Saddled

Chapter 6

We enter the office and go into the lounge where Josh and Maddie and a few other of the older campers, or were they campers?

“Hey move over Josh, Kiana fell of and probably needs to sit down,” Taylor says.

“Oh shoot, what happened?” He scoots over on the couch he’s sitting on, running into a girl.

“Ow Josh, don’t need to be so rough,” the girl says shoving Josh in the shoulder playfully.  He made a face back.

Maddie walks over to the fridge, gets an ice pack from the freezer, and hands it to Kiana, who places it on her shoulder.

“What happened?” Maddie asks sympathetically.

“Well, I was riding Ashka.  We were supposed to just do a nice easy canter but she started bolting and bucking and obviously, I came off,” Kiana’s voice is casual and she even laughs.  She laughs.  So she falls off a horse gets all bruised up and now she’s laughing.

Horse people.

You can never really can get them.

Maddie flops herself down on a small folding chair in the room and leans forward to face the group of people sitting on the couches.  Taylor leans against the wall next to me.

“Hey Joel, you going to try and hop on August later?” Maddie asks, grinning.

I look at the tall boy with dark brown hair slanting across his forehead.  Hm?  I don’t remember a boy in our camp named Joel, and frankly the only boy we had in our camp was a little kid.

Joel laughs, “Nah, not today.”

“What, you afraid?  Oooh, right, you don’t ride horses.  It’s okay, we’ll just pop you on Rosie or something.”

Rosie?  The little pony that the little girl rides?

Taylor sees me and explains to me, “Our friends come over during the day sometimes.”

I nod.

“Hey guys, this is Brei; it’s her first year here,” Taylor calls out, to my embarrassment.

“Hi Brei!” one of the girls says brightly.  They all smile at me as if I was a cute little bunny.  Frankly I’m the same age as them so I don’t know why I’m being looked at in that way.

“So you just started riding?” one girl with curly hair asks.

I nod.

She grins, “I own my own horse, he’s an equitation horse, but he’s pretty lazy.”  She chuckles.  A what horse?

“Oh, I’m Zoe by the way,” she says, grinning.  “And that’s Joel, Alice, Erin, and Ethan,” she says pointing each person out, “I’m sure you know Josh, Taylor and Maddie.”

I watch them talk for a while, observing them.

Alice is a soft looking girl, with short straight hair, who doesn’t join in the conversation much except to put in her opinions.  Erin and Joel are the ones driving the conversation along with Maddie.  Erin has crazy long red hair which she keeps pushing back, as if ignoring the tangled mess that’s sitting on her head.  Ethan talks more than Alice but isn’t as loud or boisterous as Erin or Joel.

They are all talking about their first “horsey” experiences.  Joel is the only one who doesn’t ride regularly.

Erin, Alice, Ethan, and Maddie all started out at the same barn apparently.

“Remember that time when we egged Erin on to ride Nugget out on the field that one winter bareback?” Alice asks.

Erin burst out laughing, her head tilted back her laughter filling up the room.  Alice was grinning and Maddie and Ethan were also doubled over, laughing.