Runaways

noise about something, I'd faint.'

'You might be surprised,' her father said, sounding dry. 'I've heard your mother's end of some of the editorial conferences for TimeOnline. Pretty rough stuff.'

'Maybe it is. But, Daddy, you've never treated any of us that way. I can't imagine what that kind of thing would be like, coming from your own parents. And Burt's been putting up with it for years.'

Megan leaned back in the chair. 'Lately he's been starting to mention not putting up with it anymore. Getting out. But Burt's never been clear about exactly where he planned to get out to. I don't think he had a lot of money saved, for one thing. If he's got enough money to move out, all of a sudden, I'd think maybe he'd robbed a bank or something… I don't know where else Burt would be getting it.'

Her father brooded for a few moments, turning the half- pipe over in his hands, then fitting the stem to it again.

'Are there friends who might have given him a place to stay?'

'Not that I know of. I mean, none who wouldn't tip his mother off right away once they got a feeling for what was going on. If he's staying with someone, it's nobody from school, I'd bet, or from the riding crowd. Someone none of us know.' Megan began tying the bit of fringe into a knot. 'But what's going to drive poor Wilma right around the bend is not knowing. She's seriously freaked already. If Burt doesn't at least get in touch with her to let her know he's okay, wherever he is, Wilma's going to get even more frayed at the edges.'

And Megan groaned and put her head down in her hands. 'I don't believe this is happening,' she muttered. 'Why couldn't he have waited until after the competition? What kind of person does this to their friends before they're about to do something so important? What kind of person does it at all?

'Burt's kind, apparently,' her father said, leaning against the counter and sucking experimentally on the pipe. 'Yech.'

Megan looked up, for this was an unusual reaction for her dad, but it was the pipe he was scowling at, and now he took it apart again and went rooting in the drawer for another pipe cleaner. 'Well,' he said after a moment, 'this leaves you with an interesting choice.'

'I don't see that it leaves us with any choices at all,' Megan said, mournfully.

'Whether to let this ruin your competition, for one thing.'

Megan straightened up and felt her mouth set in a grim expression. 'I'm not sure the horse isn't going to do that for us,' she said. 'Even without Burt, things are looking pretty awful.'

Her father raised his eyebrows as he worked on the pipestem. 'So even if he hadn't gone off wherever he's gone, you'd still have problems.'

'More than enough,' Megan said, and sighed again.

'No, I see your point, PopsMy life won't exactly come to an end. I may wind up looking incredibly incompetent and dumb in front of hundreds of people, but that's nothing, really…'

Her father's eyebrows went up higher, this time in response to her ironic tone. 'I've done it in front of millions, in my time,' Megan's father said. 'That last review in the New York Times, for example.'

'I thought you said that didn't matter, because the Times critic was an obsequious cretin.'

Her father smiled very slightly as he put down the pipe stem and started working on the pipe end. 'I meant that, first of all, he was wrong, and second, yes, he is an obsequious cretin. But lots of people think he's not, so I probably looked dumb to them.' Her father shrugged. 'They're not usually people who would have bought my book anyway, so I don't care what they think. It's the ones who bought it and didn't like it that I worry about. After all, I took their beer money and didn't entertain them. But third, and most important… how much does it really matter? In two hundred years who's going to care?'

Megan blinked… then sighed again. 'Okay,' she said. 'This is that 'sense of proportion' thing you keep telling me about.'

'When humor fails you,' her father said, grimacing at the second pipecleaner and throwing it away, 'there's no better substitute. Meanwhile, what have Burt's folks been doing about this situation?'

'I don't know,' Megan said. 'I should call Wilma and see if she knows anythingI don't want to call them myself. I don't know them all that well.'

'And from the sound of it, you don't want to.'

Megan shook her head. Every time she had called Burt's house in the past, there had been the sound of shouting in the background, and once, when the phone was on visual, she had seen Burt's mother go by in the background of the view, looking grim and purposeful about where she was going, and carrying.. She shook her head again. Surely nobody in this day and age actually hit their kid with a belt. She had to have seen that wrong. Oh, jeez, I hope I saw that wrong… 'It's not high on my list,' Megan said to her father. 'I'll call Wilma in an hour or so and see what she found out.'

'And what about Saturday?' her father said. 'Are you going to be able to replace Burt if no one can find him?'

Megan rubbed her eyes again. 'It's not that simple,' she said. 'The team qualifies as a group, and everybody has to have been preregistered as part of a team with the horse they're working with. If we're incredibly lucky, we might be able to get one of the other riders who's certified with Burt's horse to fill in. But there's no guarantee that whoever it is will've been working on the same figures and patterns that Burt was preparing… the ones the judges are going to be looking for.' She sighed, looked up again. 'Dad,' Megan said, 'what do you do when you see a complete disaster coming, and no matter how you try to cope, there's just no way to avoid it?'

He was frowning at the meerschaum pipe, screwing it together again. 'Prepare your responses in advance,' her father said, sounding resigned, 'and do your best to make them graceful. People do remember that afterward, no matter what the winners say.'

Megan sighed as her father went out of the kitchen, and got up to throw herself together some kind of dinner, while thinking morosely about Burt, Buddy, her sim of Buddy, and the general unfairness of life. Vd better get the nourishment into me now, because Vm not gonna have time in the next seventy-two hours…

Chapter 3

Later, three days later to be precise, Megan was standing in the shade of the big stands at Potomac Valley, in the 'prepping area,' looking down at her photocopy of her team's points sheet. She was thinking black thoughts about graceful responses and senses of proportion, since her sense of humor had so completely deserted her that she suspected she'd have to take out an ad in the paper and post notices around the neighborhood to find it again. All around her, people dressed as Megan was in dressage jodhpurs and black jackets were making their way back and forth, leading dapper and well-groomed horses of every description to and from the parking lot full of cars fastened to horse trailers. Around the little brown prefab temporary buildings under the stands that hosted the administrative offices, the air was full of the smell of wood shavings and sweat, and also of occasional cries of delight from people who had gotten their aggregate scores and were not horribly disappointed. Megan was not one of these.

She leaned against the wall of one of the prefabs and scowled at the scoring paper as if a mean look could make the digits twist themselves into more acceptable shapes. Her team's overall score was passable.. Just. It was not because they had done all that badly as a group. Mick Posen had volunteered to fill in for Burt on the horse the two of them had been sharing, McDaid's White Knight, and had done extremely well for someone who had come to the qualifiers prepared for a completely different routine-but Whitey was one of those horses routinely referred to as 'bomb-proof,' a steady, untemperamental, and good-natured creature who would do just about anything you asked him, short of jumping over the Moon, as long as you gave him extravagant amounts of horse goodies afterwards. Their teammate Rick had ridden his mount, Wellington Donnerschlag Second Strike (also known as Old Ugly) as perfectly as could be expected. And after that, to her own astonishment, Megan had actually had a good ride on Buddy. He had come 'off the rails,' performing very passable circles and running through the rest of the routine in an acceptable, if not exactly inspired, manner. It was as if the big blockheaded monster had just been pretending to malfunction-as if all the trouble of the previous week had been a big act. But as soon as he got out in front of the crowd, he began behaving like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that was something I should have added to the simulation, Megan thought suddenly, as she glanced down the scoring paper one more time. The smell of the