The Mare

Velvet

The pictures they took that day showed a lot. Me and Ginger and Paul and my mom and Dante, then me and Ginger and Edie and Edie’s mom, who’s got Ginger’s head, basically, in a lock. Me and Pat and Gare and Fiery Girl. Me and my mom and Fiery Girl. Everybody with my horse, looking at the camera with her head up and sideways, showing her kind but watching eye. Everybody smiling, even Ginger smiling all the way, Dante smiling like Chester Cheetah, and my mom smiling with her eyes closed in like three pictures, the sky very blue behind her, and random people turning to look — even they’re smiling, except for the old woman carrying the empty ribbon-bucket someplace out of the picture.

The pictures also don’t show a lot. They don’t show Jeanne from Spindletop telling me I could come train there as a “work-study” and me smiling even though I knew I would never do it. They don’t show the sea horse in my shirt pocket, broken into dust except for its nose bone. They don’t show Dante looking out the back window laughing at Beverly and Pat in the parking lot, yelling at each other while we drove away…or me walking on the block where I met Dominic forever ago, my ribbon with me so if I saw him I could show it to him. How I saw him but he was with Brianna and she was getting a bump. Gaby told me I was young, and I would meet somebody better for me. But my heart hurt, hurt for real, so much it woke me up at night.

When Ginger sent us the competition pictures, my mom framed one and put it on her dresser. The others she gave to me. But after I saw Dominic and Brianna like that, those pictures seemed far away, like something that’s only real for kids. Like butterflies bursting out from a shampoo bottle or a cereal box in a commercial. The time I spent with Pat and the things we talked about — it was real. Same with Ginger. Except it can’t exist anywhere but, like, in the car when we drove at night, listening to music, Ginger singing in her pinchy voice.

But sometimes when I wake up hurting I think: Fiery Girl. The feel of her body, her neck and the butterfly place between her leg and hoof. That was real. How I took her out at night and she reared up on me and I stayed on her until I found her. How she came back to me when I felt worthless and she nosed on my hair. How she wouldn’t let me hug her in the field but I loved her anyway. And mostly how I finally had the leg thing with her, in the last part of the competition, in front of people. Where my legs touched her sides and it was the best place in the world and we were in it together. Like with Chloe only more strong and deep, too deep to show in pictures or to talk about with Ginger or even Pat. Or anybody except maybe Dominic, and I can’t talk to him, maybe ever. Instead I hold on to the leg feeling, and I rub it on my heart like medicine. And it’s real then, real in my room, real everywhere. I sit up and look across the street at Cookie’s wall with the horseshoe hidden inside it. I don’t know when my mom will let me go see Fiery Girl again. But I know I will. Even if I don’t, she’ll always be with me. But I don’t think about that. Because I know I will, even if I have to wait and take the train to see her when I’m eighteen and everything is different. Maybe I’ll have my own baby then, or maybe I’ll be in college, that would make Ginger glad. But whatever is happening, I know I will see my mare again.