Horse Sense Read Online Free

quickly clattered to the floor. That didn’t matter, though, because it would be impossible to hula on horseback. But could she swing it around on, say, her forearm without spooking the horse?
    She got the hoop to circle her forearm. She tried to imagine being a horse, watching the spinning hoop, and decided she wasn’t upset by it—even when it upset a lampshade. Then she decided that wasn’t really an objective test.
    “What are you doing?” asked her twin brother, Alex, opening the door. “I mean, are you into busting up furniture now?”
    “No, I’m just—hey, you can help me. Come on in here.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him into her room. “I really need help, see. It’s for the gymkhana,” she began, but he interrupted her.
    “Gym-what?” he asked.
    “The gymkhana. It’s for Pine Hollow—a tournament of fun, silly games you play on horseback.”
    “Not me, Sis,” Alex said. “I don’t know anything about horses, you know that. And, anyway, I’m on my way over to Ron Ziegler’s house. His little brothers got a Laser Tag for their birthday, but they’ve gone to a friend’s house this afternoon, so Ron and I—”
    “Laser Tag! That’s perfect!” Stevie shouted. She’d never actually played it, but she knew it was an electronic game of tag with guns that shot light beams at a vest, which lit up when the beam hit its target. It seemed like a perfect gymkhana game. “I’ve
got
to borrow it.”
    “What do you mean you’ve got to borrow it? It belongs to Ron’s little brothers, and you know what monsters they are. If you want to borrow something from them, in the first place, you’re crazy, but in the second place,
you
ask them.”
    “Oh, come on, Alex,” Stevie said in her sweetest, most appealing twin-sister voice, ignoring the phone as it began to ring. “You’ve just got to get them to let me use it—”
    “Stevie, phone call!” her brother Chad yelled up the stairs.
    She walked to the door and opened it. Looking down toward Chad at the foot of the stairs, she asked, “Who is it?”
    “I dunno,” he informed her.
    “I’ll be right there,” she told Chad. “But first …” She turned to talk to Alex again, but he’d escapedthrough the other door to her room while she was talking with Chad. She stepped to her window, and saw him jogging across their lawn. She raised the sash. “Come on, Alex, you’ve only got to
ask
them for me!” she called after him. He continued on his way, pretending not to hear her.
    Stevie sighed and picked up the phone on her bedside table—a major, long-hoped-for twelfth birthday present (though at that moment, she wished she’d gotten Laser Tag).
    “Hullo?”
    “Where were you? What took you so long to answer?” Carole asked her over the phone.
    “Oh, it’s my dumb brother,” Stevie explained. “I’ve just got to borrow a Laser Tag set, and he won’t ask his best friend—well, actually it’s his little brothers—to lend it to me. I mean, it’ll be fantastic. Don’t you think so?”
    “Well, I guess it’s a pretty good game,” Carole said, “but I never much wanted to play it myself.”
    “It’s for the gymkhana!” Stevie said. “Oh, but I didn’t get a chance to tell you about it, did I?”
    “Nope,” Carole said just a little sarcastically, but Stevie didn’t notice.
    “Well, that’s what Max wanted to see me about. We’re going to have a gymkhana and he wants me to come up with all kinds of neat games for it. Mrs. Reg just suggested an egg-in-a-spoon race and a rope race, but I want something more exciting than that stuff.Can you think of anything better than Laser Tag on horseback?”
    “I guess that would be fun,” Carole told her.
    “You guess? Is that all you can say? It would be the best thing in the world!”
    “No,
I
just saw the best thing in the world,” Carole said. “I just saw a newborn foal.”
    Suddenly, gymkhanas didn’t seem so all-important to Stevie. “Delilah had the foal