Centaur Rising by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page B

gentle hug, as tentative as I’d been with Robbie when he was little, so afraid that with all his medical problems, I might break something important.
    Kai threw both arms around me, his hug awkward and much too strong for a three-day-old. I could feel his heart beating.
    His little boy heart. And the horse heart, too.
    Enough love there , I thought, for all of us .

 
    7
    The Angotti Factor
    T HOSE FIRST THREE DAYS WENT BY much too quickly, like the lead horse racing at the Three County Fairground. All we managed to get done in that time was to name Kai and make his stall as safe as possible. The rest of the time, we had all the other horses to take care of, Robbie’s schoolwork, and Dr. Herks’ careful monitoring of Kai’s extraordinary growth.
    Extraordinary was Mom’s word. I just thought, Wow! Is he getting big fast!
    It was as if the boy part of his body had to grow extra quick to keep up with the horse part. In those first few days, he got more and more control of his legs, grew baby teeth, and learned to put a few words together to make sentences, something it would take a regular human kid a year or more to do.
    He developed muscles in his upper arms by pushing at the stall door whenever we left and never got that pouchy baby tummy that some of my little cousins had.
    Along with the growth, his hair grew in red-brown tendrils till it was halfway down his neck. He looked so adorable, I took three pictures of him with Mom’s Polaroid camera. I showed them to him, and he said, “Who that, Awee?”
    â€œSilly,” Robbie said. “It’s you.”
    Kai looked puzzled. He didn’t understand how different he was. I mean, how could he? He was still a baby in many ways.
    So I asked Mom if we could get a mirror for him.
    The next time Dr. Herks came to check on Kai, he brought along a narrow full-length mirror and mounted it on the barn door.
    Kai spent hours looking at himself in the mirror, playing peekaboo games, until he finally realized that the interesting pony boy there was himself.
    As for the photographs, I pinned them to my bedroom bulletin board.
    Mom called Kai’s growth spurt a miracle. Martha called it a marvel. Dr. Herks called it nature, nurture, and myth combining.
    I—the one person who had wanted magic in our lives—seemed to be the one person worried that it was going to mean more trouble for us. Meaning me.
    Only Robbie fully accepted the magic that was Kai.
    Oh—and Agora, of course. Since she’d never had a foal before, perhaps she just thought this was an ordinary birth, an ordinary foal, an ordinary boy.
    *   *   *
    The four days we asked our horse boarders to give us should have been enough. But we hadn’t counted on Mrs. Angotti’s sneaky determination. She kept calling Mom and getting put off again and again. So she took things into her own hands.
    The morning of the next day, she didn’t call ahead, just arrived without announcing her intentions at a time when Martha and I were mucking out stalls, Robbie was in with Agora and Kai, and Mom was in the house making phone calls.
    The Angottis—Mrs. A and the two kids, Joey and Angela—all got out to shift the sawhorses so they could drive right up to the barn.
    I saw them by accident as I started out of the stables and would have said something, but Mom had already seen them, too. She came galloping out of the house, waving her hands to stop them. So I shrank back against the wall.
    She and Mrs. A argued for about five minutes, most of the time loud enough for me to hear.
    Halfway through, Mom said, “I’ll go and get your horses right now and tie them to the back of your car if you drive up to the barn.”
    Mrs. A replied, “You wouldn’t!”
    â€œJust try me! They can trot home after you, or you can leave them here, but you’re not coming in. Not till the four days are up and the vet gives us the all clear. Maybe even