Summer Rider by Bonnie Bryant

to pay for them instead of getting them for free.”
    Stevie laughed. That sounded like something she might say. “And that worked?”
    “Well, not really,” Phil said with a shrug. “But then I suggested that he could use the money for staff bonuses—you know, when he tells them the camp is closing down. That did it.”
    They stopped talking as Betty hustled past, carrying a clipboard. “Better get a move on, people,” she said when she spotted them. “The dressage event starts in fifteen minutes flat.”
    In between her fund-raising efforts and everything else, Stevie had somehow managed to find the energy to work hard with Belle in all their classes, especially dressage. The practice paid off, and at the end of the event, they rode away with the blue ribbon. Phil came in second, and Carole was third.
    Lisa, who had come in seventh, watched as all kinds of people came up to congratulate Stevie on her win.
    “Don’t worry about it, boy,” she whispered to Major, rubbing his nose as she walked him to cool him down. “This one didn’t matter. We’ll have our turn in the spotlight a little later.”
    After dressage came hunter seat equitation. This was an event in which the rider’s ability was judged, rather than the horse’s. First each competitor jumped a course of six low fences. Then the judges called the riders back into the ring one by one and asked them to perform various maneuvers and gaits.
    Stevie held her breath during the jumping portion of the event, and it wasn’t because she was worried about her own performance. Every time a hoof grazed a rail, she winced, and the few times a fence came down, she groaned out loud. She could almost hear the cash slipping away with each mistake. There were only about a dozen jumping faults in the entire group, but Stevie wasn’t comforted. The equitation fences weren’t supposed to be very challenging. The real test would come later, in the hunter-jumping and show-jumping events.
    Stevie was so distracted that she ended up placing out of the ribbons in equitation, but she didn’t really mind. She cheered loudly for Carole, who had come in first, and Phil, who was fourth.
    As the hunter-jumping event got underway, Stevie pulled out her calculator and did her best to figure out how many rails the riders could afford to miss. But thefund-raising project had become so huge and complicated that she really wasn’t certain how close they were to their goal. She could make a pretty good estimate about the take from the ticket and food sales, but beyond that it was anybody’s guess how much money they had raised so far. Tucking the calculator back into her pocket, she decided she would just have to cross her fingers and hope for the best.

“D ID YOU SEE my awesome ride?” Todd cried, almost running into Lisa as she walked out of the stable. He was leading his horse toward the water trough, and Lisa saw that there was a yellow ribbon clipped to Alamo’s bridle.
    “You came in third? That’s great,” she said, hoping she sounded enthusiastic. The truth was, she couldn’t care less about Todd’s ribbon in hunter jumping. All she could focus on right now was the event ahead of her. Soon it wouldn’t matter that Carole and Stevie had finished ahead of her in all the other events. Soon nobody would remember that she hadn’t been riding as long as her friends had. She could almost picture the blue ribbon fluttering from Major’s bridle; she could almost taste the victory. And it tasted sweet—as sweet as the chocolate chip cookie she had bought and tucked into her pocketfor luck. As soon as the ribbon was hers, she would eat every bite of it.
    More than twenty campers had decided to enter the show-jumping event, and Lisa had drawn number seventeen. She wished she could go earlier and get it over with, but maybe it was better to go near the end. That way she would know exactly how well she had to do to win. She found a spot near the fence and settled in to watch