Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
I liked the ritual of it.
The preparation.
The way a morning could have architecture—primer, then powder, then the careful selection of a hat, and then the walk out into the golden hour with purpose stitched into every step I took.
I liked being photographed.
Liked existing inside a frame that someone else held steady.
Liked the quiet authority of knowing that when I posted, four million people would stop scrolling and look at me standin' in front of my family's land like I belonged to it and it belonged to me and neither of us had ever known anything different.
And I liked the aesthetic fullness of my arranged life.
The way every surface was curated and every season had a color palette and every morning had a reason to begin.
There was a completeness to it, a geometry, like the way a well-built fence line draws your eye across a pasture and makes the whole landscape feel intentional. Even when I knew the fence was rotten at the posts. Even when I could smell the rot if I stood too close.
I liked it even though I hated the ugliness and the lies that existed backstage. The staging. The retakes. The way my mother could look at a photo of me laughing and say No, do it again, your teeth are wrong. The way a sponsored post about gratitude could take four hours and leave me feelin' emptier than the pastures in February.
I hated the machinery of it, the invisible scaffolding that held the whole beautiful lie upright, and still—still—I miss the view from up there.
That's the part that makes me feel sick, if I'm bein' honest.
Not that it was fake.
But that I loved it anyway. My phone vibrates. I blink. And then I'm back.
Back in the living room with its two-story ceilings, and its stone fireplace, and its antler chandelier catchin' the late-morning light.
The great room stretches out around me. Wide, and warm, and expensive.
I look down at my phone and find a text from Mercy. It’s a picture of the barn at Rimrock Academy. A whole line of ponies in the crossties. The text is all exclamation points and shouty caps.
LOOK AT MY NEW PONY! Six new ponies donation! This one MINE! She so PRETTY!!!!!
My smile leaks out before my melancholy can stop it. New ponies. I never got a benefactor pony because I always brought my own from home. But I actually used to get jealous of the girls who did.
The school keeps a couple dozen lesson horses for girls who want to ride but don’t have their own or don’t want to stable them at school.
The quality of the donated ponies varies. Some are very pretty and well-bred—outgrown by a kid who refused to let the parents sell it. Some of them are just old, and tattered, and lazy.
But the one Mercy is claiming as hers is a really pretty paint with a long white tail and mane.
I text her back with a congratulatory message and she responds with a shouty cap “MISS YOU!! SEE YOU AT THANKSGIVING!”
I miss her too. She was such a light in this house. Her excitement was contagious and I can’t wait for the holidays. I still get the evening updates on her schooling. Pictures of her walking in the hallways between classes, some inside the classroom, some in the barn, some in the dorm.
But she almost never texts me herself anymore. Which is a good thing. She’s making friends. Making a new life for herself.
I should take notes. Ask her how it’s done because I seem to be failing at this.
My eyes wander over to the window where Cash and a couple of the hands are gathered at the round pen.
They've got an unbroke filly in there. A dark little thing, compact and furious, and even from up here I can see the way she holds her body—tight through the poll, braced in her hindquarters, every muscle saying no before anyone's even asked her the question.
Cash has his Stetson tipped back, one boot on the lowest rail, and he's talkin' to the hands about somethin' I can't hear but can read in the way they angle their shoulders toward the filly, then away.
They're creepin' up on a strategy. Circling the problem the way men do when the problem has a heartbeat and opinions on how her life is gonna go.
The filly won't win. I know that. These old cowboys have a system for dealin' with opinionated horses. A patience that looks like laziness until it doesn't, and they'll outlast her because that's what they do.
They'll be there when her legs get tired, and her fight gets small, and the halter starts to feel like less of an insult.
But she's not givin' in easy, either.
She throws her head and spins away from Cash's outstretched hand and there's somethin' in the way she moves that reminds me of myself. Not in a specific way, just a thoughtful one. Because I wasn't one of those cliché rebellious teenagers.