“I don’t really want to talk about it right now, okay?” I said, practically begging him to understand. I didn’t want to be with anyone at the moment. He couldn’t see my tears. Nobody could.
“Was it something I did?” he asked in confusion. I was willing to bet that no girl had ever turned down his shoulder to cry on before.
I shook my head.
“Hold on,” he said, and there was that look in his eyes, the one I was so afraid of. It was the poor Jackie look. I clenched my fists in anticipation, knuckles cracking as I waited for him to mention my family. But he didn’t. “Is this about the whole sleepover thing?” asked Cole.
I blinked back at him. It wasn’t what I was expecting him to say, which was a relief, but if he already knew about the sleepover, it meant that gossip spread like wildfire in this house.
“It is, isn’t it?” Cole said when I didn’t respond.
It’s not just about that, I wanted to correct him. It’s that my family is dead, and that you know. “Did Lee tell you?” I responded instead. “He doesn’t really like me, does he? It was a bad idea anyway. I shouldn’t be overstepping.”
Back in New York, after my breakdown, I taught myself how to control my feelings. It was vital to my future success because I could never lose myself like that again. So I built a wall inside my mind to keep back my flood of emotions. But here, it was harder to maintain. The Walters’ house was like nothing I had ever experienced before: disorganized, rowdy, and unpredictable. Without a proper foothold, some type of steadiness, I was losing myself in the chaos. Lee’s comment had put a crack in my wall, and I felt like the whole thing was going to shatter.
“Jackie, you can’t listen to Lee,” he said in calm, clear-cut voice, the kind people use to convince you of something. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Just ignore him.”
I nodded mechanically as I stared past him. Sure, I understood what Cole was trying to say, some sympathetic form of assurance, but it didn’t matter what he told me. It was kind of like when people apologized to me at my family’s funeral—it was just words, a script that they all were required to recite. They said they were sorry, but in reality they could never really comprehend what I was going through. So it didn’t matter if Lee was only being mean and I should disregard him, because he was speaking the truth.
And then it was almost as if Cole understood what I was thinking. “Hey,” he said, putting both of his hands on my shoulders. He gave me a little shake, forcing me to look back at him. “I’m really sorry my cousin is being such a jerk. Let me make it up to you.”
***
“These are the horse stables,” Cole said, holding the door open for me. He’d offered to give me a tour of the ranch, and I agreed. I needed someone, anyone to take my mind off things.
I could see the stables from my bedroom window. When I noticed the main building from afar, I presumed that it was just a barn, but now as I stepped inside, I realized that it was much bigger. The first thing that hit me was the smell of animals and hay. It was overwhelmingly pungent—the kind of smell that was so heavy you could feel it in your lungs when you breathed in.
We were standing at the front of a long row, stalls on either side of us. A few were empty, but huge animals occupied the rest, snorting and swishing their tails. They varied in color from dark brown to soft gray, but to me, they were all equally daunting. I could feel Cole directly behind me, and for some strange reason, I found that reassuring.
“Besides the horses,” he told me in an easy voice, “the best thing about this place is the loft.”
He coaxed me forward, his hand a guiding pressure on my back. As we made our way to the other side of the stables, Cole pointed out the different horses, telling me each of their names. In one of the stalls, a man was brushing down a black mare that Cole called Raisin, and when he heard us, the man glanced up and nodded in our direction.
“Who’s that?” I whispered as we continued walking.
“Just one of the stable hands,” Cole told me. “My dad has a lot of employees. It takes quite a few people to run a ranch, and my brothers and I can’t always be there to help him with the work.”
By the time we reached the end of the stalls, I’d counted twenty-four horses in all. Cole had stopped in front of a wooden ladder and I craned my neck, trying to see what was on the second level. Stepping onto the first rung, he started to climb. About halfway up, he looked at me over his shoulder.
“You coming, Jackie?”