Under Threat Read Online Free

hooves.
It feels good to be back in the saddle.
    “School okay?” Leah asks as we cut off into the woods.
    She’s at a private Christian school. I’m at the regular public one. “Fine,” I say.
“Blah, blah. You know.”
    I don’t feel like talking about school. Not that it’s terrible or anything. It’s
just what I have to do. I’m in my second-last year, so grades matter. I’m pretty
sure I want to be a vet, and veterinary medicine is even harder to get into than
med school. So I work hard, manage mostly A’s and generally feel disconnected from
it all.
    My life—my friends, my heart, my every spare minute—has always been with the horses.
From sixth grade, when I got Buddy, to last spring, when he started having trouble
with his leg, I spent every evening and weekend at the hunter-jumper stables where
Buddy used to board. Lessons three days a week. Setting up jumps, schooling over
trot poles, hours riding without stirrups to strengthen my legs, cleaning tack and
braiding manes and rubbing down horses and getting up in the middle of the night
to travel to shows.
    I thought the kids I rode with were my friends, but when I retired Buddy and moved
him to the Gibsons’, those relationships kind of fizzled out. There are a few people
I still talk to occasionally, but it’s not the same as when you’re together all
the time.
    Leah and I ride on through the bare trees, mostly in silence, enjoying the stillness
of the woods. Then Snow whinnies, her head lifted, and I can see the white cloud
of her breath. A second later, I hear hoofbeats—someone coming down the trail at
a steady lope.
    “It’s Jake,” Leah says as a huge black horse with a red-jacketed rider appears around
a bend in the trail.
    Jake pulls his gelding, Schooner, up to a walk. He nods to us without smiling.
    “Hi,” I say, moving to the side of the trail and halting to let them pass.
    “Buddy’s looking good.” He takes both reins in one hand and adjusts his helmet.
    I can see the steam rising from Schooner’s sweat-soaked chest and neck. “He’s definitely
better,” I say. “And he’s happy to be out here, for sure.”
    As if in agreement, Buddy tosses his head up and down, and Leah laughs.
    “I have to get back,” Jake says and nudges Schooner into a trot.
    Leah looks at me and sighs.
    I shrug. “Whatever. It’s fine.”
    “It’s not fine,” she says. “He’s being a jerk.”
    Jake and I got along really well all last summer, when I first moved Buddy to the
Gibsons’. When Buddy was too lame to ride, Jake used to let me take out one of his
horses, so we could ride together. And I helped with his riding lessons, setting
up jumps for the kids he teaches. We weren’t super close or anything—he’s a lot older,
for one thing—but we hung out. Not friends, but friendly.
    Right up until I got together with his sister. He’s barely spoken to me since he
found out.
    “He’ll get over it, or he won’t,” I say. After almost three months, I’m not holding
my breath. “Either way, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
    Leah has that pink flush under her eyes that means she’s trying not to cry. “I’m
sorry.”
    “Don’t apologize,” I say. “You can’t control what he thinks. Anyway, you’re way more
upset about it than I am.”
    She twists her fingers in Snow’s long white mane. “He’s my brother. You know?”
    “Yeah.” Though as an only child, I don’t know that I can really understand. “At least
Hannah and Esther are cool with us,” I say.
    Leah laughs. “Hannah and Esther think it’s the coolest thing ever.”
    After we get the horses settled back in their stalls and give them a couple of flakes
of hay, we head up to the house. Leah’s mom, Diane, has invited me to stay for dinner.
    “Pizza,” she says as we walk in. “Is that okay, Franny? You eat dairy, right? And
wheat?”
    “I eat everything,” I say. “Seriously. I don’t think there is any kind of food that
I don’t