Horse Capades (5 page)

“Let’s try that again, okay?” she said to the horse. She urged Prancer back into the jump course, determined to take a firmer hand with her this time. But it didn’t do any good. Once again Prancer refused to jump, this time skittering off to one side at the last minute.

Stevie and Carole rode over as Lisa turned the mare away from the course again. “That didn’t go too well,” Carole commented, looking concerned.

“I know,” Lisa said ruefully, her brow knit in concentration.
“She seems to be listening, but when we get close, she flips out and stops paying attention to me. Let me try taking her over a different fence.”

“Good idea,” Stevie agreed. She and Carole watched as Lisa rode Prancer toward a different obstacle. The same thing happened. Once the pair got close to the jump, the mare seemed to fall apart. This time, she got within a stride of the fence. She gathered her hindquarters as if getting ready to take off, then apparently changed her mind at the last second. She whirled around, her front hooves clipping the lower rail, and nearly unseated Lisa again before dancing to one side, tossing her head.

It took Lisa a little longer to get her under control this time. When she finally succeeded, she looked to her friends for help. “What should I do now?” she asked, her face white.

“Let’s try one more thing,” Carole suggested. “I’ll take Starlight over a couple of the fences. Once Prancer sees that, maybe she won’t be so nervous.”

She mounted Starlight and rode him toward the first obstacle. The big bay gelding didn’t hesitate. He trotted with even strides, taking off at just the right point and clearing the small fence easily. Carole jumped Starlight over two more fences before pulling him off the course and trotting over to join Lisa.

“Try her now,” she said.

Lisa nodded grimly and gathered up the reins. Giving Prancer a quick pat on the neck, she aimed the mare at the first fence again.

But the same thing happened. Prancer got within a few strides of the fence and then shied away.

“Don’t push her,” Carole said gently as Lisa, her expression determined, got ready to try again. “She’s made it perfectly clear she doesn’t want to jump today. I think you might as well put her away and let her rest now. Maybe she’ll have forgotten the whole incident by tomorrow.”

Lisa didn’t think that was very likely. But it also didn’t seem likely that she would be able to get Prancer to jump that day. “All right,” she said sadly. She patted the mare’s sweaty neck and dismounted. “Let’s hope a good night’s sleep will do the trick.”

As the girls slowly walked their horses around the ring to cool them down, Carole shook her head. “I still can’t believe how much trouble Veronica manages to cause all by herself,” she said angrily. “It’s just like the time she took that flash picture and made Stevie fall off.”

Lisa nodded. “It’s also a little like my very first day at Pine Hollow,” she said softly.

“That’s right!” Carole said. “I’d almost forgotten.”
On Lisa’s first day at the stable, Veronica had carelessly let a door slam, just as she had today. The noise had startled the horse Lisa was riding and made him run wild.

“That time she spooked my horse into action,” Lisa said. “Today she spooked my horse into
in
action.” She smiled a little as she thought about the irony. But her smile faded quickly as she thought about how much work was likely to be in front of her and Prancer. She knew that horses, despite their limited intellects, can form bad habits rather quickly, especially if they learn them in a stressful or frightening way. Despite what Carole had said, Lisa knew there wasn’t much chance that Prancer would go back to jumping normally the next day.

“Well, Veronica is just lucky I gave up practical jokes,” Stevie said. “Otherwise I’d be ready to play a big one to get back at her for this.”

Carole rolled her eyes. If Stevie still wanted to pretend she’d given up pranks for good, she wasn’t going to argue. “Well, if Max really thinks she set off that alarm thing on purpose, he’ll probably kick her out of Horse Wise again,” she said. “That would be the best revenge of all.”

The others agreed wholeheartedly with that.

* * *

A
FTER DINNER THAT NIGHT
, Stevie went up to her room. She knocked a pile of clean clothes and some magazines off her desk chair and sat down. It took only a few minutes of digging through the piles of books and papers on her desk to locate the book of fairy tales she’d taken out of the library a couple of weeks before. After a grimace when she realized the book was four days overdue, she flipped it open to the contents page.

“Let’s see,” she muttered to herself, scanning the names of the stories. The more she thought about Ms. Vogel’s speech, the more she realized that her new film was going to have to be awfully good. That meant she couldn’t do some boring fairy tale like
Sleeping Beauty
this time. She was going to have to come up with a really great tale to retell.

But all the tales in the book sounded boring to her. There was no way Ms. Vogel was going to be impressed by another dull rendition of
Hansel and Gretel
or
Cinderella
.

Be clever
, Stevie told herself.
Maybe I should do
Beauty and the Beast,
starring Veronica diAngelo as the beast
, she thought, smiling a little at the thought.
I could cast myself as Beauty
.

Suddenly Stevie sat up straight in her chair. She had just given herself a great idea.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed out loud. “I’ll set my fairy tale on horseback!” As soon as she said it, she knew it was the perfect solution. The clever part wasn’t picking an unusual story, it was doing a familiar story in an unusual way. Wasn’t that what Ms. Vogel had said—bigger, better, or more original? And what could be more original than a fairy tale on horseback? For that matter, what could be bigger or better?

Since her treatment would be so original, Stevie decided she might as well choose the most familiar fairy tale of all,
Cinderella
. She would simply do it as it had never been done before. Stevie herself would play Cinderella, of course. Carole and Lisa could be the nasty stepsisters. And who better to act as Prince Charming than her very own Prince Charming, Phil Marsten?

“It’s brilliant,” Stevie whispered to herself. She scrabbled around on her desk for a pencil and a blank piece of paper and began making notes. Instead of a fairy godmother, her version would have a talking lucky horseshoe. Instead of a royal ball, the couple would fall in love at a dressage exhibition. Instead of cooking and scrubbing, poor Cinderella would have to spend her days mucking out stalls and cleaning tack.

Soon she had most of it figured out. The only thing that wasn’t absolutely perfect was that she couldn’t
think of anyone to cast as the evil stepmother. She thought about asking Mrs. Reg to play the part, then decided the kindly woman wouldn’t make a convincing villain. And she was pretty sure none of her brothers would agree to dress up as a woman, even for a starring role in her film. Finally, she decided she’d just have to do without. The pair of wicked stepsisters would be enough, and Stevie was sure Carole and Lisa would be up to the parts. After all, Lisa had acted in local plays before, and Carole had perfected an evil cackle when she had dressed up as a witch a few Halloweens ago.

Stevie grabbed another piece of paper and continued to write. There was so much to think about. She would have to type up a script for her actors and come up with the appropriate props and costumes. She would also have to figure out how to arrange the filming so that she could direct and act in the film at the same time. But she knew she could do it; after all, famous actors in Hollywood did that sort of thing all the time.

Her mind almost bubbling over with ideas, she dropped her pencil and hurried over to the phone on her bedside table. She just had to tell someone about her brainstorm. She tried Carole’s line, then Lisa’s. Both were busy, and Stevie guessed that they were
talking to each other. She tried Phil’s number. Phil himself answered after three rings.

“Hi, Stevie,” he said, sounding pleased to hear from her. “How are you? Did Veronica try to get back at you today for that joke you played on her over the weekend?” The couple had talked on the phone Saturday night, and Stevie had told Phil all about her practical joke.

“Sort of,” Stevie said, twirling the phone cord around one finger. “But I’ll tell you about that in a minute. First, I have an important question to ask you.”

“Shoot,” Phil said.

“How would you like to be a movie star?” Stevie asked.

“Huh?” Phil sounded confused. “You mean when I grow up? I hadn’t really—”

Stevie interrupted him impatiently. “No, not when you grow up. I mean right now. I have to make another film for my class, and I want you to be one of my stars. This time I’m going to do a horseback version of
Cinderella
.”

“Another film?” Phil said. “I thought you just handed one in.”

“I did,” Stevie admitted. “But my teacher handed it right back to me. I have to redo it.” She filled him in
on her conversation with Ms. Vogel. “But it was all for the best,” Stevie finished. “She made me realize I was spending too much time on stupid practical jokes. So I decided that’s it. No more pranks for me.”

Phil laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No, I mean it,” Stevie protested. First Carole and Lisa, now Phil. Why didn’t any of her friends believe her?

“Okay, whatever,” Phil said, still chuckling. “And now you want me to star in some wacky version of
Cinderella
? Let me guess—you want me to play the mean stepmother. You’re going to make me wear a dress, and then sell the tape to my sisters.”

Stevie frowned. “Of course not. I want you to play Prince Charming.”
Even though you’re not being very charming right now
, she added to herself. But she didn’t say it. She needed Phil to agree to be in her film. Sometimes movie directors just had to be tactful, whether their actors deserved it or not.

“All right, all right,” Phil said. “I’ll play along. Prince Charming it is. When do we start shooting?”

“Well, I need a day or two to get the script ready and stuff like that,” Stevie said, leaning back on her bed. “How about Wednesday after school?”

“I can’t do it Wednesday,” Phil said. “I have a riding lesson. But I’m free on Thursday.”

“Good,” Stevie said. “Thursday it is.” They talked about other things for a while, including the upcoming Horse Wise competition and Lisa’s fall that day. Finally Phil had to hang up.

“I’ll see you on Thursday,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Stevie replied. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me too,” Phil said with a laugh. “Whatever it is!”

Stevie sighed as she hung up and got ready to try Carole again. She really had given up practical jokes for good. Why didn’t any of her friends believe her?

“S
ISTER DEAR
,
LET
us depart,” Carole read. “We don’t want to be late for the dressage ball.” She let out a snort. “A dressage ball? What in the world is that?”

Stevie frowned. It was Thursday afternoon, she had just passed out the script for
Cinderella
, and her cast was already being difficult. “It’s obvious,” she replied. “It’s a ball where the dancers are on horseback, doing dressage.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” Lisa pointed out. “Why would anyone bother to do ballroom dancing on horseback?” She was perched on the fence of the outdoor ring. It was a beautiful springlike day, and the girls and Phil had decided to practice outside. Their
horses were tied up nearby. Max had agreed to let Phil ride one of the stable horses, Diablo, though he had looked skeptical when Stevie had told him the reason.

“Don’t ask such silly questions,” Stevie told Lisa, deciding that in this case the best defense was a strong offense. She had spent two days perfecting her script, and she wasn’t interested in editorial comments from the actors. “Now hurry up and read through the whole thing. Then we’ll start practicing. I thought we’d begin with the dressage ball scene, since that will be the hardest. I’ll be right back—I have to get some props.”

She disappeared inside. But instead of reading the script, Carole and Lisa went back to discussing the same topic they’d been discussing all week: Prancer.

“She still won’t go near the jumps?” Carole asked Lisa. She leaned back against the wooden fence encircling the ring, letting the stapled pages of her script fall closed. She had had a dentist appointment the afternoon before, so she hadn’t been around for Lisa’s latest attempt to get Prancer to jump.

Lisa shook her head. “No way,” she said. “She’s perfectly fine as long as we stay on the flat. But any time she gets near a fence, her ears go back and she just plain refuses. I don’t want to force her, but I’m not
sure what to do to help her. Nothing I try seems to help.”

Phil had heard all about the incident, and the girls had already filled him in on the problem Lisa was having with Prancer. He knew that Lisa had been working carefully and patiently to make the mare feel comfortable about jumping again. She had led her all around the jump course. She had left her tied to one of the obstacles for several minutes. She had even trotted her over a series of cavalletti on the ground. None of those things bothered Prancer one bit. But the minute Lisa tried to ride her to a fence, Prancer stopped cold.