Dark Horses - Softcover

Von Ziegesar, Cecily

3.46

511 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616958162 ISBN 13: 9781616958169

Publisher: Soho Teen, 2017

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The iconic author of Gossip Girl brings a dark and heart-wrenching addition to the girl-meets-horse canon. In the lens of addiction and the long road to recovery, this is a contemporary update to Black Beauty.

Merritt Wenner has been adrift ever since the untimely death of her grandmother. After skipping out on the SATs to go on a bender, she wakes up to discover that her absentee parents have committed her to Good Fences, a residential equine-assisted therapy program.

Red, a thoroughbred racing reject, is a terror in the barn. He’s never felt an attachment to anyone . . . until he meets Merritt. They belong together. Soon they’re sneaking off for late-night rides, which is strictly against the rules. Their talent does not go unnoticed. Sprung from Good Fences by the facility’s mysterious benefactor, Merritt and Red plunge into the competitive equestrian circuit—with all its seductive glamour and twisted jealousies. After a tragic incident, Merritt must choose between the boy she’s fallen for and the horse she loves.

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About the Author:

Cecily von Ziegesar is the author of the worldwide bestselling Gossip Girl book series. Her notorious satires of life on the Upper East Side were adapted for TV and aired for six seasons. Cecily grew up in Manhattan, kept horses in Connecticut, and has lived in Italy, Maine, Arizona, Budapest, and London. In each of those places, she found a horse to ride. She now lives in Brooklyn with her family and other animals.

Prologue
Red

I’m dying. Whatever I drank from those boxes has made me very, very sick. I can’t find my stall. The ground lists and sways beneath my hooves as I stagger around in the dark, looking for it. I stop to get my bearings. My sides heave and my head hangs heavy, almost to my knees. Every loud moaning breath startles me, but there’s nothing I can do to fix me. This is the end. I’m outside the barn now. The storm is over and the skies have cleared. The earth is a just-baked pie left out to cool. I splay my long legs like a newborn foal and pump giant breaths of sweet steam through my distended nostrils. In, out. In, out.
     Over in the main ring the jumps loom, huge and beautiful in the moonlight. In just a few hours she and I are supposed to jump that course. We’re supposed to ace it. We’re supposed to win. That’s highly unlikely now. More like, Bye-bye my American pie. You made living fun. But this must be the day that I die.
     I find a patch of muddy grass and lie down to sleep and replay my favorite dream. In the dream we’re together again, just the two of us, with no interruptions. I have her all to myself and she’s not distracted by anyone, girl or boy. We’re not competing either. We just hang out, like old friends.
     It was an accident how we came to be in the same field at the same time, looking into each other’s eyes, forgetting everything and everyone else. I wasn’t looking for her, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t looking for me, but I could sense then—exactly then—that everything was about to change; it had already changed. Standing in front of me was my whole reason for existing. Actually, I hated her at first. I hated everybody, and she hated me. But then I liked her. I didn’t care, and then I did care—a lot, too much maybe. It’s almost impossible to explain, especially in my current state. But I will try.

PART 1
The previous October

1 | Merritt

There’s this thing I do when I know something’s expected of me. I a) run away, b) make a big mess of it, c) all of the above. It’s like instead of anticipating failure and disaster and doing my best to avoid it, I go right ahead and make the disaster happen, so I can be right about it being a disaster and a failure, and the resulting disappointment is like a perverse triumph. Like, see what you made me do? I told you I was going to mess up.
     Today’s disaster began last night when I decided to go to a party instead of eating a nice healthy dinner and going to bed early. My parents were at a screening for a film about Pythagoras made by one of their former students. They ordered sushi for me and made me promise to get in bed at nine.
     As soon as they left, I went out.
     I didn’t even really know Sonia Kuhnhardt, the Chace senior hosting the party, but she lived near Lincoln Center, which was semi-convenient. All the Upper East Side private girls’ schools like Chace and Dowd are so small everyone recognizes everyone and it feels like we know each other, even when we don’t. Sonia lived in a brownstone, not an apartment. Girls sat on the stoop smoking cigarettes, and music drifted out of the upstairs and downstairs windows. The kitchen was huge and messy. Boxes of wine were lined up on the counter with real wine glasses. It was so private-school superior to serve wine at a party instead of beer, but I didn’t mind. Wine is stronger.
     I picked up a glass and an entire box and carried them over to the large sectional sofa, claiming a lonely spot on one end. I didn’t come there to socialize. I’d come to obliterate the SAT, which I was due to take the next morning. Setting the box on the coffee table, I dispensed the red wine into my glass and began to gulp it, gagging on its sickly sweetness. My hangover was going to be so huge I’d have to name it. Gunther. Voldemort. Lucifer. The Beast. Sorry I messed up the SAT. Blame it on The Beast.
     “Hi.” Some blond boy who was trying to grow a mustache sat down beside me. “Do you go to Chace with Sonia?”
     I nodded, figuring that was good enough. I didn’t really know how to talk to boys. No brothers, and no boys at school since I’d transferred to Dowd toward the end of last school year.
     The boy was drinking water, or something that looked like water. “I’m Sonia’s brother, Sam. We’re twins. And you are?”
     I took another vomity gulp of wine before answering. “Merritt. Like the Merritt Parkway?”
     The boy twin, Sam, chuckled. “Your parents named you after a parkway?”
     I nodded again. “Yup.”
     And that was the last thing I said all night, until several glasses of wine later, when Sam hailed me a taxi, before I “messed up the white carpet,” and I had to give the driver my address. My parents were still out when I got upstairs, so I raided the medicine cupboard and took two of the Percocet pills Dad had been prescribed for his hamstring tear. Then I passed out. Mission accomplished.

“You might want a little sea salt.” Mom placed the salt grinder at my elbow and touched her toes. Her purple Lycra leggings stretched tautly over her muscular legs. Her hips popped.
     It was morning, the morning of the SAT.
     “Somebody needs to limber up,” Dad observed cheerfully from the living room, where he was doing crunches on the floor.
     My parents were both fanatically healthy. They were professors at Columbia and they ran to work and back every day. They had me when they were well into their forties, and it was like they were trying to beat the clock somehow by getting healthier and fitter every year. A couple of years ago they had run half marathons; now they were running full ones. I preferred to walk. I was also pretty sure that all the exercise they did together was a form of premeditated alone time, a way of accomplishing two goals at once. My parents were very practical. Why not get fit and spend time together instead of going to a gym and seeing a couples counselor? I wasn’t sure if it was working. There was a lot of forced cheeriness at home that felt insincere to the point of creepy. But what did I know? Misery was my middle name.
     Eggs and kale squirmed on my plate. The Beast was in full force. I pushed back my chair. “I have to get going,” I said, desperate for some fresh air.
     “Go get ’em!” Dad called from the floor as I tromped toward the elevator.
     “You won’t make it through the test without brain food,” Mom scolded. She tucked a Ziploc bag full of raw almonds into the pocket of my faux leather jacket. I turned my head so she wouldn’t smell my sour wine breath. “Don’t stress this, it’s really not a big deal.”
     I hated when she did that, just pretending to have no expectations when she was really worried I might crack and go all Unabomber again.
     It had been like this since my grandmother, Gran-Jo, died last spring. I refused to go to school or even leave my room for weeks. My parents tried to get me to see a psychologist, but I refused to go to the appointments. Finally I transferred from my huge public school to Dowd Prep and started going to school again even though the school year was almost over. But even at tiny Dowd, I went from being a good student with friends to a student who barely scrapes by, has no friends, and prefers to stay in her room watching reruns of creepy reality TV shows like Extreme Cheapskates and 19 Kids and Counting with the door closed. Gran-Jo was the most important person in my life and suddenly she was gone. Sorry for feeling sad.
     “I’ll text you when I’m done,” I promised Mom, and turned to go.

Dowd Prep is a crosstown bus ride away from my building on Riverside Drive, through Central Park and over to Lexington Avenue. I bought a can of Red Bull at a deli and drank it on the way, but The Beast was still winning. My hands shook. My eyelids were coated with a film of cold sweat. I was freezing and suffocating. My knees wouldn’t stop bouncing.
     “Phones and other electronic devices should be in your lockers with your coats,” Mrs. T, our proctor, declared as I arrived. I sat down at the only empty desk in the Dowd gym, two number-two pencils clutched in my fist. Mrs. T’s last name was Greek and sounded exactly like “testicles,” so she stuck to “Mrs. T” for obvious reasons. “If you need to use the ladies room you must do so now, or wait for the first break in approximately one hour and fifteen minutes.”
     I stood up. My pencils rolled off the desk and onto the floor.
     “Miss Wenner, you need to use the ladies room now? Are you all right, dear?” Mrs. T asked kindly. “You look a bit pale.”
     I nodded, ignoring the accusing stares of my classmates, particularly Amora Wells and Nadia Grabcheski, the two most annoying girls in the class. They were always posting selfies on Instagram, flaunting the blue ribbons they’d won at winter horse shows in Florida, or the new monogrammed blankets that fit their sleek ponies just so. Right after Gran-Jo died I’d actually gone up to them at a party to talk about riding, but they’d just stared at me with their heads cocked to the side, as if I were speaking gibberish. Maybe I was. That was the beginning of the sadness, and the sadder I got the more wasted I wanted to be. The morning after that party Amora had posted an out of focus picture of me on Instagram. I was slumped on the floor outside the bathroom, waiting to go. Beside the picture she’d written the snarky caption, Dowd
Welcomes Promising New Student. Nadia was the first follower to “like” Amora’s post. Needless to say I wasn’t going to spend the weekend at either one of their country houses any time soon.
     “I think I need a drink of water,” I told Mrs. T.
     Ann Ware, my best friend, or rather former best friend, frowned at me as I waited for permission to leave the room. Ann and I had gone to public elementary and middle school together. She’d gone to Dowd in ninth grade, which was why my parents thought I might like it.
     “Very well then, run along,” said Mrs. T. “But hurry back.”
     And so I ran. I ran out of the gym to my locker, got my coat, and ran straight out the main door.

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