Every Wild Heart Page 5

  “Soooo,” Lucas said, filling the silence. The tone of his voice had changed. Nic knew that he was beginning to realize the kind of girl that she was, and soon there would be no going back. It was easy to go from cool to uncool in someone’s estimation—the slide down was oil-slick. Nic had never been cool, but she saw the fear hiding in the eyes of the kids who balanced on the outer ring of the popular circle; one wrong step and they were out. The move in the other direction—from uncool to cool—was a rare feat. You had to be prepared to claw your way up. If Nic clung to silence for another moment it would all be over: any chance she had of being someone Lucas Holt thought was worth knowing, any chance she had of making some of those dreams she’d had over the summer become a reality.

  “I think as your senior buddy,” Lucas said, his words dripping with sarcasm, “I’m supposed to give you some advice or impart some wisdom or something. But I’m new here.” He’d picked up Nic’s grass-pulling tic, but he did it more violently than she did. He looked at the grass in his hands, his eyes glazed over as though he didn’t really see it. He was doing that thing, she realized, that thing where people talked to her as though they were talking to themselves. She was disappearing before his eyes, fading into the background. He could say anything to her and it wouldn’t matter, because she didn’t matter.

  “It’s my second day at Kirke,” he continued. “You probably have more advice for me than I do for you at this point. Like what food to avoid in the cafeteria. Or where to catch a smoke without getting caught.” When he glanced up at her and smiled, there was a hint of something cruel in his eyes that crushed her. He knew she wasn’t a smoker—she was an awkward freshman in an oversized T-shirt. “Or where everyone hangs out after school.”

  He was pulling out grass in clumps now, roots and all, a moat of dark earth growing between them. As Nic stared at the dark line, a silver bug emerged from the soil, its back a gleaming shield.

  From across the field, the voices of her classmates formed a collective murmur.

  Talk to him. The command rose inside of her.

  “Meatball sub,” she said. The words were wet with the saliva that had pooled in her mouth during her long minutes of silence.

  Lucas looked at her. His long fingers went still, hidden in the grass.

  As a kid, Nic had eventually figured out that the only way to not stutter was to envision her words as a train bursting out of a tunnel, each word a train car that was linked to another, barreling out into the bright light of day. So that’s what she did: she swallowed a wad of saliva, cleared her throat, and pushed out a train of words.

  “You asked what to avoid in the cafeteria, so I’m telling you: the meatball sub. They put some weird spice in it that makes your mouth feel kind of furry the rest of the day. The spice makes the sub smell good under those heat lamps on the buffet so you’ll be tempted, but I promise you’ll regret it later. You have to, like, gargle with bleach to get the stink out of your mouth. You shouldn’t really do that. Gargle with bleach. I think you could die, and then Dr. Clay would really be pissed. I’d probably have to do a month of Community Spirit. It would be better for both of us if you just avoided the meatball sub.

  “On a related breath-and-death note,” she continued, “I don’t smoke. I’ve never tried it. I avoid things that hasten death.” Once she’d started talking, she couldn’t stop. She didn’t feel like Lucas was looking at her; she felt like he was watching her. The intensity in his eyes made her cheeks burn. “Seems like a pretty natural instinct, doesn’t it? Not wanting to hasten death? Well, I saw a therapist once who said I took it too far. She said if you build up walls of fear, you’re creating your own prison.”

  Why was she telling him this? She couldn’t seem to stop. She didn’t even take a breath. There was a twinge in the back of her throat that she always felt right before she started crying, but she wasn’t crying yet. She was just talking.

  “I don’t really know where everyone goes after school,” she said. “No one has ever invited me anywhere. But I doubt there’s any real mystery to it. Everyone’s parents are too freaked out about their kids getting into a good college to let them have much free time. Sports practice, academic clubs, the afterschool theater or arts programs. I’m sure there’s a group that still finds time to sneak away and smoke pot somewhere, but I wouldn’t really know. I go to Corcoran Stables to ride my horse. It’s the best part of my day. I wish I could skip the whole school part and go straight to the barn. Taking care of a horse is hard work. I like that. It feels like I’m doing something real. When I’m riding, everything else in my life goes away and I just think about what I’m doing in that moment. Also, I like being on my own. And I love horses, mine particularly. His name is Tru.”

  Lucas was silent, watching her. Nic felt sure that he was imagining retelling this story to Emory Torres or Jasmine Cane. Things wound down quickly after that. If her words were a train, fuel was running in short supply now and she was chugging to a broken-down stop. The sun that had felt so comforting minutes earlier now felt cruelly hot. Beads of sweat wet her brow.

  “I know, I know,” she said. Her voice was thin. She knew she was speaking too slowly, giving the stutter a foothold. “A girl who loves horses. How predic . . . dic . . . dic . . .”

  Nic had once watched a cartoon in which a character’s sweater caught on something sharp and unraveled in a matter of seconds, leaving the character clutching her naked cartoon body, mortified, cheeks aflame. Ha ha, Nic had thought bitterly even then, even before she knew exactly how that felt. How funny.

  She made a final, exasperated, horrified effort to spit the word “predictable” out in its entirety. She hadn’t stuttered like this in years, but still she should have remembered, should have known better, should have realized that she was too worked up for anything good to come of continuing to try.

  “. . . dic . . .” she said, and again, “. . . dic . . .”

  Finally, she clamped her hand over her mouth. Lucas was on the verge of saying something and she needed to get away before he said it. In his expression was a lightness, a near smile, a twinkle that made Nic think he was on the brink of telling a joke, and if that joke turned out to be at her expense, as she could only imagine it would be given her freakish monologue and stuttering, she didn’t know if she could survive it.

  On instinct, she scrambled to her feet and ran.

  She headed down the path that hugged the side of the school and then she ducked behind a row of hedges. There, she crouched low and wrapped her arms around her knees, crying as quietly as she could. Why had she said all of that to Lucas? She hadn’t even told Lila how she’d seen a therapist; what had made her tell Lucas Holt? What had she been thinking? She’d never done anything so impulsive, so downright strange in her entire life. Lucas would tell Emory or Jasmine or, oh God, Angel Bully. Angel Bully would tell everyone else and the story would spread through the entire school. “Some freshman, some girl named Nic, went crazy, stuttering and yelling ‘DICK’ at Lucas Holt!” Nic was sure that the story was somehow out there already, sprouting to life and quickly mutating in the toxic breeding ground of Kirke’s gossip farm. Maybe, she thought, a fresh sob shuddering through her chest, the Lurk had been somewhere on the soccer field, watching. Already, her greatest humiliation might be available for viewing on Instagram.

  Eventually, Nic pressed her face to her knees and squeezed her eyes shut. Roy would be there soon, she told herself again and again. It was almost over.

  THE DIRT DRIVEWAY leading up the hill to Corcoran Stables was pocked with holes that made Roy lean forward in his seat and grumble. If you watched for it, you could see the moss that hung from the surrounding oak trees swing in the breeze. Around the final bend of the driveway, the pretty stucco stable glistened in the sun. Nic felt the painful knot in her chest loosen ever so slightly. In the paddock, a few horses—Cricket and Thunder and Hey Ho Joe—lifted their heads from the grass, mouths still working, as the car slowed to a stop. The ocean, huge and
flat, glimmered in the distance beyond the paddocks and sloping hills of yellow wildflowers and ice plants.

  Inside, Tru waited for her with his head hanging into the aisle. The look in his gentle eye made Nic’s heart swell. A couple of hard blinks held the threat of fresh tears at bay. Below her palm, the white star marking Tru’s forehead was warm. A lot of horse markings looked like vague smudges, fuzzy around their edges, but not Tru’s. His star stood out, a crisp, milk-white jewel atop his dark brown forehead. She pulled an apple from her backpack, held it out to her horse, and felt his soft muzzle graze her palm as he bit into it. The crunch of his chewing was loud in the stone aisle and immediately the horses in the neighboring stalls swung their heads up, ears perked.

  One of them, a chestnut mare named Georgia Peach, eyed Nic through the bars on the stall door across the aisle, her dark eyes flashing dangerously. Peach was new to Corcoran Stables, but Nic had already overheard one of the barn hands refer to her as a nasty piece of work. Denny had bought her at an auction; despite her temper and bad stable manners, she was a big warmblood and he thought she had potential. He did this a few times each year, brought troubled horses back to the barn and then sold them to new riders once he’d worked out their kinks and deemed them safe. No one seemed to know much about Peach other than the obvious: she was malnourished and had been neglected to the point of abuse or abused outright. Probably both. The veterinarian guessed she was five years old.

  So far, Denny had only lunged Peach, clipping the lunge line to her halter and sending her out to move around him in a circle. Nic had watched the new horse writhe around him on the lunge line, rearing and bucking, her powerful muscles twitching in the sunlight. Peach’s head was regal but her eyes were white-rimmed and mean, resistant to Denny’s low, steady voice and reassuring body language. Usually when Denny worked on the ground with a horse, it looked like a dance to Nic. This seemed more like a battle. A few of the barn hands were watching, too, and they all, Nic included, gasped when Peach charged Denny. He’d stepped out of her way just in time and Peach had stopped and spun to face him, nostrils flaring, ready to do it all again.

  She had bars on her stall because she tried to bite anyone who walked by. She’d recently kicked the farrier who was fitting her for new shoes clear into the wall of the wash stall, breaking the man’s leg. “What woman doesn’t want new shoes?” Denny had said. Nic had looked down and smiled, knowing this type of women-love-shoes joke would have driven her mom crazy.

  Now Peach eyed Nic from behind the bars, her ears menacingly flattened.

  “Well, you’re in a delightful mood,” Nic said. She immediately felt bad for her sharp tone. It wasn’t Peach’s fault that Nic had humiliated herself in front of Lucas Holt that afternoon, that he was probably sharing the details of her humiliation with every senior at Kirke at that very moment. Part of Nic wished that she could be like Peach—snapping her teeth and kicking anyone who came close. No one could say Peach was invisible. You wouldn’t risk ignoring a horse like Peach. You wouldn’t laugh at her.

  From three feet away, Nic tossed an apple between the bars of Peach’s stall. The horse started, huffing air from her nostrils, then lowered her head to the ground. As Nic walked to the tack room, she heard the horse take a loud bite of the apple.

  The tack room was just a small, windowless room, but Nic felt better there than she did almost anywhere else. The rows of covered saddles, the bridles gleaming like thick ropes of licorice along the wall. The line of hulking tack boxes in dark shades of navy and purple. The musky scent of leather and Murphy oil soap and hay and dust and sweat and manure. Her painful rush of thoughts slowed as she went about her usual tasks: removing her saddle cover, pulling the handled wood tote of grooming brushes from her tack box, lacing up her paddock boots. Nic had never been in love, but she wondered if it felt like this, this feeling of belonging.

  Nic’s mom’s best friend, Simone, had a five-year-old daughter named Rachel who was really into her dollhouse. Sometimes when Nic and her mom went to their house, Rachel would show Nic all of her dollhouse furniture, piece by piece. Rachel had a tiny hot-pink velour cloth—Nic thought it might have been a Barbie skirt—that she ran over each piece before she put it back in the exact place from which she’d taken it. Something about the way she’d hold up a miniature chair or table on her little palm for Nic to admire—the look of pride and love on her face—made Nic feel happy for her. And a little sad, too. She could tell that Simone was worried that Rachel had OCD or something (Nic’s mom tried to make Simone feel better by joking that she was sure Rachel was just a run-of-the-mill junior fetishist), but Nic totally understood that stuff with the dollhouse. It was a form of meditation, really. Like Lila’s crazy “om shalom” chant. You say certain words, or you dust your tiny dollhouse lamp, or you scrub the day’s grime from the spine of your saddle, and in those moments nothing else matters. Your head clears. The world falls away.

  She took down her chaps from where she’d draped them over her bridle the day before and zipped them over the jeans she’d worn to school. The chaps had been made to her measurements about a year earlier, so they fit perfectly if you didn’t count the two-inch gap between where they ended and her paddock boots began. “I can’t believe you’re getting taller,” her mom had said after she noticed the chaps one Saturday morning while watching Nic ride. “How is that even possible?” She’d looked up at Nic, incredulous. Nic knew it was weird for her that her daughter was now taller than her. Nic knew it was weird for her because she talked about how it was weird for her all of the time. Those were the kind of conversations that made Nic suspect that her mom preferred to think of her as a baby born from immaculate conception rather than as the child of her father, who, for the record, was six feet two inches tall.

  She pulled her hair into a low ponytail and put on her helmet, letting the chinstrap dangle unsnapped. She carried her saddle and bridle and grooming box out to the cross ties and then headed back to Tru’s stall, the heels of her paddock boots echoing against the stone floor. It was a beautiful barn. Nic didn’t go to church, but it reminded her of one. The long, arched aisle, the hushed sound of horses breathing, moving through the straw that softened their stall floors, pulling mouthfuls from flakes of hay. All of those animals were a gentle choir, and their breathing and chewing and shifting was the most beautiful hymn that Nic knew. The sounds and smells filled her, warmed her. The quiet of the barn made her take deep breaths and feel her own strong heart beat within her body.

  Nic carried Tru’s halter into his stall. The halter was made of dark leather and had a brass nameplate on the cheek strap with Tru’s name in cursive—Yours Truly. Nic’s mom had wrapped the halter and a photograph of Tru in a box for Nic’s twelfth birthday. Nic had known about Tru—she’d been trying out horses for months—but the halter was a surprise. Denny must have told her mom what kind to buy; she didn’t know that much about horses even though she’d ridden for a time as a kid. “That was before I discovered boys,” her mom would say, a little too ruefully, Nic thought, because if she hadn’t discovered boys Nic never would have been born. Again, her mom seemed to like to forget that part of the story.

  Even before Nic had ridden Tru, she’d fallen in love with his name. It was a sweet, solid name. Not too flashy. Yours Truly. Truly. True. Tru.

  Nic thought a lot about names. Her mom’s name, Gail, was perfect for her—she was herself a strong wind, a gale force that stirred up everything in her path. She had a gale of laughter, too, a big raspy waterfall of sound that she’d never think to apologize for even though in movie theaters it made Nic want to slide out of her seat and become one with the floor. And Gail Gideon—well, you’re supposed to become famous with a name like that, which was exactly what she’d done. Nic’s last name was Clement. It was her dad’s last name, which probably bothered her mom, but Nic knew that she comforted herself with the thought that there was no connection between her fame and her daughter’s name. She thought it kept Nic safe from . . .
something. Nic didn’t really know what.

  It seemed to Nic that names were nothing and everything. They didn’t matter at all—a rose by any other name, and all that—and yet they defined you. It was what people wanted to know when they met you—they asked about your name ages, years, before they ever asked about your hopes and fears, the things that really made you you. If they ever asked those questions at all.

  Sometimes she wondered if she was the Nicola Clement her mother had envisioned when she’d settled on that name. Who had her mother wanted her to become?

  “Nic,” said Denny.

  He was outside the stall door. Nic stood next to Tru, her fingers resting on the clasp of his halter. Tru breathed patiently. Nic had no idea how long they’d been standing in the stall like that.

  She swallowed. “Hi,” she said.

  “A couple of big trees came down in the storm last night, and the trails are still slick from the rain. Better to just stick to the ring today. Everywhere else is a mess.”

  Nic considered this. She felt a tremor of something she could not place, but it was not fear. “Okay,” she said, and felt the tremor again.

  Denny looked at her and did not walk away. He had gray hair but his eyelashes, she’d noticed, were dark around his blue eyes. A lot of the girls at the barn had crushes on Denny. Nic had been riding at Corcoran Stables for so long that she could only think of him as some sort of grizzled, grumpy uncle. “Denny,” one of those girls had once whispered to another. “More like Clooney.” Nic had been right in Tru’s stall, just a few feet from the girls in the aisle, but they whispered to each other like she wasn’t there.