I craned my neck around, straining against the seat belt as I ducked my head awkwardly, anxious for a glimpse of Jinx’s broad face through the window in the front of the horse float. Dad glanced at me, then back at the road.
Packed up and sent home from camp early. Not exactly how I’d imagined things panning out after such a great session with Petra Hein. I peered at Jinx again.
“He’s fine, Melissa. Just like he was the last twenty times you looked.” Dad took a quick look of his own in the rear-view mirror, as if reassuring himself. If he needed to double-check, I didn’t see why he thought it was so weird that I wanted to keep checking. Not that I was going to say that, of course. I figured I was in enough trouble.
“Just checking,” I said instead, turning back to face the front. I did tend to habitually check on how Jinx was travelling in the float, but just now fixating on Jinx was better than talking to Dad. I mean, I knew a talk was coming, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get into it.
The stink Stacey had kicked up you’d think I was dealing ecstasy or something. I gather, in fact, that this was exactly what she’d first thought—although she wasn’t sure who’d been doing the buying and who the selling. I don’t know who was more shocked at the accusation, me or William, who I’d never seen with anything stronger than a lemonade or, since he turned eighteen, a beer.
Even once I’d told her what it was—and she’d plucked the soggy pill out of William’s hand to see for herself—she was still all fired up. She’d dismissed William and hauled me up to the part of the main building acting as the head marshal’s office and told me off in no uncertain terms. She hadn’t wanted to hear any of my explanations, which had anyway taken a dive into babbling once she mentioned the words ‘call’, ‘your’ and ‘parents’ all in the same sentence. The only break I caught was that Dad’s number was listed as the primary contact, not Mum’s. At least it had seemed like a break at the time; taking a peek at Dad’s unsmiling profile now I wasn’t so sure.
“Talk to me,” he said, as if sensing my eyes on him. He hadn’t even glanced away from the road that time; parents are so freaky that way.
“You didn’t want to hear what I had to say before you packed me and Jinx up to go home.”
“Oh no you don’t. I gave you a chance to tell your side back there and you didn’t take it.”
My face burned. He had me there. By the time Dad walked into the office at the grounds I was so tangled in anger and stress and utter humiliation (William must think I was a total loser) I was way too wound up to speak. I was afraid if I opened my mouth I’d burst into tears. I knew that sitting there all hunched in on myself with my hands cradled in the pouch of my hoodie and my lips zipped tight made me look like a sulky brat but I couldn’t help that. Better than someone (William, Eleni, Tash for starters) seeing me bawling like a three year old.
“I couldn’t,” I mumbled, knowing it was pathetic as far as explanations went. But there was some chance Dad would get it. Mum, not so much. Mum. My brain skittered away from that like a spooked horse. Even after I got through the lecture from Dad, there was still Mum to contend with. If I got lucky that would be just a phone call, but I wasn’t counting on that, not the way my luck was running lately.
“Choked up?” Dad offered.
“Something like that.”
Dad was silent for a bit, but it wasn’t a scary silence. More like an ‘I’m concentrating on my driving right now’ one. We waited at a busy T-intersection for a big enough gap for Dad to pull out into without startling Jinx and when he swung the car and float smoothly out on the highway I again craned my neck to make sure Jinx stayed on his feet. Most ex-racers are good travellers but Jinx had been terrible in the float when we first got him, scrambling madly until sometimes he actually fell down. He’d originally been bought for polocrosse by my oldest stepbrother Gary, who had taken him everywhere in the truck until he decided he and Jinx just weren’t working. I’d seen the fantastic way Jinx moved when he trotted around in the paddock and I was pretty quick to ask if I could try him.
Reassured that Jinx was still standing quietly, shifting his weight automatically to accommodate the movement of the float, I settled back down in my seat and sighed. I had been lucky in so many ways to get Jinx. Lucky he’d never clicked with Gary and that he’d sucked so badly at polocrosse my next stepbrother Brendan—a genius with horses—hadn’t been interested in taking him on. And most of all I was lucky this had all happened a few years back when my hands were still pretty good. I doubt I’d be allowed to hop on such a green horse these days.
“I gather you think it’s unfair that I’ve brought you home from camp.”
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Why do you think I’ve done that?”
Oh, I hate that. Why can’t they just tell you what’s on their mind without all those teaching-you-something guessing games? So annoying.
“To punish me?” I ventured
“Do you think you deserve to be punished?”
“No. It’s not like I did anything wrong.”
“Stealing and lying isn’t wrong?”
“What?” I exclaimed, skin heating up. “I didn’t do that!”
“You took something you weren’t supposed to have and you pretended you didn’t have it. Sounds like stealing and lying to me.”
I sank in my seat, momentarily speechless, my cheeks burning.
“Melissa, I know that seems harsh, but we’ve given you such a high level of trust for so long that it’s a big deal to think you might have been betraying it. The medications you have access to—they’re serious.”
“I know that,” I said, finding my tongue again. “I’ve never done anything like that, I swear, and I don’t see what’s so bad about it. They’re prescription. They’re my pills. I don’t see how that’s such a big deal, let alone stealing.” An image of my safety-net pill bottle stashed in among all the jars of hoof ointment and equine fly-repellent out in the tack room flitted through my mind. That was completely different I told myself firmly, booting the idea right out of my head.
“They have rules at camp for a reason. You have to follow those rules whether you agree with them or not and you should have been honest with Stacey. I think that’s why she was so angry. She felt you’d lied to her and tricked her, not just broken the rules.”
“No wonder she decided to send me home.”
“She didn’t,” Dad said, with an automatic glance in his mirror as a ute moved past us in the other lane. “I did.”
I stared at him, amazed, thoughts of the gymkhana and the presentation I’d be missing tomorrow—and the dance tonight that William might have been at—galloping through my head. “But why?”
“I believe you when you say you’ve never hoarded pills before—Jennie and I do trust you to manage your medication sensibly—but until you’re eighteen those prescribed meds are ultimately our responsibility and we keep track. You might have a hard time convincing your mother, but I do still think you’re careful with your painkillers. And that being the case, there’s only one reason you’d make sure you had an extra pain pill and that’s extra pain. Tell me I’m wrong.”
I swallowed the automatic and incredibly stupid retort that actually they hadn’t kept track as well as they thought. Yeah, way to go to convince Dad that I really was a pill-stealing junkie. I shrugged uneasily, uncomfortably aware of something horribly like guilt burning in my stomach. It was one thing to make sure Dad didn’t find out I was having a flare-up with pony club camp so close, quite another to lie to his face. But surely having a little bit of insurance against the really bad times wasn’t so terrible? I was careful, always.
“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. That seemed safe enough.
“Are you? Or are you just sorry you got caught and have to come home?”
A very good question. Typical of Dad and something I always find kind of cool—except when it’s directed at me.
“I just wanted to make sure I could ride,” I began hesitantly, aware that Dad expected me to explain myself and that if it came out wrong, if I couldn’t make him see how this was a once-in-a-lifetime remedy for a once-in-a-lifetime situation, the only riding I’d be doing for the next few months was likely to be in my dreams. Then I’d have embarrassed myself, upset Dad (and God knows how Mum’d react) and made a really bad impression on William for nothing. “The selector for the dressage squad gave me a lesson this morning and she really liked Jinx. She thought he had heaps of potential. If I’d been too sore to ride she’d never have even seen him.”
“Too sore to ride? Why?”
“I fell off yesterday.” I carefully raised my arm so I could swipe at an annoying strand of hair clinging to my face with the back of my wrist. My forehead was hot and damp with anxiety, sweat was prickling at the roots of my badly-in-need-of-a-wash hair—the queues had been too long and my hands too sore to tackle a shampoo at camp, so I’d just left it. Eleni had re-done it for me yesterday after my plait had got totally feral from four sweaty days in a riding helmet and three nights sleeping like the dead on a soggy pillow.
“You fell off? How?”
“Cross country. I’m not very good at that, not like Eleni or Tash. I misjudged a jump.”
“Do any damage?”
“I was a bit stiff all over but nothing major. Everyone falls off sometimes.”
“Mmm.”
“No, really.”
“So why the pill?”
“It was just insurance. I just had to make sure I was OK to ride this morning so Petra Hein could see how great Jinx is. She asked if I was going to Goulburn next month.” I tried not to let any questioning note enter into that, but I was fishing a bit. Dad had listened to me prattle on about the Goulburn competition for weeks, so he knew what I was getting at.
Dad seemed to be accepting my story, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. In that, he was very different to Mum—she’d be sure to tell me exactly what was on her mind. I definitely take more after Dad. It drives Tash bonkers that she always has to interrogate me (her word, not mine) if she wants to know my opinion on something. It might help if she’d actually ask me in the first place rather than expecting me to read her mind.
I glanced sideways at Dad, who slid his gaze to his left, to briefly meet mine.
“We’ll have to see about that.”
I opened my mouth to plead my case but made myself shut it again. ‘We’ll see’ was a lot better than ‘there won’t be any Goulburn for you young lady!’. I knew he hated whining, so I quit while I was ahead.
And I was ahead. I might have crocked-up hands that had plagued his life with medical appointments, prescriptions and physical therapy, but apart from that I reckon I was about as good as a daughter could be. I didn’t really have much opportunity to be bad; there isn’t too much hell you can raise when your hands don’t work and most of your body hurts a lot of the time.
“I’m sorry to have caused such trouble,” I said, thinking of how he would have had to leave work early to come to pony club and talk to Stacey.
“Now that I do believe. Let’s just hope your mother does, too.”
I let my head fall back against the seat and swallowed a groan of dismay. I’d been feeling pretty optimistic up until he reminded me that I still had to call Mum when I got home. I was not looking forward to that.
I put it off as long as I could, but eventually I couldn’t pretend I was still busy settling Jinx back in his paddock without Dad or Jennie coming out to make sure I wasn’t lying dead somewhere. I gave Jinx the last of his carrot and reluctantly made my way back up towards the house, boots swishing through the pasture that Gary carefully maintained for the horses’ grazing. I went inside through the back door into the kitchen and stood staring glumly at the phone mounted on the wall by the corkboard where we left messages, bills and reminders for appointments.
This was the phone with Mum’s number programmed in so I only had to press one button. The phone with the headset attached so I didn’t have to hold the phone while I talked to her. The phone that took away the last of my excuses.
Jennie, my stepmother, came into the kitchen from the hallway leading to the rest of the house and cocked her head at me.
“Getting over it or getting up your courage?”
You could always count on Jennie to tell it to you straight, even if you didn’t particularly want to hear it. Years ago I’d brought a sickly abandoned lamb to her and asked if it was possible to save it. Jennie had told me we could try but the lamb was almost certainly going to die. We did try, but it died anyway. At least I’d been prepared when the tiny thing lost its battle. I still cried buckets though. Stupid.
“Contemplating running,” I said, equally honest.
“Don’t keep her waiting, Melissa. The worry won’t sweeten her any.”
“You’re right,” I said, eyeing the phone as if it might bite me.
“As usual,” Jennie said. Grinning as though she knew exactly what I was thinking, she grabbed the headset off the phone base station and stuck it on my head. Lifting the handset, she pressed the appropriate number and then tucked the phone into my hoodie. Mouthing ‘Good luck’ at me, she picked up the half-drunk cup of coffee she’d obviously come in for and headed back down the hall.
I stared after my stepmother as the phone started ringing, waiting for my mother to answer and trying unsuccessfully to squash all the disloyal thoughts and comparisons trotting through my brain. The rhythmic bleep-bleep cut off with an abrupt squawk.
“Hello?” Mum said.
“Hi Mum.”
“Melissa, thank God, are you alright? I’ve been imagining the worst. Your father is infuriating; he wouldn’t tell me a thing until he’d spoken to you. What’s this about drugs? And being caught with a boy?”
I explained, careful to minimise the role riding Jinx had played in the need for an extra pill.
“Melissa, honey, this really won’t do. It sounds like you shouldn’t be riding any more. We’ve always been able to trust your judgement but really, it seems that isn’t the case anymore where that horse is concerned.”
I tucked my hands carefully into my pouch pocket, the hard lump of the phone nestled into my palm. I should have known Mum would zoom in on the one fact I was trying to slide past. She’s like that. She’s worked as a paralegal ever since she left school and she’s picked up more than a trick or two over all the years she’s worked for barristers. It’s pointless trying to win an argument with her, but I sometimes forget that. Just like I forget how she never calls Jinx by his name. He’s always just ‘that horse’ to her, like he’s no more important than a chair or a pot plant or a handbag. Actually, the way Mum is about her handbags, he probably rates far below those.
“Of course you can still trust me, Mum. I would have wanted an extra pill if I fell over in the dining room. It had nothing to do with Jinx.” I couldn’t cross my fingers over a fib, they were too lumpy, so I crossed my ankles instead, leaning precariously against one of the kitchen chairs.
“That’s a poor argument. If you weren’t riding at camp you wouldn’t have even been there at all to take the hypothetical fall you mention.”
“Mum, you know what I mean. I’ve been looking after my own meds for years and I’ve never ever abused that. I still don’t see how I did this time. It’s not my fault there are stupid rules that mean I have to go begging for a pill.”
“I agree with those rules and they aren’t the problem. Why did you fall off?”
“People fall off all the time.”
“You’re not people. Was it your condition that made you fall off?”
“No,” I said, crossing my ankles again.
My brother Brendan banged into the kitchen and gave me an odd look on his way to the fridge. I mouthed ‘Mum’ at him and he grinned, raising his eyebrows sympathetically.
“Are you telling me the truth, Melissa Marie?”
“Yes Mum,” I said firmly, stifling a wince at her use of my proper names. She only did it when she meant serious business and I hated to be telling her a fib when she’d pulled out the full deck on me. But if I didn’t convince her everything was cool, when she asked to talk to Dad (as she inevitably did after talking to me) it would be to demand that I stop riding and come to stay with her for a while, where I was safe from temptation. Or some variation of that, anyway.
She’d been singing the same tune for years, but she and I both knew a little secret we never mentioned: she didn’t really want me to come and live with her. She was saying what she thought a good mother would say, but she liked her inner-city, high-powered life just the way it was; uncluttered by responsibilities or distractions, namely, me. She might bitch about Dad’s attitude to my condition and she was sure to give him an earful over letting me handle my own medications, but she was the one who hadn’t been able to deal with it at all. Otherwise she’d never have left me behind when she left Dad. She didn’t even leave him for another guy. She just left.
I do love my Mum. She’s super-smart and she can even be funny, as well as being a bit uptight and impossible to argue with. I just don’t want to live with her. I like it here on the farm with Dad and Jennie and my stepbrothers and the animals. And Jinx of course. That goes without saying.
“Dad’s in the workshop when she’s ready,” Brendan said, going past me with a bottle of ginger beer in one hand and one of Jennie’s giant peanut cookies in the other.
I gave him a nod to show I’d heard him, then caught myself nodding in answer to Mum when she repeated herself, annoyance tightening her voice.
“Yes, I’m telling the truth Mum,” I said hastily. I didn’t want to wind her back up again as I thought she was moving into the calming-down phase of the call, getting ready to speak to Dad so she could ask him all the same questions and hash over all the same arguments she’d just raised with me. I wondered if she had any idea just how clearly that showed me she actually didn’t put much faith in what I told her. I guess not, or she wouldn’t be so habitual about it.
“I guess I better speak to your father,” she said.
“Yes Mum.” Hah. Escape was imminent.
I wondered, too, if she ever would believe me without checking with Dad and whether that was normal parent behaviour or just another side effect of having a kid with JRA. I guess I’ll never know.