Horse Talk Read Online Free PDF Page B

had.”
    Carole patted a bulging duffel bag. “I brought as many of mine as I could. They wouldn’t all fit.” Lisa and Stevie laughed. No wonder Carole knew so much about horses! She must have had ten books on jumping alone.
    The Saddle Club had faced up to the fact that they might not get real callers for
Horse Talk
. The best way to be prepared, they had decided, was to make a list of good questions that Stevie could ask. That way they would always have something interesting, or at least relevant, to say. They were going to read through all their horse books for ideas.
    “I was talking to my mom about the gardening show she listens to,” Lisa said as she sharpened her pencil and took a fresh pad of paper out of her bag. “She says that the master gardener usually doesn’t answer more than about fifteen questions per show.”
    “Fifteen!” Stevie exclaimed. “I asked at least fifty!”
    “Right,” Lisa said. “See, Mom says that the gardener talks to each caller for a while. He asks for details about their problem, and he discusses his solution, and they chitchat. Sometimes they make little jokes. And the gardener always talks to his callers by name. ‘Well,Jeremy, it sounds to me like your philodendron has an advanced case of root rot.’ Like that.”
    “By name!” Stevie rolled her eyes in mock horror. “That’ll work great for my
first
phone call. After that it’ll be”—she dropped her voice in a bad imitation of Max—“ ‘Oh, here’s Stevie again! Doesn’t Stevie know anything about horses? Why does Stevie keep calling?’ ”
    Carole tapped her cheek with her fingers. “We could make up names to go with the questions. It’s a pretty good idea, really,” she said. “If we take longer to answer each question, then we won’t need to ask as many. It’ll be easier.”
    “Plus, it’ll sound more professional,” Lisa said. “If we chat with our callers, and they all have different names, then no one will guess that they’re really all Stevie.”
    “I guess I could try to disguise my voice,” Stevie said.
    “Sure,” Lisa said. “It’ll be easy. All it takes is a little practice.”
    Someone banged on Stevie’s bedroom door. “Knock it off, Chad!” Stevie yelled without getting up. Stevie had three brothers, one older, one younger, and one twin. Chad, the oldest, was the only one who constantly bugged her.
    Chad stuck his head in the door. “Mom says to tell you it’s time for dinner.”
    Stevie and her friends got up. “Why didn’t you say so right away, instead of knocking holes through my door?” Stevie groused. Chad sneered at her and ran down the stairs.
    “Think of names,” Lisa said. “We’ll make a list after dinner.”
    “Oh, I’m thinking of names, all right,” Stevie muttered, glaring at her brother’s disappearing back. “They just aren’t names I can use on the air.”
    “
M ARILLA
,” L ISA SAID , writing it down. “I like that one.”
    “From
Anne of Green Gables
?” Stevie asked. “She was kind of a crabby old housewife, wasn’t she? Let’s see, Marilla can say, ‘I don’t understand why horses have to wear shoes on their feet. Can you explain it to me?’ ” Stevie’s Marilla voice was high and a little strained.
    “Great,” said Carole. “That’s a good question, too, because it’ll take a long time to answer. You want to avoid yes-no questions, and try to ask ones that we can discuss on the air for a while.”
    “Do you think you could imitate a boy’s voice?” Lisa asked. Stevie had gone through several characters, but so far they had all been female.
    Stevie wrinkled up her face, thinking. “Maybe. A young boy’s, anyway. And I could probably make my voice squeak, like Chad’s.” They laughed. Chad’s voicewas starting to change. At dinner he’d asked Lisa to please pass the rolls. The
please
had started out very low and ended in a squeak that hurt their ears. Chad had looked awfully embarrassed.
    “Why do people