Emma and the Cutting Horse Read Free Page B

had spoken in class that day. None of the words had been
directed at her.
    Emma passed by Candi Haynes and her friends
when she took her tray to the cafeteria window on her way out. She
forced herself to look straight ahead, but in her peripheral vision
she could see the girls elbowing each other. As she handed the tray
through the window a chorus of whinnies followed her. Emma felt her
ears reddening and struggled to keep from hurrying out the door.
Cascades of laughter reached her as she headed down the hall to her
locker. A red cloud of humiliation and rage rose in Emma’s chest.
Maybe instead of an accidental bump she should have smashed Candi
Haynes over the head with her backpack; then at least Candi would
have a reason to harass her.
    * * *
    Katie stopped Emma in the hall between
classes the next morning.
    “Come check out your name on the bathroom
wall,” she said. She guided Emma into the girls’ restroom and
pointed to a message just above one of the sinks.
    “For a GOOD time on the farm, call Emma,” it
read. Her phone number was written under the message.
    “There’s another one in the last stall.”
    Emma had to wait for the stall to empty. The
girl who came out was someone she knew from P.E. class.
    “Yikes, Emma, you must have gotten crosswise
with somebody,” she said.
    Emma went in. This one was written in huge,
angry letters with a black marker: EMMA IS A HEIFER .
    “Do you know who’s doing it?”
    “I have a pretty good idea,” Emma said
crossly.
    “You should get your dad to drag her off to
jail,” Katie snarled between her teeth. “He could file charges of
harassment or verbal abuse or something. Having a dad who’s a
deputy sheriff ought to have some perks.”
    On the bus ride home, Emma sat alone in one
of the back seats. The incident with Candi Haynes buzzed around in
her mind like a swarm of angry bees. Sometimes she wished she were
back in the safety of her small middle school. There were lots of
kids she didn’t know in high school, and some of them seemed to be
growing up a lot faster than she was. A few treated other girls
like freaks if they didn’t move in the fast crowd. One or two were
downright scary, using filthy language and smoking in the bathroom.
She would never be allowed to wear the clothes some of those girls
wore, even if her parents could afford them. Skin-tight
pants and miniskirts were taboo at Emma’s house. So were men’s
sleeveless underwear shirts and short tops that showed your midriff
when you bent over or reached up to the top shelf of your locker.
Emma’s dad had always been a take-charge kind of guy. Once he had
made up his mind, there was little point in arguing. Now that Emma
was in high school, she didn’t feel relaxed and safe at school like
she had at her old middle school. Lately she had begun to think of
herself as two different people, the quiet, withdrawn Emma everyone
saw at school, and the real, outgoing Emma she became at home. This
whole scene with Candi could have been avoided if she had just kept
her mouth shut like she usually did at school.
     

 
    Chapter
Three
     
    “Emma...Emma...this is your stop,” the bus
driver hollered as he sat with the door open waiting for Emma to
get off.
    “Oh, sorry,” Emma mumbled, grabbing her
backpack and heading for the door. “I guess I was daydreaming.”
    As soon as Emma got off the bus, the incident
with Candi Haynes began to recede to a small dark corner at the
back of her brain. Since daylight savings time ended, she had to
hurry down to the horse pens and feed and water the horses as soon
as she got home. If she didn’t, darkness caught up with her before
she was finished. Filling water tubs and scooping out feed was just
that much harder when you couldn’t see what you were doing. There
were only four horses in the small pens below the house: Scout, her
father’s roping horse, Ditto, the new mare, and Camaro, a
two-year-old filly that Emma had fallen in love with on the day of
her