Jo knew this too, and by the time she left her little wood cabin and walked half the distance of the main field of the summer camp and headed over to the horse barn, almost every kid around her was rolling in shit. Jo bit into the skin of her apple and headed on.

The horse barn was located at the farthest end of the camp, away from everything else. Which had something to do with the smell, Jo guessed. Jo thought it was a wonderful smell. But aside from a handful of the smallest of campers, and maybe a gang of rowdy boys who liked mud, most of the kids at the summer camp thought that horses were gross. Thankfully, Jo thought, the horse barn was located at the farthest end of the camp, away from everything else. That was where she was headed now, a wake of shit-covered kids rolling on the ground behind her. Thankfully, thought Jo, not many people at the camp ventured out all the way out to the horse barn. Unless they really had to, of course. They all said the horse barn was smelly. It was smelly. Sometimes the kids who were caught smoking joints behind the bathroom were forced to walk to the barn and shovel shit. That was the worst punishment of all. Everybody knew they were the kids who got caught because by the time they came back they smelled like shit.

Jo tossed her apple core into the bushes and breathed in, held it there, and didn’t breathe out for a while. She smelled: wood, boots, hay, hoof, weed, feed, grain, lumber, leather, soap, grass. And lots of mud.

Jo walked straight into the barn. You could do that in a barn with no doors. Clearly, the people who controlled the summer camp didn’t see any use for them. Clearly, the people who controlled the summer camp didn’t see the use for much, thought Jo, looking around. You could tell things like that at the camp just by looking around. Take the stable itself, for instance. Architecturally, the building – if you could call it that – possessed more of the qualities required of a boardwalk than barn. It looked like what would happen to a real barn if you picked it up and turned it inside out. (The Director of the summer camp was adamant that horses liked rain.) Jo followed the old wooden ramp upward into the "barn," which consisted of a raised wood-slatted floor, dividing two rows of box stalls on either side; slots for the animals to slide into. Every day, herds of small rubber boots stamped up that creaky wooden ramp that led into the barn, swallowing them up like an old sore tongue, before spitting them back out again at the sound of the bell. (Jo could not believe that the summer camp had bells. Luckily, the horse barn was so far away from the rest of the daily structure of systems that she could very easily pretend that she did not know about the bells and keep it that way. Such was the prevailing attitude of Jo when it came to most summer-camp matters.) Gaps in the wood all over the barn permitted excellent viewing from one stall to another, which became a very handy tool in emergency cases of badly behaved horses or children.

The entire leaning structure of the barn was topped off with a corrugated roof of cheap material. Jo liked to stand under it in the rain and hear the pellets come crashing down above her, while the horses threw their heads up and breathed fire. She could tell a storm was coming by the bulges that appeared on the sides of the necks of the horses. She would notice the animals’ restless mouths and the way their ears changed direction quickly from the tops of their heads, catching the first faraway thunder of a storm. In weather like this, Jo would lead all of the horses to the near end of the paddock and lift fifteen small children off their backs in a mechanical way as if they were dolls, reaching up to the first soft ball of brightly coloured clothing who was teetering unsteadily on the top of a horse like a poorly fastened button or a loose decoration, feet swimming in oversized stirrup holes. One by one, she pulled them all down. With the children on the ground – shrieking, by this time, in the newly regained confidence of knowing where to put their feet again – and the shoes sorted and attached to the proper feet and the clothing brushed and the mud shaken off and dust of it all finally cleared, Jo sent them all far away. Sometimes a bathroom break could be arranged. Which took up to a half-hour or so.

From her perch at the top of the ramp at the front of the barn on this day, the kids all around her covered in shit, Jo felt the longing for a storm. She knew that the horses did too.

But the day was almost done anyway. Lunch was over and there was only one class and the Extra Special Interest Group before four. The Extra Special Interest Group, which was also known as the "Horse Club" – or "Stinkers," as the rest of the freshly shampooed and blow-dried camp crowd called them – consisted of the few kids at camp – mostly girls – who felt that their allotted forty-five minutes three times a week spent participating in the torture of old hack horses wasn’t nearly long enough, who would come back for more at the end of the day, forcing Jo and the other girls who worked in the barn to muster a smile and spend the hour before dinner not in the lake or in the shower or in bed, but in muck until sunset, when dinner had already started and tardiness was frowned upon by the Director of the camp when he noticed you were late. Smelling like a barn gave the Director the advantage.

But the Extra Special Interest Group didn’t care. These were the kids who were proud to arrive at the entrance of the Dining Hall in a cloud of muck and dustiness, smirking with their heads full of straw. While they saw it as a badge of honour, their counsellors saw it as something of a nuisance that they did until they started liking boys. From her post at the top of the barn, half a mile away, Jo would catch sight of a few brightly coloured blobs trotting madly across the field to the horse barn, hands fisted, mouths open, backpacks thumping wildly on their backs behind them, leaving groups of counsellors behind, happy to get rid of their kids.