The dog doesn’t like Jennifer. 
It’s named CJ, short for Coffee Jalen Hurts, which are the favourite things of Jennifer’s mom and dad, respectively. Jennifer didn’t have any input in the naming or the getting of the dog, because her parents wanted a dog and You can’t have a name that’s three initials, Jennifer, that’s just not how these things work, even though she is allergic and Jalen Hurts is two words so it should technically be CJH. 
She’s pretty sure the dog can sense her resentment. Jennifer does not drink coffee, she is indifferent towards Jalen Hurts, and she’s not crazy about the dog, either. These are short, simple truths. Another: Jennifer has recently graduated from the sixth grade and is consequently staring down the gaping chasm between tween and teen. There are pimples on her thighs and boy pictures taped up on her closet door. Mom tells her that they can’t afford the printer ink, but Jennifer reasons that there are only so many accurate depictions of her chosen boy that she can find, and she’s almost through with the ones in colour, anyway. 
“And besides,” Jennifer says, “You won’t let me have an altar.”
“Honey, if there was an altar in front of your closet, you wouldn’t be able to open it to get dressed in the morning.” Mom has her hands on her hips and concealer under her eyes. When she was a little kid, Mom let Jennifer do her makeup for fun. “And you know we don’t like you putting tape up on the door like that.”
Jennifer sours. “God made you my mom as punishment,” she spits. The dog starts barking. Mad dog. Jennifer covers her ears. “God made that dog as punishment.”
Mom just sighs. “Okay, Jennifer.”
She’s been hearing that a lot lately. Between the barking: Okay, Jennifer. It sounds like defeat, but it doesn’t feel like a victory.

Jennifer is like other girls in the way that a pony is like a horse. You think the pony will grow up to be a horse, but it doesn’t. A common misconception. A different thing. It stays pony-sized its whole life. 

Each morning from 9:50 to 10:12, Jennifer prays. No altar. It would be easier if she had an altar. It would be more respectful if she had an altar. Still, she prays. Not to God—nothing so pedestrian as God. God, she thinks, is for judgemental, rosary-wringing geriatrics and kids whose parents only put them in Catholic school because they thought it would be better than the public one down the road. Casuals. Jennifer’s devotion is deliberate. Her prayers are precise. Her salvation will be specific. And maybe she’s searching just like everyone else, but her cause is just. 
“Saint Guy of Anderlecht,” she pleads, tips of her joined fingers pressed against his square head on the closet door, “Please, please, help me get rid of the frickin’ dog.”
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Technically the saints unit in religion class came first, but Saint Guy of Anderlecht did not come onto the scene of Jennifer’s life until the dog necessitated it. She’s not going to call it divine intervention, but he did arrive just when she needed him. Patron Saint against mad dogs, among other things. Against hydrophobia, against rabies. Of laborers, of protection of stables, of workhorses. He grew up poor, served in the church, sank a boat, went on a pilgrimage, and died of dysentery. It’s epic. It’s a Saint Guy summer.
Last summer it was rainbow loom bracelets, but the collection gets overwhelming when there’s no recipient to receive them. Jennifer is still fading the tan line on her wrists a year out, the memory of rubber pulling on the skin halfway down her arm like a gauntlet of loneliness. A rainbow of evidence, damning. Did your friends make those for you? Mom’s friends would ask.
(Thou shalt not bear false witness, but thou may bear technically-true-but-perhaps-intentionally-misleading witness.)
Jennifer would smile. Yes, she’d say, My very best friend. 
Now, the bracelet kit is gathering dust on Jennifer’s bookshelf. She imagines taking it down and spreading out the rubber bands on the carpet in front of her crossed legs, Guy (Saint? Oh, just call me Guy) sitting across from her and waiting patiently. She imagines explaining how to start it—the hardest part—and she imagines taking his hallowed hand and guiding it along the loops. Imagines what colours he would pick. Imagines his tongue poking out of his mouth in concentration, imagines him looking up with a laugh. How’d you get so good at this, Jenny? He would call her Jenny. 
She imagines a pile of bracelets between them. They’d go out and give them to the poor, just like Guy did with all his earnings when he was alive. She imagines a new friend with every bracelet given, a forever friend, and she imagines the shape of the word Jenny on their lips. She imagines the last bracelet, a sheepish look. Guy holding it in his outstretched hand and saying, This one I made just for you. She imagines a new tan line and she imagines quiet, no coffee machine or TV cheering or barking. She imagines, and it looks a lot like praying. 
Mom’s friends would ask, and she would give the same answer. My very best friend.

The differences between a pony and a horse are this: the legs of a pony are proportionally shorter than a horse’s, and their bones are denser, too. They have thicker coats than horses and don’t start to shed until the hottest days of summer come by. The hottest days of summer are yet to come by.

Dinnertime is an exercise in survival. Jennifer carves neat little tunnels into her mound of rice, douses them in lemon juice. Mom and Dad share a diet coke. There’s no school to ask about. She hasn’t been playing with anyone.
Mom clears her throat. “How’s your, your saint guy?”
‍ ‍“Mom,” Jennifer whines, “It’s Saint Guy. Of Anderlecht?”
“Right, right, sorry. Saint Guy of Anderlecht.” She looks over at Dad, widens her eyes, mouths, I’m trying. Dad just raises his eyebrows. One might call it encouraging. Jennifer calls it condescending. 
Condescending, C-O-N-D-E-S-C-E-N-D-I-N-G. That’s the word that lost Allison F the spelling bee back in May, before the dog and the devotion and the trying. There was a time, before May, when Mom and Dad didn’t have to try so hard. Jennifer thinks they could try harder. Allison certainly could have tried harder. She spelt it C-O-N-D-E-S-E-N-D-I-N-G. Forgot the second C. Jennifer had laughed, out loud. She hadn’t tried to. 
“So,” Dad says, “How is he, then?”
Jennifer shifts in her seat. He’s dead. He’s sitting here at the table with us now. He’s going to get rid of the dog. “He’s fine.” 
Dad looks at Mom. Mom looks at Dad. Jennifer looks at her rice. 
“We’re going on a walk after dinner,” Mom says, “if you’d like to join us.”
Jennifer would like to join them. Too bad that they mean taking the dog on a walk and not going on a walk. “No, thank you.
There is more looking, in all directions. She doesn’t know why they needed to get a dog in the first place. All it’s good for is walks after dinner and sitting around watching TV and barking, and Jennifer can do all of that herself. So what if she practices her gallop along the sidewalk instead of taking normal steps. So what if she doesn’t want to watch the shows that her parents want to watch. So what if she—okay, yeah, maybe the barking is off-putting when it’s coming from a twelve year-old young lady. Mom and Dad don’t seem to like it any more than the neighing, but they don’t seem to appreciate her talking, either. So what.
Mom sighs. Dad drinks the rest of the diet coke. Mom sighs again. Jennifer finishes her rice and goes to her room and works on her slideshow on why their next family vacation should be to suburban Brussels to visit the gravesite of Saint Guy. A pilgrimage. It’s rumoured that a horse kicked in his gravestone, once. Jennifer does ten squats in a row so her legs can be as strong as that horse’s, and while she is on squat eight something amazing happens. 
“Well we’re going to have to get him trained, regardless,” Mom says from downstairs, voice tight and matter-of-fact. Jennifer imagines her throwing her arms up in the air. 
“I know, honey.” Dad sounds just as unhappy. 
What happened is this: the dog bit Ms. Daniels on the arm when she tried to pet him on the walk. Jennifer feels like someone should be giving her a medal. Uproarious applause. Key to the city, all that. Stuff for winners. She creeps downstairs and Dad tells her the dog will be going away to a boarding school for a couple weeks. She scarcely avoids pumping her fist into the air. 
The next morning it goes, howling in the back of Mom’s SUV. Jennifer plays Just Dance 4 in Saint Guy’s honour for the entire afternoon. Dad joins in for The Final Countdown and Jennifer feels every single Perfect! flashing across the screen in her bones. 

Ponies can pull a lot more weight than a horse, proportional to their body size. It’s all in the legs. There are these contests, pony pulls, where ponies will get put in a harness and compete to see who can pull the most weight over a set distance. There’s prize money, and an audience, and a strict set of rules so that no harm is done to the animal. 

The dog comes back. Jennifer decides she is being punished for not doing enough almsgiving, so she gets Mom to take her downtown to give away all her allowance to the people who live on the sidewalk there. Mom says they have to bring the dog. Jennifer sneezes and seethes in the front seat while the dog rides in the back. Guy sits beside it and doesn’t say anything. Jennifer wishes he would say something. Relationship troubles.  
She’s got the almsgiving down, now, but she knows she’s not doing enough. Summer has set in, and familiarity with it. He is not as new as he once was. Jennifer knows the shape of his name in her mouth, and it’s not enough. 
‍ ‍Are you ashamed of me?  He asks it in a small voice. The air conditioning is broken, so Dad is in a bad mood. The dog is barking, and dinner had no dessert. Jennifer is in her room, diary open at her feet. Guy vents the collar of his robe and looks at her. I think you’re ashamed of me.
This isn’t the first time he’s tried to break up with her. She sees it coming. She looks in the mirror and makes her chin wobble like the girls in the teen shows always do, waits for the burning feeling behind her eyes. She’s done it desperate, she’s done it dramatic. She’s run it practically to death at this point, but this time she decides to try out running it aloof. 
‍ ‍I’m not ashamed of you, she replies coolly. Why would you think that?
Guy shrugs. The guy always shrugs. It’s just that you’ve been really busy, lately. This is what they all say.
Jennifer considers. Not quite right. Not quite true. It has to be true. 
He reverses, tries again. It’s just that you didn’t introduce me to any of your new friends today. There we go.
Jennifer looks off into the distance, sighing so hard that her bangs float above her forehead for a moment. She thinks of the sisters down the street, Abigail and Adelaide, playing horses. We don’t want to play with you, Abigail had said between chomps on a green apple, loud and wet. Your gallop is all wrong. She thinks of Guy hovering behind her on the sidewalk, giving out bracelets. The guy in the teen shows always sees it differently. The girl always cries. No, please. 
‍ ‍I think maybe we need to take a break. 
‍ ‍No! Her chin wobbles. She feels the burn behind her eyes. I’ll be better. I will, I can be. Aloof is gone. She likes this better. The scene doesn’t quite track, but it doesn’t matter. No one’s there to get mad at her for it. Guy, talk to me. 
He stays quiet, moody. She cries harder, looks in the mirror again. I can be better, she repeats, hands knotted into the pilly purple comforter. I can be better. Adelaide hadn’t said anything, just stood there with her runny nose and stared at Jennifer’s bare wrists. 
‍ ‍My gallop is fine.
‍ ‍No, it’s not. It’s like… lopsided.
Mom thinks that scoffing is undignified, but Jennifer had scoffed. Lopsided?
‍ ‍Yeah. Look at me do it. Abigail galloped a lap around her driveway. It looked normal. It looked like Jennifer’s. See?
She didn’t. Yeah, I guess. 
Guy looks at her the same way Abigail had. We need to take a break. 
A break. Jennifer flutters her wet eyelashes and watches in the mirror as another tear rolls down her cheek. It’s just the one. It’s not enough. She knows, in her chest, hollowed and devoted and wrong, that she can do it. She can be a horse. A good horse. A workhorse. 
Jennifer gallops out of bed, kneels in front of her closet, and begins to pray. 

If you put a pony and a horse in the same pasture, where a horse would starve, a pony can find nutrition, easy. They can find sustenance in the most mundane of grass. In fact, it’s not hard to overfeed a pony. This can leave them at risk of diseases like laminitis. It just takes a different approach.

“What do you want to do today, Jennifer?” Mom is asking in a way that Jennifer knows means she is only asking to be polite. Sometimes Mom feels like being polite to her. This is one of those times.
Jennifer shrugs. “I don’t know.” It doesn’t matter what she says, or what she wants. 
Mom smiles. “Well, I had an idea,” which is the entire point of this conversation. “How about we go to the pool?”
Jennifer doesn’t love the pool, but she doesn’t hate it either. Guy—she’s not sure if she’s allowed to call him that anymore or if she’s back to Saint territory—is the Patron Saint against hydrophobia, so she can work with that. Work this outing into her worship. She tells herself that it’s okay if she’s at a weird place with it, with him.
“Okay.”
There are also, notably, no dogs allowed at the pool. That helps. 
The car ride is quiet, just the two of them and Radio Disney. Jennifer used to sing along, when she was younger. Now she just sits and listens to the sound of Mom opening and closing her mouth across the car, a thousand aborted attempts at conversation that, like the singing, might have come easier at an earlier time. Jennifer’s not quite sure when it turned into this. May is blurry. She can’t remember not feeling this way. 
She blames the dog. It’s sitting at home in its crate, trained quiet. It is, almost, everything she’s ever prayed for, but there is still a foreign thing in her as she sits and waits for Mom to pull into the parking lot of the pool. She thinks it may always be this way. 
Last summer she was way too scared to jump off the high dive, but this summer she does the sign of the cross at the top of the ladder and shuffles, wet and brave, to the end of the toothpaste-coloured board. She stands there for a long time. Eyes begin to accumulate. Saint Guy of Anderlecht, she whispers, give me the strength to do a sick freaking dive.
She bellyflops from three metres up. 
Underwater, she is limbs akimbo and stomach stinging, but she isn’t afraid.
When she resurfaces, even the lifeguard is biting back a smile. There are a few claps from the boys, scattered and sarcastic, and the other girls are laughing from behind their teeth. Shoulders shake in every direction. She does the butterfly to the edge of the pool and glares at Allison F., who is here and laughing with Opal and Pamela from school. 
‍ ‍I have a crazy dog, mad dog, Jennifer thinks. It had to get sent away to be trained. It bit Ms. Daniels. I could sic it on you right now, and you wouldn’t be laughing, anymore. She imagines the dog there, imagines saying Go and watching it leap into the pool, imagines blood in the water. She climbs out of the pool and walks back to Mom, who wraps her in a towel, and she imagines the dog trotting behind her, tail wagging. Good dog. 

When it comes to temperature, ponies can withstand further extremes than horses, on either side of the spectrum. They are resilient. They adapt. Eventually, they adapt. 

School starts next week. Jennifer sits on the living room floor and runs her hands over the carpet. Digs her nails into it. Mom vacuumed today. She’s on the couch with Dad and the dog. Her third-favourite teen show plays on the TV. It’s better than football. 
Guy sits beside her, bare feet peeking out from his robes. She didn’t pray for a week after he broke up with her, but eventually he came back saying his penances. It was a Saint Guy summer, and now they’re heading into fall. It might be something else. She isn’t sure. 
He hums along to the song playing on the show. Jennifer leans her head onto his shoulder. The living room glows blue, flickering densely around them. There is something very close by, something like an equilibrium. If Jennifer reached out, she could probably touch it. She keeps her hands in the carpet.
The dog whines, stands up and shakes itself around. The tags on its collar jingle, and Guy matches the pitch. Mom and Dad get very quiet. Jennifer waits to see what will happen. The dog hops off the couch and curls up right in Guy’s lap, whining softly as it settles in. Jennifer watches as he gently rests a braceleted arm on its back and begins to move his thumb in little circles, easy and slow. It doesn’t bark.