78 THE CEDARVILLE REVIEW Something churned inside my stomach, and I felt like I was going to be sick. When Mom poked her head into my room, I told her I felt terrible. She walked over to my bed and felt my forehead. “Okay, baby,” she whispered. “Just get some rest, okay? I’ll make chicken noodle soup.” So, I stayed in my bedroom for hours, watching the snowflakes swirl to the ground outside the window. My stomach went from feeling awful to feeling okay to feeling awful again. By the afternoon, it had been feeling okay for a couple of hours. Tentatively, I stood up. I opened the window, and I climbed outside. I started walking, and trying not to think. I don’t really know how long I’d been walking before I saw the resort park’s stables on a hill in the distance. They have a bunch of trails in the woods, and they take people out on horseback rides. For some reason, I walked up the hill. My boots crunched the snow underneath them until I stood in the barn’s doorway. “Hey, man,” said a guy’s voice. I turned, and a man in his late thirties was working with a speckled gray Clydesdale horse. He had a cowboy hat and a shorttrimmed brown beard. “What’s up?” I shrugged. “Just looking around. I don’t know.”
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