Stable Manners by Bonnie Bryant

going to learn until Carole returned.
    “Here,” Carole said, entering the feed room. She was carrying three sets of papers—one for each of them. Lisa and Stevie looked at them. At first glance, it appeared to be the question-and-answer sheet the three of them had been studying from since Saturday. At second glance it was a very different set of papers, indeed.
    “What is this?” Lisa asked, but she was beginning to get the feeling that she already knew the answer to the question.
    “This is the set of sheets Max gave us on Saturday.”
    “But it’s not what we’ve been studying from,” Stevie said. “How did that happen?”
    “We’ve been studying from the sheets you took from Dad’s desk,” Carole said.
    Then Stevie understood. “Oh no. He’s a parent volunteer at Horse Wise and Max gave all the parent volunteers the actual questions and answers he’s planning to use at the Know-Down. He must want them to be familiar with the questions he’d be asking and the correct answers, right?”
    “Right,” Carole said.
    Lisa put a hand over her mouth. “That’s why your dad said he didn’t want you snooping on his desk.”
    “I thought it had to do with my birthday, but it wasn’t that at all,” said Carole.
    “I should have known,” said Stevie.
    “Why?”
    “Well, first of all because your birthday is a couple of months off yet. And second of all, there wasn’t anything in the least bit personal on his desk. I mean, if there had been anything to snoop, you know I would have snooped it.”
    “I know,” Carole said. “That’s why I assumed you were lying when you told me that you hadn’t seen anything interesting. You wouldn’t have told me anyway.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Stevie said. “You know I’m no good with a secret.”
    It was true, but Carole and Lisa didn’t bother to respond. They had something else on their minds.
    There was a long silence. The grain room was a good place for silence because it was filled with barrels of grain and a small stack of hay bales. The effect was to baffle all sounds and make it like a soundproof room—a good place for a private discussion.
    “You know what this means, don’t you?” Stevie asked after a while.
    “It means we’re cheating,” said Lisa, who had never considered cheating on anything in her entire life.
    “That wasn’t what I had in mind,” said Stevie, who
had
considered cheating many times, but had always rejected it. “What it means is that we’re just about guaranteed to do better on the Know-Down than anybody else.”
    “True,” said Carole. “We’ve been working very hard, too, and I know we’re learning a lot.”
    “We’re learning the things we’re supposed to learn,” said Lisa, who was beginning to think like Stevie. “Also, I know from experience in taking tests—and doing pretty well on them—that the teachers usually focus on the most important information when they give a test. All the things they ask questionsabout are the things they really want you to know. The point is that Max must have put the very most important information into the questions he intends to ask. That’s what we
ought
to be focusing on. And since we’ve been studying exactly that, it
is
what we’ve been focusing on. We’re learning what he wants us to learn.”
    “And we’re learning it so well that we’ll do better than anybody else,” Stevie repeated. Her eyes were gleaming.
    Carole was thinking about Cam. When they’d first found out about the Know-Down, Carole and Stevie had decided that it didn’t matter whether the boys beat them. But now that the event was drawing closer, Carole realized that she did care about doing well. In fact she really wanted to win.
    She flipped through the study sheets she’d just gotten from Mrs. Reg again. They were packed with detailed information about riding, horse care, stable management, horse health, training. There was a
lot
more on the study sheets than on the