Snack Shack

Quinn Bianchi notices everything.

She reads every wall at every rodeo. She can tell you what a girl she has never met ran in poles three weeks ago at an arena two hours over the ridge. She knows what her horse is asking her, and she knows when she isn't answering.

What she has never once had to work out is a boy.

He hands her a coffee at the water station on a Saturday morning, in front of everybody, and says her name at the end when he didn't have to. By that afternoon she has a case built - four words at a cooler, a braid picked up and let drop, a boy who knew her name before she told him. She has checked every piece of it. She is completely certain.

Every piece of it happened when she was alone.

While she's building her case, she isn't walking her pattern. She isn't at the fence when her best friend runs. And at eight o'clock on Sunday morning she is four hundred yards from the arena, standing beside a trailer that isn't hers, when Codie Peterson sings the national anthem in front of the whole rodeo.

Josie Mae has been writing it down since Friday night. So has Tawny. So has Codie. None of them told the others, and not one of them can work out what is wrong with Quinn.