Read Horse Talk for Free Online Page B

many horses can dance on the head of a pin? Why don’t horses play soccer? How many horses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
    Lisa taped the pieces of the list back together. “Just ignore him,” she suggested. “The more we react to him, the happier he is.”
    Stevie shook her head. “I don’t like the look he just got in his eye,” she said. “I’ve seen it before. He’s not going to leave us alone.”
    Carole shut Stevie’s bedroom door. “What could he possibly do?”

“H ERE ’ S MY S AMANTHA voice,” Stevie said to Lisa. “Tell me what you think. ‘I’m afraid my horse was not treated well by his previous owner. Whenever I try to bridle him, he acts like I’m going to hit him. What should I do?’ ”
    “Sounds fine,” Lisa said briefly. She plugged in the last piece of radio equipment. It was Wednesday afternoon, ten minutes before
Horse Talk
was to begin, and she had butterflies in her stomach the size of pelicans. She could hardly think, much less listen to Stevie, who’d been doing voices for days. Where was that second set of headphones? For the third time, Lisa went through her mental checklist of radio and talk-show equipment.
Music tapes, equitation books, microphones
 …
    “I think it sounds a little too close to the Augusta voice,” Stevie said. She looked through her list of questions worriedly. “Of course, Augusta and Janet are supposed to be close to the same age, but Janet’s from the South, so shouldn’t she speak—”
    “Ask Carole,” Lisa said. “She’s in the locker room.”
    “Okay.” Stevie wandered away, still muttering, and Lisa breathed a sigh of relief. Now, where was that dictionary?
    Stevie nearly tripped in the doorway to the locker room. All her attention was focused on her paper. Trying to be twenty different people wasn’t easy. In fact, it was impossible! She was sure she was going to sound the same no matter what. She didn’t have Lisa’s gift for acting. But she would certainly do her best.
    “ ‘Whenever I try to bridle him,’ ” she repeated in a slightly different tone. “No, that’s not right. ‘Whenever I try to bridle him—’ ”
    “Why don’t you just ask Red to do it?” a snotty voice said. Stevie looked up from her paper to find Veronica looking down her long nose.
    “What?” Stevie asked. She was so distracted she hadn’t even heard what Veronica had said.
    “I said, ‘Why don’t you just ask Red to do it?’ ” When Stevie still looked confused, Veronica added, “To bridle your horse. Never mind. It was a joke, but clearly some people are so wrapped up in themselvesthat they can’t see humor when it smacks them in the face.”
    Stevie stared at Veronica. Could the girl actually be trying to make a joke? And what was she talking about? Bridles? Red? “Huh?” Stevie asked, in her Patricia voice.
    “You guys are getting
way
too involved in your little radio show,” Veronica said, and huffed off.
    “Carole,” Stevie said, “listen to this. I think my Patricia voice is sliding into my Betty Sue voice. And the Janet voice is all messed up. What’s wrong?”
    Carole was searching through the pile of old clothes on the floor of her cubby. “I’ve lost my sixth sheet of answers,” she said frantically. “I can’t find it anywhere.”
    “I didn’t think you were going to write out the answers,” Stevie said. “I thought you and Lisa just had a short list of stuff to say back.”
    “Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and wrote the answers out for real,” Carole explained. “I mean, what if I get nervous and totally blank?”
    Stevie understood. “We weren’t this nervous about the first show,” she said. She helped Carole search through the pile.
    “Here it is! Good.” Carole wadded the sheet of paper into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. “We weren’t this nervous because we were too clueless to realize what could go wrong,” she told Stevie.
    Stevie knew that that was true.