“Did you ever, ya know, bleed when you got on the horse?”
Philippa broke into a cackle and swatted Devon on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ pervert, Dev, ya know that?”
He grinned. “So you did, eh?”
“Wouldn’t be telling you if we did now, would we?” She threw Nell a glance of female solidarity.
Nell stood. “Gotta use the ladies’.”
It was too warm in the staff lodge. She stepped outside onto the front porch and sat on the top step. It would be four A.M. at home in Surrey. Nell wanted to call her mother, but she would be asleep. She hadn’t wanted Nell to go to camp; instead, she had thought that Nell should have stayed home in the months leading up to university and taken an internship in the city, as if spending that extra time in the upstanding home she came from would literally set her straight.
Months earlier, Nell had been suspended from school, but her father didn’t know why. Only Nell’s mother knew; only Nell’s mother took her to that doctor. He prescribed an antidepressant, but she wasn’t depressed; she was just gay. For the remaining months of that spring, she worked at the local stables where she’d ridden as a girl. Nell carried the medication with her at all times, and every morning on her way to the horses, she threw a single pill into the dumpster.
A co-worker from the stables had worked at an American summer camp a few years earlier, and it sounded like the right kind of escape: warm weather, cheerful strangers, anonymity, horses. A chance to visit America for the first time. Nell was eighteen now; she could go where she wanted. She applied through an agency, and they placed her at Camp Marigold in the lower Berkshire Mountains of Connecticut, where she was given the role of head riding instructor. She was surprised, considering her young age and lack of camp experience, but her pedigreed English riding education seemed to be a major draw for wealthy American families. When Nell told her parents over dinner one night that she’d be going, that she had already bought her plane ticket, they begged her not to. “But we’re a team,” her mother had said. A team united against the wayward winds of homosexuality, which, her mother seemed to believe, were much stronger in America.
—
It was a family tradition to go away to boarding school at the age of fourteen, and Nell’s parents had sent her to Wentworth Academy, the same all-girls school that her mother had attended. It was a stuffy academy in the Midlands with several acres of land and—the reason Nell had agreed so readily—a fantastic number of purebred horses. As a fourth year, she was the student riding apprentice and had keys to the stables. She would have girls meet her there late at night; the mornings were reserved for her own riding with her favorite horse, Henry, a chestnut Arabian, when they would wander off campus onto trails and hills and back roads.
She became known for these late nights in the barn, which the other girls called “appointments.” For the others, the appointments were only physical, not an experiment, not love, just a way to make it from one coed dance to the next. One could say to one’s roommate, at eleven in the evening, “I have a French tutoring appointment in fifteen minutes,” and the unusual lateness of the meeting would never be questioned; perhaps the roommate had had a similar appointment just a week earlier.
Nell learned that her code name was “Red,” coined by a whispering bunkmate or a curious member of the tennis team. Not exactly original, but maybe that was the point—that her scandalous role in the school could be communicated through the mention of that seemingly innocuous color. It became known through the school’s more secretive channels that Red would meet with whomever, and would keep things quiet too.
One morning, she arrived at the barn to take Henry out, and Sasha was waiting there. She was a tall second year with gray eyes. She always wore her brown hair in a perfectly contained braid falling over one shoulder. They’d spoken only a few times, but Nell often had fantasies about the girl. She was so poised and proper on a horse, so in control.
“What are you doing here?” Nell asked, thinking that Sasha had come to ride or, even worse, to threaten her. She seemed posh enough, conservative enough, that she might have actually cared to stop it—as if an underground lesbian community at her own boarding school would bring scandal on her just by association. There was certainly a reigning old-fashioned homophobia at Wentworth; Nell’s appointments needed to be so secretive because the girls’ proper reputations were always at stake.
The girl walked toward Nell and said, sarcastically, “Hi, Red.”
Nell did not normally feel nervous, but Sasha made her nervous. It was something in the way she was looking so intensely into Nell’s eyes. It was imploring, but also challenging, the way those gray eyes squinted and studied Nell like the eyes of a cat ready to pounce.
“Nell is fine,” Nell said.
“I’m Sasha,” the girl said, not breaking the eye contact.
“I know.”
Nell looked around. Did she have backup, girls ready to attack, waiting just outside the stable doors?
Sasha approached Nell. She put a hand out and reached it toward Nell’s face. Nell flinched and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the contact, until she realized that the hand was moving through her own hair.
She opened her eyes and saw that Sasha’s intense look had gone away, and now it was nervous and unsure: all imploring, with no challenge, and at the mercy of whatever Nell decided to do next.
Normally Nell wouldn’t have taken the risk in the morning—it was about to be bright out, and time was limited before the school day started. But Nell had a feeling that Sasha was different, that she wanted this from Nell, not from Red, judging by how nervous she seemed. Or so this was what Nell told herself as she took Sasha by the hand and pulled her onto the ground in an empty stall.
Sasha leaned in to every touch. They kept their boots and tops on; Nell pulled Sasha’s jodhpurs down just past her knees and took her time. Sasha’s thighs smelled like baby oil and cardamom. When Sasha finished, she made a high-pitched squeal, which Nell thought was the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard.
Henry, in the stall next to them, stamped his feet. Sasha was standing, brushing the hay off her pants and pushing her hair behind her ears. Nell opened the door of the stall they were in and made her way around to give Henry a kiss on his wet nose.
“Should we ride?” Sasha said.
Most of the girls barely spoke afterward, embarrassed or ashamed.
Nell looked at her watch. “We don’t have much time.”