For Sale or Swap - Alyssa Brugman [26]
'No, stop!' Shelby called out. But it was no use. The trail rider was off again, herding Brat towards Gully Way with his noisy engine.
Shelby followed the trail bike rider for a hundred metres and then stopped. There was no point following him. He was travelling much faster than she could, and Brat would run away from that sound.
Her only option was to head home and ask her parents to help. Hopefully, Brat would still be in the gully somewhere, and not have found her way out onto the road.
It was now raining in earnest and Shelby's Pony Club uniform clung to her skin, weighing her down. She took off her helmet, which was making her head hot, and her hair stuck to her forehead and neck. With one twisted ankle and a blister the size of a twenty-cent piece on the opposite foot, each step was painful. Shelby was exhausted and hungry. All she wanted was to lie down in her nice soft bed and sleep for a week.
Her soaked boots squished with each step. Another blister was forming on the side of her little toe. She sat down in the middle of the trail and pulled off her boots. The stones were sharp and unforgiving, but she reasoned that her feet couldn't possibly feel any worse.
Shelby inspected her new blister. It was only a small white bubble of flesh. The one on her heel had worn through and a flap of skin hung down revealing raw, angry tissue underneath. A drop of rain splashed it, making it sting.
It felt so good to be off her feet. Shelby sat there waggling her toes in the rain. She tilted her head back to catch some of the drops in her mouth.
When she was eight, Shelby had had her tonsils out. She remembered waking up some time after the operation, and discovering that the painkillers had worn off. Her throat felt huge and gluey, and it throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Her head had been dizzy and bleary with pain. At the time she believed it was the worst moment in her whole life.
Nope. This is the worst moment of my life, she thought. It can't get any worse than this.
12 Gully Way
Barefoot and soaked, it took Shelby at least an hour to walk out of the gully, giving her a new appreciation for the speed with which horses cover the ground. She would have been able to do it in ten minutes if she had been on Blue.
She walked along the cul-de-sac near her paddock and looked at the skeleton of the new house as she passed it. A blue and yellow portaloo had been dumped on the ground where, one day, a manicured lawn would be.
Let them build their dumb houses, she thought.
She opened the front door and shuffled along the hallway. The carpet felt soft and spongy under her feet.
Her mother was in the lounge room on her hands and knees picking up blocks of Lego and dropping them into the toy box.
'What happened to you?' she asked, when she saw Shelby's bedraggled state.
Shelby felt her lip quiver. Hot tears sprang into her eyes. 'It's been a bad day,' she whispered.
Her mother held open her arms and Shelby went to them.
'Never mind, honey,' her mother said, patting her forehead. 'How about I run you a bath?'
'I can't. I've got to go back out. I lost the new horse. She pulled away from me, and then a trail bike rider chased her along the trail, and now I don't know where she is.'
'I'll get my keys. Let's just hope the car will go.'
Shelby ran down the hall to fetch her sneakers and a dry tee-shirt.
'Cross fingers,' said Shelby's mother from the driver's seat. She pushed down on the accelerator and twisted the key. The engine rumbled into life. Her mother let out a sigh of relief.
As they backed out of the driveway, her mother reached across, resting her arm on the back of the passenger seat so that she could see behind the car. Shelby watched the shaky wipers slap the water away before more rain hammered the window.
Where would they even begin to look for Brat? This was not a four-wheel drive, and even if it were, Brat would run from the noise before they