his lifeguard stand like Zeus observing the silly games of humans from Mount Olympus. Then he said something to his sister and turned away to blow his whistle at a boy jumping off the side of the pool. Katy trotted back, grinning, and flopped down on the towel beside me.
    “He says you’re not much in the face,” she dutifully reported. “But you’ve got a great body. He said that he’d meet you after school if you want to learn how to French-kiss.”
    Later on, my face still burning from this assessment, I climbed onto a chair in the middle of my bedroom and started hissing cuss words. “Shit, bitch, fuck, crap, cunt!” I whispered viciously at the ceiling. “Damn, puke, crap, bastard!”
    I ignored Donald, who sniggered just outside the door, until Mom came and pushed the door wide open.
    “There,” she said. “This way we can all hear you better. You must have something pretty important to say if you’re standing up on a chair.”

    M Y ONLY passion, other than my new bikini, was horses. I’d wanted one ever since I was a child, when I’d seen my mother climb onto the back of her Thoroughbred in Maine and ride off with a queen’s distracted wave. For years I’d been readingevery horse book I could find and living a rich fantasy life filled with mounts of every description. I had pretended that my pink and white bicycle was the Black Stallion as I raced the streets of Virginia, and I paced our hallways in Kansas as if I were leading my headstrong mustang pony causing my parents to threaten to send me to charm school if I couldn’t learn to “glide, not bounce,” as Mom implored.
    The Fort Leavenworth Hunt Club was paradise. The tack room to me was like the opium den to Sherlock Holmes. There were saddles and bridles and saddle blankets exuding those intoxicating odors of horse sweat and saddle soap. The wooden boxes were filled with brushes and crops and curry combs and hoof picks. Men and women strode about purposefully in canary-yellow jodhpurs and black knee-high leather boots. And, of course, there were the horses, snorting and whinnying and running in the paddocks or munching hay in their stalls, their heads bobbing over stall doors, ears pricking as I whispered secrets to them or fed them carrots and apple slices out of my pockets.
    I became a barn rat, helping other riders turn their horses out in the paddocks, where they rolled about in the dust, or volunteering to groom. I especially liked currying the horses’ coats in slow circles, making the animals arch their necks in pleasure like big dogs being scratched behind the ears. I loved using the shedding blade, too: this was a long silver blade with sharp teeth and leather handles at either end that you pulled along the horses’ bellies and flanks to make the loose hair rise in feathery wisps on the breeze.
    If I didn’t have a horse to work with, I’d just follow the older girls around, watching them closely as they flirted withthe prisoners on work parole. The girls stood with one hand on a jodhpur-clad hip or tucked their hair beneath their velvet hunt caps as they smiled up at the angry, rebellious, muscle-bound men who did the cleaning and carpentry around the stables. I saw the power in these girls, power that came from their horses and the confident way they tamed these huge beasts with a cluck of the tongue and a bit of leather and leg.
    I wanted to be them. I wanted to be like my mother. And, like the girl