“Oh, don’t worry,” Renee waved me off as if this wasn’t begging for catastrophe. “You just have to get her on the horse and buckle her in.”
“Why am I buckled in exactly?” Esra asked.
“So you don’t fall off when the horse rears,” Renee replied.
“That horse? Rearing? Like… ?” She pointed down the street, and it took me a second to realize she meant to point toward the park entrance and the statue of Old Bob on a rearing horse. The color was draining from her face.
There probably wasn’t a person more ill-fitted for this job than this girl. She wasn’t the first out-of-towner working here, not the first one from a big city either. Heck, she wasn’t even the first person in her family to be employed here. But you needed a certain rationality to make it work, and I could come up with a lot of words to describe Esra Taner, but rational wasn’t one of them. She’d get herself thrown off the horse before even getting in the saddle.
“Just rewrite the show,” I said. “We’ll do it without Annie Lou. She’s clearly out of her depth.”
“Hey, you don’t get to decide my depth.” Esra glared at me. “I’ll get on the damn horse.”
“She’ll be fine,” Renee insisted with a nonchalant wave of her hand, like I had no reason to be concerned here, “let’s just give it a shot. In the version we’ve done the last few years, Ace uses Annie as his human shield when he leaves the bank.” Renee stepped from the bank doors down the stairs, holding her arms as if she was holding an invisible hostage at gunpoint. She then jogged down the stairs, her voice growing louder as she went through the scene. “When he fixes the bags of money to his horse, Annie runs off. Ace races after her and hauls her on to the horse as she’s running.”
Esra opened her mouth, but Renee silenced her with a raised hand.
“I don’t think that’s realistic.” She jogged back over to us. “Not only because you don’t have the experience but because you are shorter, and those two inches Noah would have to bend down further could very well be the two inches that pull him off the horse.”
This time, I was about to speak because I wasn’t falling off any horse anytime soon, but Renee cut me off. “What we’re going to do instead is Annie running off– not as far as we have done up until now– and you, Noah, will lift her on to the horse and then mount behind her. The sheriff and his men follow, gunfire, explosions, and you ride off to the hideout.”
“You wanthimto grabmeand lift me on to the horse?”
“Yep. Let me go get Tornado in position.” Renee beamed.
“And here I thought I was in for a touch-starved summer,” Esra muttered under her breath.
She was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Nothing about the way I’ll touch you is going to fix that. It’s rough stunts. Hard work.”
“Maybe I like it hard and rough.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, willing myself not to dwell on that response in detail. “This job isn’t a joke.”
“Don’t worry. With that face, nobody will ever think you’re joking.”
“Excuse me?”
“No, not yet.” She twirled around, her glittering hair clips winking in the sun as she beelined toward the bank’s doors. “It’s empty!”
“Yeah, it’s just a set for the show.”
“All right, all right.” Renee popped up next to us, and grabbed both of us by the elbow. “Ace brings Annie out, bandits run off. He’s holding a gun to her head to get her to the horse.”
“Gun?” Esra asked.
“Prop,” I replied.
“Down the stairs.” Renee kept directing us and I knew better than to be anything but a puppet in her hands. “Ace turns, Annie runs.” Renee left me by Tornado’s side and pulled Esra further. Squinting at the distance between us, she dug her heel into the ground and marked a deep groove. “Run from Noah to this spot for me and pretend you’re in a long skirt, so no big leaps.”
Esra had to run back and forth around two dozen times before Renee was happy with the distance. At least Esra didn’t question her. She just followed each command to run, faster, slower, glance back, faster again.
Renee’s mind for the park was unparalleled. She knew each button on each costume, knew where every character was at any given time of day, and had the show choreographed down to the second. Once Esra managed to run the distance to the count of eight, I jumped in to run the same distance in half the time.
“Okay, great. And then Noah is responsible for the horse part. He’ll hoist you up there,” Renee called from where she was watching on the front steps of the town hall. “Give it a go.”
I stepped up next to Tornado, rubbing his neck, and waited for Esra to follow. She kept two extra feet of distance between her and the horse. Any mild praise I’d affordher for running back and forth on command evaporated at the sight of her pinched lips and crossed arms.
