Free Stable Manners by Bonnie Bryant

to do in order to hitch the pony to the wagon. May talked constantly, naming each piece of the harness, explaining where it would go, how to put it there, and what it would do. Stevie followed her directions to the letter and within ten minutes, Nickel was completely hitched to thewagon. During the entire process, Lisa hardly moved at all. She pasted a smile on her face that nobody believed.
    Stevie and May invited her into the cart for a ride. Lisa climbed in back while May and Stevie sat in the driver’s seat and drove Lisa around the ring once. It reminded Lisa of the very first time she’d ever touched a pony. She’d been four years old and her parents had let her have a pony-cart ride at a local park. She remembered that, at that time, she hadn’t known anything at all about horses and had dreamed of a day when she might know a lot. Lisa wondered now when that day might come.
    Once the cart had circled the ring, Max dismissed the class. Carole and Stevie helped Lisa and May, but mostly May, remove the cart and the harness from the pony.
    Max came over. Lisa dreaded hearing what he had to say. She had totally failed and she knew it. She’d been under the mistaken impression that the only person who had had anything to learn was May. The fact that May
had
learned was good, but May hadn’t learned the way Max had wanted her to learn. Max had wanted Lisa to
teach.
However, a teacher who was unwilling to learn could never teach. Lisa had let May down, she’d let Max down, and worst of all, she’d letherself down. She’d totally blown an opportunity to learn and to help. Max was certainly furious with her and he was right to be. Lisa braced herself for the worst.
    To her surprise, Max put his arm around Lisa’s shoulder while he spoke to May.
    “May, you’ve done a lot of work,” he said. That, at least was true. “I’m really impressed.” Then he spoke more slowly. “I think we’ve all learned a lot from this first attempt at Big Sis/Little Sis projects, haven’t we?”
    “I sure have,” May said. Everyone knew that was true.
    “Me, too,” Lisa mumbled. That was true, too, but Lisa had done all her learning in the last five minutes. Max gave her shoulders a warm squeeze. Somehow he just knew.

T HERE WAS MORE unfinished business and all three girls knew it. Although it was time to leave the stable, go home, do homework, bone up more on the Know-Down material, and sort out what really happened to Lisa, none of the three of them was ready to proceed. There was something else they had to do first.
    When their own horses were completely tended to, they gathered at the paddock where Samson, the stable’s colt, had been playing. Stevie had her grooming bucket. Although Samson didn’t seem particularly in need of a grooming, the girls were particularly in need of something to do while they talked. Carole clipped a lead onto Samson’s halter and they began groomingthe coal-black colt. He liked the attention. They were glad for the opportunity to talk while they combed and brushed.
    “It was awful,” Lisa said. “I just completely missed the point.”
    Her friends didn’t say anything. They agreed, they understood. They knew it could have been them.
    “The point wasn’t to be sure May knew all that stuff. The point was for both of us to learn—to learn together. May won’t always be there when I want to hitch up a pony to a wagon. And Stevie won’t always be there to make me look good. I can pretend to Max, maybe even to you two.…” She looked at her friends. “All right, not to you two, but anyway, I can pretend to other people. Who I can’t pretend to is the horse. I mean Nickel isn’t exactly able to tell me how to do it, is he?”
    “No,” Carole answered. “And that’s the core of it, isn’t it?”
    Both Stevie and Lisa knew that Carole wasn’t just talking about Lisa then. She was talking about the three of them. She was talking about the Know-Down. “You’re not the only one who