TO STEVIE, THERE were three kinds of secrets: good ones, bad ones, and boring ones. She had the best kind—a good one. But the worst thing about the best kind was that it was the only kind you really had to keep. Keeping secrets wasn’t Stevie’s favorite activity. Telling them was much more fun!

She dashed toward the stairs at her house, barely acknowledging the greetings from her parents.

“Hi, how’d you get home?” her mother asked.

“We ran into Colonel Hanson. He gave Lisa and me a ride home,” she said.

“Dinner in a half an—” her mother began.

“I already ate pizza at the mall,” she said, whizzing past both of her parents.

“Then you’ll enjoy watching the rest of us eat—in one-half hour,” her mother said pointedly.

“Okay,” Stevie agreed. Some things weren’t worth arguing about. Even though she sometimes hated being with her brothers, family dinners could be fun, if a little noisy. Besides, she thought she smelled tomato sauce and that might mean lasagna. She wouldn’t miss that, even if she was stuffed to the gills with pizza!

She took the packages she had purchased at the mall and tucked them under her bed. That was her Christmas-present hiding place. It was also her lost-schoolbook hiding place, her missing-sock hiding place, and her broken-pencil hiding place. As a result, it was her cat, Madonna’s, most favored hiding place of all. Madonna spurted out, chasing a dust bunny. She gave Stevie a withering look, and left the room.

Stevie tossed her coat toward her closet, slipped out of her shoes, and settled onto the bed. She picked up the phone and dialed one of her favorite numbers.

“Hi, this is Stevie. Is Phil there?” she asked when Mrs. Marston answered.

In a few seconds, Phil picked up the phone.

“Hi, beautiful,” he said.

Stevie knew he was joking a little, but there was a part of him that wasn’t joking and she liked that. Somehow, when Phil called her beautiful, it made her feel beautiful. It was a very nice feeling.

“Hello, hunk,” she countered. Then she giggled a little. “Guess where I’ve been all afternoon,” she said. “I’ve been at the mall.”

“You’re not turning into a mall rat on me, are you?” he asked.

Stevie thought about the girls she knew who spent every spare minute at the mall, window-shopping, or wasting their money on earrings and stockings. The girls in her classes who did that always struck her as very uninteresting, though very well-groomed.

“No way! I’ve been Christmas shopping. It makes me a sort of temporary mall rat, once a year.”

“As long as it’s only temporary. Did you have fun?”

“Oh, yes, lots. I was with Lisa. We actually bought some things for our families, too. You should see the mall. It’s all lit up with Christmas lights, and carols blast from every amplifier in the place. You can’t walk two steps without bumping into a phony Santa Claus or elves or reindeer. I’m really getting into the holiday spirit, aren’t you?”

Phil laughed. “Around here, it’s impossible not to,” he said. “See, we’re not just a one-holiday family.”

“That’s right,” Stevie said, recalling that Phil’s mother was Jewish and celebrated Hanukkah, while his father was a Christian and celebrated Christmas. “That means you get eight gifts for the eight days of Hanukkah, and at least one for Christmas—you lucky thing!”

“It also means that we’ve got Christmas cookies and Hanukkah cookies, Hanukkah candles and Christmas lights. It used to confuse me a little, but now everything just comes in a great holiday jumble. I love it all.”

“I always love this time of year, too, but my favorite part of all is the Starlight Ride. Did I remember to tell you about it?” she asked.

“No. It sounds terrific,” he said. “Tell me now.”

Stevie leaned back on her pillow and told Phil about the ride. She told him what it was like to be on a horse on a crisp winter night, with the stars above, and lamps to guide the way. “Sometimes, there’s snow on the ground. I love the sound of horses’ hooves crunching on the frozen snow. Sometimes it even makes me feel as if we lived a hundred years ago and horses are the only way we can get to where we’re going. Horses are the only way you can get that feeling. I love getting presents, of course, and giving them. But the Starlight Ride is Christmas to me.”

“Can guests come along?” Phil asked.

“What a neat idea!” Stevie said. The Starlight Ride would be even better if Phil could be there with her. Then it would not only be wonderful and Christmasy, but it would be romantic, too. “I’ll ask Max. I bet he’ll say yes.”

“Ask him if you can bring two guests. My friend A.J. is coming over to our house that night, and I know he’ll want to come. He’s a better rider than I am, almost as good as you. He’d have a blast, too.”

Stevie smiled to herself, accepting Phil’s compliment about her riding, but not taking it terribly seriously. She and Phil once had wasted a lot of time arguing over which of them was the better rider and competing against each other instead of working with each other. Now, they simply agreed that each one would claim the other was the better rider. In fact, they were both experienced, good riders. They were good enough to have fun riding together and occasionally competing against each other. Stevie was looking forward to the next Pony Club rally at which Pine Hollow’s Pony Club, Horse Wise, would compete against Phil’s. She was sure her own team would win, but she’d die before she’d tell Phil that!

“Well, I’ll ask Max tomorrow and I’ll call you tomorrow night. Okay?” she asked.

“No, I’ll call you tomorrow night because it’ll be my turn. We’re having a dance-committee meeting tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll have lots more to tell you about the New Year’s Eve party. The parents have been auditioning bands. I hate to think what they’ll end up choosing for us.”

Stevie listened while Phil described the trio with an accordion that one parent was proposing. Another seemed to favor an oompah band, and a third was in favor of a square-dance band.

“I’m sure they’re all kind of interesting,” Phil conceded. “But for a New Year’s Eve dance, I want rock ’n’ roll, don’t you?”

“As long as the band knows a few slow songs, for, um, special times?” she said.

“I’ll see to it,” Phil promised. “Now I’ve got to go. I’ll call tomorrow. Bye.”

“Good night,” she said, and hung up. She liked talking with Phil on the phone. It always left her with a nice happy feeling. If her friends had told her, six months earlier, that she’d have a boyfriend, she would have informed them that they were completely out of their minds. But it was true. She did have a boyfriend. And she liked having a boyfriend. Some girls she knew who had boyfriends seemed to have suffered total personality changes, and not for the better. Stevie had had that problem at first, but had come around to her normal self fairly quickly, and stayed that way, mostly.

For a few minutes after she hung up, she reverted briefly to her starry-eyed state. It was New Year’s Eve. She was wearing a strapless dress of aquamarine chiffon, silver sandals on her feet, a diamond tiara in her hair. Phil, in a tuxedo, held her gently as they floated across the floor to the sound of … an oompah band? What was she thinking of? There was no way her mother would let her have a strapless dress. Phil would probably die before he’d put on a tuxedo, and if she wore silver sandals like the ones in her daydream, she’d have a broken ankle long before midnight. And as for the diamond tiara … No, the whole situation called for some serious thinking. Fortunately, she had good friends to help her.

Stevie reached for the phone again. She had to talk to Carole.

“You’ve been to dances at the Marine Corps base,” Stevie began as soon as Carole picked up the phone. “Do you have to wear really high heels or can you be comfortable?”

“Comfortable!” Carole answered automatically. “Suffering for the sake of beauty went out with Scarlett O’Hara!” Then she continued without pause, “I’m so glad you called. Guess what I’m going to do! No, you’ll never guess. You couldn’t, anyway. It’s too wonderful—”

For a minute, Stevie had the horrible feeling that Carole had found out about the secret. She gulped, and listened.

“Judy was just here. I wanted her to check Snowball—who is just fine, by the way—and we got to talking and it turns out that she wants me to work with her over the vacation. Can you believe it? Me, an assistant veterinarian! I’ll be helping her with all her horse work and probably the small animals, that means dogs and cats, that she works with in her clinic, but the big stuff is the horses because they don’t come to the clinic—she has to go to them most of the time. Isn’t that fabulous?”

“Wow!” Stevie said, both relieved that the secret was safe and thrilled for her friend. “That’ll be terrific. Think what you’ll learn!”

“I know,” Carole said enthusiastically. “Maybe I’ll even get to do some things, like help her with examinations. I can do pulse and temperature, breathing rate, and stuff like that, because of what I learned from her and from Max already. How do you like the sound of Carole Hanson, D.V.M., equine veterinarian?”

“Equine? We are getting fancy, aren’t we?” Stevie joked.

“Well, after all, it’s the proper word for ‘pertaining to a horse,’ and it comes from the Latin word equinus.”

“You’re starting to sound like a dictionary, or a horse-care manual,” Stevie said, a little more sharply than she intended.

“Doing it again, huh?” Carole asked. This was a common complaint from her friends and, Carole knew, a fair one. “It’s just that I’m excited.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’d be excited, too. Just don’t get so excited that you think I don’t know what equine means, okay?”

“Deal,” Carole promised. “Anyway, we start tomorrow after Horse Wise. I can’t wait to tell Dad.”

“Haven’t you told him yet? He should have gotten home about a half hour ago,” Stevie said. Colonel Hanson had dropped Stevie and Lisa off forty-five minutes earlier, and Stevie knew that it was a fifteen-minute drive from her house to the Hansons’.

“How’d you know?” Carole asked. “That’s just when he got home. Are you becoming some kind of psychic?”

Stevie realized then that she was on the brink of revealing part of the secret. There was no way she could let Carole know about seeing her father at the mall. She had to think fast.

“Of course I’m not a psychic,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s just that …” Her mind raced. Then it came to her. “It’s just that The Honeymooners started on television half an hour ago and I know your dad never misses it.”

Carole laughed. “You do know my dad well, don’t you? It’s almost over, so I’m going to talk to him now. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow at the stable, okay?”

“Right. See you then,” Stevie said, and hung up, letting out her breath. That had been close!

Secrets were nice. Keeping them wasn’t!