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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