She Who Laughs Last...

Jockeys lost the urge to slash their whip across Krone's ear. More people started asking, "Do you know that little girl, Krone?" the way they used to ask, "Do you know that kid, Cauthen?" Not because she was as good as Cauthen yet, but because she made people who didn't know a gelding from a gerund sit up and take notice of horse racing, and that was good for all of them. Lavish compliments began to come her way, like the one from the great Cordero, who went so far as to grunt, "She don't ride like no girl rider." Even Krone started to trust the idea a little bit, the idea that maybe she finally belonged.

And now that she wasn't a female jockey anymore, she could be a female. She could wear dresses and talk now and then about retiring in 10 years, having a baby or maybe adopting one, settling down on a farm in Colorado. She still told herself she was nothing if she lost—but now she did it only in the starting gate instead of all the time. She still ate baby food from the jar and sugar out of the packet, still used kiddie toothpaste, still did headstands on horses, still was afraid of the dark, still was so damned hyperkinetic that she would leap up to grab the bars that ran the length of a Hertz bus and astonish the businessmen by swinging from the back to the front, scratching under her arms and screeching like a monkey...but then, something had changed.

The guys in the barn at Belmont were kicking it around just a few months ago. "You know what it is?" said George Michalowski, an assistant trainer. "Julie Krone's turning into someone you'd want to bring home to your mother."

And then one day a writer came to see her. "Was all of it worth it?" he asked. "To live for a dream, all the pain along the way?"

She looked at him. "The pain?" she said. "I swear, I can barely remember any of it." And then she went into her closet, pushed aside the two boxes of photographs—one of animals, one of human beings—and pulled out a box full of poems and diaries and letters....