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But she flung the door open, and he was left there with his hand in the air. Her eyes held the remnants of anger.
She glanced at his hand. “I’m sorry.”
She was sorry? He pulled his hand back.
She looked at the molding around the doorway, rubbing at an invisible spot with her finger. “I shouldn’t have come off like that. Sometimes you just you cut right to the quick, you know?”
“You too,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have slammed the door in your face.”
“I much prefer it to getting hit.” He looked up, past her, at the bedroom. Finally, a break to the white but this wasn’t much better. Pink carpeting, princess border along the ceiling, white walls, and a gold canopy bed.
“What,” he said, “no Barbie dream castle?”
Layne flushed. “Shut up.”
She moved to push past him and shut the door, but he slid into her room instead. She had a bookcase, white trimmed with pink, packed double and triple with paperbacks. No shocker there. It looked like she still had every book she’d ever read. Her bedspread wasn’t childish, though, just a simple pink, white, and yellow checked quilt. More books threatened to fall from a pile on the nightstand.
He’d been kidding about the Barbie dolls, but a row of model horses marched across the top of the bookcase, with a framed picture of a girl on a horse at the corner.
He touched a gray horse on the nose, and she was beside him immediately.
“Horses, Layne?” he said.
“Isn’t that what rich little girls do?” she said, her voice vaguely mocking. “Ride horses?”
The girl in the photo wore a helmet, so he couldn’t be sure who it was. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. Last year.” She hesitated, and something about it felt personal.
He withdrew his hand and made his own voice vaguely mocking. “I didn’t mean to make you talk about it.”
She bit at her lip. “No one knows I do it anymore.” Then she blushed and rubbed the gray horse on the nose where he’d touched it. “I mean, my parents know. They pay the bills and all. Just . . . no one at school.”
“What a crazy thing to keep secret.” He leaned closer to the picture. The horse was clearing a jump, with Layne crouched close to the animal’s neck. “That’s a big jump.”
“Nah. Only three and a half feet.”
He glanced back at her. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?”
A little shrug. “Sometimes. I think that’s why I like it. No matter how good you are, you’re never completely in control.
The horse has a mind of its own. You can’t force it.”
“So how good are you?”
She met his eyes, and he liked the spark of challenge he found there. “Good enough.” She paused. “When I was younger, I used to compete all the time. We went to New York, Devon, Washington, all the big ones. My mother loved it. She couldn’t wait to have another blue ribbon to hang on the wall, to brag about at the next benefit. Her perfect daughter.”
Like flipping a switch, Layne’s voice went from tentative to furious. “I hated the competition, I hated the pressure, I hated how something I loved had turned into something else my mother could use against me.”
She reminded him of the fire in the woods, under control one minute, then blazing.
“But still you do it,” he said.
“I don’t compete,” she said. “I just ride. Horses don’t care that I have ” Her voice broke off suddenly, and he studied her, waiting. But she didn’t say anything else, and she was staring at that picture, her shoulders tense.
The horses didn’t care that she had what?
