The Mare

Velvet

Then one day I’m sitting in class and I get a note passed that says, “Kwan likes you.” I look over and Kwan is staring the gloopy-eyed hell out of me. Which I don’t like because he’s sixteen and still in my grade, and because he’s the boyfriend of Brianna, who’s fifteen and café au lait beautiful and basically the baddest bitch in the school. And I can see he knows about this note, but I don’t think it was his idea. And I can feel every girl in the class watching to see what I do. Which is, walk up to him in the hall and bitch him out so everybody can hear, and tell him to leave me alone before I tell Brianna.

My mom said, “That’s what you get for being a troublemaker.” But Ginger said she was proud of me for handling it. I got a 3 on a paper that we did on the phone and I went upstate and jumped over a low pole on Little Tina. Pat told me she was proud of me too, and we went on a trail ride together. The leaves were changing color and the evergreen was alone in the sky. There were birds with huge wings circling over everything like searching eyes. Pat said they were searching; they were hawks out for prey. She said they caught mice, chipmunks, rabbits, sometimes even little dogs or cats. I looked up at them and my back tingled.

Then I came back home and it was on everybody’s phone, the phone everybody had but me. This picture of a girl kissing what’s supposed to be Kwan’s naked chest and reaching her hand down his pants. You couldn’t see her face, but her hair was not good like Brianna’s, it was damaged, like mine was when my mom bleached it, but not now. And there was a message with it that went, “Here she go, slurpin’ away.”

Marisol was the one who showed it to me. She said in her little voice, “They sayin’ it’s you. But I know it’s not.” She looked down instead of at me and her shoulders were turned in.

“Who sent it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I said, “I don’t care about this shit,” and she said, “I don’t either,” but we knew we did. We sat quiet for a minute. I was remembering something else Pat told me on our ride: “The dominant mare drives the troublemakers to the outside of the herd. Because that’s where the predators are.”