History Lesson 
Queen of the Rodeo
For teenage girls living in the Hill Country town of Llano, life can be short on glamour and lacking in spectacle. But once a year they compete against their friends and classmates for the chance to win the most coveted title their community offers.
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The rodeo queen they admire most of all is Kippi Kuykendall, Miss Rodeo Texas 1995, who lives on a ranch just west of town with her husband, professional saddle bronc rider T. J. Kenney. Kippi spent her high school days competing all over Central Texas and loved the arena so much that she missed her prom to compete with her horse, Streak. She can boast of winning no fewer than 49 buckles and nineteen saddles, some still enshrined in a velvet-lined shadow box at her parents’ farmhouse.
But her rodeo days are mostly behind her: Now a 29-year-old schoolteacher with the straight-backed bearing of a true rider, she barely resembles the girl with the Aquanetted hair and painted-on smile in the glossy Miss Rodeo Texas pictures. “They always wanted my hair to be poofy, and my hair just isn’t poofy,” she said, radiant in overalls and no makeup, her long blond hair spilling down to her waist. Her success led her to the national pageant in Las Vegas, which turned out to be less about horsemanship than about fashion and artifice, and she had no taste for it. “I was not living to be Miss Rodeo America. Great if it happened, but I was just a rodeo girl who wanted to ride.” The competition, she said, “was cutthroat, and I was so naive.”She was flipping through a photo album filled with memorabilia, past her ribbons and news clippings and postcards from the state finals in Abilene. Then she turned a page and came to a picture of herself when she was fifteen, just crowned Llano Rodeo Queen. She smoothed it with her hand and sighed. “Gosh,” she said, staring hard at the photo. “I was so young then.”
In the race for rodeo queen, Ashley was the girl to beat. She was beautiful and popular, and since she could afford to compete in rodeos around the state, she had been able to make a name for herself as a barrel racer. Her family was one of the oldest in Llano County and lived on a vast spread of grassland near House Mountain, not far from where the Leifestes first settled in the 1840’s. The earliest Methodist services in the county were held in the shade of Augustus Leifeste’s live oak tree, and the Leifeste name has been ubiquitous in Llano ever since. Most of Llano agreed that Ashley was fated to win, just as they agreed that Kim Feller’s chances were slim: She was the only contestant who didn’t own a horse, who wasn’t a practiced rider, and who, as a senior headed off to college, would not be in Llano to serve out the rodeo queen’s reign. The way Jessica saw it, the other girls would be tougher competition: Tasia was pretty, Jennifer was good with her horse, and Ashley was the one she spent her time worrying about. Ashley’s best friend was Tasia, though ever since their mothers entered them in the same beauty pageant for babies, the two had competed against each other. (Ashley won glamour baby; Tasia won beautiful baby.) And from the time they were little girls, Ashley had been the one to run faster, jump higher, win more. She was always in motion, her blond hair whipping behind her as she raced her horse in Hickory Creek or tore across the ranch on her Suzuki three-wheeler. She was voted Future Farmers of America Sweetheart her freshman year, and though she smiled sweetly as she accepted the title, she was also a fiercely competitive girl who couldn’t stand to lose. For this reason, she adored her mare, Super T Sails—Te for short—who always delivered victories in the arena. “When I first got on Te, I just won and won and won,” Ashley said. She scoffed at ladylike equestrian events such as Western Pleasure, which Tasia competed in, where girls had to “sit proper” while loping their horses around the arena. “I like to compete in the rough-going, fast stuff,” said Ashley. “Te’s a real go-go horse—always hyped up and ready to run because she’s race-bred. I like to ride her on days when she’s crazy, so I can get on her and just go.”
Tasia was a different sort of restless. She was eager to see the world but was too young to have a driver’s license, and she spent her time hoping that her fledgling modeling career would take her to Houston again, or maybe even Paris. She was a striking girl with hazel eyes and the perfect tan who had left behind the days of gangly girlhood, having become the sort of young woman men from out of town turned to admire. But she seemed blithely oblivious to such things as she ran barefoot around her parents’ ranch, spending her spare time braiding her horse’s mane or deer hunting with her father or practicing her horse whispering. (For the latter, she would put one hand over her heart and one hand over the horse’s, leaning close to commune.) She made extra money helping her father with his taxidermy and bird-hunting business; he paid her a dollar for each pheasant or quail or chuckar he gave her, and she skinned the birds clean. “You just clip out the backbone and scoop the guts out,” Tasia said cheerfully. Then she stopped and laughed at herself. “It’s funny—at school, I’m Little Miss Perfect, and at home, I skin birds and ride.”
Tasia and Ashley were popular at Llano High School, in part because they walked the line between the girls who belonged to 4H and the girls who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing mud-caked ropers. They dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch instead of Wranglers, and they often asked their mothers to make the two-hour drive to the mall in Austin so that they wouldn’t have to dress too “country.” They did everything together, whether it was cheerleading, track, cross-country, or basketball, and though their running for rodeo queen at the same time may have strained their friendship, they didn’t let it show. Privately, they worried; Tasia dreamed one night that the pageant was actually a cheerleading competition in which only she and Ashley were trying out. But rather than begrudge each other for running, they did what best friends do: Tasia slept over at Ashley’s, and the two girls lay by the edge of Hickory Creek and stared up at the stars, talking excitedly about the summer trip they were taking with Ashley’s father to Cozumel. Before the pageant, they went to Kingsland and had their bellybuttons pierced—a blood pact of sorts for the future.
Jessica was once close friends with Tasia, and her scrapbooks are filled with old snapshots of the two of them posing in Halloween costumes and blowing out candles at birthday parties and standing arm-in-arm at Fiesta Texas beneath the words “Friends Forever.” They were not so different when they were younger, both loving horses and loving to ride. When Jessica spent the night at Tasia’s house, they would get spooked by the glassy-eyed twelve-point bucks and stuffed mountain lions that lined the walls. Now there was an awkward unfamiliarity between the two. They began to drift apart in the seventh grade, when Tasia made the cheerleading squad and Jessica did not. Three years later they seemed the unlikeliest of friends, the sort of girls who could only have been confidantes before the concerns of boys and clothes and popularity intervened. Jessica was in the same grade as Tasia and Ashley, but a year younger in age; the year’s difference meant that Jessica wore braces and that her demeanor was one of girlish enthusiasm instead of studied cool.
At times, Jessica felt more comfortable on her horse than she did anyplace else, and in some ways she knew her mare better than herself. “When she was old enough to hold her head up, she rode with me on the saddle,” said her mother, Maxanne. “She rode before she walked.” Jessica did not live in a big stone house, as both Ashley and Tasia did, but in a double-wide manufactured home that Maxanne had decorated in a Southwestern theme with cedar bookshelves and Mexican blankets and concho-studded picture frames. Jessica’s bedroom was a shrine to horses: A wall full of horse posters (her Backstreet Boys poster had been relegated to a dark corner), a bookshelf of horse novels, another bookshelf of miniature model horses, a box of horse jewelry, and horse hangers in the closet. Even the bathroom’s toilet paper dispenser was fashioned out of horseshoes. Jessica’s hands were toughened from years of roping and ranch work, and she loved nothing more than running her mare bareback along the creek that ran cold and clear through her family’s land. Rather than sending her mare away to be trained by professionals for steep fees, as contestants often did, she had trained Princess herself.
“A horse is what you make of it,” Jessica said. “We paid five hundred dollars for Princess, and she’s the best horse you could ever have. Folks around Llano will argue with you and say you need three or four thousand dollars to buy a good horse, but you can’t ride papers and bloodlines.” She was driving her family’s ranch truck down a rutted dirt road that rambled past oak trees and prickly pear and fields of green milo. Sitting beside her was her friend Trish, whose two sisters had both run for rodeo queen in years past. The girls hummed along to a Faith Hill song on the radio while Jessica steered the truck toward pens that held two feral hogs she needed to check on. The song faded, and the radio began to blare: This Weekend! The Llano County Rodeo! Jessica gripped the steering wheel and sucked in her breath. “Are you nervous?” asked Trish. Jessica nodded her head vigorously. “I’ll be so nervous,” she said. “I just can’t be nervous at the gate, because Princess will act up and get prancy, and I can’t mess up at the rodeo.”
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