Catch Rider (9780544034303) by Jennifer H. Lyne Read Free Book Online Page A

She swore at them, and for the first time, I felt a little sorry for her. She was always alone. No one really cared whether she liked boys or girls—people just got angry because they couldn’t figure it out.
    Wayne had never told me much about Oak Hill, just that the horses were fancy and the people were rich. He said they went to big shows and won lots of trophies. That was about it; for some reason, he didn’t like to talk about it. Maybe they were mean to him there. Maybe I’d have to set them straight.
    When I pulled in to Wayne’s place, I was late, but he was waiting in his truck. I turned off the car and we looked at each other.
    â€œWhat do I bring?” I asked.
    â€œJust yourself.”
    â€œI gotta get my saddle.”
    â€œYou need your saddle to clean stalls?”
    I slid out of the car, walked around his truck, and got in.
    â€œWhat’re they paying?”
    â€œMinimum.”
    I sighed.
    â€œThat’s more per hour than you’re making now,” he said.
    We got on the interstate and hit about eighty in that old truck of his. He said it was ninety miles—through Bath County, Allegheny, Rockbridge, and into Albemarle.
    He told me that he slept in the barn sometimes, got up and worked there the next day, which I never knew. I said I wasn’t sleeping in their goddamn barn—they could put me up in a hotel. For some reason, he thought that was hilarious.
    The truck heaved up Afton Mountain and started down the other side. There was so much fog on the top of the mountain that tractor-trailers were pulled over, hazards flashing. As Wayne came over the top, the fog thinned, and I could see the cars in front of us again.
    I looked at the white rock formations peeking through the exposed bluffs on top of the mountain. Ruthie’s dad, Earl, had told me it was quartzite, one of the toughest rocks in the world. He had been working in the Massey Mine in Highland County when Ruthie lost her mother, and he’d quit and gotten a job at the mill because Ruthie and her sister were scared that they might lose him, too. But he was a miner at heart, knowing every rock and vein in Allegheny County.
    One time, when we were little, he took Ruthie, Dorine, and me down near the Trueheart Mine in Amelia County in the early spring to look for gems in the rich, red clay. Amelia was on a fault line, ripe for rock hounds. We had packed a lunch and a couple of sodas and driven through the mountains, then through the tobacco fields lined with Queen Anne’s lace and barbed wire, and then we’d turned off the main road and gone deep into the woods. Ruthie’s father had pulled up to a white farmhouse and slipped a dollar bill under the door as payment for rock hunting. It was spooky. There was no one around but a deerhound covered in fat yellow ticks.
    We’d dug our shovels into the silty creek bed, put a clump of dirt onto the screen, and hosed it off. I found a piece of shiny black tourmaline the size of my finger wedged into a rock, and when Ruthie’s father saw it, he whistled. Over the years, he’d found dozens of aquamarines, amethysts, buckets full of smoky quartz, but this was something rare. He told me to keep it just like it was because God had taken his time with it. I was surprised when he said this—he wasn’t usually that sentimental. But it gave me a tingly feeling down my back because he said it like he meant it, and for a split second I thought it might be true. If God, whoever that was, took his time with a piece of tourmaline, why the hell didn’t he bring my father home from the Falling Springs market?
    â€œThese rich people are just like you and me,” Wayne finally said, interrupting my thoughts. “They put their boots on one at a time, just like we do.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
    After we passed Shadwell, we took the Crozet exit. The spiny mountains rolled into hills with thick, wet pasture