Cecily von Ziegesar - Dark Horses

Copyright 2016 Cecily von Ziegesar

All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Excrement Poem from T he Retrieval System by Maxine Kumin. Copyright 1978 by Maxine Kumin. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

E xcerpt from Horse from 45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton, edited by Linda Gray Sexton. Copyright 1976 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr., Executors of the Estate of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and by permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Us from Love Poems by Anne Sexton. Copyright 1967, 1968, 1969 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1995, 1996, 1997 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and by permission of SSL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Soho Teen

an imprint of

Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Von Ziegesar, Cecily, author.

Dark horses / Cecily von Ziegesar.

ISBN 978-1-61695-517-5

eISBN 978-1-61695-518-2

1. HorsemanshipFiction. 2. Horse showsFiction. 3. LoveFiction.

4. JealousyFiction. 5. Self-actualization (Psychology)Fiction. I. Title

PZ7.V94 Dar 2016 DDCdc23 2016003782

Horse illustration VectorPic/Shutterstock

Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Agnes, never dark.

Prologue | Red

I m dying. Whatever I drank from those boxes has made me very, very sick. I cant find my stall. The ground lists and sways beneath my hooves as I stagger around in the dark, looking for it. I stop to get my bearings. My sides heave and my head hangs heavy, almost to my knees. Every loud moaning breath startles me, but theres nothing I can do to fix me. This is the end.

Im outside the barn now. The storm is over and the skies have cleared. The earth is a just-baked pie left out to cool. I splay my long legs like a newborn foal and pump giant breaths of sweet steam through my distended nostrils. In, out. In, out.

Over in the main ring the jumps loom, huge and beautiful in the moonlight. In just a few hours she and I are supposed to jump that course. Were supposed to ace it. Were supposed to win. Thats highly unlikely now. More like, Bye-bye my American pie. You made living fun. But this must be the day that I die.

I find a patch of muddy grass and lie down to sleep and replay my favorite dream. In the dream were together again, just the two of us, with no interruptions. I have her all to myself and shes not distracted by anyone, girl or boy. Were not competing either. We just hang out, like old friends.

It was an accident how we came to be in the same field at the same time, looking into each others eyes, forgetting everything and everyone else. I wasnt looking for her, and Im pretty sure she wasnt looking for me, but I could sense thenexactly thenthat everything was about to change; it had already changed. Standing in front of me was my whole reason for existing. Actually, I hated her at first. I hated everybody, and she hated me. But then I liked her. I didnt care, and then I did carea lot, too much maybe. Its almost impossible to explain, especially in my current state. But I will try.

PART 1

The previous October

1 | Merritt

T heres this thing I do when I know somethings expected of me. I a) run away, b) make a big mess of it, c) all of the above. Its like instead of anticipating failure and disaster and doing my best to avoid it, I go right ahead and make the disaster happen, so I can be right about it being a disaster and a failure, and the resulting disappointment is like a perverse triumph. Like, see what you made me do? I told you I was going to mess up.

Todays disaster began last night when I decided to go to a party instead of eating a nice healthy dinner and going to bed early. My parents were at a screening for a film about Pythagoras made by one of their former students. They ordered sushi for me and made me promise to get in bed at ten.

As soon as they left, I went out.

I didnt even really know Sonia Kuhnhardt, the Chace senior hosting the party, but she lived near Lincoln Center, which was semi-convenient. Besides, all the Upper East Side private girls schools like Chace and Dowd are so small everyone recognizes everyone else. It feels like we know each other, even when we dont.

Sonia lived in a brownstone, not an apartment. Girls sat on the stoop smoking cigarettes. Music drifted out of the open windows. Upstairs, the kitchen was huge and messy. Boxes of wine were lined up on the counter with real wine glasses. It was so private-school superior to serve wine at a party instead of beer, but I didnt mind. Wine is stronger.

I picked up a glass and an entire box and carried them over to the large sectional sofa, claiming a lonely spot on one end. I didnt come there to socialize. Id come to obliterate the SAT, which I was due to take the next morning. Setting the box on the coffee table, I dispensed the red wine into my glass and began to gulp it, gagging on its sickly sweetness. My hangover was going to be so huge Id have to name it. Gunther. Voldemort. Lucifer. The Beast. Sorry I messed up the SAT. Blame it on The Beast.

Hi. Some blond boy who was trying to grow a mustache sat down beside me. Do you go to Chace with Sonia?

I nodded, figuring that was good enough. I didnt really know how to talk to boys. No brothers, and no boys at school since Id transferred to Dowd toward the end of last school year.

The boy was drinking water, or something that looked like water. Im Sonias brother, Sam. Were twins. And you are?

I took another vomity gulp of wine before answering. Merritt. Like the Merritt Parkway?

The boy twin, Sam, chuckled. Your parents named you after a parkway?

I nodded again. Yup.

And that was the last thing I said all night, until several glasses of wine later, when Sam hailed me a taxi, before I messed up the white carpet, and I had to give the driver my address. My parents were still out when I got upstairs, so I raided the medicine cupboard and took two of the Percocet pills Dad had been prescribed for his hamstring tear. Then I passed out. Mission accomplished.

You might want a little sea salt. Mom placed the salt grinder at my elbow and touched her toes. Her purple Lycra leggings stretched tautly over her muscular legs. Her hips popped.

It was morning, the morning of the SAT.

Somebody needs to limber up, Dad observed cheerfully from the living room, where he was doing crunches on the floor.

My parents were both fanatically healthy. They were professors at Columbia and they ran to work and back every day. They had me when they were well into their forties, and it was like they were trying to beat the clock somehow by getting healthier and fitter every year. A couple of years ago they had run half marathons; now they were running full ones. I preferred to walk. I was also pretty sure that all the exercise they did together was a form of premeditated alone time, a way of accomplishing two goals at once. My parents were very practical. Why not get fit and spend time together instead of going to a gym and seeing a couples counselor? I wasnt sure if it was working. There was a lot of forced cheeriness at home that felt insincere to the point of creepy. But what did I know? Misery was my middle name.