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an excerpt

Chapter 1
Megan, July 2007

I listen for the sound of my mom’s footsteps in the house. Where is she? There is only silence. My fingers play absently at the braid hanging over my shoulder, pulling on the pink and purple ribbons knotted at the end. I can hear the horses whinnying faintly through the big bay window. Wind hums in the phone lines out by the road, pushes against the back door, buzzes at the kitchen window. Nothing but the incessant wind.

Does that mean she’s outside? Is she riding her retired racehorse, Bayou’s Pride?

“Mom?” I yell down the basement stairs. My voice echoes off the cement walls. “Mom, are you down there?” I wait, but there is no answer.

I walk into the kitchen and look out the back window. Is she out by the rabbit cage? All I see is the split rail fence, and the bone-dry, super flat pasture with a few horses cropping the measly left-over grass. One of the dogs is sitting in front of the rabbit cage, staring into it like she wants dinner. The cage is a huge thing my brother made that I swear could be a bomb shelter. It’s really cool for the rabbits, though, like having their own entire house.

Mom isn’t out back, so I go to the front window and look out. Is she in the barn?

“Mom?” I yell one more time into the empty, echoing, sighing, buzzing house. I think the wind is going to blow this house away someday. It sucks, or pushes haha.

I can see Mom in the round pen with Bayou. She’s lunging him. Good, then she won’t see me and maybe I won’t get in trouble this time. Yeah, right, I always get in trouble. But whatever.

She loves that horse more than she loves anything or anyone else, including Brandon and I. He’s a gorgeous nut brown bay Arabian, very flighty and spirited. Mom thinks she’s that way too. Spirited. Not flighty. I like horses too, a lot. But I wish Mom loved me more than she loved her horses. I wish a lot of things. Like that she and Dad would stop fighting. Like that they wouldn’t get divorced. Like that they would notice me, just once, for me and not for how I could help their arguments against each other. Or notice something good instead of all the trillion terrible things I did like break the horse clippers or leave the milk out.

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