Tight Rein Read Free Page B

you, Chad Lake!” she screamed. “I’ll get you for this if it’s the last thing I do!”

“W OW .” C AROLE SHOOK HER HEAD dejectedly. “This is just awful. I mean,
awful
.” Beside her, Lisa nodded. Carole slumped against the side of the stable wall. It was Sunday afternoon. The two of them had just met at Pine Hollow, and now they were sitting outside the stable, watching the horses in the pasture grazing in the warm sunshine. It would have been a wonderful day, Carole thought, if they all hadn’t been in such big trouble.
    “So how mad were your parents?” she asked Lisa. “Were they as angry as they looked last night?”
    Lisa slumped against the wall beside Carole. “Oh,no,” she said. “When you saw them last night, they were still being polite. They were
much
angrier than they looked.”
    Because all the girls were supposed to have been spending the night at Lisa’s, one of the first things Mr. and Mrs. Lake had done, after helping Carole out of the pool, was to call Lisa’s parents. Needless to say, Mr. and Mrs. Atwood were not delighted to have their bridge game interrupted by the call. They had come to get Lisa and Carole, whose overnight bags were still at Lisa’s house. Colonel Hanson had picked Carole up from Lisa’s house within half an hour. The sleepover had been over without anyone’s having slept at all.
    “No, my parents weren’t very happy,” Lisa repeated. She picked up a twig and used it to draw a design in the dirt. “Apparently covering the neighbor’s lawn with toilet paper is not what my mother considers ladylike behavior. Neither is sneaking out of the house and then using a ladder to spy on other people.”
    “Chad’s not other people,” Carole said. “He’s Stevie’s brother.”
    “I know, but my mother wasn’t in the mood to see the difference.”
    Carole nodded sympathetically. She had to admit, once the Lakes had turned on all the outside lights by the pool, the crime scene had looked pretty disastrous.Most of Mrs. Lake’s flowers were not going to survive, and Carole had her doubts about the tomato plants.
    “The strange thing is, I have a brother,” Lisa continued. “But he’s so much older than me, I hardly know him. I mean, I don’t know him well enough to fight with him. In a way that’s kind of sad. My mother seems to think that most families are like ours—she doesn’t understand why Stevie would fight with her brothers at all. She said our actions were ‘totally uncalled for.’ Her words exactly.”
    “I think my father thought it was funny,” Carole said. “I mean, he’d never say so, but he gets this little look in the back of his eyes.”
    “So you’re not in trouble, really?”
    “Oh, no, I’m in plenty of trouble, really.” Carole sighed. Just because her father was amused didn’t mean he was going to let her get away with anything. “I’m on KP for the next month.”
    “What’s KP?”
    “Kitchen Police. I have to cook, and wash all the dishes.” Carole looked up at Lisa and grinned. “Still, I suppose it could be worse.”
    Lisa shook her head. “Not for Stevie.”
    Carole’s grin vanished instantly. “You’re right,” she said.
    “The worst part,” Lisa continued, “was that it was ourfault just as much as hers, but she’s getting most of the blame. We went along with her. We thought the whole thing was funny. And you know the TP’ing was my idea.” The thought weighed heavily on Lisa’s conscience. She was supposed to be the well-behaved one. For once she had led Stevie astray, not the other way around, and now Stevie was paying for it.
    “If you hadn’t thought of TP’ing, Stevie or I would have thought of something just as bad,” Carole said comfortingly. “We were all to blame.” She yawned.
    “Are you sleepy?” Lisa asked.
    “Sure.”
    “Me too. Getting up at seven A.M. to take toilet paper off bushes isn’t exactly my idea of fun.”
    They had spent two hours at the Lakes’ that morning,