Codie Peterson knows everything that happens at Cloverdale before anybody else does.She isn't a gossip. Gossip is when you're trying to make somebody look bad. Codie is just interested - and standing behind her mother at the can trailer happens to be the best place on the grounds to learn who scratched, who's fighting, whose horse came up sore, and what somebody's daughter said in the parking lot on Friday. Ninety miles she hauls to this rodeo, every weekend of the season, and she'd haul two hundred.Then it's her turn to be the news.Back in February, Codie stood in a room and sang for two ladies with a clipboard, and they said yes, and she was so happy she could barely get to the truck. Now it's April. On Sunday morning, at the grand entry, in front of every single person on those grounds, she is singing the national anthem. Nobody made her. She asked for it. That is the part she keeps coming back to.She has told exactly three people. She intends to keep it that way until about nine o'clock Sunday.Her sister Christie announces it to the grandstand instead.By Saturday afternoon four hundred people know. The same camp that carries Codie's news every weekend is carrying hers now - trailer to trailer, faucet to faucet, through a hundred and forty rigs - and there is nowhere on those grounds to put it down. Not the snack shack. Not the alley. Not the arena, where a girl from up north named Kira Vance is one-hundredth of a second away in the breakaway and would love to know why Codie can't hold a rope hand still.There is one place left. An old wooden room up over the cattle pens at the east end, with a set of steps nobody's fixed and a bird painted on the corner, weathered down to almost nothing. Josie Mae, Quinn and Tawny will be up there after dark, and they will not let her carry this by herself.Center Stage is the second book in the Crows Nest Cowgirls series - twelve books following four girls through one rodeo season. Written by a lifelong California cowgirl and rodeo mom, with the tack, the times and the terminology exactly right. Each book stands alone and can be read in any order. Read more
