SIXTEEN
Horses are not like dogs in ways that are both obvious and kind of annoying.
Like if it was a dog, I feel pretty sure you could ask it, “Hey, where’s your mom/dad/owner? Please take me to them.” Although I don’t know if Monty would take you to me, if you found her somewhere wandering on her own. I think Monty would just wag her tail and look at you expectantly and then walk in a circle and lie down.
As soon as I reached up to take hold of the reins, the horse jerked its head like I’d insulted its favorite band and let out an angry whinny.
“Okay, okay. Uh, easy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
As I took another step forward, the horse stumbled backward again like I was waving a firecracker in its face. At which point I realized I was kind of dressed like a glittery flag.
“I get it,” I said, my voice calm and quiet. “I’m dressed up. It’s fringe. Not everyone likes fringe.”
I lowered my arms and stood quiet and still for what felt like hours, until finally, I think looking for an apple, the horse stretched its head out toward me. Slowly I reached out my hand and closed my fingers around the reins.
I was a girl with a pair of roller skates and a horse and nowhere to go.
At which point I realized, because I’d been calling out for good signs, that while this horse felt a little fortuitous for me, it was also, very possibly, a bad sign for whoever was riding him before I found him in the river.
Wait. Him?
I looked.
Yep. Him.
“Hey, friend.” I put my palm on his neck, which was sweaty. “Are you Gilly’s horse? You look like Gilly’s horse. You wouldn’t happen to know where she is, would you?”
It was very difficult to tell if the look I got back was a murderous look or a disinterested one. Like when Monty does something even slightly bad, you can see it in her eyes immediately. I guess horses are like cats, that way; cats being the most duplicitous and hard-to-read creatures on the planet. (Bjorn comes and demands pats just minutes after barfing on my bed, and you can’t tell at all that he’s done something wrong.)
I took hold of the saddle, increasingly off-kilter as it continued to slide around the horse’s. . .waist? So it was almost under his belly. Upon closer inspection, one stirrup was unbuckled and looked like it had been. . .pulled.
Lending a little bit more than a bit of worry to the situation.
“Where is Gilly? Huh, buddy? You remember? Is she okay?”
As if on cue, the horse, aka Buddy, turned and started charging through the woods, yanking me along with him. As I tried to keep up and not get trampled, a million images flashed through my brain, none of them good. What if Gilly was lying on the ground with a broken neck or something? I mean, I thought this as someone whose mother (or one of them) is convinced that roller-skating means at some point I’m going to end up brained on the side of the road.
Which I’d always thought—until today—was an overreaction.
I scanned the distance for signs of a reason for alarm.
Clearing the thicker trees, we broke out into a field of tall grass. At which point I spotted the first clue; a lone riding boot in the mud.
Crap.
I cupped my hands to my mouth, “GILLY!”
The horse picked up the pace, basically dragging me over the grass as I ran next to him, my heart beating as I searched.
“GIL-LY! GIIIIIIIIIIILLY!”
A distant voice carried over the breeze. “Hello?”
My feet sinking into the mud, I yanked on the horse’s reins, which apparently you shouldn’t do because he gave me a really dirty look, but still. . .
“Gilly?”
“Uh, yeah?” a small voice called back. “I’m here! Can you see me?”
At first she was just a little blond bump on the horizon that, as we got closer, became a person sitting on the ground, like a doll that had been dropped there.
She was covered in dirt; it was in her hair and on her face and caked on her clothes. She had her helmet, also covered in mud, in her lap, her legs stretched out; one sock, one boot (to match the one in my hand). Her eyes peered out from the mud, two lights of brilliant blue.
“Hey!”
“Hey!”
“It’s Anne,” I said, because I am the most awkward.
“Uh.” Gilly smiled a dirt-covered tired smile. “Yeah, I know.”
“Um.” I held up the horse’s reins. “I found your horse.”
Gilly smiled bigger. “I see that. Thanks.”
(I just want to pause here really quickly to say that I don’t buy into damsel-in-distress tropes. Okay? I was raised by two queer women.
I know that the notion of a woman needing to be saved as a motivator for the protagonist is really just contributing to the romanticization of women as victims, and the whole thing takes away from women’s, or really anyone other than a cis white male protagonist’s, agency.
I get that.)
Anyway! I just didn’t want you to think I was, like, all happy to be rescuing Gilly.
Except that I was clearly feeling just really elated, not just that she was okay, but that I was standing there and she needed my help.
Don’t tell Millie and Lucy.
“He fricking slipped in a puddle and took off right past the fence.” Gilly threw her hands up, revealing palms also caked in mud. “I fell out of the saddle and I couldn’t get my foot out of the stirrup, so he basically just dragged me through the mud for like thirty feet.”
“Oh my gosh! Does that happen, like, a lot?”
Why do people ride horses if that can happen?
“Yeah, I mean, it can.” Gilly pulled a twig out of her hair. “I lost my phone too, so I’m really glad you came along. You’re kind of a lifesaver.”
I leaned down next to her and watched with alarm as she winced. “Are you, like, hurt? Like broken bones or anything?”
“I think my ankle’s sprained.” Gilly leaned back. “And I scratched my leg pretty good.”
That’s when I saw.
Blood.
A huge spot of blood on Gilly’s pant leg.
Hurk!
A swell of familiar nausea washed over me.
Gilly’s eyes popped open in alarm. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I, uh.” I attempted to take a deep breath. I closed my eyes and tilted my head toward the sky, like someone trying to surface from a very deep dive.
Please, oh please, Anne, do not pass out. Not in the middle of this possibly heroic moment. Not that it has to be heroic or that that means Gilly is a vi ctim —
“You look, like, not okay.” Gilly leaned forward to touch my shoulder. “You look kind of green.”
The dissonance between the feeling of Gilly touching my arm and the feeling of deep vertigo was Alice in Wonderland -ian.
“Really?” I took shallow breaths. A wave of cold washed over my face. “Um, sorry I, just a second, just.”
“Oh!” I heard Gilly shift. “Oh, are you, like, scared of blood?”
Yes.
“Um. A little? I’m so sorry; that’s so super embarrassing.”
Please don’t barf, please don’t barf on Gilly, Anne, I beg you.
“What? Ah!” Gilly cried. “Okay. Just, um, just hold on a second.” There was some scuffling. “Hold on.”
“Holding.”
“Um.”
“Once again, I’m so sorry about this.” I could feel myself listing to the left. “This is obviously not cool. I mean, you are in need, and I am kind of not being helpful right now and I get that.”
There were some more indecipherable noises then. “Okay. You can look now.”
I opened my eyes, cautiously. There was Gilly Henderson. In her bra. With her T-shirt covering her bloody ankle. Looking like a little nervous and. . .
HO. LEE. SHIT. SHE WAS IN HER BRA.
I actually stumbled backward, like someone hit me with a pillow. Or. Something. I could feel myself blushing like mad. “Oh, uh. Yes. Um. Yes, that’s fine.”
And of course because I was being so cool, let’s be honest, I’d been cool this whole time, but now, like, epically cool, then GILLY felt awkward.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Is this a problem?”
“No, not it’s not—”
“Do you need me to put my shirt back on?” Gilly looked around.
Just then the horse let out a massive, loud. . .neigh? Like this guttural metallic horse scream.
“Oh, shut up, George, you ridiculous nightmare horse!” Gilly cut him off. “This is all your fault!”
George responded with something like a wet sneeze that, if it were a word, would be spelled, “PBBTBTBTBTBTBTBBTBTTT!”
“PAH!” I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh.
It was like the dam broke. For five minutes after that, we were just sitting in the dirt, laughing our asses off.
“Oh my God, I am so weird,” Gilly moaned. “No wonder my horse is such a weirdo.”
“What?”
“This whole day is ridiculous!” Gilly’s shoulders curled forward. “I just took my shirt off!”
“So? It was so I wouldn’t throw up on you!” I said. “Who’s awkward there? Hello? Me?”
“You’re like the opposite of awkward.” Gilly sighed.
“Well, you’re one of the few people who thinks so,” I said, getting to my feet. “Can I help you back to your house or something?”
“Yeah. I mean, thanks.”
“Do you have someone you can call?” I asked.
Gilly held up her empty palm. “I lost my phone?”
“Oh, right! Duh. You said.” I pulled mine out of my pocket. Dead. “Okay, well, that’s not going to work.”
Gilly looked up at me with those blue eyes. Which had flecks of gold in them. Just saying.
“Do you think you can manage the walk?” I asked. “If I help you?”
“Yes.”
It took a few minutes to get Gilly up off the ground, and another twenty minutes of a three-legged crawl to get back to her house, with George trailing, unimpressed, behind us. For most of it, Gilly was surprisingly quiet, which I took to mean that she was in pain, but as we got closer to her house, I felt her eyes on me.
“What? Are you okay?”
“I just— I can’t believe you’re helping me,” she said quietly.
“Why wouldn’t I help you?”
“Because,” Gilly said, mostly to her stomach, “they were terrible to you. I mean, we were terrible. The sign-up sheet? I honestly didn’t know what they wrote. But I knew they were doing something. I shouldn’t have, you know, helped them.”
I didn’t want to say, “Yes, you were mean,” because I didn’t want Gilly to feel bad, but I didn’t want to say “No,” because it wasn’t true. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “This is your place?”
It was a ranch just beyond the meadow. The house was big and beige and had a paddock and a barn in the front, with loads of different machines parked, and maybe forgotten, on the front lawn. There was one of those lawn mowers you ride. Two bicycles. A wading pool that was cracked up the center.
“That’s all my little brothers’ stuff,” Gilly said. “They’re at some sports thing.”
George moseyed past the house and through another gate toward what looked like a barn.
“He okay?”
Gilly sucked in a sliver of air. “He’s fine for now. I’ll get my dad to—”
Oh, right, my caution sensors clicked on. A dad.
On cue, as we opened the door, a big voice boomed from inside, “GILLY?!”
Gilly’s dad was a giant silver-haired man in a flannel shirt. He bounded over, eyes filled with worry, a dishrag in one hand. “Where have you been? What happened?”
As he stood in front of us, I had to actually tilt my head back to take him in. He looked like a muscular Santa. He was as wide as Gilly was thin, with hands like baseball mitts. The cloud of silver hair on the top of his head was distinct from the mostly cropped hair I’d seen on other men in Greenville.
“George bolted,” Gilly explained as her father paused to, I imagine, take in the fact that Gilly was in her bra. I smiled a smile I hoped communicated that I was not necessarily (although I was) responsible for the lack of shirt. “Also this is. . .Anne. She found George in the woods and basically saved me.”
“Hi.” I waved. “I mean. I found Gilly. I wouldn’t say sa ved.”
“That damn horse!” her father boomed. Then, resetting, he turned to me and said, “Thank you, Anne, for saving my daughter from her horse, who I’m going to go shoot.”
“Dad! That’s not funny,” Gilly huffed.
“Not meant to be,” her father said as he reached out to take his daughter’s arm.
“Also don’t let Anne see the blood on my leg,” Gilly noted.
“Or I’ll barf,” I added.
Gilly’s father’s gaze darted between me and his daughter. “Right,” he said finally, carefully putting Gilly’s arm over his shoulder. “Well, why don’t we get you on the couch and then I’ll get that damn horse back in his stall before he breaks his neck.”
We got Gilly to a sofa in a living room full of big stuffed couches and a television bigger than any television I’d ever seen in my whole life. Like a wall of TV. Her father brought her a bag of frozen peas and a stool and then ran out the door. I grabbed a stray sweatshirt on a chair and handed it to Gilly.
“Do you”—I looked over my shoulder to give her privacy and to see if her dad was going to bound back in the door—“want me to go?”
“OH,” Gilly said. “Do you want to stay for, like, a snack or something? Or will your moms worry?”
“No. I can stay.” I pulled out my cell. “Can I charge my phone?”
It was entirely possible Lucy was home and wondering if I was sitting in the woods with a sprained ankle.
“Yes.” Gilly brightened. “You can charge your phone and then possibly have a snack?”
“Do you have, like, awesome snacks?” I teased. “I feel like you keep pushing the snacks.”
“Hospitality.” Gilly pointed at a chair. “Have a seat. My dad will get us something when he gets back. My father is also very into snacks.”
He was. As soon as he got back, he made us both root beer floats in mugs I initially mistook for pitchers. Also, whose idea was it to put ice cream in root beer? It’s genius!
“Thanks, sir,” I said as I took the glass.
“Just call me Bob,” he said, moving toward the doorway. “You kids relax. I’m going to call the doctor.”
So there I was, on a Saturday, in the living room of Gilly Henderson, getting a pretty solid ice cream headache.
I didn’t want to move because I thought if I moved the whole thing would turn out to be a very weird but amazing dream. Although, as soon as I got a wisp of a charge I sent my parents a quick “I AM OK” message.
“So.” Gilly took a long slurp. “I just wanted to tell you. I thought your audition was really compelling.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes,” Gilly gasped. “Your singing, the acting. It was amazing. It was just very professional.”
“Wow.”
“Now, I’m just blathering on.” Gilly looked down at the couch.
“What? No. That’s all really nice things to say,” I said. “I was going to tell you that you did really great too!”
“Thanks.” Gilly sloshed the last bits of ice cream around in her mug. “I liked the song too. The one you sang. What was it?”
“ ‘I Will Survive.’ ”
“Really?” Gilly looked momentarily confused. “It didn’t. . .sound like ‘Survive’?”
“Possibly you’re thinking of the Destiny’s Child song ‘Survivor’?”
Gilly dropped her forehead into her hand and groaned.
“It’s okay!” I leaned forward, sloshing root beer on my leg. “Lots of people mix those two up. . .I bet.”
I mean no, but.
“I’m ridiculous.”
“You’re really not. And, actually, in my house I get in, like, deep shit for saying stuff like that, so, yeah. You are not.”
There was a light knock on the door as Gilly’s father stepped in. “Doctor says he can see you in twenty. All right?”
He turned to me. “You need a ride home, um, Anne?”
“Oh sure.” I stood up and took Gilly’s mug. “I’ll just put this stuff away?”
As I walked to the kitchen, I felt Gilly’s father hovering. I moved to the sink to deposit our formerly frosty glasses.
This is it, I thought, this is where the whole thing turns and now that Gilly’s safe he’s going to say something crappy. Or something.
My brain flashed to an angry email to Lucy: “THAT GIRL TOOK OFF MY DAUGHTER’S SHIRT AND ALMOST BARFED ON HER LEG!”
“I don’t need a ride if you need to get to the hospital,” I offered, spinning around and leaning, somewhat defensively, against the counter. “I can walk. It’s totally fine. Or I can call my moms.”
He was holding out a pair of purple rubber Crocs. “I just thought you’d like something on your feet,” he said. “Don’t want your moms thinking I’d let a kid out there with no shoes.”
“Oh.” I took the offering. “Sorry. Defensive. That was weird.”
Gilly’s father rubbed his beard as I slipped the Crocs over my totally trashed socks.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for bringing her home.”
“No problem.”
“Right.” He clapped his hands and turned to leave the room. “Okay, Gilly! Let’s get you loaded up!”
Gilly’s dad had a massive black truck that Gilly could sprawl out in the back of. I sat up front once I’d managed to climb up into the seat.
“Hey! What were you doing out in the woods when you found George?” Gilly called forward once we were on the road.
“Skating,” I said, “I mean, I was skating. Then I. . .” I looked in the rearview mirror. “I had a little detour.”
“Oh.” Gilly twiddled her fingers. “Like how? Did you get lost?”
“Not exactly.”
We were quiet for a while. I looked off and out the window as we coasted up to my front door.
Maybe Gilly didn’t want to hear what I had to say about who I thought ran me off the road.
Her friends.
Like even with the apology, only coming from her BTW, she was still their friend.
“Thanks for the ride, uh, Mr., uh, Bob.” I opened the door.
“Nothing doing.” Gilly’s father put the truck in park. “Thanks for saving my kid, Miss Anne.”
Gilly rolled down her window as I stepped onto the lawn.
“Thanks,” Gilly said, resting her chin on the window ledge. “For everything. Thanks.”
“Nothing doing.” I gave a little bow.
A wisp of her hair swooped over her face as another tendril floated up and out of the window like a kite string.
Gilly waved. “Bye!”
“BYE!”
And they drove off. And I headed up the walk to the sound of Monty barking her head off and my heart beating out of my chest.
I had a bunch of messages on my phone, which I’d completely forgotten I’d charged. Two were from Millie, wondering where I was and asking me to clean my room. Two were from Lucy, a little more frantic and wondering where I was and why I wasn’t answering my phone.
The rest were from Berry.
BERRY
Hey!
BERRY
Sorry was being weird earlier.
BERRY
About when Gilly stood up for you?
BERRY
I have kind of a weird history with her?
BERRY
It’s fine though
BERRY
Do you want to come over?
Weird history with Gilly? Geez, was nothing in Greenville simple?