Snap

Praise for Ellie Rollins:

“Pure whimsical delight. Magic does blow throughout the world, and
Zip
proves it!”

—Lauren Myracle,
New York Times
bestselling author of
ttyl

“A clever novel with a bright and spunky heroine. Readers will root for her and empathize with her search to find her place in the world.”

—
School Library Journal

“Slapstick humor and a sense of magic help maintain this affecting story's levity as Lyssa learns to overcome her fears and accept change.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Totally enchanting! I loved this book every step of the way! Lyssa's journey is a once-in-a-lifetime odyssey, where seeds sprout in front of your eyes and the winds of change blow you to runaway rock stars and glass-skinned monsters alike.”

—Shelby Bach, author of
Of Giants and Ice

“Zip, zap, and zoom with Lyssa as she races against the clock!”

—GirlsLife.com

ELLIE ROLLINS

An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)

A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA), 345 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

Copyright © 2013 Paper Lantern Lit LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60440-3

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Summer,
best friend and honorary sister

CHAPTER ONE

The Cat Has Eyes

D
anya woke to
the sound of thumping on glass and blearily blinked the sleep from her eyes. Golden light filtered into her room. All around was muffled morning silence.

Another thump came from the window, followed by a loud, sudden snort, like someone revving the engine on a lawn mower.

“Hold your horses,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She sat up and let out a laugh that was half snort. Could a
horse
hold his horses?

She hopped out of bed, crossed the room, and pulled back the curtains—revealing a long brown nose pressed up against the window. The nose belonged to her pony, Sancho.

He was a tiny Shetland pony, just over three feet tall—short, like Danya. He stood on his back legs, his front hooves propped against the window ledge so that Danya could see his golden-brown belly with its big black heart-shaped splotch in the middle. His chestnut mane hung down over his eyes.

Danya unlatched the window and swung it open. The Kentucky air was heavy, and already hot for summer. It smelled like freshly cut grass and the daffodils her neighbor, Mrs. Harrison, grew in her front lawn.

Sancho pushed his head into her room and pawed at her window ledge with his hooves, like he wanted to climb inside and curl up in bed with her. Danya tickled Sancho beneath his chin, and the pony let out a light, breathy grunt, his lips flaring up around his teeth. “What is it?” she asked, following Sancho's gaze. It was then that she noticed the time.
Oh no!
It was already eleven
_A.M
. Danya had stayed up late reading again and must have overslept
 . . .
which meant she was late to help her father out at the farmer's market, like she did most Sunday mornings. “Let me grab my book and pen, and we can get going,” she said.

Danya's room teetered between lovably messy and totally chaotic. An emptied dresser drawer stood on its side as a makeshift desk, clothes strewn around it in knee-high piles. The framed photographs on her wall were all a little askew, and a few of the posters had scribbles in the corners because Danya had been testing her pens for ink. The pens themselves were hiding
everywhere
—they poked out of the flowerpot on Danya's windowsill and peeked from underneath the tangle of sheets on her bed. Her lucky purple gel pen stuck out of last night's half-eaten cheese sandwich, which sat on her bedside table. It wasn't that Danya was a messy person; it's just that her mind always seemed to be focused on something more interesting than cleaning. She grabbed the gel pen from the sandwich and stuck it in her pocket.

The book she'd been reading last night was now half-buried under the rumpled covers of her bed. It was one of her favorites—the third book in the Adventures of Ferdinand and Dapple
series. Out of habit, she flipped to the last page and smiled at the photograph of an old woman with wildly curly white hair and a dark, deeply wrinkled face. The name beneath the photograph read
_{ANGIE RUIZ}
. Angie Ruiz was the author of all the Ferdinand and Dapple books. She was also Danya's grandmother.

Danya reread the description of Angie, her famous
abuelita
, for what had to be the hundredth time. Angie had been everywhere—Italy, Bali, Peru—and done everything. She'd climbed to the very top of Mount Kilimanjaro and learned to craft authentic clay pots at a gallery in New Mexico. She'd run with the bulls in Barcelona and perfected the art of sushi-making in Japan. Danya had never met her grandmother, but sometimes her father would tell her stories about his great adventurer of a mother.

Ever since Danya was born, Angie had lived in a tiny village in Cuba where she didn't have access to a phone and was twenty-four miles from the nearest post office. She'd written the stories about Ferdinand on an ancient typewriter in her tiny, one-room house and sent them to her publisher on the back of a donkey.

Sticking the book under one arm, Danya grabbed her bag of pens, notebooks, and writing supplies and headed back toward the window, where Sancho still waited, pawing the ground impatiently.

“What's up, buddy?” Danya said. “Is Mom mixing grass in your good hay again? You know she only does that to make it last longer.”

Sancho cocked his head and fixed Danya with one dark eye, letting out a huff of breath from one nostril.

“Fine, don't believe me,” Danya said, grinning as she ruffled his mane. She grabbed her gray T-shirt with the purple heart on the center from a pile on the ground and slipped it on over the tank top she'd worn to bed. Then she slipped into her favorite pair of jeans, folding the cuffs up so they didn't drag on the ground. Most jeans were too long for her short legs.

Just before climbing out the window, Danya placed a letter for her
abuelita
on her pillow, where she knew her mother would find and mail it.

• • •

A few minutes later, Danya rode Sancho into the farmer's market. Her T-shirt already stuck to the sweat on her back, and the summer air was just growing warmer.

Dozens of people wove in and out of the brightly colored stands, carrying canvas bags piled high with fruits and veggies. Lemon and honey smells filled the air, along with the scent of her mom, Maritza's, delicious cookies, which Danya balanced on the saddle in front of her. She rocked gently back and forth on Sancho's back as the pony trotted, and only once or twice did she have to tug on his ear to keep him from stepping on someone's toes.

Danya got Sancho when she was only three years old. Back then their house had been almost like a farm. Her dad, Luis, often brought home new cows and goats and sheep so he could experiment with all different varieties of cheese for the fancy wine and cheese restaurant he owned downtown. One day he arrived with a full-grown Shetland pony and her tiny Shetland foal, Sancho, a runty little pony hardly bigger than a puppy. Danya had always been small herself, and she'd been just the right size to climb onto Sancho's back.

Then three years ago, Sancho's mom—Jupiña—died in a fire that destroyed the stable in Danya's backyard, killing a few chickens and their old cow, Henrietta, too. It was the worst day of Danya's life. She still had nightmares about the fire sometimes, and she couldn't think about it without remembering the crackle of flames and all the smoke she'd inhaled. Her throat squeezed up at the memory, like she was trying to swallow a fist, so she tried to think about it as little as possible. Then her dad lost his restaurant. They had to sell off the surviving animals one by one. Now only Sancho and Bess, the mean old goat her dad kept to milk for cheese to sell at the farmer's market, were left.

Danya gave Sancho's ear a double tug to get him to go left and Sancho turned, waiting patiently for an old man on a motorized scooter to cross before he started trotting again.

Luis Ruiz's arms were propped on the cheese stand as Danya and Sancho approached. He wore his usual flannel shirt and jeans, his hair tidily combed back from his forehead. But something about him seemed
off
this morning, though Danya couldn't quite put a finger on what. He gazed off into the distance, as though staring down an invisible foe.

Sancho whickered softly, and Danya patted his neck. “I think you're right,” she said under her breath. “Dad does look tired.” She pulled Sancho to a stop in front of her father's stand and said, louder, “Hey, Dad. Sorry I'm late. Sancho troubles. He's been acting antsy this morning.”

Her dad gave Danya a sideways smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. “I'm glad you brought him along, actually. He's . . . well, he can help me carry some of the extra cheese and desserts home today.”

Danya searched her dad's face. In her
abuelita
's stories, Ferdinand could always tell whether someone was lying just by looking at them. They'd wink or twitch their nose and Ferdinand just
knew
. Danya watched her father, but he didn't wink or anything. He laughed and leaned forward to ruffle Danya's curls.

“You okay, Snap? You look kind of serious.” Everyone had taken to referring to Danya as Snap because ever since she was a kid, she was known for getting lost in books. She used to think she wanted to be a writer someday. She loved making up stories in her head, but she had a hard time organizing her thoughts enough to get them down on paper. People were always telling her to “snap out of it,” and the name just stuck.

“I guess,” Danya said. “But . . .” The buzzing static from the walkie-talkie she always kept in her back pocket cut her off.

“Hold on a second,” she muttered, digging the walkie-talkie out. She switched on the talk button and groaned into the speaker. “Mom, I'm coming but—”

A familiar voice cut through the static, interrupting her. “The cat has eyes.”

“Pia? Is that you?” Danya clenched the walkie-talkie so tightly her knuckles turned white. Pia had her other walkie-talkie? The only way that could be possible was if Pia was at her house! Danya's mom hadn't mentioned she'd be coming for a visit today.

“The
cat
has
eyes
,” Pia said again, “and the wind is blowing north-northeast.”

Danya frowned. The air around her grew warmer by the minute. She wiped her sweaty palms on her shorts before pushing the talk button again. “I heard you the first time. But that's not part of our code.”

Pia hesitated. “Er . . . the cat has
teeth
? No, wait, I've got it—the cat has a tongue!”

“You're supposed to say ‘the cat has
my
tongue
,
'” Danya said. “I can meet you in our secret place in five! Over!”

Danya switched off the walkie-talkie, but her dad was helping a customer now: a bald man in a fancy black suit with shiny, shiny shoes. Luis's back was to Danya as he wrapped a stinky wedge of blue goat cheese that smelled exactly like his favorite sneakers before her mom insisted they be thrown away.

“Help me down, buddy?” Danya said, giving Sancho's back a pat. Sancho knelt in the dirt, and Danya scooted off his back. She slipped his reins through the fence post and tried to get her short fingers to work the ropes into a knot.

Suddenly Sancho tugged on his reins, his pupils wide and black. He yanked again, harder, and the reins slid from Danya's fingers.

“Whoa there!” said a deep voice behind her. Danya turned, hoping it was her dad. Instead the bald customer her dad had been helping approached, his shoes kicking up clouds of dust. Now that Danya could see him better, she noticed his slim-fitting black pants still had a crease down the legs, like he'd just bought them at a store, and his shoes were so shiny she could probably make faces at herself in their reflection. The man wore dark sunglasses even though clouds filled the sky, covering the sun.

Danya glanced at her dad again, but he was busy with another customer. Sancho snorted into her neck and backed up against the fence. Danya knew that snort. It meant Sancho was
scared
.

“Is he always so ornery?” the bald man asked, kneeling next to them.

“Only around people who make him nervous,” Danya said. The man smiled at Danya, but something about his smile seemed wrong, like his lips were pulled too tightly over his straight, white teeth. He tried to pet Sancho's nose, but Sancho pulled away and shook his mane violently. Danya reached out to calm him, but he trembled beneath her fingers.

“Are you feeling okay, buddy?” she asked.

“Well, there's your problem. You shouldn't talk to him like he's a person,” the man said. “I work with horses, and you have to show them who's the alpha, let 'em know you're the boss.”

Danya frowned—she wasn't Sancho's boss, she was his friend—but before she could say as much the man grabbed Sancho's reins and in a single fluid movement steered the pony's head around so Sancho was forced to look him right in the eye.

Before Danya could open her mouth to tell the man to get his dirty mitts off her horse, Sancho whinnied and reared back, pumping at the air with his hooves. He was a tiny little pony—but he was strong, and he struck the man's hand,
hard
. The man shouted in pain, dropping the reins like they'd burned him.

“What's
wrong
with you?” Danya yelled at the man, grabbing for Sancho. Sancho dropped back to all fours and chomped down on his bit with his front teeth. “You shouldn't mess with other people's pets!”

The man smiled again—that strange, stretched-out smile that almost didn't look like a smile at all. He held up his hand and Danya could see the beginnings of a dark, purple bruise forming where Sancho struck him.

“That horse needs to be broken,” he said. Then he turned on the heel of his shiny shoe and stalked back over to Danya's father.

Anger and nerves clawed at Danya's throat as she watched the man go. Her father would be furious that Sancho struck one of his customers, even if the bald man was pestering them. Sancho snorted again and kicked the dirt. This time Danya didn't need to ask what was bothering him.