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“You messed up again. You weren’t careful. She knows how much you have,” Piper told me, stretched on her side beside me on the bed. Her head rested in her hand.
“So what?” I asked, turning over onto my stomach away from her.
The bed covers slipped to my waist, so I tugged them up a little farther.
“Too bad,” Piper purred in reaction, making me recoil. “I like your back. I like your front even more. Turn over for me.”
“Get out of here, Piper.”
“She knows how much you have,” she repeated.
“Again, so?”
“What if she tells the others? What if they want what you have?”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
“She could.”
“Even if she did,” I said, losing my temper, “they wouldn’t take it.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because they’re good people.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There is! You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Everyone has a little leech in them, Spencer. Don’t be naive.”
The alarm rang out at four thirty the next morning once more, and once again, I realized that I was indeed not dreaming. When I was dressed in my new clothing, I asked Bridge if she thought I looked like a tool. In perfect seriousness, she said, “Dude, you look like you belong here,” which made me happy as shit. Jonah picked Bridge up again, but this time Cricket didn’t meet me halfway down the drive, much to my disappointment. This is good, I kept telling myself over and over.
Jonah and I repeated cleaning out the stalls much as we did the day before but this time, we placed a bag of something called “bedding pellets” down. We laid the bags down in the corners of the stalls and with a knife, cut a cross section, tucking the flaps into the inside of the bag. What happened next fascinated me because we poured an entire bucket of warm water into the bag.
“Leave it,” Jonah told me. “We’ll come spread the bedding after breakfast.”
“What will happen to the pellets?” I asked him as we made our way up to the main house.
“They spread. That entire bag will turn into at least twelve cubic feet of extra pine bedding. It has the consistency of sawdust, is soft on the horses, better for their allergies, and even increases the rate of urine absorbency, making it more sanitary. We use one to two bags a week, depending on how often the horses use the stalls.”
“Cool.”
“It is.”
After breakfast, we spread the bedding. I was excited to get on a horse because it’d been at least a year, but Jonah informed me we needed to groom them before. I’d never had to do that. Shamefully, the stable hands did all that for us. Jonah taught me how to properly groom a horse so that it didn’t chafe or get rubbed by any loose dirt during the workday. I asked him why they didn’t do that when they put them away and he told me they did it any time a horse is ridden and any time they’re put away.
“Damn, this is a lot of work,” I told him.
Jonah laughed. “We haven’t even started, greenhorn.”
I paid, in cash of course, I heard Cricket’s phone ring.
“Hello?” Her breathing picked up, making my heart race. “Okay. Okay. Sure.” She brought the phone to me. “It’s August.”
“August?” I asked, nervous. “What’s up, dude?”
“Dude, your dad is crazy,” he began.
