Page 10 of Run for the Money

“Melanie, stop.”

I ignore Nick. GT belongs to him; he can groom the horse. There’s a pang of regret in my chest at the thought of abandoning the poor animal after putting him through such a tough workout today, but it’s not enough for me to turn back. I shouldn’t have let a perfect horse blind me to the reality of my skills—and Nick’s impossible attitude.

“Melanie, you can’t quit on me,” Nick says, surprisingly gentle.

His voice is way too close—he’s not shouting, but I can hear him perfectly so he must be following me.

“Yes I can,” I say through my tears. “Watch me.”

He catches my wrist and I’m so tired, that’s all it takes to bring me to a halt. One tug is enough to turn me around.

“Don’t quit just because it’s hard,” he says. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

“Easy for you to say, since you’re not the one flying through the air on a nine-hundred-pound animal with unbelievably snappable ankles while an angry giant of a man shouts at you,” I retort.

His face clears, like I’ve just unlocked a puzzle he’s been stuck on for ages.

“So that’s really it—that’s why you’re holding back,” he says. “You’re scared of a fall.”

I yank my wrist out of his grasp. “I’m not going to fall off the horse.”

He shakes his head. “You’re afraid of GT going down and taking you with him. It’s why you tense up before every jump, why you hesitate.”

“I don’t hesitate,” I mutter.

Nick doesn’t bother refuting the obvious lie; it would just waste even more of the time I’m already squandering. Instead, he shoves the clipboard under my face so I can see his notes. He hasn’t covered it in scribbles about how inadequate I am, but what I see is even more unnerving. It’s a print-out of my stats from my last ten competitions. In the margins, he’s written out the stats for all of today’s runs in pencil.

“I know you’re sore and still getting used to training full-time, but you’re not struggling as much as you think,” he says, jamming a finger against the clipboard so hard the clip rattles. “You have more clean runs now than you did at the height of your Junior career. The only major difference is the time penalties.”

“It’s GT. He jumps higher than my horses ever did,” I counter. “That’s why I’m not knocking over as many poles or missing water jumps.”

“Wrong. When you hit poles, it’s because you hesitate,” he says. “You wait a hair too long to jump him, and the arc of his jump is wrong. Those hesitations stack up, and then you’re outside the time limit.”

For the millionth time today, he’s annoyingly right. Three of the top five scores on his clipboard are from today. The fourth is from the last competition I ever completed—the one before Diana’s accident. Thinking of her accident turns my stomach, though.

It was my fault. Our whole childhoods, Diana Walters and I were in constant competition with one another. We were always ranked first and second in the nation for our division, though who was the winner and who was runner-up shifted constantly. My family’s money pales in comparison to hers, but our parents were in the same social circles, which only served to fan the flames of our competitive spirits.

The year we both quit riding was the year Diana stole Lisa Conway out from under me. My parents spent months wooing Lisa, bending over backwards to convince her to drop her other athletes and focus on me exclusively. She was going to push me to the next level and put some distance between Diana and me. I was going to do it all—make it to the Youth Olympics, then compete full-time, and head to as many Olympics as I could. Barring injury or financial catastrophe, I would have been able to ride well into my fifties.

But then Diana fell. It was her injury, not mine, that ended our careers. When her parents offered Lisa double what mine could, I was stuck without a coach. My parents scrambled to find someone to fill the last-minute gap, and I was trapped with Roger Peart. He was known for his ruthlessness, and I naively thought it would all be reserved for his own athletes.

I wanted to win everything that year—not just to fulfill my own dreams but to punish Diana for stealing Lisa. Roger loved the vindictive streak in me, and I was well on my way to another national championship—until Diana smoked me at a competition in Las Vegas. She did a clean run, no penalties, four seconds under the time limit. I hit a pole on the last jump, and came in three tenths of a second beyond the time limit. She placed first, and I barely salvaged third place. It closed the lead I’d gained earlier in the season, and by the time we reached the last qualifier before nationals, it was down to one final competition to determine who would compete in the Youth Olympics, representing the entire continent of North America, and whose season was done.

Timothy Andrews went to the Youth Olympics, not me or Diana, because Roger snuck into the stable while Diana was walking the course and cut three slits in the leather straps holding her stirrups onto her saddle. Afterward, he told me to stop fretting about how tight the turns on the course were, and how flawlessly I’d need to ride to beat her. He told me he’d taken care of her, then winked. Terrified, I raced to Diana’s horse to see what he’d done. Before I could find anything wrong, Diana discovered me, and accused me of being a “bitter little bitch who has to resort to cheating to win,” so I left in a huff.

Ten minutes later, I watched her stirrup snap as she took off for a jump. I saw her slip sideways in the saddle as they landed, accidentally kicking her horse’s belly in the process.I saw him rear back, startled, and dump her on the ground. Then, worst of all, I saw him slide in the loose sand of the track and fall, right onto Diana’s leg. What I saw isn’t the part that haunts me most, though. It’s what I heard.

I heard bones snap—hers, and the horse’s. I heard her scream in agony, first when her leg broke, then again when she realized her horse wasn’t getting up because he couldn’t—he’d broken an ankle. He was still lying on top of her when she threw her arms around his neck, sobbing hysterically that it wasn’t his fault, that he shouldn’t have to die. With ambulance sirens blaring behind me and a knot in my stomach, I walked to the jury table and told the judges what Roger had said to me, and what I suspected. They told me I didn’t have to withdraw, but how could I stay? How could I ride the course after that, knowing if I’d been mature enough to ignore one meaningless insult, I could have stopped all the carnage?

Diana’s parents sued Roger within an inch of his life. She got a pin put in her leg and went on to found a horse rescue up in the mountains. I never faced a single consequence. No sanctions from the United States Hunter/Jumper Association or the Fédération Équestre Internationale. Not even my parents. I had to punish myself, so I quit. It still doesn’t feel like enough.

Of course I’m scared of a fall. I owe a debt, and I haven’t paid it. Who’s to say the universe won’t collect the moment I set foot onto my first competition course?

“Look, Nick, I don’t know what your mom told you about my last competition—”

“I was there,” he interrupts.

“What?” is my eloquent response.

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