I noticed a patch of yellow under one of the rags. I picked it up. A half-empty tube of horse liniment. Equus Ben-Gay. No, I couldn’t do that. Not even to Karen Holloway.

“Oh, yes, faster, faster,” Cheryl’s voice said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be hard and fast. I’ll pretend you’re that dyke who fancies herself Nancy Drew. This would all be mine now, if it weren’t for her.”

“Don’t get distracted, Karen,” Cheryl whined, “I’ll lose my concentration. Besides, you got to do it with her. She’s kind of cute.”

Cute? Me? I’m too tall to be cute. She obviously hadn’t seen me up close.

“I’m sure you can do it, too. She has no standards,” Karen said, finally going harder and faster and cutting off whatever reply Cheryl was going to make. “She and her boring little set of do-gooder friends. Her best friend is the daughter of a bait-catcher out of the bayous. Black, no less.”

Cheryl’s response was to come in a loud spurt.

I’m a big girl. I can take insults, even being called cute. But don’t mess with my friends. I had to get out of here. I started prowling through the cardboard boxes. Christmas decorations. Tinsel, tiny Santas, reindeer, and the like in the first box. The next box contained a Christmas tree baking pan, a mind-boggling number of holiday cookie cutters, and other baking things, none of which would get me out of the barn. But then I found something that could make my stay here a bit more interesting.

Karen shrugged off her dress and handed the dildo to Cheryl.

“Cordelia would shit if she knew I was doing this. ‘Scares the horses,’ she would say. She wants to save the world. What a bore.” Cheryl put the dildo to use, but Karen still continued, “I even invited her to my big party, since we’re cousins and she’s rich, but she declined, saying she had to work in that crappy little clinic. How she can even go to that section of town is beyond me.”

Food coloring was my discovery. Red, blue, yellow, green. Green. I decided to change Karen’s bush from winter wheat to a springtime forest. Springtime is for love, after all. There was a crack between bales wide enough for me to put my arm through and get within squirting distance of the bag. I squeezed a generous dollop of green into the lubricant. In fact, I emptied the bottle.

“Did you lube that up good? It’s catching on my vag,” Karen complained.

Let’s hear it for poetic justice. Cheryl rolled the dildo over the now adulterated bag, then put it back into Karen and started working it vigorously in and out.

For about a minute nothing happened, except for the boring routine of sex. Then Karen chanced to look down. I covered my ears to protect them from her screaming and cursing. It took Cheryl a while to understand that this was not excitement.

“Get that thing out of me. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Karen yelled.

When Cheryl finally pulled the dildo out, Karen, still cursing a blue, or rather, green, streak, grabbed the lantern. She focused it between her legs, and started assessing the damage.

With the ladder now in darkness and the level of noise extremely high, Karen accusing and Cheryl defending, it was time to make my escape. I tiptoed around the dim side of the bales and was down the ladder in a moment.

I was on the floor of the barn, Karen and Cheryl still audible, when another evil thought occurred to me. No, I said, you can’t do it, but I had already gotten a good grasp on the ladder and was silently pulling it away from the edge of the loft. This should definitely prove that I and my friends weren’t all do-gooders. Particularly me. I laid the ladder down on the floor, then found my shoes and headed for the door.

I did not want to be there when Karen noticed the ladder was moved. Cordelia was wrong about the horses, they didn’t look scared, just very annoyed. Exit barn left.

The cool night air felt good. It would be chilly in a few hours, but it was still a mild night for February.

I saw a figure in the darkness heading in my direction. Some other nonparty person preferring horses to people. Unfortunate that Karen and Cheryl would get rescued so quickly.

“Hello,” the figure said. “Why did I think you might be at the barn?”

It was Cordelia.

“You’ve recognized my basically misanthropic nature. And that I always vote for Mr. Ed for President,” I replied.

“Sounds good to me.”

“You don’t want to go in there. Karen and consort are in a highly volatile mood in the hayloft,” I warned.

“Maybe I had better head her off, before she causes a scene,” Cordelia said, annoyance in her voice.

“She’s not going anywhere,” I answered. Cordelia gave me a questioning look. “She’s up in the hayloft and the ladder’s on the ground.”

Cordelia burst out laughing. She had a deep, warm laugh that tempted me to stand on my head or do anything to keep her laughing. “Good for you,” she said. I started to demur, but she continued, “You’ve made my night. Come on, let’s walk down to the river. I want to talk to you.”

She took my arm companionably. We walked across the unlit lawn, the warm bustle of the lanterns off to one side and the moonlit gray of the river in front of us.