Colt by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

pleading for him that for a moment he couldn’t speak. Then in a small voice he said, “I won’t hassle Rosie anymore.”
    It was the truth. Rosie was a friend after all, like Liverwurst. Colt felt glad he hadn’t put the hair remover anyplace serious, like Rosie’s head.
    â€œIt’s just boy stuff, hon,” Brad said to his wife.
    Still more hurt and baffled than angry, Audrey grumbled, “Well, I don’t know …”
    â€œHe won’t do anything else to me,” Rosie said as if promising for Colt. “Because he knows if he does, I’ll do it right back to him. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Right, brat?” Rosie grinned at Colt. Past him Colt could see Brad’s laughing eyes. These Flowers guys had something good between them, and they were offering to include him in it.
    â€œRight!” said Colt.
    When practice started, the last week of July, Rosie told his cross-country teammates that he had gotten himself a special aerodynamic leg clip originated by the Olympic running coach. To smiling passersby as he jogged he muttered something about racing stripes. To his sister he said that he would punch her lights out if he heard one more word. To Colt and his father he maintained that the hair remover treatment really seemed to be helping him run faster. His time had mysteriously improved over the previous year’s.
    All that hair, his father gravely agreed, had been slowing him down. Maybe he ought to defuzz his legs regularly, as he did his face.
    On that basis, Audrey remarked, a shaved racehorse should run faster.
    And Colt sat in his thigh-high leg braces and dreamed of going fast, faster, on a horse.
    His riding lessons had started. (“You scum!” Lauri had complained, and she had called her father at work to see if she could get him to promise her horseback riding lessons the next summer instead of gymnastics.) Because of the summertime heat, lessons took place in the evening, which worked out for Colt’s mother. By that time of day she was home from work and could take Colt to Deep Meadows Farm.
    For the first few weeks Lauri came along too, and watched wistfully. After that she quit coming. It just made her mad, she said.
    Mrs. Reynolds had arranged for Colt to have his lessons by himself, because she wanted to give him her full attention. He wore a helmet and safety belt borrowed from Mrs. Berry. After Mrs. Reynolds found that he could consistently keep his balance on a walking horse, she stopped staying right by his side. Leaning against the ring’s rail fence, she called instructions to him, watching him guide Liverwurst in circles and reverses and along diagonals.
    â€œYou have good hands,” she told him. “You keep a nice, steady, light contact with the mouth. I like to see that. I hate to see a rider dragging on the horse’s mouth.”
    Colt said, “I try to think what it would feel like if I were the horse.”
    â€œWe’ll make a horseman of you yet.”
    After a few weeks she put him into a class of non-handicapped beginning riders. Colt could do everything the others could do at a walk, but while they practiced posting to a trot he halted Liverwurst in the center of the ring, doing saddle exercises and watching. The trot was a piston-action two-beat gait, bumping the riders along until they learned to rise and sink, rise and sink in the saddle. When Mrs. Reynolds demonstrated, posting to the rhythm of her own thoroughbred’s long, reaching trot, she seemed to skim the world like a meadowlark.
    Colt’s mother, who was sitting on a bench reading a paperback novel while he had his lesson, lifted her eyes from time to time and watched him anxiously. He wished she wouldn’t stick around while he rode, but she always did. She had to help Mrs. Reynolds get him onto Liverwurst and off again, and she said by the time she went anywhere else it would be time to come back again. But if she was going to stay, he