Pleasure Horse by Bonnie Bryant Page A

first “Hip, hip, hooray” hit her ears, Stevie thrilled with pride. That was another thing about cheerleaders she hadn’t taken into consideration: They could cheer for her!

I T HAD BEEN the longest long weekend that any of The Saddle Club members could remember. “So much has happened since you left, I don’t know where to start,” Lisa said to Stevie.
    All three girls were lazing in the locker room after their Tuesday-afternoon lesson. They knew that Mrs. Reg would catch them any minute and give them tack to clean, but for right now, they just had to catch up. They were also waiting for Max’s wife, Deborah, who had promised to pick them up and take them over to see Samson settled in his new home.
    “Or, you could say that only one thing happened: Samson left to go and be trained at Mr. Grover’s,” Carole said with a grin. “It’s just that so many things had to happen before
that
happened.”
    “Right,” Lisa agreed. “Like we had to try ninety-nine ways to get Samson used to the stirrups before realizing that nothing we did was going to work.”
    “Only ninety-nine? Lisa, that’s not like you,” Stevie kidded. “You’re such a perfectionist that I wouldn’t have expected you to quit before at least a hundred!”
    “Actually, Lisa had the sense to quit, but I didn’t,” Carole said, more seriously. “I didn’t want to feel that I wasn’t doing everything I could for Samson, since I hadn’t been able to do enough to save Cobalt’s life. I was really getting paranoid—I thought Max was spying on us when he was only keeping tabs on Samson like he does on any other horse.”
    “And I talked to Max yesterday. It really was a coincidence that we ran into problems at the same time that Max was planning to send Samson away. We didn’t realize that. To us it looked like we messed up and so Max was taking him away as punishment,” Lisa explained.
    Lisa and Carole agreed that the main thing they had learned was that sometimes somebody outside The Saddle Club was more qualified or more experienced to dothe job at hand. “My dad tried to tell us that, but I, for one, didn’t get it,” Carole said.
    Lisa pointed out that she hadn’t gotten it, either, at first. As a top student, she was used to taking on tasks that no one thought she could do and making them come out perfectly. And she shared the we-can-do-anything Saddle Club spirit with Stevie and Carole. But, unlike Carole, she hadn’t had a bond with Cobalt. So when Samson started misbehaving, she could see that they weren’t getting anywhere with his training.
    “So, Carole, do you miss Samson a lot already?” Stevie inquired gently.
    Carole thought for a minute. “Yes and no,” she said finally. “When I walked in today, I thought of his empty stall and I felt sad. But then I felt this overwhelming sense of relief that his training’s in Mr. Grover’s hands now. I got a good night’s sleep last night for the first time since the stirrup problem began. It seems so obvious to me now: Sometimes you’ve just got to call in the expert.”
    Stevie grinned. “Experts aren’t always the answer, though,” she said. She filled her friends in on the weekend, starting with Angie’s new personality and ending with the very amateur way the party had turned out, under her guidance.
    “But you’re wrong, Stevie,” said Lisa. “If there’s anything you’re an expert at, it’s throwing parties and having fun.”
    “That’s exactly what I was going to say,” Carole agreed. “You should hire yourself out to people who don’t know how to enjoy themselves.”
    “I thought my cousin had fallen into that category, but she turned out to be okay. I think part of her attitude problem was that she was incredibly nervous about the party. But once her sweet sixteen turned out well, she was almost a different person.” The day after the party, Stevie and Angie had hung out all day. In a lot of ways, Angie really was still the girl Stevie