Hot Potato (Shelby and Blue) - Alyssa Brugman [12]
Lying on the tack room floor, in the gloom, crumpled like an autumn leaf, was a fifty-dollar note.
Shelby looked over her shoulder. There was no one around. She stared at the note for a second and then slipped it into her pocket.
I will give it to Mrs Edel, she told herself.
Shelby tipped Ajax's feed into the bin and then, while she pushed the trolley around the corner to the next row, she thought about Tammy's nasty letter. As long as everything was done safely, did it really matter if they laughed while they worked?
She also remembered seeing Ajax kick an appaloosa filly half his size while the filly squealed with fear and pain. It had been awful.
Tammy received special treatment all the time. Shelby didn't know if she paid extra. She doubted it, but even if she did, Shelby and Lindsey were the ones who actually had to do the extra work, and they didn't get anything more for it.
Besides that, who leaves fifty dollars lying around? Tammy must be pretty rich not to have noticed that it was missing.
Maybe I should consider it payment? she thought. A one-off tax – a 'levy', as they'd learned in Commerce at school.
Shelby prised another biscuit from the bale. No, she couldn't do that, but she could borrow it for a while, just until she had figured out another way of getting the money.
She was pretty sure she could remember seeing Tammy at the stables on the weekend just past, so she had two weeks to put it back. Two weeks was ages!
8 Sensible
'How's Lindsey's new horse?' Shelby's mother asked as she climbed into the car. Shelby had finished work for the day. Lindsey and Erin hadn't returned from the back paddock before it was time for Shelby to go. Shelby was glad, because she wasn't sure how they would behave.
'It's OK.'
'Did you have a ride?'
'No.' Shelby wound down the window and rested her feet on the dashboard.
At the bottom of the driveway her mother waited for a break in the traffic. She steered the car onto the road. 'Are you going off horses?'
'No way! I'm still going to be riding horses when I'm eighty.'
'It's just that normally I wouldn't be able to shut you up about a new horse. You went on for a week about that riding pony.'
It was true. The previous month Miss Anita had schooled a beautiful black show pony for a few weeks. While he was there Shelby tried to get through her work quickly so that she could sit on the fence at the edge of the arena and watch Miss Anita work. Afterwards she would offer to hose him off in the wash bay and take him back to his yard. He loved a bath and would poke his nose into the stream of water with his eyes closed.
Shelby had decided that pony was her second favourite horse in the world, after Blue, of course, but now the black pony had shuffled down to third place.
Shelby shrugged. 'There's just nothing to say.'
'Did something happen at the sales that you haven't talked about?'
'What makes you say that?'
'We were so sure that you were going to be upset, and since then you've been quiet. I want you to tell me if you're upset about something. It's bad for you to keep things locked up inside.'
'I'm not upset,' Shelby reassured her.
Her mother glanced at her. There was a long silence while she waited.
Shelby shrugged again. 'You can't tell where they've come from. You have no idea if they've come from a bad home and are going to a good one, or the other way around,' she explained. 'Besides that, it's a completely unnatural place, so of course they're going to be a bit frightened. Also, you only see them for about half an hour. You don't know anything about them. Some of them had cuts and scratches, but you don't know how they got them. They could be mean, like Ajax, and just picked the wrong horse to bully.' Shelby paused, frowning while she thought about it. 'I'm sure I could get upset if I had more information.'
'That's a sensible way to think about it. It's wise