Carry On (Book 1)

Chapter 34:

Madison's pov

"This sucks!" I state.

Ariel laughs at my negativity as we work on our homework. After our intermediate team practice today, we had worked all the horses attending Ariel's clinic. We had just finished a training session with two Willow Lane student horses, Odin and Angel.

After the whole Jack fiasco, liberty was exactly what Ariel and I needed to de-stress. While rumours spread like wildfire about Jack's sudden departure, no one knew the reason behind it. My mother suggested everyone kept quiet for the sake of both parties.

While Ariel gained this pure determination to teach Bullet liberty, I started to find my own idea of fun. Sure, the proper liberty work was cool, but it wasn't me, or Koda. Koda and I needed to find a way to add some fun into the mix. And so we did.

I began to teach him things like head shaking, pawing, pushing and sitting. We got the first three down rather quickly, but the sitting part was difficult as I expected. Ariel was skeptical about teaching me these things at first, worried that Koda would pick them up as bad habits. I wasn't to concerned, I knew Koda well enough to know he's to chilled to play up with me.

"Why would you teach him those tricks anyway?" Ariel had asked.

"I don't know, for fun I guess?"

"Alright" Ariel sighed.

"Obviously we'll do the things we were planning, this is kind of like a side task" I added.

Ariel didn't press any further on the topic from then onwards.

I just wanted to get started on working with Koda. For the whole afternoon, I had pondered about the parents weekend coming up. Mom and dad surely couldn't be attending just to watch me? I could easily bet that they're were only attending for buisness reasons. Right?

"Earth to Maddy" Ariel says.

I glance up from my book, trying to hide my amused expression when I see her squinting at the textbook. "Yeah?"

Ariel points at an equation. "None of it makes any sense to me, how am I suppose to figure this out?"

"You'll need to rearrange the equation... so to get the value of X you'll need to move the other numbers to here..." I point out.

"-that should then give you an equation... then the answer to that equation is X"

"Oh..." Ariel says.

I laugh silently and go back to my work.

"Ugh! You're right! This does suck"

"At least you get formulas to answer the questions. This history quiz is so boring, I could fall asleep" I sigh.

Even though my grades were great and I usually liked school work, I wanted to be at the barn more then ever. We had so much to do there, but I doubt Mr. Mallen would be happy about seeing us at this time of night. I bet Koda was eating his dinner as we speak, maybe I should feed him my homework. I grin at the thought of saying 'my horse at my homework'.

"Oh because it's such a monstrosity that you know all the answers" Ariel says sarcastically, shaking her head at me.

"I think I'm going stircrazy, we've been here for hours" I said, motioning around Ariel's dorm room.

Ariel laughs. "Maddy, we've only been here for ten minutes"

"Ten minutes. Ten hours. Same thing" I mumble.

Ariel rolls her eyes "no it isn't drama queen"

I huff and stare at my already completed history quiz. What do I do now besides help Ariel with homework? My gaze falls onto a mystery box and I couldn't help but to become immediately curious. After about half an hour of helping Ariel, she finally finishes her worksheet. I didn't mind helping her, it made me feel better knowing I was doing some good.