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Dirt (Excerpt) by Denise Orenstein

A Horse in the House? Things are hard for eleven-year-old Yonder. Her mother died and her father has sunk into sadness. She doesn't have a friend to her name . . . except for Dirt, the Shetland pony next door. Dirt has problems of his own. He's overweight, he's always in trouble, and his owner is the mean Miss Enid, who doesn't have the patience for a pony's natural curiosity. His only friend is Yonder, the scrawny girl next door. So when Miss Enid decides to sell Dirt for horsemeat, Yonder knows she has to find a way to rescue him. Even if that means stealing Dirt away and sneaking him into her own house. What follows will make you worry, will make you cry, and will ultimately fill you with hope, love, and an unshakable belief in the power of friendship. Especially the four-legged kind.

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1K views7 pages

Dirt (Excerpt) by Denise Orenstein

A Horse in the House? Things are hard for eleven-year-old Yonder. Her mother died and her father has sunk into sadness. She doesn't have a friend to her name . . . except for Dirt, the Shetland pony next door. Dirt has problems of his own. He's overweight, he's always in trouble, and his owner is the mean Miss Enid, who doesn't have the patience for a pony's natural curiosity. His only friend is Yonder, the scrawny girl next door. So when Miss Enid decides to sell Dirt for horsemeat, Yonder knows she has to find a way to rescue him. Even if that means stealing Dirt away and sneaking him into her own house. What follows will make you worry, will make you cry, and will ultimately fill you with hope, love, and an unshakable belief in the power of friendship. Especially the four-legged kind.

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I Read YA
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Denise Gosliner Orenstein

Scholastic Press / New York


For Andr Bertram Siegel
and for Duncan and McNeill,
brave, naughty, and magically intuitive pony friends

Copyright 2017 by Denise Gosliner Orenstein

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.,


Publishers since 1920. scholastic, scholastic press, and associated logos are trademarks and/or
registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author
or third-party websites or their content.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the
publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention:
Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the
authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Orenstein, Denise Gosliner, 1950- author.


Title: Dirt / Denise Orenstein.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Scholastic Press, 2017. | Summary: Eleven-year-old Yonder
stopped talking when her mother died, and she stopped going to school because of the bullies, knowing that
her father would never even notice (although the social worker did); indeed the only creature that seems to
care about her is the one-eyed Shetland pony called Dirt who lives on the neighboring farmso when she
discovers that Dirt is about to be sold for horsemeat she is determined to find a way to save him.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045585 (print) | LCCN 2017003405 (ebook) | ISBN 9780545925853
(hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780545925860 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780545925877 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Shetland ponyJuvenile fiction. | Human-animal relationshipsJuvenile fiction. | Animal
welfareJuvenile fiction. | Fathers and daughtersJuvenile fiction. | Dysfunctional familiesJuvenile
fiction. | Foster home careJuvenile fiction. | CYAC: Shetland ponyFiction. | PoniesFiction. |
Human-animal relationshipsFiction. | AnimalsTreatmentFiction. |
Fathers and daughtersFiction. | Family lifeFiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.O6314 Di 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.O6314 (ebook) | DDC 813.6 [[Fic]] dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045585

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 18 19 20 21

Printed in the U.S.A. 23


First edition, August 2017

Book design by Nina Goffi


Illustration page 174 by Nina Goffi for Scholastic
To hear, one must be silent.

Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea


My Rocky Road

My father once explained that they named me Yonder


because theres always something to learn, way up ahead,
yonder. Always a surprise right around the corner, sometimes
sweet and sometimes sad, but always a fork in the road that
could change your life.
When my mother died four years ago, my father said,
Here is the fork, Yonder. Here is the learning just up ahead.
We can choose to stop moving up that rocky path or we can
decide something else. What will you do? What will we do
together?
Silence draped my little crooked house and the windows
went dark. I crawled into quiet and decided to stay there.
After all, words didnt work. Did it really matter if you called
out at night, all alone in your narrow bed: Bring her back.
Please bring my mother back.
1
Did it matter if you yelled at the top of your lungs until
your throat hurt? If you yelled and yelled for her and there
wasnt a single answer?
It did not. It did not matter one bit.
So I decided not to speak. Silence seemed safer.
An unusual childhood disorder, the clinic doctor told
my father, but it was almost as if my father hardly noticed
that I stopped speaking. He was so lost in his own sadness.
One afternoon at the Shelter Library, I looked up speech
disorders and children and found this: a condition in
which a child who can speak stops speaking because of
trauma or anxiety. Well, I thought, I suppose the doctor might
have gotten it right, although I wasnt sure if I really could
speak anymore, even if I wanted to. I wasnt sure and I was
scared to try.
What if I opened my mouth and ugly words spilled out?
Better to be quiet than say what it was like to lose my mother
and father at the same time, my mother in body and
spirit and my father just in spirit. While he hadnt died in the
car accident, he was not the same father as before. This new
father heaved himself around the house as if his body were
filled with cement.
This is what I remember about my mother: how she
loved to read to me before I went to sleep at night, the way
her cheeks pinked up in the fall, and the broken front tooth
that she cracked when we were ice-skating on the Shelter
town pond. I remember my mothers short, wavy dark hair
2
and the soft khaki jacket that she wore even inside. The one
with the blue ink stain on the left shoulder, both sleeves torn
to the elbow, making it look like she had four arms. My
mothers fingernails were long and splintered from cold
Vermont winters; sometimes they scratched my scalp when
she brushed my hair. She smelled like maple syrup, burnt
sugar, overripe apple.
Even though I was little, I knew that the fork in the
road my father talked about offered only one possibility. We
would surely walk that rocky path because we didnt have a
choice. We would move forward because there was no going
back. The fork in the road was there, just as he always told
me, but we would take the more difficult turn and keep
struggling uphill. And so we did.
I didnt understand how rocky a road could be back then.
I didnt understand how slippery or how full of twists and
turns. And then my fork led the way to a lonely pony who
needed me as much as I needed him. But I didnt know Dirt
was coming way back then.

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