Dancing With the Devil

Chapter 9

 This chapter is dedicated to an awesome person who never fails to make me smile! Her support is unreal, and I can't thank you enough!!

Hope you guys enjoy this chapter. I made it extra long just for you guys, and poured a lot of info into it. Hope it makes up for my disappearance for the past month!

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For being a country girl, I’d never had a horse. It wasn’t uncommon to have a beast grazing in the backyard, but for some reason, my parents had never been interested in building a barn or even just a tiny stable for a pony. I had always wanted one, but I rarely got the chance to even sit in a saddle, despite most of my neighbors owning at least one or two.

It had been worse, the begging and wanting, when I was younger, around ten. I’d convinced my mom to get me a pair of cowgirl boots, cute brown ones that had pink jewels down the sides. For the first month after getting them, they hadn’t left my feet once. I would walk around in them, eat in them, go to school in them, show Violet them, sometimes even sleep in my precious boots. The leather had felt smooth when it brushed against my skin as I walked, and the thick soles had supported my feet that wouldn’t sit still.

The true storm hit about a week into my cowgirl obsession, when I’d been with Violet and her mom. We’d gone to the supermarket (I was of course wearing my boots) and spotted two rodeo hats, one pink and one purple. I had fallen in love instantly with the pink that was identical to the jewels on my boots and wide brim that shadowed my face.

Violet’s mom had been hesitant at first, probably picturing all of our other useless toys: lock and key diaries, jewelry boxes with passwords, millions of dolls that we dressed and redressed to perfection, sparkly fairy wands that we were convinced had some sort of magic to them, and now cowgirl hats. We just needed those cowgirl hats.

She caved, giving into the puppy eyes and innocent, wide smiles like most mothers do. Then the real damage began. I put my hair in two braids almost everyday. I would pretend that I had to lasso a wild horse in as I perched on my own trusty steed. And whenever someone greeted me, I would respond, “Howdy y’all,” with a tip of my hat.

My mom got a kick out of it, laughing at my antics that I was completely serious about. I didn’t understand why she would laugh at my war cries against enemy bandits that tried to steal my horse or the reason she giggled behind her hand as I walked with slow, steady, and casual steps with my hands on my belt. It all made sense a couple of years later as we flicked through photo books and there I was, waving my invisible lasso in my usual getup, mouth open wide in a defiant yell.

Despite me no longer strutting around in a cowgirl hat and two braids- pretending to be something between the outlaw Chuck Norris and wild, free Pocahontas- I still wanted a horse. I loved wearing my cowboy boots, even though I didn’t stomp around in them every day like I used to, and they were now a classy black instead of the glamorous brown and pink. My eyes lit up every time I saw the swift, muscled animal. My ears perked at the familiar clop, clop, clop of their four hooves, usually protected with metal horseshoes. I jumped at any opportunity I got to ride one.

We had a small Amish community in our tiny town. There was a nice Amish woman who drove by our house about once a week, and she noticed my interest in her sleek chestnut-colored mare. One day, when I was around twelve, she offered to let me take a ride, if it was alright with my mother of course. I’d all but ran into her in my rush to ask if I could please ride the pretty horse, and she agreed as long as she could watch. So, once a week I would happily trot her horse up and down our road for ten minutes, making sure to not exert her so that she could get her owner back home. Our tradition came to an abrupt end when the lady died last year, when I was sixteen. The horse was inherited by her daughter, who left the Amish within the week and moved, horse and all, somewhere else.