ON STATE'S GROUNDS Chapter3 of South Paw

ON STATE’S GROUNDS:  Rainie

Two days of riding boot camp doesn’t necessarily fly by. We spent six hours in the saddle on the first day, and then spent the second day cleaning tack, packing, having horses massaged and chiropracted, getting ourselves massaged and chiropracted, and cleaning horses to the utmost immaculacy. I hardly had time to breathe or think, and frankly, it’s easier that way.

That first night, the nightmares became worse. If I had ever thought that nightmares could get worse than the ones I had been having, I would have passed out at the thought. But they did. I remembered the face of the man who kidnapped my sister, the one riding shotgun. He had been looking back at us in the side mirror on the truck. He had given me a yellow, evil smile and I had tried to chase down the truck. Every night for the past year, I’ve been having the same basic idea of the nightmare, but each slightly differed. It’s always me in the yard, watching my two sisters run down the road. I am trapped in a glass box, but I don’t know it. Then a truck with a greasy, yellow smile on the grill comes and takes my sisters away, stringing them to the back in the bed so I can hear them screaming for me. They yell and yell and I bang and bang on my box, screaming and yelling past what I thought I could physically do, but I can’t get out and they can’t hear me. Then, as they drive away, Shasta comes into the suburbs and stands in the yard next to the box. I have to watch as a snake, a gigantic cotton mouth about ninety feet long comes out of the ground and swallows my horse. He can’t hear me screaming. He can only see me, and he trusted me to keep him safe. I used to wake up after that, but now the nightmares have gotten a new twist: sometimes I can’t wake up. I’d be in the box, crying, when a raspy, dirty voice would come and talk loudly. He was threatening me, telling me how I was next after my sisters, and how not a soul in the word could try and save me because I was a goner and he was working his way in to kill me. Even then I can’t wake up, as a feeling of total doom comes in on me. I woke from this one with a scream. My skin was crawling and I had sweated through my sheets. I never screamed at my dreams. That in itself made me scared. Something was horribly, horribly wrong.

But, I couldn’t be thinking like that the day before a big show. We had this tradition, where before every regional show we rotated houses to sleep over at, so only one parent had to drive to the barn with a bunch of rowdy teenagers at four in the morning. This time, we were at Kat’s. Her house was actually three rooms smaller than what qualified for a mansion. It was beautiful, the architecture crafted after Barcelona, Spain. Kat didn’t think she was rich, but her father was a lawyer and her mother was a cardiovascular surgical technician. That’s just the super fancy way of saying heart doctor. It was a fantastic house, big enough for us to be loud in and nobody would hear us. We went into the movie room, which was actually just a projector with a screen up front and nice lazy chairs to sit in. There were six lazy chairs, so we each got one and thumped our stuff onto it. We burned time. We gave each other makeovers, making ourselves look horrible then beautiful. We drew pictures with sharpies on each other’s arms and legs. We made up karaoke songs that we sang loud and obnoxiously then put up on facebook. Finally, after we played a game of football in the yard with the five neighbor boys, we were ready to go to bed. We had to get up at three thirty to get ready for the show, and then be at the barn by four, so we went to bed around seven. We watched a movie while some of us were trying to sleep. We were going to watch Flicka, but then AnnLee remembered that I had problems with movies with dying horses in them, so instead we watched Avatar. It was about eight fifteen when we were all out like lights, and then the dream came back.

The glass box. My sisters. My horse. The cold voice. The dream was there, and stronger than ever. Then, when his threats kept going instead of me waking up, my dream self was washed in cold. A feeling of hands tightening around my throat sent me reeling, hitting the sides of the glass box with my fists, crying and yelling. Now the hands were shaking me. I woke with a start, and looked up at Indie. She was right above my face, shuffling around in her bright pink squirrel slippers.

“Rainie,” she said, “You were screaming. Really intensely. And loud. You have awakened us all. But on the bright side, the alarm clock is broken and you’ve woken us up at three thirty-two. Good work, shrieker.”

The alarm clock had died in the middle of the night, murder no doubt, by Kat’s foot knocking it off the table. It shattered, and was never able to wake another human being again. It’s a good thing we woke up in time, or else we wouldn’t have been able to make the eight hour drive to Ocala. Our schedule was so tight, with us getting there by four, leaving by four fifteen, and there by lunch time for sign in’s and the festivities. We had no idea what kind of festivities that meant, we just knew it probably involved money. I had four hundred bucks on me to cover the trip and “festivities”, though I had little to no intention of ever spending it.

The drive was uneventful to say the least. We drove for four hours before anything was open for breakfast. We couldn’t agree on anything, because although McDonald’s was AnnLee’s favorite, I couldn’t stand it and would rather get coffee and a sandwich at Starbucks. Indie wasn’t in a coffee mood and weird enough, wanted Taco Bell at seven in the morning. Kaitlyn did not want the upset stomach from Taco Bell so she wanted to go to the Panera. Kat didn’t care about what any of the others wanted. She wanted Spaghetti-O’s with meatballs out of the can. We all thought she was crazy, because the microwave was in the trailer and cold spaghetti o’s didn’t seem like they’d actually hit the spot. Finally, Mrs. Carroll intervened, and sent us to the Fresh Italian at the trucker’s stop. She chose that place because there was a yard big enough to take the horses out of the trailer and lunge them in. So what we ended up doing was ordering food, then lunging our horses then eating. Lyra was such an overexcited jerk. As soon as the lunge was on, she was galloping around me, bucking and wheeling and doing all sorts of “interesting” things. I wanted to kill her, because if I didn’t, a car might have. We had gotten to stop her after she ran around and around and we put on the lip chain so that we could actually have control over my whacky horse. Lyra knew we were going somewhere exciting. One thing about Lyra made her an intense competitor and a pain in the butt. Lyra could sense adrenaline and your emotions, and she takes whatever you’re feeling and magnifies it about ten times over. This would help her focus and relax, or make her scatter brained and spooky. For this very reason, nobody could ride her besides those with extreme self control and focus. The rest of my team can ride her, but in shows they become excited and just can’t manage her. Today she was feeling out the people around her, feeling the temperaments and adrenaline from show excitement. With the lip chain, she was controllable and we finished her exercise. Everyone else exercised their horses without any problems, and we loaded back up.

When we drove off again, we decided we wanted to be in the living quarters in the trailer. The tack room had a door in it that led to a small room with a couch and a loveseat, fold out beds, a small closet, a microwave, and a mini fridge. It probably wasn’t the safest thing to be in, a sixteen by ten foot room with furniture and electricity, going seventy miles per hour down a highway. At that point, we didn’t care. We wanted to sleep and there was no room in the truck. There are two fold out beds, a couch, a loveseat, and a futon. I automatically called the couch. Indie grabbed the loveseat, Kat grabbed one bed, and AnnLee and Kaitlyn rock paper scissored over the last bed. Kaitlyn won, and so on that, we all fell asleep. We slept for the rest of the ride, the lurching and bouncing lulling us to sleep. I was too exhausted to have the nightmares, so I dreamed of nothing.

When we woke up, we were on the show grounds. It was incredible. There were trailers everywhere, horses being unloaded and led to the colorful temporary stalls. We saw many teenagers, the competition standing around, watching us drive in. The fair grounds were beautiful, with incredibly well maintained grass, and wonderfully kept fencing and horse stalls. Then we found out what festivities where.

All along the driveway in, there had been signs saying things like “horse jewelry”, “show photographers,” and “HDR Saddlers” on plastic poke into the dirt kind of signs that flapped in the Florida wind. We saw too many things to count, like horse treats, human snacks, and people posing their horses for portrait makers, bridle makers, animal psychics dressed in robes, and jewelry makers. We had never seen a fair at a horse show before, but then again, we’d never been to States.

We were competing against sixty other top-ranking teens and their horses from across the country. We were not all going to be able to win, so we had to focus, and focus hard on what we wanted.

We unloaded our horses after we parked and led them into the temporary barn. The walls were yellow, as it was just a huge temporary barn with plastic walls. I don’t know what the stalls were made of, but they were sturdy enough for Lyra, who wasn’t the type of mare to kick out. I rubbed my mare’s mahogany bay coat, and fixed her forelock braid, which was sticking up into the air like some type of Hoo from Dr. Seuss-land. I told my mare that I didn’t expect for her to win, that all we needed to do was try our best, because we weren’t even supposed to be here. Before we had even considered States, Lyra had gotten sick. She had gotten some disease, and had gotten it bad. The vet did everything in her power to give Lyra chances to live, and she pulled through, but we spent six months nursing my mare back to health. That’s when I had been competing Jeremy. I had two choices, compete my less experienced gelding in harder classes to get points, or not compete and miss States completely. Jeremy had chosen to rise to the occasion, and I was very proud of him, and in that season, we placed in every class we rode in. When Lyra had gotten better, it had been a month before States. I had already qualified with my points, but now I had a choice to make. I could nurse my mare back, the one I knew was a constant winner and able to do whatever the world threw at her, from weakness to ride in the hardest show in Florida, or ride my gelding who was a great horse, just young and maybe not experienced enough. I had chosen my mare, because States is not the time to give your horse experience. But Lyra had been off for six months, so retraining took hours and a lot of time, because she wasn’t fit. Another thing about Lyra was that she lived to jump. When we were first reconditioning her for the show, she had been very unhappy, because it took a week or so to get back to jumping. We rode three times a day, and each was a dressage lesson. When we do only dressage on Lyra for an amount of time, she becomes a monster. She braces on the bit and becomes a freight train. We ended up having to do dressage on her in a Pelham, which is actually quite annoying and unconventional. At shows, she does different. When she’s at a show she knows that dressage comes first, then she can do cross country, then show jumping. She understands the need to behave, and exhibits perfect training. Any other time, my horse is a speed demon with an attitude that feels you out to know what you’re thinking, but in a show, she’s feeling you out for confidence and instruction. You barely have to ask her to do anything. You ride like butter and she moves like butter. Eventually, she was fit again, but not until two weeks until States. We spent those weeks reconditioning for stamina and speed, which meant six hour trail rides at mostly trot and canter. She could feel the excitement, though, so she kept pushing until she was a wonderful athlete. She was now ready for States, with four days to spare.

Indie, AnnLee, Kaitlyn, and Kat decided without my consent that as soon as we put the horses up, we would all go shopping. There were about one hundred shops in the festival, and the girls were bent on going to all of them before sundown. We didn’t, though, end up visiting all of them. We just went to about fifty of them. We started at a boot maker’s, where Kat bought a pair of five hundred dollar custom boots. It was interesting to watch, as two little Italian men measured her feet and legs and then let her choose the boot leather and design she wanted. We visited an aroma therapy tent, which sold scents that made you and your horse relax. AnnLee jokingly told me to buy some for Lyra, but I ended up buying some for myself. I bought black cherry mint body spray, which you sprayed on yourself and instantly felt relaxed. We visited the HDR saddle maker, made our own custom saddle pads, and ate all sorts of food from Italy, where horseback riding shows had originated in the coliseums. We had our horses portrayed by an abstract artist, which was really cool. We described our horses by the way they looked, the way they acted, their breed, and ourselves, and little French ladies painted the picture. Lyra’s was beautiful. It showed a red horse with a black mane and tail with a deep chest, huge eyes, and legs a mile long. The horse was poised to run, with the paint showing a wind of excitement It was exotic. It was beautiful. It was slightly expensive. I paid for it, though, because it was a painting that I wanted in my room. I wish I had also done Jeremy. We visited a lot of other places after that, including a Native American sales tent, which had a wood fire and a man making glass models of horses that he was painting like Plains Indian’s ponies. We each bought one of these. We visited all sorts of other shops, and bought lots of food and horse treats.

We were walking down the road to a weird little shop, a photography booth. There were two men, each making a picture frame. AnnLee said to the man on the right “excuse me sir, but may we please have a picture taken to buy?” He looked up, and my heart fell into my stomach. This was the man from the rear view mirror. I saw it in his face that he noticed me too, but he wasn’t surprised in the least. This man had known I was going to be here at States.

I wanted to run. I wanted to disappear, to scream and to tell my friends that this was one of the men who had killed my eight year old sisters. This wasn’t a human, but a monster. But the monster only took out his camera, and gave a yellowed smile. “Say cheese and look pretty!” he said, and I shivered. His was the raspy voice that I had been hearing in my dreams. But I hid my emotions. I gave him a cold look, one that told him that I knew what he was, that I hated him and wasn’t afraid, but only for a second before I transformed into the smiling, happy blonde fourteen year old girl who had, beyond all doubts, made it to States and believed she was on her way to Nationals. He took his snap shot, and printed the photo into five copies. He slid them into the picture frames of our choice. We paid, and then left. I looked over my shoulder with a cold glare, and felt a deep pang of hate for this man. I thought about it for a second, how this man could have figured out where I was. I didn’t know him, only through the murder of my sisters. I hadn’t had a facebook either. It would have been an easier assumption of I had one, because he could have found the last name of his little victims in the obituary, and then searched for me, but I had deleted it immediately after the deaths because of all the people commenting about them on my page. I got tired of hearing it so I deleted it. I doubt he was taking tabs on my friends, because he wouldn’t have known that I hung out with them or knew their names. I brushed it off, because maybe, I was just imagining things. The death had been a year ago. The murderers had probably hopped the country to avoid capture forever ago. They wouldn’t risk coming back within the next decade, much less a year after the deaths.

We walked for awhile longer, and visited several more shops. We then stopped by a gypsy wagon.

“Hold your shopping backs close,” whispered Indie, “we’re going in to see the gypsies and have our futures read.”

“Ok,” whispered Kat, “but you know this is a bunch of bullcrap, right? Gypsies can’t really read the future.”

“Oh, can we not?” said an old lady with a turban on her head, and a loose peasant top and denim skirt. Kat shut her mouth quickly, and looked slightly scared.

“Do not be scared child,” the gypsy said, “my name is Luna, and I have been reading futures for the last thirty years.”

“Hello Luna,” Kaitlyn said, “may we please have our futures read?”

“Yes child, and I can read pieces of the future right now, just looking into such beautiful young faces. There is a victor among you, but much suffering will befall her. You may trust one another, but nobody else. You will all be successful, each in a completely different way, but all the same, successful. I will take individual sessions now. How about the redhead first?”

Kat went into the wagon with Luna, and ten minutes later came out.

“Wow, thank you so much Luna,” she said, and handed her ten dollars.

“Any time, darling, your future is quite a pleasant one to read. The blonde?” she said and beckoned for Kaitlyn. She stepped into the wagon. She came out in fifteen minutes. She handed Luna her ten, and sat down with the rest of us. Indie went in after her, then came out and gave Luna her ten. AnnLee was after her. Then it was my turn. She led me to a table in the back of the wagon, surrounded on three sides by a red silk cloth, and had me sit down. She pulled out cards and a cup of tea.

“Child,” she said, “I can read some of your future by just looking at your face and a great deal of your past also. You are carrying baggage, and four ghosts are following you, whether you know it or not.”

“Ghosts? What do you mean?”

“Three little girls and a horse. You have obviously been through much.”

“Wait, three? But only my two sisters passed on.”

“There is much you need to figure out on your own. May I see your palm?”

I offered over my right hand, and she went pale. She traced the cross over my love line and the swirled scar on my life line.

“Child, you have much to fear. You have the devils mark, and are being tracked. You are not safe here, but you are not safe anywhere with that mark. You are strong, and of the fire, and you are going to have to sap up all of your strength to keep yourself safe from evil. Your future is quite complex. Please, take a cup of tea while I read your cards. Don’t mind the leaves at the bottom, I will read those after your cards.”

She folded and cut her cards many different ways, making them jump between her hands. Then she cut eight off the top of her pile. They were beautiful cards, yet scary. These were a taboo. I was Christian, and I shouldn’t even be in this gypsy’s wagon, getting my future told. But here I was, and this gypsy had figured so much out, so even if it was the devil speaking through her, God had brought me to this place. The eight cards were the prophet, the maiden, death, the lovers, the lamb at the mill, fear, grace, and victory.

“The cards should give you hope, child. In the order that they have been drawn they will tell you much. The prophet means you are part of a story that has already been started, and that you have to complete it. The maiden is a card of protection, that you have protection under a force that cannot be touched by another. Death has already touched you, and may try to touch you again, but in the order that it has been pulled, since it is an odd numbered pull, it may not bring the foretold. You are going to have lovers, multiple, and you will have to choose one out of the four. Complete changes are brought by the lamb at the mill, and they have already started. Fear and Grace next to each other are very rare, and mean one thing only. You will have an encounter, and you will have to rely on someone else to get you through it, whether you live or not is not answered though. Maybe one of your many lovers will safe your life. You are more likely going to have victory over what this situation is, whether you figure it out or not, but you may not win, in the end. That is what your tarot says.”

I had finished my tea, and she took the cup, pressed it to her mouth, said something into it, and looked down. She gave me the cup to see, and I saw a sword displayed truly and boldly where a second ago, there hadn’t been anything but a blob.

“Your tea leaves show great promise, darling. You are brave, strong, and going to have a warrior behind you. I know you will come out of this. I have one more test for you, since none of these are giving me answers I should have expected. Please bite into this apple. Close your eyes, and just take a bite and I will read it.”

I thought she was crazy, because she is expecting me to take one bite into an apple then give it back to her. I did as she asked though, and handed her back the apple. It had been one of those apples that was both red and yellow, and I had bitten down true and straight into the middle of the red part. It was a deep bite, and you could tell where each of my teeth marks was.

“Child, if you survive, you are going to live long, and you are going to prosper. You will do everything with love, with many children and all of what the world could ever want. You will suffer hardship in your youth, but you will be completely happy in the end, if you do survive the battle.”

She stood up, and opened the door. I walked down the steps to my awaiting friends. “Darling, it has been a wonder to read such a complex and exciting future and I give you luck, not only in this show, but the others, and in the adventure that is to come. We will be seeing each other again, Rainie.”

I turned around and looked at her, bug eyed. I hadn’t told her my name. The others didn’t seem to notice, and we turned around and walked to our trailer. Dusk had fallen, and we needed to be back before night. Plus I didn’t want to be out and about with a crazy gypsy and the man I suspected murdered my sisters.

“Dude, that lady is one of two things, magic, or possessed,” said Kaitlyn. “She knew everything. Nothing was a secret. She did incredible predictions in there. Apparently, I am going to have a very hard time between years twenty and thirty, but pull through and have an incredible life.”

“Not fair!” said AnnLee, “she told me that I was going to have multiple lovers, but none who really loved me, and I am going to waste my life away and not realize it until too late.”

“Haha, my life is going to be great,” Kat said. She gloated on, saying “I am going to be as happy as humanly possible, married with children, by age twenty-two!”

“Shut up,” said AnnLee who then hit her with her saddle pad.

“My future was okay, I guess,” Indie said, “She said I was going to be happy, then have a rough patch, then be happy again. She said my life would be normal and that I wouldn’t really have anything super bad happen, but I wouldn’t necessarily be winning the lottery either.”

“Well, that’s okay Indie-Pie. It’ll all be good. It’s probably just a lot of bull anyway,” said Kat.

“So we’ve heard everybody’s besides Rainie’s. What was your future?”

Something in the back of my mind told me to tell them; after all, they were my best friends. The front of my mind told me to lie, hard. I ended up listening to the back of my mind, since it was probably all just bull crap.

“Well, she told me that I am in danger now, something about the devil’s mark, and how I’m going to have a dangerous adventure that I might not survive. But she told me that I am strong and brave and some other stuff, and that I will have help. And that if I am to survive, I am going to have a fantastic, happy life. I think it’s all bull crap.”

“I do too,” said AnnLee, just as we made it to the trailer. We showered in the community showers, and put on our team pajamas, which were team Jacob shirts and heart boxers. It was a joke, because we had gone to see Breaking Dawn together, and we had seen a very skinny guy whose pants fell down in the theater after he stood up. He had had heart boxers on. So after that, we went into the mall and bought our tee shirts and boxers. We drew names out of a hat to see who got what bed, and ended up with AnnLee on the couch, Indie on the first fold out, myself on the love seat, Kat on the second fold out, and Kaitlyn on the futon. Mrs. Carroll slept in the truck, folding back the hood over the bed, opened the back windows, and cracked the truck’s windows. I stayed up past the others, because I couldn’t sleep. The other girls were out like lights around nine, but I just couldn’t. I sat up in bed, and grabbed my phone. I checked it under the covers. While I was playing Tetris, I got a text from Kat.



“Can U Slp?”

“Nope.”

“Do u wanna go 2 the barn & c the horses?”

“Sure. Quietly tho.”



We snuck out of bed, and grabbed the pair of socks out of our emergency bag. We slipped on our fat baby boots, and snuck out the door silently. I had my pocket knife on me, which wasn’t really protection, but could be of great help if we got attacked by a certain sister-killer. We walked quietly but quickly to the barn, and we stopped and sat on the empty saddle rack between Lyra and Olli, Kat’s horse.

“So what’s keeping you up?” Kat asked.

“I don’t know if I should tell you, because it sounds insane.”

“Please, half the stuff you say sounds insane, Rainie, and that’s why we love you!”

“Yea, but this is probably one of the craziest things I have ever said.”

“Well, tough, ‘cause you’re going to have to tell me or else I’m not going to let you leave the barn.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. I will feed you to Olli, who will lick you to death.”

“Oh no, death at the hooves of Olli!? Who could stand that?!”

“People without your sass.”

“Sorry. So if I tell you, you promise not to call the whack shack on me?”

“Yes, I promise. And I won’t make you get your head shrunk either.”

“Okay. Do you remember the guy who took our picture?”

“Yea! The scary guy with the dumpster breath!”

“Yep. I think he was one of the guys who killed my sister. And he’s on the show grounds.”

“You really think it was him?”

“Gee, I don’t know! Yes, I think it was him, I felt in my whole body that it was him. He looked at me like I was prey. And I don’t know how he would have found me. Well, I kind of do, after what the gypsy said.”

“What did Luna say?”

“She told me that I had the devil’s mark, and that I was being tracked. If I’m right, he’s tracking me to kill me like he did my sisters. He’s using Satanic Power.”

“Rainie, you know I don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Well, you should, because it’s true.”

“Whoa, hold on a sec. I just thought of something. I went outside in the middle of the night with you, when you think you’re being stalked by a creepy murderer? You’re an idiot for not telling me, and I’m an idiot for going with you!”

“Don’t be so loud. He’ll find us,” I joked around. Suddenly, we heard footsteps echoing on the other side of the barn. These weren’t boots, though, these sounded like dress slacks. The kind you would wear if you were selling things. Kat and I exchanged glances, and climbed over the eight foot wall and into Lyra’s stall. We hid on the floor, under the hay net and the water buckets. The footsteps kept getting closer and closer. Then we started hearing whistling. The whistler had no musical talent, and was whistling a scary tune, the type that you’d hear in movies that involve murder and gore. I pulled out my knife from inside my boot, and flicked open the longest blade, a three inch blade that was sharp enough to oranges with only a little bit of pressure. He then started reading nameplates. This was the man.

“Golden Days, owned by Marie Costello. Never Forget Dis, owned by David Kales. Payton’s Grace, owned by Indie Newportson. Don’t Tell Daddy, owned by AnnLee Salomon. Mr. Sunday, owned by Kaitlyn Sterling. Oleander, owned by Kat Calebson. Lyrically, owned by Rainie Hanson.” At Lyra’s stall, he stopped, and tried to take a look over the stall door. I thought we were dead, and I was praying the whole time that this man didn’t see us. If he had looked to his left, he would have seen us huddled on the floor. He didn’t get the chance to, though. Lyra came leaping out of the back of the stall, ears pinned and teeth out, and tried to attack him. He jumped back, and let out a couple of swear words, then tried to look in through the barring right above is. She whipped around and kicked out at the bars, barely missing his face. He let out a couple more words, and walked off, swearing as he went. Lyra had felt our emotions, and known that we were scared of this man. She had protected us. As soon as I heard the flap door open, and him exit, I leapt up from the ground, brushed the shavings out of my boxers, and hugged Lyra good and hard around her neck. She put her head down low enough, and nuzzled at my hip, wanting a treat.

“No treats now, Lyra, but tomorrow, when we win the dressage test, you can have a whole boat load.”

We climbed back over the stall door, and the question now was, how do we get out of the barn without being caught. We decided on something. It wasn’t a genius plan, but there aren’t any genius plans to be made when you’re trapped in a barn with a mad man on the outside. Either you get past him to escape, or you avoid him to escape. Seeing how he knew every move I seemed to be making, we decided to sneak out under the tent. We went to the opposite side of the aisle way, where there was a small amount of yellow canvas flapping in the night breeze. We lifted it slightly, and Kat went through first. I went through just afterwards, and we ran. We sprinted all the way back to the trailer. We ran until we got two steps from the trailer, when we walked, looking behind us the whole time. Then we opened the door and slipped in, locked it behind us, took off our shoes, and fell asleep. Tomorrow was an important day, first off, for survival, and second off it was the dressage test. Tomorrow was going to set the pace for our whole weekend, whether we wanted it to or not, so it was in our best interest to sleep now, be afraid later.