Team Play by Bonnie Bryant

head. “Then how did you get to be in charge?” Carole wanted to know.
    “Veronica volunteered me,” Stevie said simply. “And I didn’t circulate a petition to run for President of the Middle School.”
    “Do we have to ask who did?” Carole said.
    “Veronica,” Lisa supplied.
    “And I definitely did not enter my name in the election for chairman of the Spring Fair,” Stevie said.
    “Veronica again?” Lisa asked.
    “Go to the head of the class,” Stevie told her.
    “But it doesn’t make sense,” Carole protested. “Why would Veronica try to make you into some kind of hero?”
    “She isn’t,” Stevie explained. “She’s trying to make me go so crazy that I won’t be able to do everything at once.”
    “Well, you can’t,” Lisa said sensibly. “You’re going to have to give up some of it.”
    “And play right into her slimy little hands?” Stevie asked.
    “What are you talking about?” Carole asked.
    Stevie scooped a generous glob of saddle soap out of the container and began rubbing it vigorously onto Topside’s saddle. “It all has to do with the Italian boys,” she said. “Veronica is trying to force me to give up the job of hosting them. She wants them all to herself!”
    “You’ve got too much there,” Carole said, taking some of Stevie’s soap. She worked it into the bridle she was cleaning.
    “I’ll take some, too,” Lisa said. Stevie offered her a third of the soap.
    “That’s what friends are for,” Stevie said. “I knew I could count on you.”
    Lisa looked up from the bridle she was cleaning. “I’m getting a funny feeling about this,” she said to Carole.
    Carole nodded.
    Before Carole or Lisa could ask Stevie exactly what she’d meant by that remark, Mrs. Reg appeared. As well as being Max’s mother, the riders thought she was a kind of part-time mother to all of the riders as well. That included the bossy side of mothering as well as the loving support.
    “I trust you aren’t talking so much that no work is getting done,” she said.
    “No, Mrs. Reg,” Stevie said. “Believe me, a
lot
of work is getting done.”
    She said it so positively that everybody looked at her a little oddly.
    “Hmmm. All this chatter reminds me of something,” Mrs. Reg said. Everyone looked up eagerly. Mrs. Reg was famous for telling the most astonishing stories about horses and riders. But nobody had ever found a way of talking her either into or out of telling one of her stories. When she had something to say, she said it.
    “What’s that, Mrs. Reg?” Carole asked.
    “Reminds me of a rider we had here a long time ago. Important man, he was,” she began. She sat down on one of the benches near Stevie and picked up a sponge and a bridle. She talked best when she was soaping leathers. “Mr. Dunellen, I think that was his name. He appeared here one day and told my husband, Max—your Max’s father—that he’d just bought two horses, and hewanted to ride them every day. At first, Max was pretty happy about that. Times were thin then, and a paying boarder was very welcome. Then the man brought them in. One was a bay mare, the other a gelding, gray, I think. Anyway, he told Max he was going to ride every day.”
    “Lucky guy,” Carole remarked. “He must have been a millionaire, huh?”
    “No, he was just the town pharmacist,” Mrs. Reg replied. “Didn’t make a lot of money at that, though he paid his bill on time every month. Well, Max predicted that this man was going to be more trouble than he was worth. Said the man had too much to do to ride every day. Said he’d be calling in all the time and getting us to exercise those horses.”
    “Why was that?” Stevie asked.
    Mrs. Reg appeared to ignore the interruption. One of the things about her stories was that she told them exactly the way she wanted to tell them.
    “That Mr. Dunellen was one of the busiest men in town,” Mrs. Reg went on. “See, because he was the only pharmacist in town at that time, he