“She stuck,” Evie announced, yanking on Gloriana’s tail.

“Well, you shouldn’t have committed vehicular manslaughter.” Hazard hesitated. “Horse slaughter. Equine slaughter. I’ll have to look at the criminal code.”

“She stuck,” Evie said, louder and more slowly.

Sighing, Hazard crossed the room and knelt next to his daughter. Gloriana was well and truly stuck, her little horsey head wedged between the steering wheel and the RV’s molded plastic driver’s seat. The problem was that Hazard’s fingers were too thick to get inside the front of the RV, where he needed to depress the steering wheel so that Gloriana’s head could slip free.

“See?” Evie said. “Stuck.”

“Yes,” Hazard said, “you made that pretty clear. Where’s that horse stripper pole your dad bought you?”

“Stwipper powe?”

“Do not tell him I said that. Where’s the, uh, filly dance class stuff that he got you?”

“Oh,” Evie said. Her little legs churned as she ran for the stairs. Then she stopped, looked straight at the ceiling, and said, “Stwipper powe.”

Hazard groaned, picked up the RV with its embedded horse carnage, and followed her up to her room. Evie managed to find the stripper pole in the debris of her toybox. Somers had insisted it was supposed to be a ballet barre, but Hazard had pointed out that it was a single pole, bright silver, and that it had come with a tiny plastic boom box that would provide the imaginary bump-and-grind accompaniment. After delivering the pole to Hazard, she immediately lost interest in Gloriana’s fate and began digging through the dress-up box.

“Come here,” Hazard said. “I want to show you how to do this.”

In answer, she whipped around, a plastic helmet canting over one eye, a plastic sword in one hand. “I a knight.”

“A very brave knight,” Hazard said.

What followed after that was something garbled about rescuing a princess.

“Princesses don’t always need to be rescued,” Hazard said, thinking of those heavy steps. “That’s an outdated sexist fantasy. Sometimes princes need help too.”

Evie considered this for a moment and then delivered a vicious chop that parted Gloriana’s head from her body. Then she climbed onto the bed, still swinging the sword, and said, “Jump!”

“Hold on, I want to show you how to get Gloriana—well, her head, anyway—out of here.”

“Jump!”

So Hazard sat on the edge of the bed, raising himself and then dropping down hard enough to shake the frame. For some reason, Evie found this hilarious, and she bounced and swung the sword and squealed with laughter.

“See, a lever is a simple machine,” Hazard said, inserting the pole and bracing it against the top of the Fashionista Fillies RV’s windshield. “This is the fulcrum. A lever works by reducing the amount of force needed by spreading it out over a longer distance.” He applied pressure; the steering wheel tilted, and Gloriana’s head popped free. Hazard reattached it to her body, and then he passed Gloriana up to Evie, who was still jumping and squealing, the sword whipping through the air. Hazard realized he was dangerously close to meeting the same fate as Gloriana, so he set the RV down, ready to clear out of the chopping zone. When he looked up, though, Somers was coming across the room, dressed in a pair of mesh shorts and his undershirt and one sock that he’d somehow forgotten to take off.