Add continuity dashboard and scene authoring workflow
This commit is contained in:
Joey Grasty
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<Title>Novel Format</Title>
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Mai Lin had decided, sometime around the first plate of cake, that this was the best party she had been to in her entire life.\par
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\par
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She was sitting on the coping with her legs dangling in the water, the warm June air settling around the yard like something living, and she was wearing the white string bikini that she had purchased specifically for this summer and specifically for situations like this one. She had spent twenty minutes on her eye makeup. She knew exactly what she looked like. She was having no guilt about this whatsoever.\par
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\par
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"You did that on purpose," Tyler Marsh said from the water below her.\par
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\par
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"I have no idea what you're talking about," Mai Lin said, and used both feet simultaneously to drive a wall of water directly into his face.\par
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\par
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The boy sputtered. He wiped his face with both hands. He looked up at her with that expression boys got when they were trying to decide whether to be annoyed or charmed and she could see the exact moment charmed won, which was deeply satisfying.\par
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\par
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"Okay," Tyler said. "Okay, you want to do this."\par
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\par
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"I'm just sitting here," she said innocently, and kicked another small splash at him for emphasis.\par
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\par
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She did not have time to read his intention before his hands closed around her ankles, and then she was in the water, fully submerged, the world gone quiet and blue and glittering for one suspended second before she came up laughing so hard she could barely breathe. She got her bearings, got a mouthful of pool water, turned to find him grinning at her from two feet away, and spat it directly into his face.\par
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\par
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The look on his face was extraordinary. Pure shock. His mouth opened.\par
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\par
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She shrieked with laughter and shoved off from the wall, putting distance between them while he recovered, and she was already among three other boys in the shallow end before he got the water out of his eyes. She could hear him laughing behind her. One of the other boys\u8212?Harrison Webb, she thought, the senior Hannah had brought\u8212?made a lunge for her and she ducked under and came up on the other side and grabbed the pool edge.\par
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\par
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"She's fast," Harrison announced to no one in particular.\par
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\par
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"She's dangerous," Tyler said from across the pool, and there was something in the way he said it that made her absolutely delighted.\par
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\par
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She pulled herself up to sitting on the coping again and pushed her wet hair back from her face. Her red lipstick was probably doing interesting things at this point but she didn't especially care. The yard was full and loud and lovely. Strings of lights were on along the fence and the tiki torches were still burning, their orange light doubling itself in the dark water of the canal beyond the yard. The music from the patio was audible between the noise\u8212?something fast, something good\u8212?and she could see two or three couples doing an approximation of dancing near the back door, supervised at a comfortable distance by Emma's parents and Mrs. Carpenter, who had that look adults get at parties like this, vaguely watchful but basically content.\par
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\par
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Then Emma appeared at the deep end.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin watched her best friend surface like a seal behind Tyler Marsh, grab his shoulders with both hands, and attempt something that was clearly intended as a dunking and became, through some chain of physics and enthusiasm, Emma sitting on the boy's shoulders with her arms up in triumph.\par
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\par
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The yard exploded.\par
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\par
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Within thirty seconds it had gone completely wrong in the best possible way. Or right. It was hard to say. Some other girl climbed onto some other boy's shoulders, and then another, and then a cousin\u8212?one of the three wild Hayes boys who had arrived earlier and immediately treated the pool like a personal obstacle course\u8212?was yelling something from the shallow end and the shallow end was suddenly a chaotic knot of boys and girls trying to either maintain or destroy the arrangement of humans stacked on top of other humans.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin watched this for about four seconds.\par
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\par
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Then she looked around, found one of Emma's cousins\u8212?Corey, or possibly Travis, she'd been introduced at speed\u8212?standing at pool's edge looking enthusiastic and available, and said, "Hey. You. I need your shoulders."\par
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\par
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The boy looked at her. He was maybe fifteen and was having the time of his life. "Yes," he said immediately.\par
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\par
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She slid back into the pool. He bent at the knees and she climbed on and he stood and she was up, absurdly high, grabbing at his head for balance while he grabbed her ankles to steady her, and he was already wading toward the deep end before she had fully located her center of gravity.\par
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\par
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"Emma!" she yelled.\par
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\par
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Emma turned on Tyler's shoulders, wobbling magnificently. Her face was soaked and she had a leaf of something in her hair and she was grinning with every single tooth she owned.\par
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\par
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"MAI LIN," Emma screamed.\par
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\par
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"YOUR COUSIN IS GOING TO DUNK YOU," Mai Lin announced, because she believed in transparency, and then Corey-or-Travis surged forward and the collision was wonderful and terrible and loud, a full-yard tangle of shrieks and splashing and someone's elbow and then everything went underwater again.\par
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\par
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She came up for the second time to find herself in approximately the center of the pool, surrounded by the floating aftermath of the collision\u8212?three or four boys, two girls, Emma. Emma was treading water six feet away, still laughing, her birthday hair a complete wreck, and she looked at Mai Lin with an expression of pure unhinged joy.\par
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\par
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"Second piece of cake after this," Emma said.\par
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\par
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"Obviously," Mai Lin said.\par
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\par
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They swam to the wall.\par
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\par
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She climbed out and accepted a towel from someone\u8212?she was never entirely sure who, things were moving fast\u8212?and found herself standing near the patio, dripping, wringing out her hair, while Tyler Marsh climbed out of the pool a few feet away and shook himself like a dog, which sprayed her again, which made her laugh again.\par
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\par
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"You're relentless," she told him.\par
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\par
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"I learned it from someone," he said, and handed her a second towel, which was extremely gentlemanly of her. She took it.\par
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\par
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She had a general theory about boys that she had developed over approximately two years of careful observation: the ones worth spending time on were the ones who handed you towels after dunking you. This was probably not a universal rule but it was her rule.\par
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\par
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She was mid-examination of this theory, and also mid-examination of Tyler Marsh, when she caught something at the edge of her peripheral vision and looked over.\par
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\par
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Lizzie Hayes was standing at the far edge of the pool deck, at the quiet end near the fence, with the blonde boy Hannah had brought. Will something. She hadn't paid much attention to him when he arrived\u8212?he was cute but Hannah had claimed him in that territorial way Hannah had\u8212?but now he was completely absorbed in talking to Emma's little sister, and Emma's little sister was completely absorbed in talking back.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin paused.\par
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\par
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She knew Lizzie. You couldn't be Emma's best friend for three years without knowing Emma's sister. Lizzie was the one with the books. Lizzie was the one who showed up to things with that gentle apologetic expression that meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*. Lizzie was extremely pretty in a way she didn't seem to fully understand yet and extremely smart in a way she understood completely but tried not to flaunt.\par
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\par
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Lizzie was not usually standing close to boys, talking fast, using her hands.\par
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\par
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But she was doing that now.\par
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\par
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She was doing that right now.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin watched Lizzie shake her head at something the boy said, very definite, very certain, and say something back that made him look like she'd surprised him in the best possible way, and she thought: *oh, interesting.*\par
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\par
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She filed this away. It was clearly something, and the something of it was clearly just beginning, and she thought Emma probably needed to know about it, and then she remembered the expression on Emma's face earlier\u8212?that wide, wondering, full-warmth smile\u8212?and realized Emma had already seen it.\par
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\par
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That was good. That was Emma being a good sister. Emma was good at that.\par
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\par
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She turned back to Tyler, who was looking at her in the way that boys looked at her when they were trying to figure out what she was thinking.\par
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\par
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"More cake?" she said.\par
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\par
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"I could eat," he said.\par
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\par
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"Come on then," she said, and they went toward the table in the warm evening light, the pool behind them still glittering with chaos, the music from the patio threading through everything, and somewhere across the yard Lizzie Hayes was still talking to a boy named Will as if they were the only two people at the party, which Mai Lin thought was maybe exactly what they were.
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}
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 If it had been up to Lizzie, she would have spent the evening exactly where she'd spent the afternoon: cross-legged on her bed with a pillow behind her back and four hundred pages of uninterrupted Ursula K. Le Guin ahead of her. That had been the plan. That had been a good plan. But her mother had appeared in the doorway an hour ago with a look that required no translation, and the book was currently face-down on her nightstand waiting for her return, and Lizzie was standing on the pool deck in the middle of something that seemed to be expanding outward in every direction at once.\par
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\par
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It was loud. It was remarkably, impressively loud for a backyard.\par
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\par
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Emma's party had hit some kind of critical threshold in the last twenty minutes, the way a fire goes from tentative to committed, and now the whole space had a pulse to it. Music came from Jim's sailboat out on the dock\u8212?she could see the three men on the deck, her father and Bobby's father and Jim, silhouettes tilting bottles in the direction of the sun, which was going orange over the canal and throwing long shadows across the pool. The water in the pool was bright and churned. Six or seven boys had claimed it entirely, splashing with the territorial confidence of boys who had decided a pool was theirs. The girls were mostly on the patio side, gathered around Emma in overlapping clusters, talking in the animated, overlapping way of people who had been looking forward to this specific gathering for two weeks.\par
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\par
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Lizzie stood slightly to one side of all of it.\par
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\par
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She had a can of soda she wasn't drinking and a towel draped over her shoulder she wasn't using and she was doing the thing she sometimes did at parties, which was watch, because watching was more interesting than participating and required considerably less energy. Emma didn't understand this about her and probably never would, but Emma was currently at the center of eight separate conversations and was not thinking about Lizzie at all, which was fine. Lizzie watched her sister hold court near the pool steps\u8212?Emma in the green swimsuit she'd deliberated over for three days, sun-bright and completely at ease, laughing at something Mai Lin had just said\u8212?and thought, not unkindly, that Emma genuinely couldn't imagine anyone not wanting this exact thing.\par
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\par
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From the pool there was a concussive boom of water and then a wave sloshed over the coping onto the deck.\par
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\par
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"Marcus!" Three voices said it at once.\par
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\par
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Laughter followed, including, reluctantly, from Lizzie.\par
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\par
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Marcus surfaced with his arms out, grinning without remorse, and she could see cousin Devin shaking his head with the weary tolerance of a sixteen-year-old who had been dealing with Marcus since birth. Tyler, the middle one, was already retaliating by splashing in Marcus's direction, which caused a general escalation, which caused two of the older boys to drag themselves up onto the coping to avoid the crossfire.\par
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\par
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One of them was Bobby.\par
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\par
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Lizzie knew Bobby well enough\u8212?he'd been coming around on Saturdays for years, always polite, always deferential to her parents in the particular way of a boy who understood he was a guest. He pulled himself up to sitting on the pool edge and shook water from his hair, and he was talking to someone still in the pool, and then that person grabbed the edge and came up beside him.\par
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\par
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Lizzie looked at him.\par
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\par
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She didn't mean to look the way she looked. It wasn't a decision.\par
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\par
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He was maybe her age, maybe a year older\u8212?it was hard to tell. Blond. Blue-eyed in the fading early-evening light, the kind of blue that looked almost gray in shade and then resolved clearly when the sun hit. Compact and muscular and tan in the way of boys who spent real time outdoors, not just backyard hours. He was laughing at something Bobby had said, his head tilted back slightly, and there was something about his laugh that was\u8212?\par
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\par
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Lizzie redirected her eyes to the middle distance and took a long sip of soda she didn't taste.\par
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\par
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This was disorienting. She had read extensively about this experience\u8212?it appeared in literature with remarkable frequency\u8212?but she had not previously encountered the actual firsthand version, and now that she had, she found herself unprepared for how thoroughly it disrupted normal cognition. She was a person who prided herself on normal cognition.\par
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\par
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She looked again.\par
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\par
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He was still there. Obviously he was still there.\par
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\par
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She was trying to decide whether to go back inside\u8212?the book was there, the book was reliable, the book did not cause this problem\u8212?when something grabbed her arm.\par
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\par
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She startled badly enough to slosh soda on her wrist.\par
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\par
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"Come on," Hannah said.\par
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\par
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Hannah was Emma's friend, not hers, a pretty and slightly curvy girl in an extraordinary one-piece with a pattern of dark jewels at the neckline that had probably cost more than everything in Lizzie's closet. She had the manner of someone who was constitutionally incapable of allowing a social situation to go unimproved, and she had Lizzie by the elbow with the grip of someone who had made a decision.\par
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\par
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"Hannah\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"You'll thank me."\par
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\par
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"I really don't think\u8212?"\par
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\par
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But they were already moving. Hannah navigated the pool deck with the breezy confidence of a girl who'd never once been ungraceful, steering around a cluster of boys and a folding chair someone had dragged to the edge, and Lizzie was doing an inventory of every conversational inadequacy she possessed and finding the list alarmingly long when Hannah called out, "Will!"\par
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\par
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The blond boy looked up.\par
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\par
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He looked directly at Lizzie.\par
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\par
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She stopped breathing for a moment, which was a physiological response she now understood was not metaphorical.\par
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\par
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"This is Lizzie," Hannah said. "Emma's sister. She loves Lord of the Rings."\par
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\par
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There was a half-beat of silence in which Lizzie became acutely aware that Hannah had already let go of her arm and taken a step back and was in the process of a departure so smooth it was nearly invisible.\par
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\par
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"Hannah\u8212?" Lizzie said, but Hannah was already gone, absorbed by a group of girls near the food tables with the seamlessness of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had zero intention of explaining it.\par
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\par
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Lizzie stood there. Bobby had drifted off somewhere. It was just her and Will Fontaine on the edge of the pool, the party going loud and bright and chaotic around them, Marcus launching another cannonball into the far end.\par
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\par
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"Will Fontaine," he said, and held out his hand.\par
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\par
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She shook it. "Lizzie Hayes."\par
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\par
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He had an easy, unguarded quality, like someone who hadn't yet learned to be self-conscious. "You actually read it?" he said. "Or Hannah's just doing the thing where she says people have things in common to make them talk?"\par
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\par
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"Hannah does that?"\par
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\par
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"Constantly." He said it without malice. "So?"\par
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\par
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"I've read it three times," Lizzie said. "And the Silmarillion twice, which I'm aware most people don't finish."\par
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\par
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Something in his expression shifted. Reorganized. "Okay," he said. "Okay, you actually read it."\par
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\par
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"Do you?"\par
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\par
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"I've read the trilogy four times and I have opinions about Tom Bombadil that most people find excessive."\par
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\par
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And there it was\u8212?that thing that happened occasionally, rare enough to be notable, where the unpromising situation inverted itself completely. Lizzie felt the tightness in her chest release a fraction.\par
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\par
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"Tom Bombadil," she said, "is the most interesting problem in the whole book and nobody talks about it seriously."\par
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\par
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He turned more fully toward her. "Nobody," he agreed, "because everyone gets stuck on whether he's a god or a nature spirit and misses the actual interesting part, which is that the Ring has absolutely no effect on him\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"\u8212?which means either he's outside the power structure that makes the Ring meaningful, or he simply doesn't desire anything the Ring could amplify\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"Exactly." He was animated now, water still running down his shoulder, the pool noise and the music from the sailboat and the accumulated roar of thirty-six teenagers reduced somehow to a middle distance. "Because Sauron's whole thesis is that everything wants. That every will can be captured. And Bombadil disproves that just by existing. He rescues the hobbits from Old Man Willow without ceremony, without drama. He just\u8212?does it. Like it's obvious."\par
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\par
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"Like it costs him nothing," Lizzie said, "because he has nothing to lose."\par
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\par
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"Or everything he has can't be taken." He looked at her with a directness that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn't been so clearly intellectual. "Does that mean he's the most powerful being in the story, or the least powerful? Like, the Ring is the whole axis of the story. If you're immune to it, are you even in the same story?"\par
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\par
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Lizzie had thought about this exact question before. She had written two pages about it in her journal and not arrived anywhere conclusive. She sat down on the pool coping, because this was going to take a minute, and he sat beside her, and somewhere behind them Marcus detonated another wall of water and a girl shrieked in protest and everyone laughed, and the sun went lower, and the music from the dock drifted over them, and the party went on being what it was.
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}
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{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
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{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
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\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
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\f0\fs24 \cf0 Youngest daughter. To be a high school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, shy. She has three close friends, all of which are bookworms like herself.\
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Reads at a college level per her English teacher Mrs. Patterson. Aspires to write fantasy fiction in the tradition of Tolkien and McCaffrey. Moves through tasks with focused, urgent efficiency when a book is waiting. Tends to process frustration quietly and internally rather than acting out \'97 explicitly contrasted with Emma's more reactive temperament.\
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}
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@@ -1,133 +1,89 @@
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 The kitchen clock read 5:47 when Ella came downstairs, her golf shoes already on her feet, bag propped against the wall by the garage door. She'd been awake since five, lying in bed listening to the mockingbirds outside her window, running through her swing in her mind the way her father had taught her to do. First weekend of summer. Thirty-six holes ahead of her. She could hardly stand it.\par
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\f0\fs24 The kitchen clock read 5:47 and Ella Hayes had been ready since five-fifteen.\par
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\par
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Her mother was at the stove, sliding eggs onto a plate without being asked, because Elikapeka Hayes always knew what her daughters needed before they knew themselves.\par
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She stood at the sliding glass door that opened onto the back patio, watching the canal. The water was black and flat under a sky just beginning to lose its darkest shade, the stars above the mangroves fading one by one like lights being switched off in a distant building. The sailboat at the dock \u8212? Jim Kowalski's enormous white fifty-footer \u8212? shifted almost imperceptibly against its lines, and the soft knock of fiberglass against the piling was the only sound in the world. Ella had her golf shoes on already, had them on for the better part of an hour, and she could feel the cleats against the kitchen tile, a solid deliberate contact that made her feel ready in the way that the shoes of a surgeon or a soldier might make them feel ready.\par
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\par
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"Sit," her mother said.\par
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Her bag was in the garage, standing up against the wall beside her father's. She had checked it twice. Fourteen clubs, a dozen golf balls because you never needed a dozen but she liked having them there, two gloves with the left hand on top, four sharpened pencils, the yardage book she'd made herself for Pompano Beach Golf Club with notations in her own small handwriting, a rain jacket rolled tight inside the side pocket even though the forecast called for nothing but clear skies and the low nineties by afternoon.\par
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\par
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Ella sat, but only on the edge of the chair.\par
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Behind her at the kitchen table, her father turned a page of the newspaper.\par
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\par
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She ate quickly, cleaned her plate, drank her orange juice in three swallows, and carried everything to the sink. It was 6:02. Their tee time was 7:24. Pompano Beach was twelve minutes away, maybe fifteen with the light on Sample Road. She wanted forty-five minutes on the range, minimum. That left them needing to leave the house no later than six-thirty, and even that was cutting it closer than she liked.\par
|
||||
She did not look at him. Looking at him would require her to say something, and she had already said enough. She had cleared her breakfast plate, rinsed it, set it in the rack, and said, "Dad, we should go." He had nodded without lifting his eyes from the sports section. She had gone to the garage to check the bags and come back and said, "Seriously, Dad, we should go." He had said, "Ella, the first tee is at seven twenty-four. We have time." And then he had reached for the coffee pot.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Upstairs, her sisters were still asleep. She could hear the particular silence of rooms full of sleeping people. And from the direction of the master bedroom she heard the low murmur of the television her father turned on every morning while he dressed, and she knew from long experience that the television was a bad sign. The television meant he was not rushing.\par
|
||||
The second cup. She had watched him pour it with the specific agony of someone watching a slow leak drain something precious away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went back to the kitchen and sat down again, this time not even pretending to be relaxed.\par
|
||||
She turned from the door. Her father sat with his long legs stretched under the table, ankles crossed, newspaper folded to a quarter of its size the way he always did. He was still in his golf shirt and shorts and his shoes were on, at least, which was something. His bag was in the garage too, already loaded, which she had checked along with her own. But he had that cup in his hand, that white ceramic mug her mother had brought back from Oahu six years ago, and he was in no hurry at all.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father came out of the master bedroom at 6:09 in his golf shirt and khaki shorts, his hair still damp, and went directly to the coffee maker. He poured a cup and leaned against the counter and looked out the window at the canal, where the first light was going silver and pink across the water. The sailboat in their dock shifted almost imperceptibly against its lines.\par
|
||||
Andrew Hayes was a large, unhurried man. In nearly every context Ella had observed him \u8212? at the airline, at family gatherings, on the golf course \u8212? he moved and spoke at a pace that suggested the world would wait for him. Usually Ella admired this about him. On the golf course it produced a steadiness she had tried for years to copy into her own game, that ability to stand over a four-foot putt with a two-shot lead or a two-shot deficit and feel more or less the same. Off the golf course, especially on Saturday mornings, it made her want to scream.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning," he said.\par
|
||||
"Bobby's going to beat us there," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We need to leave before six-thirty," Ella said.\par
|
||||
Her father looked up. He had a handsome, creased face, dark from the sun, and he looked at her with the mild amusement that she found simultaneously comforting and infuriating. "Bobby lives ten minutes closer than we do."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning, Ella."\par
|
||||
"That's my point."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She exhaled through her nose. "Good morning. We need to leave before six-thirty."\par
|
||||
"Ella." He said her name the way he sometimes said it, with a slight downward inflection, the way you'd say *easy* to a horse. "We have an hour and thirty-seven minutes before we tee off. The drive is twenty minutes. You like to warm up for forty-five minutes. That leaves\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father smiled at his coffee cup, and that smile\u8212?patient, unhurried, the smile of a man who had been doing this for thirty years and believed there was very little in life that required actual rushing\u8212?made her want to tip the cup out of his hand.\par
|
||||
"I like to warm up for an hour."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's probably already there," she said.\par
|
||||
He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses, which he'd recently started wearing and which she'd recently started resenting because they made him look settled. "Since when."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby can wait."\par
|
||||
"Since this summer. I've been working on the range every morning this week and an hour is what I need." She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, not because she wanted to sit but because standing and looking at him while he sat made her feel like she was waiting to be seen by a doctor. "If we leave now we have exactly enough time."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby doesn't like to wait. Neither do I."\par
|
||||
He folded the newspaper and set it on the table and picked up the mug.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then Bobby and you are well matched." He sipped his coffee. "Your mother made eggs?"\par
|
||||
She watched the mug.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There's some in the pan. Dad. We need a good warm-up. I need a good warm-up. You can hit six balls and walk to the first tee, but I need time on the range."\par
|
||||
He drank.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll have time on the range."\par
|
||||
"Dad."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Not if we leave at seven."\par
|
||||
"It's hot." He set the mug down. "I can't drink it fast when it's hot."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say we were leaving at seven."\par
|
||||
"Then you shouldn't have poured a second cup."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're on your first cup."\par
|
||||
He smiled. It was not a chastened smile. It was the smile of a man who understood perfectly well that he was being unreasonable and had made his peace with that. Ella had seen the smile ten thousand times and it still got to her, the way an old joke can still be funny even after you know the punchline by heart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at her over the rim of the mug. "This is my second cup."\par
|
||||
From upstairs came the faint sound of one of her sisters shifting in a bed, a creak of springs, then silence. The rest of the house was asleep. Her mother had gotten up before five to make breakfast \u8212? eggs and toast and sliced fruit, the same breakfast as every Saturday \u8212? and had gone back to bed with a kind and unhurried efficiency that reminded Ella, not for the first time, that her mother and father were profoundly well-matched in a way that had almost nothing to do with her. Her mother understood her father completely and found him largely sufficient. This was admirable. It was also no help to Ella at ten to six on a Saturday morning.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood up from the table and walked to her golf bag and crouched down and unzipped the front pocket and took out her glove and put it on and took it back off again. She had no reason to do this. She did it anyway.\par
|
||||
She stood up again and went to the glass door again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Behind her she heard the scrape of a skillet, her mother serving her father his eggs, and then the soft sound of them exchanging some words she couldn't quite make out, and her mother's quiet laugh, and the terrible, leisurely normalcy of it all. It was 6:14.\par
|
||||
The canal had taken on a thin pewter color. The stars were entirely gone now. Somewhere out on the water something jumped, a mullet probably, and there was a brief silvery splash and then the flatness again. Down the canal, in the direction of the Intracoastal, a heron stood on someone's dock with the motionless concentration of a professional. Ella felt a brief abstract kinship with it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went out the back door and stood beside the pool. The water was still and dark blue in the early light, and the neighbor's bougainvillea spilled over the fence in a great cascade of orange-pink that was almost violent in its color. She breathed in the morning air, which smelled like canal water and cut grass and the faint diesel memory of some boat that had gone out before dawn. She tried to think about her swing. She'd been working on keeping her right elbow closer to her body on the downswing, something her father had shown her three weeks ago at the range, and she'd had it and then she'd lost it and she wanted to find it again before she was standing over a shot on the first hole.\par
|
||||
She thought about the range. She thought about the sequence of the session \u8212? wedges first, short irons, then the middle irons, then the hybrids, then driver last, but not too many drivers because this course didn't ask for driver very often. She thought about the thing she'd been working on with her ball position, moving it back a half inch with the seven iron, the way it was cleaning up that occasional thin strike she'd been getting on courses with firm fairways. She wanted to hit at least thirty seven irons before they walked to the first tee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The door opened behind her.\par
|
||||
"You know," her father said behind her, "when I was coming up, you hit six balls on the range and if the six balls went more or less where you were pointing you went and played."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Five minutes," her father said.\par
|
||||
"That's why I'm better than you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned. He was carrying his coffee cup. Still.\par
|
||||
A pause. She did not turn around.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're bringing that?"\par
|
||||
"That might be the most disrespectful thing you've ever said to me," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm finishing it."\par
|
||||
"You know I'm right."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck."\par
|
||||
Another pause. Longer this time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck," he agreed, and something in his tone told her he'd been planning to leave at six-thirty all along and had simply declined to tell her, because he found her impatience amusing and saw no reason to relieve it prematurely. This was, she knew, a form of love. It did not feel like one.\par
|
||||
"I'm going to finish my coffee," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up her bag and went through the house to the garage without waiting for him.\par
|
||||
"Obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
But when she finally turned around she caught something in his expression before he recovered it, a flicker of something that was not amusement and not offense. Something closer to pride. He looked down at the mug and she looked at the side of his face for a moment, his jaw, the gray that had started at his temples in the last year, and she felt the particular complicated love of a daughter who has been taught by her father to be difficult and precise and uncompromising and who is now deploying those qualities directly against him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They drove north on Federal Highway with the windows down, her father's coffee cup sitting in the holder between them, still half full. The morning was already warm the way South Florida mornings were in late May, the air thick and sweetly humid, and the palm trees along the road were motionless in the stillness before the sea breeze came up. Ella sat with her left knee bouncing and her arm out the window.\par
|
||||
"Five minutes," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You need to stop rushing the range," her father said.\par
|
||||
"Two."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't rush the range."\par
|
||||
"Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You rush the range. You go too fast and you don't let the feelings settle. You hit twelve balls when you should hit eight."\par
|
||||
"You've had two cups. There's nothing left in there worth saving."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby hits fifty balls."\par
|
||||
He looked into the mug. He looked at her. He pushed his chair back with his foot and stood up, all six feet two inches of him, unhurried as ever, and carried the mug to the sink, rinsed it, set it down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's habits are Bobby's business."\par
|
||||
"Get your bag," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked out the window. A sprinkler system was running in the parking lot of a strip mall, arching water across the empty asphalt for no apparent reason. "I just want to be ready," she said.\par
|
||||
She was already through the door to the garage.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're already ready. You've been ready since you woke up." He glanced at her. "Probably since last night."\par
|
||||
The sky outside the garage door, when her father lifted it, was a deep and luminous blue-gray, the color the sky is for only a few minutes in the summer before the light begins its real work. The air smelled like water and cut grass from somewhere down the block. Ella slung her bag onto her shoulder and felt the weight of it settle and felt the cleats of her shoes on the driveway and felt the whole long useful day opening in front of her like a fairway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How long have we been doing this?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Since I was six."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And have I ever not gotten you to the course in time for a proper warm-up?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about it longer than he deserved to wait. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay then."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She let her knee stop bouncing. He reached over without looking and turned on the radio, and they drove the rest of the way with the windows down and the warm air coming in and a country station playing low enough that it was almost just texture rather than sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The parking lot at Pompano Beach Golf Course was mostly empty when they pulled in, only a handful of cars clustered near the clubhouse entrance. Ella had her door open before the truck stopped rolling, which earned her a single patient look from her father that she ignored. She shouldered her bag and walked fast toward the entrance, her spikes clicking on the asphalt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the glass door she could see Bobby Carpenter already inside, sitting on the bench beside the pro shop counter with his arms folded, his own bag leaning against the wall beside him. He was wearing a Pompano Beach Golf hat and a green shirt, and when he saw her come through the door he made a show of checking his watch.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Six-forty-five," he said. "I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you've had five minutes to contemplate your many swing flaws," Ella said, going directly to the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My swing flaws." Bobby unfolded his arms and stood up. "You're the one who started blocking it right under pressure last month. What was that on sixteen at the district qualifier?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was the wind." She slid her father's credit card across the counter to the young man working the register. "Two, on the Pines. Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was not the wind," Bobby said. "There was no wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was some wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was no wind, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too, Bobby," her father said, coming through the door behind her, carrying nothing, having left both his golf bag and his apparently now-finished coffee in the truck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned and shook Andy's hand. "Morning, Mr. Hayes. I've been telling Ella I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know," her father said. "She mentioned it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't mention it," Ella said, signing the receipt and taking the card back. "I acknowledged it. There's a difference." She picked up her scorecard from the counter and turned toward the door that led to the range. "We have nineteen minutes. I'm going to go use them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father looked at Bobby and Bobby looked at her father and some small communication passed between them that she caught only from the corner of her eye and chose to ignore entirely.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed through the door into the morning light, already thinking about her elbow.
|
||||
"Let's go," she said, not unkindly, and she walked to the truck.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The eighteenth green on the Pines was elevated slightly above the fairway, and Andy Hayes stood just off the fringe with Alex Carpenter and watched his daughter climb down into the bunker with the careful, deliberate movement of a person keeping something tightly leashed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd seen that walk before. Knew it the way he knew the particular sound an engine made when something was about to go wrong.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Rough lie?" Alex said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Plugged." Andy kept his eyes on her. "Ball went in soft sand on the steep face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex made a low sound that wasn't quite a wince. He understood bunkers. They both did.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby stood on the far side of the green, leaning on his wedge with his arms folded over the grip, two feet from a birdie putt he hadn't bothered to mark because there was nothing to discuss about it. He'd striped a seven-iron from a hundred and sixty-two yards into a two-mile-an-hour crosswind and put it exactly where he'd aimed it, and the ball had tracked to the hole and stopped close enough that a moderately talented four-year-old could have made the putt. Andy had seen it happen and had felt the small, involuntary contraction in his chest that a father feels when the outcome his child needs begins to slip away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That had been four minutes ago.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon had gone wrong in pieces, which was somehow worse than going wrong all at once. She'd played the front nine at two-under on the Palms \u8212? same as the morning \u8212? and stood one up at the turn, just as she'd predicted, the shoulder adjustment Bobby had given her at lunch paying dividends on the fourth and sixth holes where she'd taken two birdies and gone ahead by two, and Andy had watched her from the cart path and felt the clean uncomplicated pleasure of watching someone do something genuinely difficult and make it look like less than it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then the back nine.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The heat, mostly. Ninety-four degrees in direct sun on a course with no shade to speak of, and she'd sweated through her shirt by the eleventh and her swing had shortened again \u8212? he could see it happening, the way a clock runs slow in cold weather \u8212? and Bobby had birdied twelve and thirteen and the match had leveled. Then the sixteenth, which Andy would rather not have watched but had watched anyway, because that was the arrangement. You stood there. You watched all of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd pushed her drive right on sixteen and the ball had found the rough, not deep rough but wiry coastal rough that gripped the club like a hand, and she'd taken her medicine and laid up and then come up short with the approach and three-putted from forty feet, the last putt a straight two-footer that she'd pushed, and he'd heard the small hard sound she made through her nose when she missed it. Not a word. Just the sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Double bogey. One down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd birdied seventeen on pure aggression, a career drive and a nine-iron that came out of the sun and landed soft and the birdie putt from eighteen feet that she'd read and rolled perfectly, and she'd walked off that green all even again with everything still open and the whole day still salvageable and Andy had thought: there it is, that's my girl, because that was the part that was entirely hers, the thing he hadn't taught her and couldn't have, the capacity to absorb damage and come back through it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then the eighteenth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her iron had come off slightly \u8212? he knew it the moment she struck it, something in the shoulder, the heat doing its slow work \u8212? and it had faded right instead of drawing and found the bunker face, and the ball had buried. He'd watched it happen from the cart path and had said nothing and continued saying nothing because there was nothing to say, and Alex had stood beside him and also said nothing, which Andy appreciated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now she was in the sand with a lie that a touring professional would have been grateful just to get on the green, and she needed to hole it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy crossed his arms and watched.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood over the ball for a long time. He could see her reading it, cataloging the ugly geometry of the situation \u8212? the steep face, the plugged lie, the distance to the hole, Bobby's ball sitting two feet away making the whole thing worse by its simple, cheerful proximity. She gripped the sand wedge and settled her feet and the set of her jaw was visible even from where he stood, that particular expression she'd had since she was nine years old and someone told her something couldn't be done.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd always loved that about her. It had also given him more gray hair than the job.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the club back and came through it hard, a full committed swing, the sand exploding out in a heavy wet sheet that caught the afternoon light and came apart in the air, and the ball jumped up out of the crater with the desperate trajectory of something that had been buried and was suddenly free.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
For one moment \u8212? one brief, irrational moment \u8212? Andy thought it might go in. The flight was high and the ball was tracking and Bobby, on the far side of the green, had straightened slightly, watching, the grin gone from his face for the first time all afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball landed four feet past the hole and ran.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It ran another two feet and stopped.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy breathed out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six feet, roughly. Slightly above the hole. A putt she made eight times out of ten in practice and six out of ten in competition and today, this afternoon, in ninety-four degrees after seventeen holes of emotional labor, the odds were whatever they were and he didn't want to calculate them.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She climbed out of the bunker and Alex said something under his breath that Andy didn't hear. Bobby stayed where he was, arms back over the wedge grip, and when she came up onto the green he took a step back and gave her the whole thing, the way you did. The grin was still absent. He was watching her the way Andy was watching her, with a different kind of attention than the match had required up to this point.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She marked her ball and cleaned it and replaced it and read the putt from both sides, and Andy watched her read it and knew from the set of her shoulders exactly when she'd decided on the line because that was how she'd always been, the decision arriving and then the doubt running in behind it, and what separated her from most golfers her age was that she didn't let the doubt change anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She set up and stroked it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball rolled true for four feet and then broke slightly \u8212? a half-inch, maybe less \u8212? and caught the right edge of the cup and spun out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six inches past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He heard her exhale. Heard it from where he was standing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't move immediately. She stood over the ball with the putter at her side and her head down, and Andy stayed exactly where he was and let her have it, the six seconds or ten seconds or whatever it needed to be, because you had to let it land fully before you could carry it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up the ball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She walked to Bobby, who had come forward now, his putter loose in one hand, the grin returning quietly to the corners of his mouth the way it would, the way you couldn't help. He put his hand out and she shook it \u8212? a real handshake, not a tap \u8212? and she said something to him that Andy couldn't hear and Bobby nodded once, serious, and that was the concession and the end of the match and the whole long day of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up her ball and dropped it into the water hazard alongside the green with a clean deliberate motion, no windup, just a short underhand toss, and the ball hit the surface and vanished, and she turned and walked off the green without looking at anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby watched her go. He shook his head once, the grin wider now but something else in it, something that wasn't mockery. He looked at Andy across the green and Andy met his eyes and Bobby said, "She had it the whole way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she did," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at Alex, who raised an eyebrow the small amount it needed to be raised, and they walked toward the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck on the way home she sat in the passenger seat with her bag stowed and her shoes changed and her jaw set in the same line it had been on the eighteenth green and Andy drove south on Federal Highway and let the silence be what it was. The air conditioning ran. The light was going amber in the west.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. The best in the world won fewer than one in four. She knew it the way she knew everything about the game \u8212? completely and without comfort, because it didn't help, not today, not ever on the day itself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. She looked out the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He let her fume.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,81 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The coffee was good. Elikapeka stood at the kitchen counter with both hands wrapped around the mug and allowed herself thirty seconds of stillness before the evening swallowed her whole.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the sliding glass door she could see Susan Carpenter moving between the rented folding tables with the brisk competence of a woman who had organized school fundraisers and church potlucks and knew exactly how a tablecloth should be anchored against a canal breeze. The caterers\u8212?two young men and a girl in black polo shirts\u8212?were arranging chafing dishes with the careful efficiency of people being paid by the hour. The patio looked better than Elikapeka had expected. The string lights she and Emma had hung last night caught the late-afternoon sun and would come into their own once the sky darkened.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She drank her coffee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From behind the house came the low, pleasant thump of bass finding its footing, then a moment of silence, then the opening of something Emma had described as essential. Elikapeka recognized it dimly. The sound system on Jim's sailboat apparently worked. She heard Andy's laugh carry across the water\u8212?that easy, unselfconscious laugh of a man holding a beer and doing something pleasant with his hands\u8212?and then Alex Carpenter's voice saying something she couldn't make out, and then both of them laughing, and then Jim's voice joining in. Three men on a sailboat in a canal in Fort Lauderdale in June, which was exactly what three such men would choose to be doing on a Friday evening if given any latitude at all.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had given them the latitude. She was not sorry about it. The sound system worked and they were out of her kitchen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella appeared from the direction of the stairs with a boy behind her, and Elikapeka registered the boy before she registered anything else, which was how she always registered Bobby Carpenter\u8212?as a presence slightly larger than expected, taller this year than last in a way that still surprised her faintly each time. He'd always been a polite boy. He was a polite taller boy now. He had the particular expression of someone who understood he'd been drafted and was trying to look willing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella was already moving toward the front door with the focused economy of someone who had been given a task and intended to discharge it efficiently and return to her own concerns. She was wearing a coverall over her swimsuit, practical and unadorned, and Elikapeka thought for the hundredth time that Ella would find this entire evening mildly tolerable at best and was doing it because she'd been asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard the door open.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard Michelle's voice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set her coffee mug on the counter and moved to the kitchen doorway where she could see the entry hall. Michelle Hayes was a compact, energetic woman married to the most amiable of the three Hayes brothers, and she had brought all three boy cousins in one efficient delivery, like a woman who had learned to consolidate her errands. The cousins came through the door in a loose cluster\u8212?Devin first, who was sixteen and had the unhurried manner of a boy who had been told he was good-looking often enough to believe it; Tyler behind him, who was fifteen and had apparently had some kind of recent moment of recognition with Lizzie that still mildly baffled Elikapeka; and Marcus last, who was fourteen, who was wearing his flip flops on the wrong feet, and who was already looking past everyone toward the back of the house with an expression that could only be described as strategic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma appeared from the direction of the stairs with Mai Lin one step behind her, the two of them moving in the synchronized way of girls who had been best friends since the second grade and had developed a shared locomotion. Both wore coveralls over their swimsuits. Emma's coverall, Elikapeka noted, was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, which was cover the swimsuit she and Andy had disagreed about. She had made her peace with it. More or less.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma greeted her cousins with the warmth of a hostess who had already filed several private grievances about their attendance and had decided, professionally, to set those aside for the duration of the evening. She kissed Michelle's cheek and pointed all three boys toward the back of the house with a gesture that was somehow both gracious and directional, the way a good ma\u238?tre d' points guests toward a table.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They did not require pointing twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Tee shirts hit the kitchen floor. Flip flops went in two different directions. Devin cleared the sliding glass door first. Tyler was a half-step behind him. Marcus, she noticed, had already located something\u8212?a Nerf football, presumably from the basket of pool toys she kept in the utility closet\u8212?and was holding it above his head like a trophy as he crossed the patio and hit the water with a sound that reached her from twenty feet away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The men on the sailboat cheered.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka picked up Marcus's tee shirt from the kitchen floor and folded it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mrs. Hayes, should I\u8212?" Bobby started, gesturing vaguely toward the backyard in a way that suggested he would go wherever he was pointed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go on," Elikapeka said. "You're doing Ella a kindness."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella's expression suggested she disputed the framing but would not contest it in front of her mother. She and Bobby went out through the sliding door. Elikapeka could hear Susan Carpenter greeting them warmly, because Susan was the kind of woman who greeted everyone warmly as a matter of genuine temperament rather than social management.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music from the sailboat shifted to something louder and the bass settled into the boards of the dock and came up through the kitchen floor faintly, which was not something she'd anticipated but was, she decided, acceptable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle had come through to the kitchen. She was already opening the refrigerator with the easy familiarity of a woman who'd stood in this kitchen dozens of times, which she had.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The tables look beautiful," Michelle said, pulling out the pitcher of iced tea Elikapeka had made that morning.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Susan did most of the arranging."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The lights were Emma's idea, I assume."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma's idea and Emma's installation. She had Lizzie on the ladder."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle laughed. "How is Lizzie taking all this?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She has a book," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Smart girl."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang again. And then again before she'd taken three steps. And then, before she reached the hallway, a third time, because whoever was on the other side was either impatient or had missed the first attempt and was making up for it. She opened the door to four girls at once, all of them in coveralls, all of them carrying towels in the pastel colors of girls who coordinated these things in advance. They were talking before the door was fully open and did not stop talking as they came through it, and Elikapeka caught their names\u8212?she'd reviewed the list twice\u8212?and matched three of four on the first pass.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then more cars. Then more voices at the door. Then the particular compound noise of a party finding its footing, which was different from the noise of one or two or five people gathered in a place. It had a texture to it, something almost physical, and it rose from the backyard and came in through the sliding door and mixed with the music from the sailboat and the caterers' efficient movements and Michelle's steady presence at the counter and the smell of the chafing dish lids just beginning to warm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From the pool she heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of a cannonball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then laughter. Then what sounded like protest. Then more laughter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Marcus.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew without looking. She would have bet money.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was standing at the kitchen counter again\u8212?she kept returning to it, some gravitational pull\u8212?and she picked up her coffee mug and found it had gone cold. She drank it anyway and looked out through the sliding door at the thirty-odd young people filling her backyard by degrees, at the sailboat lit now by the dropping sun with three men on its deck who had earned the right to cold beers, at Susan moving between tables with the assurance of a woman who could set a tablecloth in a canal breeze, at Emma holding court near the pool steps with the easy authority of someone who had always expected this exact outcome.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Another cannonball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
More laughter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka smiled into her cold coffee, because it was chaos, and it was hers, and that was not the worst thing in the world to be able to say.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The breakfast dishes were still on the table when Elikapeka Hayes poured herself a second cup of coffee and settled into the chair at the head of the table. Through the sliding glass doors she could see the backyard, the pool catching the late May morning light, the canal beyond it glittering, and the tall white mast of Frank Bellardi's sailboat swaying gently at the dock. Andy and her mother had been gone just over an hour. She had the morning ahead of her, quiet except for her daughters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was working through a bowl of cereal with the focused efficiency she applied to anything she considered a preliminary to something more interesting. Lizzie had barely touched her toast and was reading a paperback she'd propped against the orange juice glass, something with a dragon on the cover.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll ruin your eyes doing that," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that every morning," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"One morning I'll be right."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma set her spoon down. "Mom. Can we talk about my birthday party?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at her over the rim of her cup. Emma was fifteen, and would be sixteen in June, and there were mornings when Elikapeka looked at her second daughter and felt something almost like vertigo \u8212? the girl was so thoroughly, effortlessly herself, so completely certain of her own orbit. She had Andy's easy confidence and none of his self-doubt, and she had Elikapeka's stubbornness without the patience that usually accompanied it. A complicated gift.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about it," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Pool party. Evening. Backyard. My birthday is on a Friday, so I can have a party on my birthday for once."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That could work."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And I want it to be a real party. Not just a family thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can have your friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know, but that's the thing." Emma pulled her knees up onto the chair in a way that Elikapeka had been asking her not to do since she was eight. "I have a lot of friends, Mom. I'm going to have to cut the list down. There are people who are going to be upset if they don't get invited and I need to think about it strategically."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie turned a page without comment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How many are you thinking?" Elikapeka asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Maybe forty. Forty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For a backyard pool party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The backyard is big."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Forty-five children in my backyard at night is not a party, Emma, it's a liability."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're not children. And I was thinking more like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty," Elikapeka said. "Twenty-five at the absolute outside."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma made a face that communicated the full tragedy of this constraint. "Okay, I can work with twenty-five. But there's something else." She paused, and Elikapeka recognized the pause \u8212? it was the same pause Emma had used at age six when she wanted a second dessert, the brief moment of gauging whether the ground was firm enough to stand on. "I want to invite boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked up from her book for the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm turning sixteen, Mom. Not twelve."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You made a face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm allowed to make a face in my own kitchen." Elikapeka set her cup down and folded her hands on the table. "You can invite boys. Within reason."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously within reason." Emma's tone carried the faint implication that her mother's concept of reason was narrower than the average person's. "So I'll put together a list for you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll need the names, yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just\u8212?" Emma pointed at her. "Just look at the list and trust me a little. Don't go being racist about it, okay?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The word landed in the room with a particular weight. Lizzie's eyes moved from her sister to her mother and back to her sister, and then, wisely, returned to her book.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka kept her expression level. "Excuse me?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying. You have opinions about who I'm allowed to be friends with. Or who counts as appropriate." Emma put small sarcastic emphasis on the last word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have opinions about who comes into my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know what your opinions are. I've known since I was little. And I'm just asking you to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're asking me not to be a racist," Elikapeka said. "That is what you just said to me, in my kitchen, about my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had the grace not to smirk, but she met her mother's eyes without flinching. "I didn't say you were a racist. I said don't be racist about the list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was quiet for a moment. She was not going to have this argument in full \u8212? not now, not with Lizzie sitting three feet away pretending to read about dragons. There were things she believed that she had never dressed up in pretty language, and she wasn't going to start doing it because her fifteen-year-old daughter had learned the vocabulary of a challenge. She would look at the list. She would make her decisions. The decisions themselves were not going to change.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Give me the list," she said. "I'll tell you who's welcome."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma opened her mouth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's not a negotiation, Emma. You asked for a party, I'm giving you a party. You want to invite boys, I'm allowing boys. You give me the list, I look at the list, and that is how it works in this house." She picked up her coffee cup again. "Next item."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma sat back, not quite defeated, recalibrating. Elikapeka knew that look too. It meant the subject was being filed away for a later attempt, not abandoned.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cousins," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't want to invite all of them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie's mouth curved very slightly at the corner of her page.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're your family," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're our family," Emma said, then immediately adjusted: "I mean \u8212? they're family, yes, I know. But Malia and Koa are fine and Auntie Lena's kids are fine but if I have to invite the Pahoa cousins then I'd honestly rather not have a party at all, because Devin is going to spend the entire night complaining about the music and Tyler is going to eat everything and not talk to anyone and\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tyler is twelve," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Exactly."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's twelve and you want to exclude him from your birthday party so you can have a more sophisticated evening with your forty friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty-five friends. You said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yes." Emma pressed forward, undeterred. "Is it wrong to want my own birthday party to be fun? I see these cousins at every single family thing. At Christmas, at Easter, at Grandma's \u8212? can I have one thing that's just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma blinked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They'll all be invited. Every last one of them. Devin, Tyler, all of them. And you will be gracious about it or there won't be a party." Elikapeka said it the way she said most things she was certain about \u8212? without heat, without performance, simply as the shape of reality. "Don't push me on this, Emma. I have given you a lot of ground this morning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"An evening pool party with boys for your sixteenth birthday," Elikapeka said. "In this backyard. When I was your age, do you know what I got for my sixteenth birthday?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie chose this moment to set her paperback down and observe, with the mild, studied disinterest of someone who had clearly been following every word: "Stinky boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned the full weight of her attention on her younger sister. The look was slow, deliberate, the kind that communicated a detailed opinion about the immaturity of the person receiving it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She rose and carried her cup to the sink, looking out through the window over the water. The morning was already warm and would be hot by noon, and Jim Kowalski's sailboat rocked in its gentle patient way against the dock, going nowhere.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." Elikapeka turned back from the window and smiled at her, the full warm smile that she knew her daughter found difficult to stay annoyed at. "It's going to be a beautiful party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,73 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 2\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T16:14:50-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Scene 1\par
|
||||
At 5:47 a.m. on the first weekend of summer, thirteen-year-old Ella Hayes\u8212?golf bag packed, glove handled nervously, mind fixed on a downswing elbow flaw\u8212?endures her father Andy's unhurried breakfast routine before he drives her to Pompano Beach Golf Course, arriving at 6:45 to meet their waiting partner Bobby Carpenter, with the 7:24 tee time for thirty-six holes still unmet and Ella already moving toward the range with nineteen minutes and unresolved mechanical anxiety.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
She let her knee stop bouncing. He reached over without looking and turned on the radio, and they drove the rest of the way with the windows down and the warm air coming in and a country station playing low enough that it was almost just texture rather than sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The parking lot at Pompano Beach Golf Course was mostly empty when they pulled in, only a handful of cars clustered near the clubhouse entrance. Ella had her door open before the truck stopped rolling, which earned her a single patient look from her father that she ignored. She shouldered her bag and walked fast toward the entrance, her spikes clicking on the asphalt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the glass door she could see Bobby Carpenter already inside, sitting on the bench beside the pro shop counter with his arms folded, his own bag leaning against the wall beside him. He was wearing a Pompano Beach Golf hat and a green shirt, and when he saw her come through the door he made a show of checking his watch.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Six-forty-five," he said. "I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you've had five minutes to contemplate your many swing flaws," Ella said, going directly to the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My swing flaws." Bobby unfolded his arms and stood up. "You're the one who started blocking it right under pressure last month. What was that on sixteen at the district qualifier?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was the wind." She slid her father's credit card across the counter to the young man working the register. "Two, on the Pines. Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was not the wind," Bobby said. "There was no wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was some wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was no wind, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too, Bobby," her father said, coming through the door behind her, carrying nothing, having left both his golf bag and his apparently now-finished coffee in the truck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned and shook Andy's hand. "Morning, Mr. Hayes. I've been telling Ella I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know," her father said. "She mentioned it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't mention it," Ella said, signing the receipt and taking the card back. "I acknowledged it. There's a difference." She picked up her scorecard from the counter and turned toward the door that led to the range. "We have nineteen minutes. I'm going to go use them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father looked at Bobby and Bobby looked at her father and some small communication passed between them that she caught only from the corner of her eye and chose to ignore entirely.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed through the door into the morning light, already thinking about her elbow.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Early morning at the golf course.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Andy Hayes.\par
|
||||
Andy watches as Ella and Bobby get ready to tee off from the first tee. Andy asks Alex where Bobby wants to go play golf in college and learns the boy wants to go to the University of Florida. Ella wants to go to Stanford, which has a fine women\u8217?s golf program.\par
|
||||
Though the girls\u8217? golf team never plays from the back tees, Ella always practices from there when she can. Ella and Bobby go to the back tees, negotiate a buck a hole bet and flip a tee to see who goes first. Ella wins and tees off, hitting an impressive drive right down the middle of the first fairway. Bobby, taller, stronger, tees off, hitting a perfect drive 30 yards past Ella\u8217?s ball. Bobby makes a snide comment and Ella huffs. Their fathers tee off from the white tees and off they go.\par
|
||||
Both fathers are good players, but they are playing for the fun of it, whereas Ella and Bobby are out for blood. Bobby has a natural advantage as he\u8217?s stronger and hits the ball farther, but Ella has a wonderful short game and that makes their matches more or less even.\par
|
||||
On the green, both kids have birdie putts, Bobby the longer of the two, so he plays first. He makes his putt, but Ella runs hers into the hole as well, so they\u8217?re even after the first hole. It\u8217?s clear that both kids have brought their A games to the course. Their fathers are already debating how early they could get away with ordering beers from the cart girl.\par
|
||||
Expand this into 1500 words max.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand this into 1500 words maximum. Keep it fun with some snarky dialog.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 This episode is told in third person from the viewpoint of Mai Lin Wen.\par
|
||||
Mai Lin was having a fabulous time at Emma\u8217?s party. She wore a white string bikini which accented her black hair, tanned skin, and dark eyes. She\u8217?d done her makeup to make her eyes appear larger and she wore red lipstick. She knew she was a babe and she was flirting incessantly with every one of the cute boys, especially that hunky boy Tyler Marsh. She was a good girl; she\u8217?d never let the boys take advantage of her but that didn\u8217?t mean she didn\u8217?t want the boys to try. That was part of the fun.\par
|
||||
After the cake was served and eaten, the boys and girls began to mix in a chaotic frenzy. Music was playing and some girls were dancing with cute boys on the patio. Naughtiness was at a minimum as the adults were keeping a close watch on the party, keeping things under control. She sat on the edge of the pool, kicking her feet, splashing cute boys in the pool, and they splashed her back playfully. Tyler was in the pool and she used both feet to splash him, succeeding perfectly in driving water straight into his face. She giggled hysterically as the boy grabbed her feet, pulled her into the water and dunked her. She surfaced with a mouthful of water and spit it into his face, which shocked the boy and gave her an intense fit of giggles as she escaped from his attempted grasp. One of the other boys dunked him and she turned her attention to the other boys in the pool.\par
|
||||
She saw Emma dive into the deep end, swim underwater and come up behind Tyler, jumping on his back and attempting to dunk him. Somehow the girl got on his shoulders. Another girl did the same, and suddenly a half dozen girls found themselves on boys shoulders and the shrieks of laughter filled the air. Mai Lin found a boy, one of Emma\u8217?s cousins, climbed onto his back and joined in the fun. The boy declared his intention to dunk Emma, so off they went, Mai Lin on his shoulders, to dislodge Emma from Tyler\u8217?s shoulders.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Ella Hayes.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby sat at a table on the patio outside of the golf course restaurant having a snack. They\u8217?d finished eighteen holes in three and a half hours, but they still had an hour to kill before they could start the next round on the Palms course. Their fathers were inside at the bar, drinking more beer. Sometimes Ella wondered how her father could drink beers and still play solid golf, but he rarely seemed to be affected at all.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby had finished the round tied at two under. The trash talk had gone back and forth during the round, but neither player had ever gotten more than one hole up on the other. It was to be a grunge match on the easier course in the heat of the afternoon. This time, they\u8217?d take a cart rather than walk in the humidity and heat. Ella would drive; she refused to let Bobby drive the cart as one time he\u8217?d almost driven them into a pond. \par
|
||||
Bobby asked her out again. She rolled her eyes and said he\u8217?d always be in the friend zone. He just grinned, knowing what she\u8217?d say. She\u8217?d never gone out with any of the boys on the golf team, though she was friendly with all of them and been asked by several of them.\par
|
||||
At last, it was time to play again. They went to the clubhouse and got the key to a cart. Ella drove. She always drove. And she always gave him crap about it.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,211 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The moment the car backed out of the driveway, Emma was moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't run\u8212?running was undignified\u8212?but she walked with a purpose that was very close to it, straight to her parents' bedroom, where the phone sat on her mother's nightstand like a reward for exactly this kind of patience. She settled herself against the headboard, pulled her mother's decorative pillow behind her back, and positioned the notepad on her knees with the pen uncapped. The morning light came through the curtains in long warm stripes. Outside, she could hear the sailboat knocking gently against the dock.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote BOYS at the top of the page and underlined it twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna first. Susanna Greer was the head cheerleader and functionally omniscient about the male population of their school. If Susanna didn't like a boy, the boy ceased to exist as a viable option. This was simply how it worked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The phone rang twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hello?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's me. I need the definitive list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Of what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys, Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A pause. "For the party?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No, for my knitting circle. Yes, for the party. My mom said boys are allowed, which I did not see coming, so now I need to move fast before she changes her mind or adds some condition I haven't thought of yet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, okay." She could hear Susanna settling in on her end, which meant she was sitting down somewhere comfortable with the phone cord stretched to its limit, the way she always did when she was about to deliver information she considered important. "Okay. Jake Ferreira, obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote the name. "Obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Chris DeLuca."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He chews with his mouth open."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"At lunch. In a pool he'll be fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote Chris DeLuca and put a small question mark after it. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Matt Brouwer."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He asked Danielle out and then didn't show up."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was like six months ago."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a long memory. Next."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Next, Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna sighed. "Fine. Brandon Hicks."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Brandon is good." She wrote his name. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They went on like this for twenty minutes, Emma with her pen moving over the notepad, crossing out and adding and putting small notations next to certain names\u8212?things like *asks too many questions* or *fine if Danielle isn't there* or simply *no*. By the time she hung up, she had seven names that had survived the cross-examination. Seven boys. From one phone call. She looked at the list with genuine satisfaction. This was going to be the best birthday party she'd ever had, provided her mother didn't ruin it, which remained a live concern.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She dialed Mai Lin Wen without consulting the notepad. She knew that number by heart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting by the phone, which was very Mai Lin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tell me everything," Mai Lin said, before Emma could speak.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom said yes to the party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She said yes to boys?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She said yes to boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The shriek on the other end of the phone was satisfying. Emma held the receiver a few inches from her ear and waited it out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," Emma said, when it was over. "I need your input on the list. I already talked to Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What did Susanna say about Tyler Kim?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She didn't bring up Tyler Kim."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's a no from me on Tyler Kim, then. He was staring at me all through third period last week and not in a good way. In a weird way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Agreed." Emma hadn't written Tyler Kim down anyway. "I have seven so far. I'm going to read them to you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma read the names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a silence after each one that communicated Mai Lin's processing. Then: "Cross off Chris DeLuca."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I had a question mark next to him anyway."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cross him off. He told Hannah he thought the two of us were basically the same person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stopped. "I'm sorry\u8212?what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He literally said we were interchangeable."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That is\u8212?" Emma searched for the appropriate word. "That is genuinely insulting to both of us."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Right?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We don't even look alike."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We're not even the same height."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma, I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying that is an extraordinarily stupid thing to say." She crossed off Chris DeLuca with enough pressure to leave an impression on the next page. "He's gone. Who do you want to add?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nate Oliveira," Mai Lin said. "He's very cute, and he was nice to me at the track meet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote the name. "Anyone else?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's it from me. I want it to be an exclusive list. Not every boy in the junior class."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously not every boy in the junior class. I'm not running a charity event."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Some people invite everyone."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not some people."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's why I like you," Mai Lin said, and Emma could hear her smiling. "Am I sleeping over after?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Of course you're sleeping over after."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good. I'll need to decompress."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma laughed, which was real, because Mai Lin always made her laugh. She said goodbye and moved down her mental list of people to call.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Prescott was next, and this was the call Emma approached the way one approaches a necessary dental appointment\u8212?something to get through, efficiently, and not dwell on. Hannah came from money and was popular with the boys in a way that Emma found slightly suspicious, which was to say that Hannah was obviously aware of this popularity and deployed it deliberately. Emma didn't dislike her, exactly. She simply had no illusions about her or her motives, some of which she knew her mother would not approve.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma, hi! I heard about the party, this is going to be so fun\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Who should I invite? Boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A brief pause as Hannah recalibrated from enthusiasm to usefulness. "Okay. Marcus Webb."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Definitely Corey\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Last name."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Corey Janssen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it. "Good. Anyone else you're thinking about?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about Ryan?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Which Ryan?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ryan from the swim team."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ryan from the swim team has a girlfriend."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They broke up."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma paused. "When?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Like two weeks ago."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote *Ryan\u8212?swim team\u8212?confirm* with a small circle around it. "I'll look into it. Thanks, Hannah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my gosh, of course, I'm so excited\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll call you later." Emma hung up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She worked through the rest of her list of girls, methodically, a conversation here and a conversation there, the names accumulating on the notepad in her lap. Some boys she added. Some she declined before they were fully nominated. One she wrote down and then stared at for a long moment before drawing a slow, deliberate line through his name, for reasons she didn't articulate out loud because she was alone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Finally, she sat back against the headboard and counted.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys, all thoroughly vetted, all approved by at least two people she trusted to have opinions worth consulting. It was a good list. It was an excellent list. She looked at it with the satisfaction of a general surveying a well-positioned army.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then she thought about Devin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And Tyler.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And the others.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother's voice came back to her with pristine clarity: *Every last one of them.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Twenty-five guests total. Which meant ten girls, herself included\u8212?and she'd already been composing that list in her head separately, so she knew exactly who those ten were. It was wrong. The number of boys and girls needed to balance. She needed her mother to agree to thirty attendees, to properly balance the sexes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She counted her cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There were three boy cousins who would plausibly be invited by her mother's standard of *every last one of them*. Devin, who was fine, she supposed, in the way that a piece of furniture is fine. Tyler, who Lizzie apparently thought she knew, which was hilarious and also somehow annoying. And Marcus, who was fourteen and had gone through a phase last summer of doing cannonballs directly next to whoever was floating quietly in the pool, which was not something Emma was prepared to tolerate at her own birthday party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three boys who would have to come off this list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at her fifteen names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at them for a long moment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she said something under her breath that she would not have said in front of her mother, picked up the phone again, and started to think very carefully about which argument would work.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the fairness argument. Her mother was impervious to fairness arguments.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the numbers argument. Her mother would simply raise the cap, or suggest she invite fewer girls.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
No. She needed something her mother couldn't easily dismiss. Something that reframed the question. She didn't have it yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote *cousins don't count\u8212?separate category* on the corner of the notepad and starred it three times.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd figure it out. She had time.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 10\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268,F3A0BCE3-9F1F-4EB2-9490-F185AF944E53,EC970280-C7C1-4B26-B531-4D083A6626FB,DE370E46-CBAB-4C99-9D5F-45FF0AA2FAEE,CA099051-6C98-4DFF-BCFF-86B96AC3B704,E3BCC7D7-8DBC-4A37-AFCE-73851FCFD0CA,703B03BF-51F9-4BEA-A388-126886494B96\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-27T16:59:52-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
From Elikapeka's viewpoint at the kitchen window, the final half-hour before Emma's party begins sees logistics resolved (tiki torches placed, chairs sourced by Jorge, Bobby Carpenter proving unexpectedly gifted at welcoming arrivals), the Hayes cousins immediately causing pool chaos upon arrival, Emma absorbing the day's accumulated negotiations and concessions before stepping outside to claim the afternoon on her own terms, and the first guest car arriving as Elikapeka, steadied by Susan's competent company and the sight of Andy at ease in the yard, sets down her cup and declares herself ready.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At Emma's pool party, Lizzie\u8212?ordinarily bookless and reluctant\u8212?is deliberately positioned by Hannah Eliot and introduced to Will Fontaine, a sun-blonde, blue-eyed boy whose presence triggers Lizzie's first-ever involuntary romantic awareness; their immediate, unguarded argument about Tom Bombadil and the Council of Elrond reveals a rare intellectual compatibility that dissolves her anxiety, leaving them mid-debate beside the pool, the prior version of Lizzie\u8212?defined by detachment and her book\u8212?quietly retired, and the nature of their connection still unresolved but clearly begun.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna Barnes\par
|
||||
Friend of Emma Hayes. Varsity cheerleader since sophomore year. Maintains a thorough mental catalog of every boy in their class and takes anything involving boys with focused, game-day intensity. Brisk and efficient when going through names. First person Emma called when building the boys list for her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot\par
|
||||
Peer of Emma Hayes, maintained by Emma as a frenemy for strategic reasons. Comes from significant money with its own social gravitational field; moves through high school social life accordingly. Emma finds her exhausting in the way overly confident people are exhausting. Unavoidable, like weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Daniel Park\par
|
||||
Quiet boy recommended by Mai Lin Wen for Emma's party guest list. Described by Mai Lin as extremely interesting and very good-looking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Harrison Webb\par
|
||||
A senior, suggested by Hannah Eliot for Emma's party guest list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan Carpenter\par
|
||||
Wife of Alex Carpenter and mother of Bobby Carpenter. Competent, decisive, and low on surplus motion; a trusted presence in the Hayes household.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle Hayes\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes's sister-in-law, arriving with the Hayes cousins Travis, Corey, and Derek for Emma's party. Warm and affectionate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
"She's like\u8212?" He gestured at the party generally, at Emma's orbit visible across the water. "A different person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She is a different person," Lizzie said. "We both are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded. "Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a crash in the pool behind them and Derek's voice emerged from the water and several people yelled and the music shifted to something louder and Will glanced at the pool and then back at her and said, with apparent genuine curiosity, "Hannah said Lord of the Rings. Like the books or the\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The books," Lizzie said, faster than she meant to. "The books are\u8212? the movies aren't out yet, so. The books."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Right." He nodded. He had the look, she realized, of someone who was actually going to continue this. "Okay, question then. Tom Bombadil. You think he should have gone to the Council of Elrond?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The question hit her so directly in the center of something she'd genuinely thought about that she lost, briefly, the thread of being nervous. "No," she said. "Because he wouldn't have taken the Ring seriously and they'd all have been standing around having an existential crisis while he was singing about the river." She paused. "But I think he should have sent a message. A message would have been appropriate."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will stared at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody says that," he said. "That's\u8212? nobody says the message thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's the obvious gap," Lizzie said, because it was, it absolutely was, Tolkien leaves it completely unaddressed, Bombadil simply does not engage with the council at all, there's no indication he even knows it's happening\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, but he pulls them out of Old Man Willow\u8212?" Will started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Which he only does because they happened to be in his territory\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"But that's\u8212? wait, so you think he's purely reactive?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I think he's the oldest thing in the world and he operates by completely different logic and I think Gandalf knew better than to invite him because the invitation itself would have required him to care\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The Hayes cousins crashed into the shallow end together and the wave came over the lip of the pool and ran cold across the deck and hit both their feet and Lizzie looked down at the water spreading over the sun-warmed concrete and Will laughed again and she looked up and the party was loud and bright around them and she thought, with one small, private part of her mind: she could close the book later.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Early evening, Friday, mid June, 2000. Emma's birthday.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Emma Hayes.\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes, wearing her almost too skimpy red sequined bikini, stood in front of a two tiered birthday cake while her thirty closest friends sang Happy Birthday. She was quite sure she was dead and had gone to heaven. Tears dripped down her lovely face. Someone took a flash photo and all she could see were the afterglow of the brilliant light. She blew out the candles and everyone applauded. Nothing could ever top this moment. Ever.\par
|
||||
Well, almost. She\u8217?d blown out the candles but not one of the boys had kissed her. She wanted to be kissed, but which boy should it be? There were so many possibilities. She would have to consider which one she would kiss good night, since none had stepped up and given her a kiss yet. Of course, her very protective father was right there, keeping an eye out. Perhaps that\u8217?s why none of the boys had done their duty and kissed her. She might have to be sneaky to get a proper kiss. Surely God could forgive one little kiss on her birthday!\par
|
||||
Someone handed her a knife and she cut the first piece, almost like she was a bride at a wedding, but then her mother took it from her hand. Elikapeka and Susan quickly formed a cake cutting team and it was only minutes later than everyone had a piece. The cake was awesome, chocolate with pink and white buttercream icing. It was so freaking great. It was all great. But she still wanted that kiss.\par
|
||||
Out of the corner of her eye she saw her sister with a cute boy she barely knew. What was his name? Oh, yeah, Will. She saw them talking, laughing, and her sister touched his hand. What the heck! Her sister was doing better in the boy department than she was! Her nerdy, bookish sister!\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep it sweet and sentimental.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The eighteenth green on the Pines was elevated slightly above the fairway, and Andy Hayes stood just off the fringe with Alex Carpenter and watched his daughter climb down into the bunker with the careful, deliberate movement of a person keeping something tightly leashed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd seen that walk before. Knew it the way he knew the particular sound an engine made when something was about to go wrong.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Rough lie?" Alex said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Plugged." Andy kept his eyes on her. "Ball went in soft sand on the steep face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex made a low sound that wasn't quite a wince. He understood bunkers. They both did.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby stood on the far side of the green, leaning on his wedge with his arms folded over the grip, two feet from a birdie putt he hadn't bothered to mark because there was nothing to discuss about it. He'd striped a seven-iron from a hundred and sixty-two yards into a two-mile-an-hour crosswind and put it exactly where he'd aimed it, and the ball had tracked to the hole and stopped close enough that a moderately talented twelve-year-old could have made the putt. Andy had seen it happen and had felt the small, involuntary contraction in his chest that a father feels when the outcome his child needs begins to slip away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That had been four minutes ago.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon had gone wrong in pieces, which was somehow worse than going wrong all at once. She'd played the front nine at two-under on the Palms \u8212? same as the morning \u8212? and stood one up at the turn, just as she'd predicted, the shoulder adjustment Bobby had given her at lunch paying dividends on the fourth and sixth holes where she'd taken two birdies and gone ahead by two, and Andy had watched her from the cart path and felt the clean uncomplicated pleasure of watching someone do something genuinely difficult and make it look like less than it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then the back nine.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The heat, mostly. Ninety-four degrees in direct sun on a course with no shade to speak of, and she'd sweated through her shirt by the eleventh and her swing had shortened again \u8212? he could see it happening, the way a clock runs slow in cold weather \u8212? and Bobby had birdied twelve and thirteen and the match had leveled. Then the sixteenth, which Andy would rather not have watched but had watched anyway, because that was the arrangement. You stood there. You watched all of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd pushed her drive right on sixteen and the ball had found the rough, not deep rough but wiry coastal rough that gripped the club like a hand, and she'd taken her medicine and laid up and then come up short with the approach and three-putted from forty feet, the last putt a straight two-footer that she'd pushed, and he'd heard the small hard sound she made through her nose when she missed it. Not a word. Just the sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Double bogey. One down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd birdied seventeen on pure aggression, a career drive and a nine-iron that came out of the sun and landed soft and the birdie putt from eighteen feet that she'd read and rolled perfectly, and she'd walked off that green all even again with everything still open and the whole day still salvageable and Andy had thought: there it is, that's my girl, because that was the part that was entirely hers, the thing he hadn't taught her and couldn't have, the capacity to absorb damage and come back through it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then the eighteenth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her iron had come off slightly \u8212? he knew it the moment she struck it, something in the shoulder, the heat doing its slow work \u8212? and it had faded left instead of drawing and found the bunker face, and the ball had buried. He'd watched it happen from the cart path and had said nothing and continued saying nothing because there was nothing to say, and Alex had stood beside him and also said nothing, which Andy appreciated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now she was in the sand with a lie that a touring professional would have been grateful just to advance to the green, and she needed to hole it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy crossed his arms and watched.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood over the ball for a long time. He could see her reading it, cataloging the ugly geometry of the situation \u8212? the steep face, the plugged lie, the distance to the hole, Bobby's ball sitting two feet away making the whole thing worse by its simple, cheerful proximity. She gripped the sand wedge and settled her feet and the set of her jaw was visible even from where he stood, that particular expression she'd had since she was nine years old and someone told her something couldn't be done.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd always loved that about her. It had also given him more gray hair than the job.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the club back and came through it hard, a full committed swing, the sand exploding out in a heavy wet sheet that caught the afternoon light and came apart in the air, and the ball jumped up out of the crater with the desperate trajectory of something that had been buried and was suddenly free.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
For one moment \u8212? one brief, irrational moment \u8212? Andy thought it might go in. The flight was high and the ball was tracking and Bobby, on the far side of the green, had straightened slightly, watching, the grin gone from his face for the first time all afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball landed four feet past the hole and ran.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It ran another two feet and stopped.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy breathed out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six feet, roughly. Slightly above the hole. A putt she made eight times out of ten in practice and six out of ten in competition and today, this afternoon, in ninety-four degrees after seventeen holes of emotional labor, the odds were whatever they were and he didn't want to calculate them.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She climbed out of the bunker and Alex said something under his breath that Andy didn't hear. Bobby stayed where he was, arms back over the wedge grip, and when she came up onto the green he took a step back and gave her the whole thing, the way you did. The grin was still absent. He was watching her the way Andy was watching her, with a different kind of attention than the match had required up to this point.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She marked her ball and cleaned it and replaced it and read the putt from both sides, and Andy watched her read it and knew from the set of her shoulders exactly when she'd decided on the line because that was how she'd always been, the decision arriving and then the doubt running in behind it, and what separated her from most golfers her age was that she didn't let the doubt change anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She set up and stroked it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball rolled true for four feet and then broke slightly \u8212? a half-inch, maybe less \u8212? and caught the right edge of the cup and spun out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six inches past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He heard her exhale. Heard it from where he was standing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't move immediately. She stood over the ball with the putter at her side and her head down, and Andy stayed exactly where he was and let her have it, the six seconds or ten seconds or whatever it needed to be, because you had to let it land fully before you could carry it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up the ball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She walked to Bobby, who had come forward now, his putter loose in one hand, the grin returning quietly to the corners of his mouth the way it would, the way you couldn't help. He put his hand out and she shook it \u8212? a real handshake, not a tap \u8212? and she said something to him that Andy couldn't hear and Bobby nodded once, serious, and that was the concession and the end of the match and the whole long day of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up her ball and dropped it into the water hazard alongside the green with a clean deliberate motion, no windup, just a short underhand toss, and the ball hit the surface and vanished, and she turned and walked off the green without looking at anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby watched her go. He shook his head once, the grin wider now but something else in it, something that wasn't mockery. He looked at Andy across the green and Andy met his eyes and Bobby said, "She had it the whole way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she did," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at Alex, who raised an eyebrow the small amount it needed to be raised, and they walked toward the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck on the way home she sat in the passenger seat with her bag stowed and her shoes changed and her jaw set in the same line it had been on the eighteenth green and Andy drove south on Federal Highway and let the silence be what it was. The air conditioning ran. The light was going amber in the west.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. The best in the world won fewer than one in four. She knew it the way she knew everything about the game \u8212? completely and without comfort, because it didn't help, not today, not ever on the day itself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. She looked out the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He let her fume.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,211 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The moment the car backed out of the driveway, Emma was moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't run\u8212?running was undignified\u8212?but she walked with a purpose that was very close to it, up the stairs and straight to her parents' bedroom, where the phone sat on her mother's nightstand like a reward for exactly this kind of patience. She settled herself against the headboard, pulled her mother's decorative pillow behind her back, and positioned the notepad on her knees with the pen uncapped. The morning light came through the curtains in long warm stripes. Outside, she could hear the sailboat knocking gently against the dock.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote BOYS at the top of the page and underlined it twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna first. Susanna Greer was a cheerleader and functionally omniscient about the male population of their school. If Susanna didn't like a boy, the boy ceased to exist as a viable option. This was simply how it worked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The phone rang twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hello?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's me. I need the definitive list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Of what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys, Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A pause. "For the party?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No, for my knitting circle. Yes, for the party. My mom said boys are allowed, which I did not see coming, so now I need to move fast before she changes her mind or adds some condition I haven't thought of yet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, okay." She could hear Susanna settling in on her end, which meant she was sitting down somewhere comfortable with the phone cord stretched to its limit, the way she always did when she was about to deliver information she considered important. "Okay. Jake Ferreira, obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote the name. "Obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Chris DeLuca."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He chews with his mouth open."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"At lunch. In a pool he'll be fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote Chris DeLuca and put a small question mark after it. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Matt Brouwer."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He asked Danielle out and then didn't show up."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was like six months ago."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a long memory. Next."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Next, Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna sighed. "Fine. Brandon Hicks."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Brandon is good." She wrote his name. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They went on like this for twenty minutes, Emma with her pen moving over the notepad, crossing out and adding and putting small notations next to certain names\u8212?things like *asks too many questions* or *fine if Danielle isn't there* or simply *no*. By the time she hung up, she had seven names that had survived the cross-examination. Seven boys. From one phone call. She looked at the list with genuine satisfaction. This was going to be the best birthday party she'd ever had, provided her mother didn't ruin it, which remained a live concern.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She dialed Mai Lin without consulting the notepad. She knew that number by heart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting by the phone, which was very Mai Lin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tell me everything," Mai Lin said, before Emma could speak.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom said yes to the party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She said yes to boys?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She said yes to boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The shriek on the other end of the phone was satisfying. Emma held the receiver a few inches from her ear and waited it out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," Emma said, when it was over. "I need your input on the list. I already talked to Susanna."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What did Susanna say about Tyler Kim?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She didn't bring up Tyler Kim."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's a no from me on Tyler Kim, then. He was staring at me all through third period last week and not in a good way. In a weird way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Agreed." Emma hadn't written Tyler Kim down anyway. "I have seven so far. I'm going to read them to you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma read the names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a silence after each one that communicated Mai Lin's processing. Then: "Cross off Chris DeLuca."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I had a question mark next to him anyway."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cross him off. He told Hannah he thought the two of us were basically the same person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stopped. "I'm sorry\u8212?what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He literally said we were interchangeable."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That is\u8212?" Emma searched for the appropriate word. "That is genuinely insulting to both of us."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Right?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We don't even look alike."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We're not even the same height."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma, I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying that is an extraordinarily stupid thing to say." She crossed off Chris DeLuca with enough pressure to leave an impression on the next page. "He's gone. Who do you want to add?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nate Oliveira," Mai Lin said. "He's very cute, and he was nice to me at the track meet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote the name. "Anyone else?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's it from me. I want it to be an exclusive list. Not every boy in the junior class."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously not every boy in the junior class. I'm not running a charity event."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Some people invite everyone."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not some people."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's why I like you," Mai Lin said, and Emma could hear her smiling. "Am I sleeping over after?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Of course you're sleeping over after."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good. I'll need to decompress."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma laughed, which was real, because Mai Lin genuinely made her laugh. She said goodbye and moved down her mental list of people to call.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Prescott was next, and this was the call Emma approached the way one approaches a necessary dental appointment\u8212?something to get through, efficiently, and not dwell on. Hannah came from money and was popular with the boys in a way that Emma found slightly suspicious, which was to say that Hannah was obviously aware of this popularity and deployed it deliberately. Emma didn't dislike her, exactly. She simply had no illusions about her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma, hi! I heard about the party, this is going to be so fun\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Who should I invite? Boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A brief pause as Hannah recalibrated from enthusiasm to usefulness. "Okay. Marcus Webb."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it. "Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Definitely Corey\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Last name."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Corey Janssen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it. "Good. Anyone else you're thinking about?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about Ryan?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Which Ryan?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ryan from the swim team."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ryan from the swim team has a girlfriend."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They broke up."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma paused. "When?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Like two weeks ago."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote *Ryan\u8212?swim team\u8212?confirm* with a small circle around it. "I'll look into it. Thanks, Hannah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my gosh, of course, I'm so excited\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll call you later." Emma hung up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She worked through the rest of her list of girls, methodically, a conversation here and a conversation there, the names accumulating on the notepad in her lap. Some boys she added. Some she declined before they were fully nominated. One she wrote down and then stared at for a long moment before drawing a slow, deliberate line through his name, for reasons she didn't articulate out loud because she was alone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Finally, she sat back against the headboard and counted.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys, all thoroughly vetted, all approved by at least two people she trusted to have opinions worth consulting. It was a good list. It was an excellent list. She looked at it with the satisfaction of a general surveying a well-positioned army.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then she thought about Devin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And Tyler.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And the others.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother's voice came back to her with pristine clarity: *Every last one of them.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Twenty-five guests total. Which meant ten girls, herself included\u8212?and she'd already been composing that list in her head separately, so she knew exactly who those ten were. It was tight. It was exactly right. Twenty-five people was a party. Twenty-six was a crowd. Twenty-seven was chaos.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She counted her cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There were three boy cousins who would plausibly be invited by her mother's standard of *every last one of them*. Devin, who was fine, she supposed, in the way that a piece of furniture is fine. Tyler, who Lizzie apparently thought she knew, which was hilarious and also somehow annoying. And Marcus, who was fourteen and had gone through a phase last summer of doing cannonballs directly next to whoever was floating quietly in the pool, which was not something Emma was prepared to tolerate at her own birthday party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three boys who would have to come off this list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at her fifteen names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at them for a long moment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she said something under her breath that she would not have said in front of her mother, picked up the phone again, and started to think very carefully about which argument would work.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the fairness argument. Her mother was impervious to fairness arguments.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the numbers argument. Her mother would simply raise the cap, or suggest she invite fewer girls.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
No. She needed something her mother couldn't easily dismiss. Something that reframed the question. She didn't have it yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote *cousins don't count\u8212?separate category* on the corner of the notepad and starred it three times.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd figure it out. She had time.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 At Emma's pool party, Lizzie\u8212?ordinarily bookless and reluctant\u8212?is deliberately positioned by Hannah Eliot and introduced to Will Fontaine, a sun-blonde, blue-eyed boy whose presence triggers Lizzie's first-ever involuntary romantic awareness; their immediate, unguarded argument about Tom Bombadil and the Council of Elrond reveals a rare intellectual compatibility that dissolves her anxiety, leaving them mid-debate beside the pool, the prior version of Lizzie\u8212?defined by detachment and her book\u8212?quietly retired, and the nature of their connection still unresolved but clearly begun.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,120 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 9\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268,F3A0BCE3-9F1F-4EB2-9490-F185AF944E53,EC970280-C7C1-4B26-B531-4D083A6626FB,DE370E46-CBAB-4C99-9D5F-45FF0AA2FAEE,CA099051-6C98-4DFF-BCFF-86B96AC3B704,E3BCC7D7-8DBC-4A37-AFCE-73851FCFD0CA,703B03BF-51F9-4BEA-A388-126886494B96\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-27T16:45:33-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
Hayes cousins (boys) \u8212? three boy cousins on the Hayes side who are close to Emma's age\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
From Elikapeka's viewpoint at the kitchen window, the final half-hour before Emma's party begins sees logistics resolved (tiki torches placed, chairs sourced by Jorge, Bobby Carpenter proving unexpectedly gifted at welcoming arrivals), the Hayes cousins immediately causing pool chaos upon arrival, Emma absorbing the day's accumulated negotiations and concessions before stepping outside to claim the afternoon on her own terms, and the first guest car arriving as Elikapeka, steadied by Susan's competent company and the sight of Andy at ease in the yard, sets down her cup and declares herself ready.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna Barnes\par
|
||||
Friend of Emma Hayes. Varsity cheerleader since sophomore year. Maintains a thorough mental catalog of every boy in their class and takes anything involving boys with focused, game-day intensity. Brisk and efficient when going through names. First person Emma called when building the boys list for her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot\par
|
||||
Peer of Emma Hayes, maintained by Emma as a frenemy for strategic reasons. Comes from significant money with its own social gravitational field; moves through high school social life accordingly. Emma finds her exhausting in the way overly confident people are exhausting. Unavoidable, like weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Daniel Park\par
|
||||
Quiet boy recommended by Mai Lin Wen for Emma's party guest list. Described by Mai Lin as extremely interesting and very good-looking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Harrison Webb\par
|
||||
A senior, suggested by Hannah Eliot for Emma's party guest list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan Carpenter\par
|
||||
Wife of Alex Carpenter and mother of Bobby Carpenter. Competent, decisive, and low on surplus motion; a trusted presence in the Hayes household.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle Hayes\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes's sister-in-law, arriving with the Hayes cousins Travis, Corey, and Derek for Emma's party. Warm and affectionate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
Susan appeared beside her at the window with two fresh cups of coffee. Elikapeka accepted hers and they stood together watching Derek surface, still holding the football, raising it above his head like he'd recovered something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's good with the door," Susan said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mm."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good at\u8212?" Susan paused, searching for the precise version. "He knows how to make people feel they're expected."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka thought about that. It was true. She'd watched him in the front hall, just briefly, the slight forward attention he gave to whoever came in, not performative, just present. It was a quality you didn't teach. "Ella does not have that quality," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan smiled into her coffee. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had gotten the football now and was standing at the edge of the pool and Corey was in the water and Travis threw it directly at his face from four feet away and Corey caught it and pulled Travis in by the wrist in a single fluid movement and there was a crash of water and Emma made a sound at the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're going to break something," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Probably," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go, mija. Go outside. Your party is starting."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her with the particular look she had, the one that held several things at once: the residue of negotiations, the awareness of concessions made and not made, the birthday, the day, the afternoon light. Then she crossed the kitchen and went out the back slider and Mai Lin followed her, and Elikapeka heard Emma's voice shift the moment the door opened, warmer, louder, already calling out to the cousins, already entering the afternoon on her own terms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music moved across the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle wandered into the kitchen looking for a glass and Elikapeka found her one and poured her the last of the old coffee, which she took without complaint. Outside, Andy had stepped off the boat onto the dock and was crossing the yard toward the pool, beer still in hand, and he had the look he got when things were going well, that particular ease, the long unhurried movement of a man who felt himself to be in the right place.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six kids.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She could already hear the first car pulling into the driveway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan put down her clipboard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready?" Susan said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took a breath, looked at the plumeria on the windowsill, its single open flower going gold in the afternoon light, and set down the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
Early evening, Friday, mid June, 2000. Emma's birthday.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\par
|
||||
If it had been up to Lizzie, she\u8217?d have stayed in her room and read books, but it wasn\u8217?t up to her and now she stood on the pool deck in the chaos of Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen party as the party goers began to arrive. Her sister was in the middle of it, greeting and being greeted as if she was queen of the world, and perhaps on this night it was true. The sexes weren\u8217?t really mixing yet, as the boys were mostly in the pool and the girls were mostly on the patio, surrounding Emma.\par
|
||||
And then Lizzie saw him. The coolest boy she\u8217?d ever seen, wearing swim trunks and talking with Bobby, Ella\u8217?s golfing buddy. The boy was blonde, muscular, and compact, not so tall as Bobby. He was tan and fit and blue eyed. He was a god, she was sure he was a god. She\u8217?d not once looked at a boy with desire but now she did. It was completely disconcerting.\par
|
||||
Suddenly, someone grabbed her arm. It was Emma\u8217?s friend Hannah, who was pretty, stylish, and very slightly chubby and who wore a one piece swimsuit that had jewels on it and must have cost a fortune. She felt herself being dragged along right towards the boy she\u8217?d spotted. Hannah called out his name, Will Fontaine. He looked right at her. And before she could react, Hannah was telling him that Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings, too. And Lizzie felt Hannah let go and leave, and she was left tongue tied, desperately trying to think of something to say to Will.\par
|
||||
By whatever magic existed in the universe, Will had her mesmerized as they discussed how Tom Bombadil rescued the hobbits from Old Man Willow.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep it chaotic and fun.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The eighteenth green on the Pines was elevated slightly above the fairway, and Andy Hayes stood just off the fringe with Alex Carpenter and watched his daughter climb down into the bunker with the careful, deliberate movement of a person keeping something tightly leashed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd seen that walk before. Knew it the way he knew the particular sound an engine made when something was about to go wrong.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Rough lie?" Alex said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Plugged." Andy kept his eyes on her. "Ball went in soft sand on the steep face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex made a low sound that wasn't quite a wince. He understood bunkers. They both did.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby stood on the far side of the green, leaning on his wedge with his arms folded over the grip, two feet from a birdie putt he hadn't bothered to mark because there was nothing to discuss about it. He'd striped a seven-iron from a hundred and sixty-two yards into a two-mile-an-hour crosswind and put it exactly where he'd aimed it, and the ball had tracked to the hole and stopped close enough that a moderately talented four-year-old could have made the putt. Andy had seen it happen and had felt the small, involuntary contraction in his chest that a father feels when the outcome his child needs begins to slip away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That had been four minutes ago.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon had gone wrong in pieces, which was somehow worse than going wrong all at once. She'd played the front nine at two-under on the Palms \u8212? same as the morning \u8212? and stood one up at the turn, just as she'd predicted, the shoulder adjustment Bobby had given her at lunch paying dividends on the fourth and sixth holes where she'd taken two birdies and gone ahead by two, and Andy had watched her from the cart path and felt the clean uncomplicated pleasure of watching someone do something genuinely difficult and make it look like less than it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then the back nine.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The heat, mostly. Ninety-four degrees in direct sun on a course with no shade to speak of, and she'd sweated through her shirt by the eleventh and her swing had shortened again \u8212? he could see it happening, the way a clock runs slow in cold weather \u8212? and Bobby had birdied twelve and thirteen and the match had leveled. Then the sixteenth, which Andy would rather not have watched but had watched anyway, because that was the arrangement. You stood there. You watched all of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd pushed her drive right on sixteen and the ball had found the rough, not deep rough but wiry coastal rough that gripped the club like a hand, and she'd taken her medicine and laid up and then come up short with the approach and three-putted from forty feet, the last putt a straight two-footer that she'd pushed, and he'd heard the small hard sound she made through her nose when she missed it. Not a word. Just the sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Double bogey. One down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd birdied seventeen on pure aggression, a career drive and a nine-iron that came out of the sun and landed soft and the birdie putt from eighteen feet that she'd read and rolled perfectly, and she'd walked off that green all even again with everything still open and the whole day still salvageable and Andy had thought: there it is, that's my girl, because that was the part that was entirely hers, the thing he hadn't taught her and couldn't have, the capacity to absorb damage and come back through it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then the eighteenth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her iron had come off slightly \u8212? he knew it the moment she struck it, something in the shoulder, the heat doing its slow work \u8212? and it had faded right instead of drawing and found the bunker face, and the ball had buried. He'd watched it happen from the cart path and had said nothing and continued saying nothing because there was nothing to say, and Alex had stood beside him and also said nothing, which Andy appreciated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now she was in the sand with a lie that a touring professional would have been grateful just to get on the green, and she needed to hole it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy crossed his arms and watched.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood over the ball for a long time. He could see her reading it, cataloging the ugly geometry of the situation \u8212? the steep face, the plugged lie, the distance to the hole, Bobby's ball sitting two feet away making the whole thing worse by its simple, cheerful proximity. She gripped the sand wedge and settled her feet and the set of her jaw was visible even from where he stood, that particular expression she'd had since she was nine years old and someone told her something couldn't be done.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd always loved that about her. It had also given him more gray hair than the job.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the club back and came through it hard, a full committed swing, the sand exploding out in a heavy wet sheet that caught the afternoon light and came apart in the air, and the ball jumped up out of the crater with the desperate trajectory of something that had been buried and was suddenly free.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
For one moment \u8212? one brief, irrational moment \u8212? Andy thought it might go in. The flight was high and the ball was tracking and Bobby, on the far side of the green, had straightened slightly, watching, the grin gone from his face for the first time all afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball landed four feet past the hole and ran.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It ran another two feet and stopped.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy breathed out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six feet, roughly. Slightly above the hole. A putt she made eight times out of ten in practice and six out of ten in competition and today, this afternoon, in ninety-four degrees after seventeen holes of emotional labor, the odds were whatever they were and he didn't want to calculate them.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She climbed out of the bunker and Alex said something under his breath that Andy didn't hear. Bobby stayed where he was, arms back over the wedge grip, and when she came up onto the green he took a step back and gave her the whole thing, the way you did. The grin was still absent. He was watching her the way Andy was watching her, with a different kind of attention than the match had required up to this point.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She marked her ball and cleaned it and replaced it and read the putt from both sides, and Andy watched her read it and knew from the set of her shoulders exactly when she'd decided on the line because that was how she'd always been, the decision arriving and then the doubt running in behind it, and what separated her from most golfers her age was that she didn't let the doubt change anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She set up and stroked it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball rolled true for four feet and then broke slightly \u8212? a half-inch, maybe less \u8212? and caught the right edge of the cup and spun out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Six inches past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He heard her exhale. Heard it from where he was standing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't move immediately. She stood over the ball with the putter at her side and her head down, and Andy stayed exactly where he was and let her have it, the six seconds or ten seconds or whatever it needed to be, because you had to let it land fully before you could carry it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up the ball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She walked to Bobby, who had come forward now, his putter loose in one hand, the grin returning quietly to the corners of his mouth the way it would, the way you couldn't help. He put his hand out and she shook it \u8212? a real handshake, not a tap \u8212? and she said something to him that Andy couldn't hear and Bobby nodded once, serious, and that was the concession and the end of the match and the whole long day of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she picked up her ball and dropped it into the water hazard alongside the green with a clean deliberate motion, no windup, just a short underhand toss, and the ball hit the surface and vanished, and she turned and walked off the green without looking at anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby watched her go. He shook his head once, the grin wider now but something else in it, something that wasn't mockery. He looked at Andy across the green and Andy met his eyes and Bobby said, "She had it the whole way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she did," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at Alex, who raised an eyebrow the small amount it needed to be raised, and they walked toward the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck on the way home she sat in the passenger seat with her bag stowed and her shoes changed and her jaw set in the same line it had been on the eighteenth green and Andy drove south on Federal Highway and let the silence be what it was. The air conditioning ran. The light was going amber in the west.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. The best in the world won fewer than one in four. She knew it the way she knew everything about the game \u8212? completely and without comfort, because it didn't help, not today, not ever on the day itself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. She looked out the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He let her fume.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,10 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 The first scene of the book is told in third person from the viewpoint of Ella Hayes. It is the first weekend after the end of Ella\'92s junior year in high school. She\'92s a skilled golfer and has been taught to play from a very young age by her father. It\'92s Saturday, and like most Saturdays, she\'92s planning to play 36 holes of golf with her father. On this Saturday, they will be joined by a father who teaches his son in the same way that Andy teaches Ella. Ella and the boy, Bobby, are on their high school golf team, both are the best golfers on the team. There is no romantic interest between Ella and the boy; they are friends but their relationship is mostly just a shared interest in golf.\
|
||||
It\'92s early on Saturday morning, more than an hour before their tee time, and Ella is anxious to get to the course. They have the first tee time at 7:24AM, as both Ella and her friend Bobby like to play fast, and the best way to play fast is to be first on the course, dew sweepers, they are often called. Her father is dawdling over a second cup of coffee. Ella likes a long warmup, whereas her father usually hits a few wedges and a few drives and is good to go. There is always tension between her and her father to get him going.\
|
||||
The other daughters aren\'92t even up yet and Ella has finished her breakfast that her mother prepared and is ready to go. She dearly loves her father but wants him to get off his butt and go to the course RIGHT NOW!\
|
||||
At last they leave the house, their clubs in the back of Andy\'92s old pickup truck. They arrive at Pompano Beach Golf club and she finds her friend Bobby already having paid and waiting for her inside. She pays for herself and her father with his credit card. They exchange some snarky comments and then proceed to the range to warm up.}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Elikapeka Hayes.\par
|
||||
The two younger girls Emma and Lizzie are at the breakfast table and the discussion turns to Emma\u8217?s upcoming sweet sixteen birthday party. Emma is a social butterfly with dozens of friends and she\u8217?ll have to whittle down the list, as she wants an evening pool party in the backyard. And, she says, she wants to invite boys for the first time. Lizzie makes a snarky remark about stinky boys as she\u8217?s shown little interest in them so far. Emma gives her sister the stink eye.\par
|
||||
Elikapeka wants a list of the boys Emma wants to invite so she can check them out and reject any that aren\u8217?t suitable. Emma rolls her eyes and says she\u8217?ll give her mother a list but she insists that her mother \u8220?not be racist,\u8221? knowing that her mother will not be allowing any black or hispanic boys to come to the party. Emma had heard from her mother since she was little that the only suitable boys for her girls would be white or Hawaiian or perhaps Asian. Emma continues that she wants to limit which of her cousins can come to the party, complaining that some of them are just no fun at all. Elikapeka tells Emma that all of them will be invited and Emma shouldn\u8217?t push her luck or there would be no party at all.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 At the Lighthouse Point library, Lizzie discovers and is denied *Stardust* by Neil Gaiman\u8212?her mother ruling it "not right yet" and invoking the implicit threat of a book-ban\u8212?so Lizzie retreats to three familiar McCaffrey novels she wins back through a measured standoff with Elikapeka; afterward at the grocery store Lizzie completes the dry-goods errand at near-running speed to get home to read, and the outing closes with Elikapeka softening slightly by suggesting Gaiman may be permitted "in a year," while Lizzie silently files the author's name as something to return to, establishing a deferred want and the precise texture of her mother's authority over her reading life.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,95 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Mai Lin had decided, sometime around the first plate of cake, that this was the best party she had been to in her entire life.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was sitting on the coping with her legs dangling in the water, the warm June air settling around the yard like something living, and she was wearing the white string bikini that she had purchased specifically for this summer and specifically for situations like this one. She had spent twenty minutes on her eye makeup. She knew exactly what she looked like. She was having no guilt about this whatsoever.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You did that on purpose," Tyler Marsh said from the water below her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Mai Lin said, and used both feet simultaneously to drive a wall of water directly into his face.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The boy sputtered. He wiped his face with both hands. He looked up at her with that expression boys got when they were trying to decide whether to be annoyed or charmed and she could see the exact moment charmed won, which was deeply satisfying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," Tyler said. "Okay, you want to do this."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just sitting here," she said innocently, and kicked another small splash at him for emphasis.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She did not have time to read his intention before his hands closed around her ankles, and then she was in the water, fully submerged, the world gone quiet and blue and glittering for one suspended second before she came up laughing so hard she could barely breathe. She got her bearings, got a mouthful of pool water, turned to find him grinning at her from two feet away, and spat it directly into his face.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The look on his face was extraordinary. Pure shock. His mouth opened.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shrieked with laughter and shoved off from the wall, putting distance between them while he recovered, and she was already among three other boys in the shallow end before he got the water out of his eyes. She could hear him laughing behind her. One of the other boys\u8212?Harrison Webb, she thought, the senior Hannah had brought\u8212?made a lunge for her and she ducked under and came up on the other side and grabbed the pool edge.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's fast," Harrison announced to no one in particular.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's dangerous," Tyler said from across the pool, and there was something in the way he said it that made her absolutely delighted.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pulled herself up to sitting on the coping again and pushed her wet hair back from her face. Her red lipstick was probably doing interesting things at this point but she didn't especially care. The yard was full and loud and lovely. Strings of lights were on along the fence and the tiki torches were still burning, their orange light doubling itself in the dark water of the canal beyond the yard. The music from the patio was audible between the noise\u8212?something fast, something good\u8212?and she could see two or three couples doing an approximation of dancing near the back door, supervised at a comfortable distance by Emma's parents and Mrs. Carpenter, who had that look adults get at parties like this, vaguely watchful but basically content.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then Emma appeared at the deep end.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin watched her best friend surface like a seal behind Tyler Marsh, grab his shoulders with both hands, and attempt something that was clearly intended as a dunking and became, through some chain of physics and enthusiasm, Emma sitting on the boy's shoulders with her arms up in triumph.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The yard exploded.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Within thirty seconds it had gone completely wrong in the best possible way. Or right. It was hard to say. Some other girl climbed onto some other boy's shoulders, and then another, and then a cousin\u8212?one of the three wild Hayes boys who had arrived earlier and immediately treated the pool like a personal obstacle course\u8212?was yelling something from the shallow end and the shallow end was suddenly a chaotic knot of boys and girls trying to either maintain or destroy the arrangement of humans stacked on top of other humans.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin watched this for about four seconds.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she looked around, found one of Emma's cousins\u8212?Corey, or possibly Travis, she'd been introduced at speed\u8212?standing at pool's edge looking enthusiastic and available, and said, "Hey. You. I need your shoulders."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The boy looked at her. He was maybe fifteen and was having the time of his life. "Yes," he said immediately.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She slid back into the pool. He bent at the knees and she climbed on and he stood and she was up, absurdly high, grabbing at his head for balance while he grabbed her ankles to steady her, and he was already wading toward the deep end before she had fully located her center of gravity.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma!" she yelled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned on Tyler's shoulders, wobbling magnificently. Her face was soaked and she had a leaf of something in her hair and she was grinning with every single tooth she owned.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"MAI LIN," Emma screamed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"YOUR COUSIN IS GOING TO DUNK YOU," Mai Lin announced, because she believed in transparency, and then Corey-or-Travis surged forward and the collision was wonderful and terrible and loud, a full-yard tangle of shrieks and splashing and someone's elbow and then everything went underwater again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She came up for the second time to find herself in approximately the center of the pool, surrounded by the floating aftermath of the collision\u8212?three or four boys, two girls, Emma. Emma was treading water six feet away, still laughing, her birthday hair a complete wreck, and she looked at Mai Lin with an expression of pure unhinged joy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Second piece of cake after this," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously," Mai Lin said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They swam to the wall.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She climbed out and accepted a towel from someone\u8212?she was never entirely sure who, things were moving fast\u8212?and found herself standing near the patio, dripping, wringing out her hair, while Tyler Marsh climbed out of the pool a few feet away and shook himself like a dog, which sprayed her again, which made her laugh again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're relentless," she told him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I learned it from someone," he said, and handed her a second towel, which was extremely gentlemanly of her. She took it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had a general theory about boys that she had developed over approximately two years of careful observation: the ones worth spending time on were the ones who handed you towels after dunking you. This was probably not a universal rule but it was her rule.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was mid-examination of this theory, and also mid-examination of Tyler Marsh, when she caught something at the edge of her peripheral vision and looked over.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie Hayes was standing at the far edge of the pool deck, at the quiet end near the fence, with the blonde boy Hannah had brought. Will something. She hadn't paid much attention to him when he arrived\u8212?he was cute but Hannah had claimed him in that territorial way Hannah had\u8212?but now he was completely absorbed in talking to Emma's little sister, and Emma's little sister was completely absorbed in talking back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin paused.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew Lizzie. You couldn't be Emma's best friend for three years without knowing Emma's sister. Lizzie was the one with the books. Lizzie was the one who showed up to things with that gentle apologetic expression that meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*. Lizzie was extremely pretty in a way she didn't seem to fully understand yet and extremely smart in a way she understood completely but tried not to flaunt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was not usually standing close to boys, talking fast, using her hands.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But she was doing that now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was doing that right now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin watched Lizzie shake her head at something the boy said, very definite, very certain, and say something back that made him look like she'd surprised him in the best possible way, and she thought: *oh, interesting.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She filed this away. It was clearly something, and the something of it was clearly just beginning, and she thought Emma probably needed to know about it, and then she remembered the expression on Emma's face earlier\u8212?that wide, wondering, full-warmth smile\u8212?and realized Emma had already seen it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That was good. That was Emma being a good sister. Emma was good at that.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned back to Tyler, who was looking at her in the way that boys looked at her when they were trying to figure out what she was thinking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"More cake?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I could eat," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Come on then," she said, and they went toward the table in the warm evening light, the pool behind them still glittering with chaos, the music from the patio threading through everything, and somewhere across the yard Lizzie Hayes was still talking to a boy named Will as if they were the only two people at the party, which Mai Lin thought was maybe exactly what they were.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 From her vantage point at Emma's birthday pool party, Mai Lin flirts with and is dunked by Tyler Marsh (who earns approval by handing her a towel), participates in a chaotic chicken-fight collision engineered with Emma, and observes from across the yard that Lizzie Hayes is in an absorbed, animated, apparently mutual conversation with Hannah's date Will\u8212?a development Mai Lin notes is already on Emma's radar and files away as something clearly just beginning.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The breakfast dishes were still on the table when Elikapeka Hayes poured herself a second cup of coffee and settled into the chair at the head of the table. Through the sliding glass doors she could see the backyard, the pool catching the late May morning light, the canal beyond it glittering, and the tall white mast of Frank Bellardi's sailboat swaying gently at the dock. Andy and her mother had been gone just over an hour. She had the morning ahead of her, quiet except for her daughters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was working through a bowl of cereal with the focused efficiency she applied to anything she considered a preliminary to something more interesting. Lizzie had barely touched her toast and was reading a paperback she'd propped against the orange juice glass, something with a dragon on the cover.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll ruin your eyes doing that," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that every morning," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"One morning I'll be right."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma set her spoon down. "Mom. Can we talk about my birthday party?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at her over the rim of her cup. Emma was fifteen, and would be sixteen in July, and there were mornings when Elikapeka looked at her second daughter and felt something almost like vertigo \u8212? the girl was so thoroughly, effortlessly herself, so completely certain of her own orbit. She had Andy's easy confidence and none of his self-doubt, and she had Elikapeka's stubbornness without the patience that usually accompanied it. A complicated gift.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about it," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Pool party. Evening. Backyard. I'm thinking the second Saturday in July, so it's actually close to my birthday for once."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That could work."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And I want it to be a real party. Not just a family thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can have your friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know, but that's the thing." Emma pulled her knees up onto the chair in a way that Elikapeka had been asking her not to do since she was eight. "I have a lot of friends, Mom. I'm going to have to cut the list down. There are people who are going to be upset if they don't get invited and I need to think about it strategically."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie turned a page without comment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How many are you thinking?" Elikapeka asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Maybe forty. Forty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For a backyard pool party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The backyard is big."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Forty-five children in my backyard at night is not a party, Emma, it's a liability."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're not children. And I was thinking more like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty," Elikapeka said. "Twenty-five at the absolute outside."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma made a face that communicated the full tragedy of this constraint. "Okay, I can work with twenty-five. But there's something else." She paused, and Elikapeka recognized the pause \u8212? it was the same pause Emma had used at age six when she wanted a second dessert, the brief moment of gauging whether the ground was firm enough to stand on. "I want to invite boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked up from her book for the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm turning sixteen, Mom. Not twelve."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You made a face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm allowed to make a face in my own kitchen." Elikapeka set her cup down and folded her hands on the table. "You can invite boys. Within reason."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously within reason." Emma's tone carried the faint implication that her mother's concept of reason was narrower than the average person's. "So I'll put together a list for you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll need the names, yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just\u8212?" Emma pointed at her. "Just look at the list and trust me a little. Don't go being racist about it, okay?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The word landed in the room with a particular weight. Lizzie's eyes moved from her sister to her mother and back to her sister, and then, wisely, returned to her book.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka kept her expression level. "Excuse me?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying. You have opinions about who I'm allowed to be friends with. Or who counts as appropriate." Emma put small sarcastic emphasis on the last word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have opinions about who comes into my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know what your opinions are. I've known since I was little. And I'm just asking you to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're asking me not to be a racist," Elikapeka said. "That is what you just said to me, in my kitchen, about my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had the grace not to smirk, but she met her mother's eyes without flinching. "I didn't say you were a racist. I said don't be racist about the list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was quiet for a moment. She was not going to have this argument in full \u8212? not now, not with Lizzie sitting three feet away pretending to read about dragons. There were things she believed that she had never dressed up in pretty language, and she wasn't going to start doing it because her fifteen-year-old daughter had learned the vocabulary of a challenge. She would look at the list. She would make her decisions. The decisions themselves were not going to change.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Give me the list," she said. "I'll tell you who's welcome."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma opened her mouth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's not a negotiation, Emma. You asked for a party, I'm giving you a party. You want to invite boys, I'm allowing boys. You give me the list, I look at the list, and that is how it works in this house." She picked up her coffee cup again. "Next item."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma sat back, not quite defeated, recalibrating. Elikapeka knew that look too. It meant the subject was being filed away for a later attempt, not abandoned.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cousins," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't want to invite all of them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie's mouth curved very slightly at the corner of her page.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're your family," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're your family," Emma said, then immediately adjusted: "I mean \u8212? they're family, yes, I know. But Malia and Koa are fine and Auntie Lena's kids are fine but if I have to invite the Pahoa cousins then I'd honestly rather not have a party at all, because Devin is going to spend the entire night complaining about the music and Tyler is going to eat everything and not talk to anyone and\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tyler is twelve," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Exactly."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's twelve and you want to exclude him from your birthday party so you can have a more sophisticated evening with your forty friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty-five friends. You said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yes." Emma pressed forward, undeterred. "Is it wrong to want my own birthday party to be fun? I see these cousins at every single family thing. At Christmas, at Easter, at Grandma's \u8212? can I have one thing that's just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma blinked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They'll all be invited. Every last one of them. Devin, Tyler, all of them. And you will be gracious about it or there won't be a party." Elikapeka said it the way she said most things she was certain about \u8212? without heat, without performance, simply as the shape of reality. "Don't push me on this, Emma. I have given you a lot of ground this morning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"An evening pool party with boys for your sixteenth birthday," Elikapeka said. "In this backyard. When I was your age, do you know what I got for my sixteenth birthday?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie chose this moment to set her paperback down and observe, with the mild, studied disinterest of someone who had clearly been following every word: "I don't know why you'd even want boys at a pool party. They smell like the inside of a gym locker."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned the full weight of her attention on her younger sister. The look was slow, deliberate, the kind that communicated a detailed opinion about the immaturity of the person receiving it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She rose and carried her cup to the sink, looking out through the window over the water. The morning was already warm and would be hot by noon, and Frank Bellardi's sailboat rocked in its gentle patient way against the dock, going nowhere.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." Elikapeka turned back from the window and smiled at her, the full warm smile that she knew her daughter found difficult to stay annoyed at. "It's going to be a beautiful party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 In the library, Lizzie discovers and is refused Neil Gaiman's *Stardust* by Elikapeka on grounds of content maturity, settles for familiar McCaffrey titles she has already read, and during the subsequent grocery trip shares with her mother an unprompted declaration that she intends to write fantasy novels herself, which Elikapeka affirms without qualification, leaving the book refusal unresolved but the mother-daughter dynamic briefly and genuinely close.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,135 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The dishes were still being rinsed when Emma announced she had things to do and disappeared upstairs, her revised list tucked under her arm. Lizzie watched her go, then carried her own bowl to the sink.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Library this morning?" her mother asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Please."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was already looking at her with that particular expression she wore when she'd decided something and was waiting for the other person to catch up. "Grocery store after. I need to get ahead of the week."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay." Lizzie dried her hands on the dish towel. "I'll get my bag."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, called down from the top of the stairs, declined both invitations in a single syllable. Lizzie had not expected otherwise. Emma's relationship with the library was cordial but distant, the relationship of someone who respected an institution without requiring anything from it personally.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The Lighthouse Point library was small and smelled the way all libraries smelled, which was to say it smelled like the best possible version of being indoors. Lizzie walked in ahead of her mother and felt, as she always did, some internal mechanism ease open. She went straight to the stacks without needing to think about where her feet were going.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She found it by accident, really. She'd been moving along the F-G shelf, not looking for anything specific, when the cover stopped her. It was a painting, pale and strange and old-fashioned, a young man and a young woman against a sky that had the quality of a dream half-remembered. *Stardust*, it said. *Neil Gaiman*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't know the name. She turned the book over and read the back, and then she read it again, more slowly, and then she walked back to her mother, who was examining a display of new arrivals near the door with the focused, skeptical attention she brought to most things.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom. Look at this one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took the book and read the back. She opened it somewhere in the middle and read for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then she turned to the front matter, and then to a page somewhere in the first chapter, and Lizzie watched her mother's face and tried to interpret what she saw there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," her mother said, and handed it back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie took the book and looked at it again, as though it might have changed. "Why not?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not right for you yet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm fourteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know how old you are." Her mother's voice was pleasant and entirely final. She was already looking back at the display table. "Put it back and find something else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"But I read the back and it sounds\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie." Her mother looked at her, and the look was not unkind, which somehow made it harder. "I've said no. Let's not make this into something."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie knew the weight of those words. She knew what the something could become, and she knew that the something could become, if it grew large enough, a week without new books, which was a punishment so precisely calibrated to her specific architecture that it still struck her, every time her mother deployed the possibility of it, as almost admirable. She turned and walked back to the stacks.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood in front of the F-G shelf for a moment, the rejected book in her hand, looking at it. Then she reshelved it carefully, spine out, exactly as she'd found it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went to the S shelf and found *Dragonflight*. The library's copy was older than her own, the cover different, a dragon curving against an orange sky. She stood there running her thumb along the edge of the pages, feeling the familiar texture of something she had read\u8212?she counted, roughly\u8212?seven times. The way Lessa moved through the world. The way F'lar didn't understand her at first and then did. The Weyrs. Thread falling silver and deadly through the cold air. She already knew what happened on every page and she was already, faintly, beginning to feel better.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She collected *Dragonflight* and then *Dragonquest* and then *The White Dragon*, tucked them against her chest, and carried them back to her mother.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at the stack without expression, then picked up each book and looked at the cover, which Lizzie had always found slightly puzzling since the covers told you nothing useful, and then set them aside.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've read these," her mother said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Several times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother waited, which was a thing her mother did that Emma had never learned to withstand and that Lizzie had developed a partial immunity to. The silence sat between them and Lizzie looked at the middle distance and said nothing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It seems like it might be a good opportunity," her mother said, "to find something you haven't read before."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I tried to." Lizzie kept her voice even and respectful, which was the right register for this kind of thing. "You didn't want me to read it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at her. Lizzie looked back. Something passed between them that was not quite amusement and not quite exasperation, and belonged, she thought, to both of them equally.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fair enough," her mother said, and picked up the three McCaffrey novels and handed them back. "These are fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The grocery store was bright and cold the way grocery stores always were in Florida, air conditioning cranked against the June heat building outside. Elikapeka took a cart and unfolded her list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"All right." She scanned it. "I need to go slowly in produce. You could do the dry goods if you want."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was already looking at the list. She knew the store well enough that she could map it in her head\u8212?the aisles, the shelves, the approximate location of every category her mother bought with any regularity. If she moved efficiently she could cut the total trip time by two-thirds.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Give me the list," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at her. "You're in a hurry."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I want to get home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"To read."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother smiled, just slightly, the way she did when she found something genuinely amusing rather than merely note-worthy. She detached the bottom portion of the list and handed it over. "Dry goods, canned goods, dairy. I'll do produce and meat and we'll meet at the front."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie took the list and went.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She moved through the aisles at a pace that was not quite running but was faster than browsing, reading the list and reading the shelf labels with the same eyes, making decisions in advance so she didn't slow down at any single point. Two cans of black beans. Pasta, the kind her mother liked, not the store brand. Olive oil, which was on the top shelf, so she had to stand on the cart rail to reach it, which she did without breaking stride. Chicken broth. The particular cereal her father liked which was embarrassing to buy but was on the list. Bread crumbs. Parmesan.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was at the dairy case, examining cream cheese, when her mother appeared at the end of the aisle with the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Already?" her mother said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie held up the list. Everything on it had a small check mark beside it. Her mother took it and looked it over with the same focused attention she'd given the library books.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The olive oil?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Top shelf. I used the cart."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The parmesan is the block, not the green container?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Block. Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was quiet for a moment, looking at the list, and Lizzie waited. Then Elikapeka folded it and tucked it into her purse and began loading Lizzie's items from the basket into the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know," her mother said, arranging cans with the label-forward precision she applied to everything, "you could slow down occasionally."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There's no emergency."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother set the olive oil in the cart and looked at her. Outside the dairy case, the store moved around them with its ordinary weekend noise\u8212?carts, children, the overhead system playing something Lizzie didn't recognize.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The Gaiman book," her mother said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie kept her face neutral. "Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Maybe in a year."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You don't know that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," her mother agreed. "I don't. But probably in a year." She pushed the cart forward. "Get the cream cheese. The Neufch\u226?tel, not the regular."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie got the Neufch\u226?tel. She put it in the cart and fell into step beside her mother, and they moved together toward the front of the store, and Lizzie thought about Pern\u8212?about Thread, and the old weyrs, and the sound of a dragon's voice in a rider's head\u8212?and how she could be home and on the couch within thirty minutes if the checkout line was reasonable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought, also, briefly, about a pale cover and a sky that looked like a half-remembered dream, and a name she hadn't known an hour ago.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
*Neil Gaiman.* She said it to herself silently, once, the way she sometimes catalogued things she wanted to return to.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she helped her mother unload the cart.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 7\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-24T21:58:58-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
At 5:47 a.m. on a Saturday, seventeen-year-old Ella Hayes \u8212? already dressed in golf shoes and obsessively prepared with a self-annotated yardage book and an hour-long warm-up plan \u8212? pressures her large, unhurried father Andrew into leaving their Pompano Beach canal-side home for a 7:24 tee time, overcoming his deliberate second cup of coffee through persistent argument and a pointed declaration that her rigorous work ethic has made her the better golfer, a claim he does not deny; he rinses his mug and concedes, and she leads them out into the pre-dawn blue-gray air with her bag on her shoulder, the day unresolved but full of competitive promise.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At the Pines course, Andy and Alex Carpenter watch their children \u8212? Ella and seventeen-year-old Bobby \u8212? warm up together on the range and then compete head-to-head from the black tees under a dollar-a-hole gross-score bet, with Bobby outdriving Ella by thirty yards but both halving the first hole, while Andy registers Ella's Stanford ambitions against Bobby's Florida plans and observes his daughter's precision and self-possession with quiet, chest-level pride, leaving the match and their dynamic unresolved as the round begins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
On a humid patio after their morning round at Pompano Beach Golf Club\u8212?which both finished two-under and halved\u8212?Ella and Bobby eat lunch while she reveals she'd been saving a callback to his "barely" from the first hole, he asks her to dinner and she flatly re-establishes the permanent friend-zone, he observes that her backswing shortened on holes seven and eight of the back nine causing her to lose yards, she reluctantly accepts the correction as useful ahead of their afternoon round at the Palms, she claims the cart keys and the driver's seat (invoking a prior near-pond incident), and they depart with competing predictions\u8212?her one-down at the turn, his two-up\u8212?while her father and Alex Carpenter drink inside the clubhouse bar, their dynamic intact and the afternoon match unresolved.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
"It's both." He said it cheerfully. "I'm telling you because we're playing the Palms in an hour and it's ninety-four degrees and your shoulder is going to tighten up more, not less, and if you don't make a conscious adjustment on the first tee you're going to give me two holes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella looked at him. His face was open and even and entirely sincere. This was also Bobby. The grin and the dinner invitations and the look on the first green when he drained the putt and spread his arms \u8212? and then this. The information offered straight because it was information, because she would use it, because he wanted the match to mean something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She hated that he was right about her shoulder.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're welcome."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes. Inside the bar, her father said something and Alex threw his head back and laughed. "We should get the cart key."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yep."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They cleared the table and carried their plates inside to the bin by the kitchen and passed the bar where Andy looked up and tracked them with the unhurried ease of a man who had nowhere else to be.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Round two?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty minutes," Ella told him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't get in a hurry. It's hot out there."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are." He turned back to Alex and whatever they'd been saying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She and Bobby went to the counter and she got the key from the kid behind it, a summer hire with a slow smile who said something to Bobby about the Marlins that Bobby answered without stopping. Outside in the cart lot it was bright and sharp and the afternoon heat sat on everything with its full weight.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart was a standard white two-seater with a canopy. She went to the driver's side without ceremony, put the key in, adjusted the seat. Bobby loaded both bags onto the back rack and got in on the passenger side and stretched his long legs out into the footwell.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I just want to make sure you're not looking at any birds."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I won't look at any birds."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Any unusual waterfowl of any kind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Herons. Egrets. Anything in that general category."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll close my eyes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Please don't close your eyes." She put the cart in reverse. "One down at the turn," she said. "That's what I'm thinking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm thinking two up at the turn," he said. "But I'm an optimist."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She backed the cart out and pointed it toward the Palms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Pompano Beach Golf Course \u8212? A frequently played course with Andy and Ella. Two eighteen hole courses, the shorter and easier Palms course and the longer and harder Pines course.\par
|
||||
Mid afternoon, Saturday, late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Andy Hayes.\par
|
||||
Andy could see Ella had her temper barely under control as she stepped into the bunker with a bad lie and a difficult shot that she had to hole to tie with Bobby in their grudge match after the first round of the day ended a tie. Ella had struggled on the back nine of the Pines course but nevertheless had kept it even until a disastrous double bogey on the sixteenth. She\u8217?d picked up a shot on the seventeenth, but her shot to the green on eighteen had buried in the soft sand, whereas Bobby had hit a perfect iron to about two feet and was eagerly waiting to tap in the putt for birdie and win the match. From her lie, a pro golfer would be happy just to get the ball on the green, but she had to hole it or lose the match. She went into the bunker, sneered at the ugly lie of her nearly buried ball, and took a mighty swing with her sand wedge. The ball popped high into the air, the sand nearly blinding her, and the ball rolled past the hole and the match was lost.\par
|
||||
She angrily raked the sand and went up on the green and shook Bobby\u8217?s outstretched hand, conceding his putt, kicking her ball into the pond, turned and stalked off the green. Bobby knew she was furious and let her go without any trash talking. He couldn\u8217?t help grinning, though. It wasn\u8217?t often that he\u8217?d beaten her; she was by far the best player on the high school team, man or woman. She was good enough, he thought, to go pro, once she\u8217?d had a few seasons in college to polish her game.\par
|
||||
In the truck on the way home, Andy let her fume. She knew, as well as he did, that even the best golfers in the world won fewer than one-fourth of their tournaments. But it always made her angry to lose, every darn time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep it dramatic\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 At 5:47 a.m. on the first weekend of summer, thirteen-year-old Ella Hayes\u8212?golf bag packed, glove handled nervously, mind fixed on a downswing elbow flaw\u8212?endures her father Andy's unhurried breakfast routine before he drives her to Pompano Beach Golf Course, arriving at 6:45 to meet their waiting partner Bobby Carpenter, with the 7:24 tee time for thirty-six holes still unmet and Ella already moving toward the range with nineteen minutes and unresolved mechanical anxiety.
|
||||
\f0\fs24 At 5:47 a.m. on a Saturday, seventeen-year-old Ella Hayes \u8212? already dressed in golf shoes and obsessively prepared with a self-annotated yardage book and an hour-long warm-up plan \u8212? pressures her large, unhurried father Andrew into leaving their Pompano Beach canal-side home for a 7:24 tee time, overcoming his deliberate second cup of coffee through persistent argument and a pointed declaration that her rigorous work ethic has made her the better golfer, a claim he does not deny; he rinses his mug and concedes, and she leads them out into the pre-dawn blue-gray air with her bag on her shoulder, the day unresolved but full of competitive promise.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The coffee was going cold.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka had poured it twenty minutes ago and set it on the counter and then been pulled away by a question from the caterer about whether the tiki torches went along the fence line or grouped near the patio, and then by the discovery that someone had miscounted the folding chairs, and then by Susan Carpenter appearing at the back slider with a clipboard and an expression of capable cheerfulness that Elikapeka had come to understand meant *I have solved three problems you don't know about yet.* She liked Susan. Susan had the particular competence of a woman who had raised two children and had learned to make decisions without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the coffee cup now and drank it cold, standing at the kitchen window, watching the canal.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon light came off the water in long flat angles, the kind of light that made the whole backyard look like somewhere else, somewhere slightly idealized, the way places looked in memory before the difficult parts returned. Out on the sailboat\u8212?Jim's boat, the big one, the one that overhung the dock in a way that had bothered her for three years\u8212?she could hear the men. Andy's laugh came across the water first, that particular sound, unhurried, the laugh of a man who was genuinely comfortable. Then Alex Carpenter's voice, lower, and Jim's, and then music began, something with a bass line that moved across the water and came in through the window glass.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had given them the CDs herself. A playlist. She had presented it with the same organized seriousness she'd brought to the guest list negotiations, which Elikapeka had thought about more than once in the weeks since. The methodological error argument. Cousins as family, guests as a distinct category. Emma had made the case with such carefully assembled calm that Elikapeka had let her finish entirely before explaining that the answer was still no, and had watched her daughter absorb this with the contained dignity of someone who intended to remember it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had given her the extra girls instead. Three more, to balance the cousins. Emma had accepted this with a graciousness that was only slightly performative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six teenagers were arriving in a half hour.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka drank the coffee and breathed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The back slider opened and Susan came in, still holding the clipboard. "Tiki torches are along the fence," she said. "The chair situation is resolved. Jorge found four more in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He had four chairs in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He has a great deal in that truck." Susan looked at the cold coffee cup. "I'll make a fresh pot."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You don't have to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm making one for myself." She moved to the coffee maker with the ease of someone familiar with the kitchen, which she was, having spent several Saturday mornings here after the children's golf rounds, and Elikapeka let her, because the coffee genuinely needed to be made and there was something clarifying about Susan's company, her lack of surplus motion.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set the cup down and started toward the front of the house, but Ella was already there\u8212?she'd heard the door, she always heard the door, even when she appeared not to be paying attention to anything domestic. Ella had come in twenty minutes ago in her coverall, Bobby Carpenter behind her in board shorts and a t-shirt, the two of them with the easy unselfconsciousness of people who had been in each other's company so long they'd stopped performing anything for each other. Elikapeka had assigned Ella the greeter role without much expectation that she'd embrace it. Ella had responded by recruiting help, which was, she supposed, its own kind of initiative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard Michelle's voice in the front hall, and the heavier sound of boys, male voices that had mostly finished changing and not yet settled into what they'd become, and then the particular quality of noise that the Hayes cousins produced simply by being in a space together, which was a noise like something slightly loosely assembled, liable to spill.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She reached the front hall.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle had her arms around her, kissing her cheek, saying happy birthday to Emma's mama, and the boys were already moving, already past the introductions, Travis with his hair still damp from wherever they'd come from, Corey a full head taller than the last time she'd seen him at Christmas, and the third one, Derek, Andy's brother Michael's son, who still wore the expression he'd had at age seven of someone who had recently been accused of something and was reserving his defense.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go find your uncle," Elikapeka said. "He's on the boat."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They were gone. The back slider was still moving when Emma came into the kitchen from the hallway, Mai Lin a step behind, both of them in coveralls, both of them bright with it, the day, the occasion, the thing finally actually happening. Emma's coverall was a pale yellow that worked with her coloring and she had done something with her hair that Elikapeka recognized as effort and approved of. The bikini underneath she had opinions about and had agreed with Andy to set aside, which she had done, mostly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're here?" Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Outside. Your father's on the boat, I sent them out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went to the window. Mai Lin drifted to the counter and picked up a grape from the fruit tray Susan had arranged and ate it with the unceremonious comfort of a girl who had been in this kitchen enough times to be furniture, which was accurate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Outside, the cousins had found the Nerf football.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't know where it had come from. They had not put it out deliberately. It had materialized, the way things materialized when you introduced enough boys into a space with a pool\u8212?objects appeared, projectiles were launched, someone was going to be in the water before the first guest arrived.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Corey threw a spiral the length of the pool. Derek caught it and immediately fell backward into the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my god," Emma said, not entirely without affection.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your father's watching," Elikapeka said. She could see Andy on the deck of the sailboat, beer in hand, already laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music got louder. She could hear Andy shout something at the boys, the cousins shouting back, the easy call-and-response of the Hayes male frequency which she had been decoding for twenty years and still sometimes missed a word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan appeared beside her at the window with two fresh cups of coffee. Elikapeka accepted hers and they stood together watching Derek surface, still holding the football, raising it above his head like he'd recovered something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's good with the door," Susan said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mm."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good at\u8212?" Susan paused, searching for the precise version. "He knows how to make people feel they're expected."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka thought about that. It was true. She'd watched him in the front hall, just briefly, the slight forward attention he gave to whoever came in, not performative, just present. It was a quality you didn't teach. "Ella does not have that quality," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan smiled into her coffee. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had gotten the football now and was standing at the edge of the pool and Corey was in the water and Travis threw it directly at his face from four feet away and Corey caught it and pulled Travis in by the wrist in a single fluid movement and there was a crash of water and Emma made a sound at the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're going to break something," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Probably," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go, mija. Go outside. Your party is starting."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her with the particular look she had, the one that held several things at once: the residue of negotiations, the awareness of concessions made and not made, the birthday, the day, the afternoon light. Then she crossed the kitchen and went out the back slider and Mai Lin followed her, and Elikapeka heard Emma's voice shift the moment the door opened, warmer, louder, already calling out to the cousins, already entering the afternoon on her own terms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music moved across the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle wandered into the kitchen looking for a glass and Elikapeka found her one and poured her the last of the old coffee, which she took without complaint. Outside, Andy had stepped off the boat onto the dock and was crossing the yard toward the pool, beer still in hand, and he had the look he got when things were going well, that particular ease, the long unhurried movement of a man who felt himself to be in the right place.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six kids.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She could already hear the first car pulling into the driveway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan put down her clipboard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready?" Susan said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took a breath, looked at the plumeria on the windowsill, its single open flower going gold in the afternoon light, and set down the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes," she said.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,86 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 6\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: F03D5899-C5FB-43BB-90A7-611E9DCDD98C,332DAD85-2636-46A0-8336-D2AEAEDF8241\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T18:26:11-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Scene 3\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes, alone with daughters Emma and Lizzie after Andy and Ella leave, grants Emma a Friday-evening backyard pool party capped at twenty-five guests and permits boys, but refuses to exclude any family cousins and deflects Emma's pointed accusation of racial bias in the guest-list vetting process\u8212?asserting she will review all names and decide who is welcome\u8212?leaving Emma's challenge to her mother's social prejudices unresolved and filed away for a later attempt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. To be a high school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends. She\u8217?s the unacknowledged highest status girl in her class. In her mother\u8217?s words, the sun around which the other girls orbit.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house. Born in America of Chinese immigrants. Beautiful and outgoing, wears the same dress size as Emma. Serves the secondary role as Emma\u8217?s enforcer in the gang of fashionable girls who orbit around Emma.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
"And yes." Emma pressed forward, undeterred. "Is it wrong to want my own birthday party to be fun? I see these cousins at every single family thing. At Christmas, at Easter, at Grandma's \u8212? can I have one thing that's just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma blinked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They'll all be invited. Every last one of them. Devin, Tyler, all of them. And you will be gracious about it or there won't be a party." Elikapeka said it the way she said most things she was certain about \u8212? without heat, without performance, simply as the shape of reality. "Don't push me on this, Emma. I have given you a lot of ground this morning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"An evening pool party with boys for your sixteenth birthday," Elikapeka said. "In this backyard. When I was your age, do you know what I got for my sixteenth birthday?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie chose this moment to set her paperback down and observe, with the mild, studied disinterest of someone who had clearly been following every word: "Stinky boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned the full weight of her attention on her younger sister. The look was slow, deliberate, the kind that communicated a detailed opinion about the immaturity of the person receiving it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She rose and carried her cup to the sink, looking out through the window over the water. The morning was already warm and would be hot by noon, and Jim Kowalski's sailboat rocked in its gentle patient way against the dock, going nowhere.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." Elikapeka turned back from the window and smiled at her, the full warm smile that she knew her daughter found difficult to stay annoyed at. "It's going to be a beautiful party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
Emma at home while Lizzie and their mother are out. Saturday morning in late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Emma Hayes.\par
|
||||
As soon as her mother and sister drove off, Emma was on the phone, sitting on the bed in her parents\u8217? bedroom, as the phone was on the nightstand and she could sit comfortably against the headboard of the bed with a pillow. In her lap was a notepad, and she planned to quiz all of her friends about what boys she should invite to her birthday party. It wouldn\u8217?t do to invite a boy her friends didn\u8217?t like, that would not do at all.\par
|
||||
First up was her friend Susanna. She was a cheerleader and had an encyclopedia knowledge of all of the boys, good and bad. If she didn\u8217?t like a boy, the boy would not get on her list, even if Emma liked the guy. By the time they\u8217?d hung up the phone, she had seven boys on her list. She was shockingly, almost halfway done with one call. Next up, her best friend Mai Lin. She was Chinese, a major league cutie, and she and Mai Lin were constantly up for the yearbook \u8220?best looking\u8221? in the class. Mai Lin was also extremely picky and the call ended with two boys scratched off and only one added. The third call was with Hannah, who Emma didn\u8217?t much like, but she had to be invited, as she came from a wealthy family and was popular with the boys. Two boys added. On and on the calls went, and finally, she had fifteen boys on the list, all vetted by her friends. And that\u8217?s when she realized she\u8217?d have to dump three of them for her boy cousins. She screamed in frustration, preparing herself to argue with her mother than her cousins didn\u8217?t count in the total.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Emphasize Emma's snarky dialog with her friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Blond, blue-eyed, handsome, a junior to be in high school \u8212? eyes appear almost gray in shade and resolve clearly in direct light. Compact, muscular, and tan in the way of someone who spends real time outdoors. Has an easy, unguarded quality and is not self-conscious. An avid Tolkien reader: has read the Lord of the Rings trilogy four times and holds strong opinions about Tom Bombadil that he acknowledges most people find excessive.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
@@ -7,4 +7,4 @@
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Emma Hayes.\
|
||||
As soon as her mother and sister drove off, Emma was on the phone, sitting on the bed in her parents\'92 bedroom, as the phone was on the nightstand and she could sit comfortably against the headboard of the bed with a pillow. In her lap was a notepad, and she planned to quiz all of her friends about what boys she should invite to her birthday party. It wouldn\'92t do to invite a boy her friends didn\'92t like, that would not do at all.\
|
||||
First up was her friend Susanna. She was a cheerleader and had an encyclopedia knowledge of all of the boys, good and bad. If she didn\'92t like a boy, the boy would not get on her list, even if Emma liked the guy. By the time they\'92d hung up the phone, she had seven boys on her list. She was shockingly, almost halfway done with one call. Next up, her best friend Mai Lin. She was Chinese, a major league cutie, and she and Mai Lin were constantly up for the yearbook \'93best looking\'94 in the class. Mai Lin was also extremely picky and the call ended with two boys scratched off and only one added. The third call was with Hannah, who Emma didn\'92t much like, but she had to be invited, as she came from a wealthy family and was popular with the boys. Two boys added. On and on the calls went, and finally, she had fifteen boys on the list, all vetted by her friends. And that\'92s when she realized she\'92d have to dump three of them for her boy cousins. She screamed in frustration, preparing herself to argue with her mother than her cousins didn\'92t count in the total.\
|
||||
}
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Emphasize snarky dialog with her friends.}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\par
|
||||
After breakfast, Lizzie goes to the library and then shopping with her mother. Emma is not much of a reader and declines to go. It\u8217?s the start of summer and Lizzie can easily read a book a day. Her mother\u8217?s rare punishments are usually withholding books from Lizzie. She wants to be a writer of fantasy books like the Lord Of the Rings and Anne McCafferty\u8217?s Dragonflight novels. In the library, she finds a book by an author by the name of Neil Gaiman called Stardust. Her mother reads the blurb on the back cover and takes a quick scan through it and declines to let her read it. Her mother brooks no dissent. Lizzie goes back into the stacks and looks for other books, deciding to read, for the nth time, Dragonflight and others from the series. She decides she\u8217?ll read Lord of the Rings again, though she doesn\u8217?t need to check them out, as she has a boxed set already. She returns to her mother, who looks through the books and approves of them, noting that Lizzie has read them before, and perhaps it would be better to find something new. Lizzie grumpily said she\u8217?d tried to but her mother had rejected the one she wanted to read.\par
|
||||
In the grocery store, to save time, Lizzie runs about the store collecting items on the list, to speed up getting back home where she can read and read and read.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs24 \cf0 Emma\'92s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\'92s house. Born in America of Chinese immigrants. Beautiful and outgoing, wears the same dress size as Emma. Best friends with Emma since 2
|
||||
\fs16 \super nd
|
||||
\fs24 \nosupersub grade. Serves the secondary role as Emma\'92s enforcer in the gang of fashionable girls who orbit around Emma.\
|
||||
Often sleeps over at Emma\'92s house or Emma at hers.\
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Lizzie had negotiated her outfit for twenty minutes, standing in front of her mirror in a way she almost never did, because she almost never cared and now she did, which was its own kind of betrayal. She'd settled on a white cover-up over her suit, which felt like a compromise between being at a pool party and being invisible, which was, in the end, what she wanted. To be invisible at a pool party. To perhaps find a corner where she could exist adjacently to the event without being fully absorbed by it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had a book in her room. She knew exactly which page she was on.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie, you cannot bring a book," Emma had said, in the flat tone of someone who had already won this argument.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
So there was no book, and now there was this.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six people, her mother had said, though thirty-six felt conservative from where Lizzie stood on the pool deck, pressed against the low fence near the hibiscus, watching the yard fill with people who all seemed to know exactly what to do with themselves at a party. The music was coming from somewhere, competing with the water sounds, and the Hayes cousins \u8212? Travis and Corey were in the pool already, Derek had apparently never left \u8212? had established a physics of chaos in the deep end that sent regular concussive waves against the tile. Someone had already knocked over one of the tiki torches and Jorge had come around the side of the house at a near-jog to right it with the expression of a man managing infrastructure in a war zone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood and watched.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was at the center of it, as Emma always was, moving between clusters of arriving girls with the ease of someone who had been trained for exactly this. Which she had, in a way. Emma had been training for this her whole life. She had the gift of making each person feel briefly, convincingly, like the most important arrival. Lizzie had watched her do it from the time they were small, had catalogued it the way she catalogued things she found genuinely mysterious, like tides and long division and the way some people slept through thunderstorms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin was with her, laughing at something, and then Susanna Barnes materialized out of nowhere in a red two-piece and headband and immediately began conducting some kind of census near the cooler. Hannah Eliot was behind her, tall and deliberate in a jeweled one-piece that caught the afternoon light in a way that suggested it had cost more than Lizzie's entire wardrobe. Hannah moved through the patio like she was accustomed to spaces making room for her, which, in Lizzie's experience, they did.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At the pool, the boys were a separate civilization.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was normal, Lizzie knew. She'd read enough to understand the social anthropology of it, the initial segregation, the gradual permeation, the later entanglements. It was documented behavior. Knowing it was documented did not make it less loud.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had the football again and was threatening Corey with it and one of Emma's friends shrieked when the splash came and Derek rose from the water laughing and wiped his face and looked extremely pleased with himself, and there was Bobby Carpenter at the far edge of the pool deck, out of the splash radius, talking to someone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at the someone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the someone for perhaps four seconds before she understood something had changed, some prior version of herself had been quietly retired, and here was the new one standing in the same white cover-up by the same hibiscus, and everything was slightly different now and it was completely disconcerting.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was blonde. Not the washed-out kind but the sun-saturated kind that looked like it had been bleached from the outside in over years. Compact and muscular in the way that was different from just big, the kind of build that suggested it was not accidental, that the whole structure was organized and intentional. He stood with his weight slightly forward, talking to Bobby, and he laughed at something Bobby said and looked briefly at the pool and then looked away, and he was tan and blue-eyed at a distance and Lizzie felt her face do something without her permission.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had not, not once, looked at a boy with anything resembling the feeling she was currently having.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She found it extremely inconvenient.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked away. She looked at the plumeria on the kitchen windowsill through the glass slider, which she could see from here. She looked at the tiki torch. She looked at Derek's abandoned towel crumpled near the steps. She looked, briefly, back at the boy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was still there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Someone grabbed her arm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh good, you're here," Hannah Eliot said, as though she'd been looking for Lizzie specifically, which seemed unlikely. Hannah had a drink in her free hand and a look of focused intention that Lizzie recognized, in retrospect, as the look of someone in the middle of executing something. "Come with me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm\u8212?" Lizzie started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah was already moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was dragged across the pool deck at a pace that left no time for objection, weaving through a cluster of girls she half-recognized from Emma's lunch table and past the cooler where Susanna was making notes in her phone and past the cousins who were now engaged in some kind of underwater wrestling that had attracted a small audience, and then they were on the far side of the pool and there was Bobby Carpenter and he turned and said "hey, Lizzie," because Bobby knew everyone in the Hayes household, and then there was the boy standing right there at close range and Lizzie's peripheral vision did something unhelpful.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Will," Hannah said, with the tone of someone completing a transaction. "This is Emma's sister Lizzie. Lizzie, this is Will Fontaine." She said the last name the French way, Fon-TEN, and it sounded like it had always been a name, like it had been a name since long before this afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will Fontaine looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He had blue eyes. This was confirmed at close range.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings too," Hannah said, and there was something in the way she said it, satisfied and slightly amused, that suggested she had already considered and completed whatever calculus had led her here, and then Lizzie felt the hand release her arm and when she looked, Hannah was already three steps away and angling back toward Emma's orbit with the efficiency of someone who had done what she came to do.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby found somewhere else to be. He was tactful, Bobby. She'd give him that.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then it was just Lizzie and Will Fontaine and the noise of the party continuing around them like it didn't know or care, and her mind, which was usually reliable, had gone essentially blank.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will tilted his head slightly. "She just leave you standing there?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She does that," Lizzie said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Something about that seemed to land correctly. He smiled \u8212? not the performative kind she'd been watching boys do all afternoon near Emma, but a real one, slightly asymmetric. "So you're Emma's sister."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yeah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's like\u8212?" He gestured at the party generally, at Emma's orbit visible across the water. "A different person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She is a different person," Lizzie said. "We both are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded. "Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a crash in the pool behind them and Derek's voice emerged from the water and several people yelled and the music shifted to something louder and Will glanced at the pool and then back at her and said, with apparent genuine curiosity, "Hannah said Lord of the Rings. Like the books or the\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The books," Lizzie said, faster than she meant to. "The books are\u8212? the movies aren't out yet, so. The books."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Right." He nodded. He had the look, she realized, of someone who was actually going to continue this. "Okay, question then. Tom Bombadil. You think he should have gone to the Council of Elrond?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The question hit her so directly in the center of something she'd genuinely thought about that she lost, briefly, the thread of being nervous. "No," she said. "Because he wouldn't have taken the Ring seriously and they'd all have been standing around having an existential crisis while he was singing about the river." She paused. "But I think he should have sent a message. A message would have been appropriate."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will stared at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody says that," he said. "That's\u8212? nobody says the message thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's the obvious gap," Lizzie said, because it was, it absolutely was, Tolkien leaves it completely unaddressed, Bombadil simply does not engage with the council at all, there's no indication he even knows it's happening\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, but he pulls them out of Old Man Willow\u8212?" Will started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Which he only does because they happened to be in his territory\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"But that's\u8212? wait, so you think he's purely reactive?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I think he's the oldest thing in the world and he operates by completely different logic and I think Gandalf knew better than to invite him because the invitation itself would have required him to care\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The Hayes cousins crashed into the shallow end together and the wave came over the lip of the pool and ran cold across the deck and hit both their feet and Lizzie looked down at the water spreading over the sun-warmed concrete and Will laughed again and she looked up and the party was loud and bright around them and she thought, with one small, private part of her mind: she could close the book later.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The candles were still smoking when Emma understood that she was, without question, the luckiest girl alive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood in the warm June dusk with the last of the Happy Birthday chorus dissolving into applause and laughter around her, her face wet in a way she hadn't anticipated and couldn't entirely explain, and thought: *this*. This exact second. This is the one she would keep.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty faces in the soft golden light of the tiki torches. The pool glowing turquoise behind them. The smell of chlorine and jasmine and sunscreen and birthday cake. Mai Lin whooping with both hands raised. Hannah Eliot holding up her Solo cup in a toast. Even Harrison Webb, who Emma had half-expected to be too senior, too cool, to actually show up, was clapping with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. The music was going. The yard smelled like summer.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother had been so worried. Emma had watched her worry all day from across the kitchen counter, seen the logistics and the phone calls and the chair situation and whatever the thing with the tiki torches had been, and now here was the yard full and the night beginning and her mother standing at the back edge of the crowd next to Susan Carpenter and smiling, actually smiling, and Emma thought: I should remember to tell her. Later. I should tell her she did it perfectly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But not yet. Right now there was cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The flash hit her before she expected it and the whole world became white for two seconds and she stood there blinking stars out of her vision while everyone laughed and someone\u8212?Mai Lin, it had to be Mai Lin\u8212?said something about her face and Emma laughed too because she couldn't help it and then she could see again and there was the cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Two tiers. Pink and white buttercream. Sixteen candles still tracing the last of their smoke upward into the darkening air.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She closed her eyes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I want this to last. Not just tonight. All of it. I want this whole summer to last the way this moment is lasting right now, every person I love in a backyard with cake and music and the pool going and my mother happy and my father\u8212?she could feel her father somewhere behind her left shoulder, that specific gravity she had always been able to locate without looking\u8212?my father watching.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She blew.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The applause came up like a wave and she opened her eyes to smoke and dark wicks and thirty people who had come to her yard on a Friday night because they wanted to, because she had asked, because they were hers, and she was theirs, and Emma Hayes pressed both hands to her face and cried with the absolute unselfconscious ease of a girl who has never once been afraid of being seen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my God," Mai Lin said, arriving at her elbow immediately. "You're *crying*."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not," Emma said, which was completely false.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You are literally\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Shut up and give me a piece of cake."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother appeared with the knife and pressed it into her hand, and Emma understood she was meant to do the ceremonial first cut, the way she'd seen in wedding pictures, and she felt a small peculiar dignity about that, about being the center of a ritual that had rules and a shape, and she pressed the knife through the bottom tier and everyone said *ooh* because of course they did and then her mother, with the smooth efficiency Emma had watched all her life, extracted the knife, patted her hand once, and pivoted toward Susan Carpenter, and the two of them were cutting and plating before Emma had fully registered that the ceremony portion was complete.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was, she thought, accepting the first plate back from Susan's capable hands, an absolutely perfect cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Chocolate. The buttercream was the real kind, not the sugary thick kind that sat wrong in your stomach. There was a layer of something\u8212?raspberry, maybe\u8212?in the middle that she hadn't known about, and the first bite hit her with the clean force of something genuinely unexpected, and she thought: *Mom*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked across the yard and found her mother's face. Elikapeka met her eyes and smiled, a small private smile, and Emma held up her fork in a salute that meant *I see you* and *thank you* and *you knew about the raspberry* and her mother gave one tiny nod that meant *of course I did*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned back to her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty people, cake plates, the pool, the music, the tiki torches throwing orange warmth against the deep blue of the early summer sky. She let herself have a single slow moment of it, panoramic and grateful, like taking a photograph with her eyes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then, because she was Emma Hayes and there was a persistent item still outstanding on the evening's agenda, she let herself consider the question of the boys.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There were, she thought, tallying, approximately eleven viable candidates present. This was a high number. She had worked hard for this number. Harrison Webb was talking to someone near the cooler and had, objectively speaking, excellent arms. Daniel Park, whom Mai Lin had delivered on every promised count\u8212?interesting, extremely good-looking, both confirmed\u8212?was sitting on the steps of the pool with his feet in the water and had looked at Emma twice during the song. There were other possibilities. The evening was young.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father was standing near the far edge of the patio.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She watched him. He had his arms crossed and he was talking to Bobby Carpenter's father, the two of them in that easy men's conversation that involved long pauses and barely visible nods, and he was not obviously watching the party, but Emma Hayes had known her father for sixteen years and she understood at a molecular level that he was watching everything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I would have to be *very* sneaky.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: surely God has some kind of birthday exemption policy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: one kiss. Just one. Just to mark the occasion. It was, she felt, genuinely sacramental.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The air smelled like jasmine and chlorine and cake. Somewhere across the pool someone cannonballed and the splash made a dozen people shriek and laugh. The music shifted to something with a bass line that could be felt in the chest.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was mid-consideration\u8212?Harrison Webb's arms again, Daniel Park's attentiveness, a third option she was still evaluating\u8212?when she caught something out the very corner of her eye, near the shallow end.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her sister.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was standing with a boy whose name Emma was now reconstructing\u8212?*Will, Hannah brought him, she'd barely registered him at the time*\u8212?and they were talking the way you talk when you've forgotten the party around you exists. Standing close. Their body language had that specific unguarded quality that Emma, as a student of these things, recognized immediately and catalogued with some precision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her sister reached out and touched the boy's hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stopped moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie. Her *sister*. Her bookish, shy, perpetually reading, forever-in-her-own-world, had to be practically dragged to any social event within a five-mile radius sister. Lizzie, who had brought a book to the party. Lizzie, who had looked at Emma with that patient, tolerant expression approximately forty-five minutes ago that clearly meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That Lizzie was touching a boy's hand and laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stared.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The boy\u8212?Will\u8212?said something and Lizzie shook her head and said something back and the boy's face did the thing that faces do when a person says something genuinely surprising and good, that involuntary bright opening, and he laughed, and Lizzie laughed, and they were still standing close and neither of them was looking anywhere else.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma felt something move through her chest that took her a second to identify.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was not envy, exactly. It was more like wonder. Like watching something grow faster than you expected.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: *Lizzie.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: my nerdy baby sister is doing better in the boy department than I am at my own party and I cannot even be angry about it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: good for her. I mean it. *Good for her.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned back to her own side of the party, smiling with the full warmth of it, and found Mai Lin at her elbow again with two new plates of cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Second piece?" Mai Lin said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Absolutely," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the plate. The night was warm and the pool was lit and her thirty closest friends were all around her and someone was taking another photo and the flash went off again and this time Emma was ready for it, was already grinning into it, was already mid-laugh when the white light bloomed across the yard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I still need a kiss.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I have all night.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: this is the best birthday I have ever had.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took a bite of cake and let herself back into the party.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 3\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: DC6BC0EF-F4CE-4303-99AD-CA12671B9092,F03D5899-C5FB-43BB-90A7-611E9DCDD98C,091EE601-91DB-497C-A646-B094624414DE\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T16:43:05-05:00\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-24T20:33:03-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
@@ -18,10 +18,10 @@ Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. To be a high school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends. She\u8217?s the unacknowledged highest status girl in her class. In her mother\u8217?s words, the sun around which the other girls orbit.\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. To be a high school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, shy. She has three close friends, all of which are bookworms like herself.\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
@@ -30,8 +30,7 @@ Youngest daughter. To be a high school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, shy.
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
In the kitchen in the Hayes house, an hour after Andy and Ella have left for the golf course. It is late May, 2000. No cell phones yet.\par
|
||||
Early morning, late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Elikapeka Hayes.\par
|
||||
@@ -39,7 +38,7 @@ The two younger girls Emma and Lizzie are at the breakfast table and the discuss
|
||||
Elikapeka wants a list of the boys Emma wants to invite so she can check them out and reject any that aren\u8217?t suitable. Emma rolls her eyes and says she\u8217?ll give her mother a list but she insists that her mother \u8220?not be racist,\u8221? knowing that her mother will not be allowing any black or hispanic boys to come to the party. Emma had heard from her mother since she was little that the only suitable boys for her girls would be white or Hawaiian or perhaps Asian. Emma continues that she wants to limit which of her cousins can come to the party, complaining that some of them are just no fun at all. Elikapeka tells Emma that all of them will be invited and Emma shouldn\u8217?t push her luck or there would be no party at all.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand into 1500 words maximum. Dialog between the protective mother and willful daughter should dominate this scene.\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Dialog between the protective mother and willful daughter should dominate this scene.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 4\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-24T21:11:14-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
In a weekday kitchen morning anchored by Elikapeka's transplanted plumeria and her private longing for Oahu, Emma formally opens negotiations over her sixteenth birthday pool party\u8212?presenting a prepared guest list and requesting permission to invite boys\u8212?while Elikapeka deflects Emma's pointed accusation of prejudice with a measured non-promise to judge the boys' list on her own terms, overrules Emma's attempt to exclude the Hayes cousins under threat of canceling the party entirely, and closes the scene with a brief reassuring touch that Emma accepts without pulling away, leaving the boys' list unreviewed, Emma's specific concerns about her mother's biases unresolved, and Lizzie a silent witness throughout.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
A beat passed. Emma picked up her spoon again and then put it back down. "Can we talk about cousins?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because some of them are just\u8212?" she searched for the word\u8212? "they're not fun, Mom. Specifically the Hayes side. They're going to stand around and be weird and eat all the food and not talk to anybody and it's my birthday and I just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?want it to be a good party and I feel like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma." Elikapeka's voice dropped half a register, not louder but denser, which both her daughters had learned years ago was the relevant signal. "All of your cousins will be invited."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"All of them?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Every single one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma closed her eyes briefly. "Mom."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The Hayes side included."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They don't even like parties."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They love parties. They just express it differently than you do." Elikapeka lifted her mug. "And before you say anything else on this subject, I want you to think carefully, because we are getting close to the point in this conversation where there isn't a party at all."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went very still.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie appeared to find something interesting to look at on the wall to her left.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm serious," Elikapeka said, not unkindly. "Your cousins are your family. Your birthday is a family event. You can have your friends there\u8212?thirty, thirty-five, we'll figure out the number\u8212?and the boys you want to invite, you'll give me the list and I'll think about it. But your cousins will be invited and they will be welcomed in this house the same way every guest is welcomed in this house. That is not negotiable."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The morning light had shifted slightly, spreading further across the floor. From somewhere outside came the sound of a car starting on the street.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma picked up her orange juice and drank. She set the glass down and looked at her list, which sat folded beside her bowl. After a moment she unfolded it and picked up the pen she'd also, apparently, brought to breakfast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," she said again, though this time the word was smaller and had less architecture to it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good." Elikapeka rose to refill her coffee. "And Emma?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It will be a good party." She paused by her daughter's chair and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. "I'll make sure of it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma didn't say anything, but she didn't shrug the hand away either.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie, very quietly, reopened her book.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Mid morning, Saturday, late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
Told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\par
|
||||
After breakfast, Lizzie goes to the library and then shopping with her mother. Emma is not much of a reader and declines to go. It\u8217?s the start of summer and Lizzie can easily read a book a day. Her mother\u8217?s rare punishments are usually withholding books from Lizzie. She wants to be a writer of fantasy books like the Lord Of the Rings and Anne McCafferty\u8217?s Dragonflight novels. In the library, she finds a book by an author by the name of Neil Gaiman called Stardust. Her mother reads the blurb on the back cover and takes a quick scan through it and declines to let her read it. Her mother brooks no dissent. Lizzie goes back into the stacks and looks for other books, deciding to read, for the nth time, Dragonflight and others from the series. She decides she\u8217?ll read Lord of the Rings again, though she doesn\u8217?t need to check them out, as she has a boxed set already. She returns to her mother, who looks through the books and approves of them, noting that Lizzie has read them before, and perhaps it would be better to find something new. Lizzie grumpily said she\u8217?d tried to but her mother had rejected the one she wanted to read.\par
|
||||
In the grocery store, to save time, Lizzie runs about the store collecting items on the list, to speed up getting back home where she can read and read and read.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Dialog between mother and daughter should dominate this scene.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,81 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The coffee was good. Elikapeka stood at the kitchen counter with both hands wrapped around the mug and allowed herself thirty seconds of stillness before the evening swallowed her whole.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the sliding glass door she could see Susan Carpenter moving between the rented folding tables with the brisk competence of a woman who had organized school fundraisers and church potlucks and knew exactly how a tablecloth should be anchored against a canal breeze. The caterers\u8212?two young men and a girl in black polo shirts\u8212?were arranging chafing dishes with the careful efficiency of people being paid by the hour. The patio looked better than Elikapeka had expected. The string lights she and Emma had hung last night caught the late-afternoon sun and would come into their own once the sky darkened.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She drank her coffee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From behind the house came the low, pleasant thump of bass finding its footing, then a moment of silence, then the opening of something Emma had described as essential. Elikapeka recognized it dimly. The sound system on Jim's sailboat apparently worked. She heard Andy's laugh carry across the water\u8212?that easy, unselfconscious laugh of a man holding a beer and doing something pleasant with his hands\u8212?and then Alex Carpenter's voice saying something she couldn't make out, and then both of them laughing, and then Jim's voice joining in. Three men on a sailboat in a canal in Fort Lauderdale in June, which was exactly what three such men would choose to be doing on a Friday evening if given any latitude at all.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had given them the latitude. She was not sorry about it. The sound system worked and they were out of her kitchen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella appeared from the direction of the stairs with a boy behind her, and Elikapeka registered the boy before she registered anything else, which was how she always registered Bobby Carpenter\u8212?as a presence slightly larger than expected, taller this year than last in a way that still surprised her faintly each time. He'd always been a polite boy. He was a polite taller boy now. He had the particular expression of someone who understood he'd been drafted and was trying to look willing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella was already moving toward the front door with the focused economy of someone who had been given a task and intended to discharge it efficiently and return to her own concerns. She was wearing a coverall over her swimsuit, practical and unadorned, and Elikapeka thought for the hundredth time that Ella would find this entire evening mildly tolerable at best and was doing it because she'd been asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard the door open.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard Michelle's voice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set her coffee mug on the counter and moved to the kitchen doorway where she could see the entry hall. Michelle Hayes was a compact, energetic woman married to the most amiable of the three Hayes brothers, and she had brought all three boy cousins in one efficient delivery, like a woman who had learned to consolidate her errands. The cousins came through the door in a loose cluster\u8212?Devin first, who was sixteen and had the unhurried manner of a boy who had been told he was good-looking often enough to believe it; Tyler behind him, who was fifteen and had apparently had some kind of recent moment of recognition with Lizzie that still mildly baffled Elikapeka; and Marcus last, who was fourteen, who was wearing his flip flops on the wrong feet, and who was already looking past everyone toward the back of the house with an expression that could only be described as strategic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma appeared from the direction of the stairs with Mai Lin one step behind her, the two of them moving in the synchronized way of girls who had been best friends since the second grade and had developed a shared locomotion. Both wore coveralls over their swimsuits. Emma's coverall, Elikapeka noted, was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, which was cover the swimsuit she and Andy had disagreed about. She had made her peace with it. More or less.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma greeted her cousins with the warmth of a hostess who had already filed several private grievances about their attendance and had decided, professionally, to set those aside for the duration of the evening. She kissed Michelle's cheek and pointed all three boys toward the back of the house with a gesture that was somehow both gracious and directional, the way a good ma\u238?tre d' points guests toward a table.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They did not require pointing twice.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Tee shirts hit the kitchen floor. Flip flops went in two different directions. Devin cleared the sliding glass door first. Tyler was a half-step behind him. Marcus, she noticed, had already located something\u8212?a Nerf football, presumably from the basket of pool toys she kept in the utility closet\u8212?and was holding it above his head like a trophy as he crossed the patio and hit the water with a sound that reached her from twenty feet away.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The men on the sailboat cheered.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka picked up Marcus's tee shirt from the kitchen floor and folded it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mrs. Hayes, should I\u8212?" Bobby started, gesturing vaguely toward the backyard in a way that suggested he would go wherever he was pointed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go on," Elikapeka said. "You're doing Ella a kindness."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella's expression suggested she disputed the framing but would not contest it in front of her mother. She and Bobby went out through the sliding door. Elikapeka could hear Susan Carpenter greeting them warmly, because Susan was the kind of woman who greeted everyone warmly as a matter of genuine temperament rather than social management.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music from the sailboat shifted to something louder and the bass settled into the boards of the dock and came up through the kitchen floor faintly, which was not something she'd anticipated but was, she decided, acceptable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle had come through to the kitchen. She was already opening the refrigerator with the easy familiarity of a woman who'd stood in this kitchen dozens of times, which she had.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The tables look beautiful," Michelle said, pulling out the pitcher of iced tea Elikapeka had made that morning.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Susan did most of the arranging."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The lights were Emma's idea, I assume."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma's idea and Emma's installation. She had Lizzie on the ladder."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle laughed. "How is Lizzie taking all this?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She has a book," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Smart girl."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang again. And then again before she'd taken three steps. And then, before she reached the hallway, a third time, because whoever was on the other side was either impatient or had missed the first attempt and was making up for it. She opened the door to four girls at once, all of them in coveralls, all of them carrying towels in the pastel colors of girls who coordinated these things in advance. They were talking before the door was fully open and did not stop talking as they came through it, and Elikapeka caught their names\u8212?she'd reviewed the list twice\u8212?and matched three of four on the first pass.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then more cars. Then more voices at the door. Then the particular compound noise of a party finding its footing, which was different from the noise of one or two or five people gathered in a place. It had a texture to it, something almost physical, and it rose from the backyard and came in through the sliding door and mixed with the music from the sailboat and the caterers' efficient movements and Michelle's steady presence at the counter and the smell of the chafing dish lids just beginning to warm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From the pool she heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of a cannonball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then laughter. Then what sounded like protest. Then more laughter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Marcus.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew without looking. She would have bet money.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was standing at the kitchen counter again\u8212?she kept returning to it, some gravitational pull\u8212?and she picked up her coffee mug and found it had gone cold. She drank it anyway and looked out through the sliding door at the thirty-odd young people filling her backyard by degrees, at the sailboat lit now by the dropping sun with three men on its deck who had earned the right to cold beers, at Susan moving between tables with the assurance of a woman who could set a tablecloth in a canal breeze, at Emma holding court near the pool steps with the easy authority of someone who had always expected this exact outcome.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Another cannonball.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
More laughter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka smiled into her cold coffee, because it was chaos, and it was hers, and that was not the worst thing in the world to be able to say.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\par
|
||||
If it had been up to Lizzie, she\u8217?d have stayed in her room and read books, but it wasn\u8217?t up to her and now she stood on the pool deck in the chaos of Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen party as the party goers began to arrive. Her sister was in the middle of it, greeting and being greeted as if she was queen of the world, and perhaps on this night it was true. The sexes weren\u8217?t really mixing yet, as the boys were mostly in the pool and the girls were mostly on the patio, surrounding Emma.\par
|
||||
And then Lizzie saw him. The coolest boy she\u8217?d ever seen, wearing swim trunks and talking with Bobby, Ella\u8217?s golfing buddy. The boy was blonde, muscular, and compact, not so tall as Bobby. He was tan and fit and blue eyed. He was a god, she was sure he was a god. She\u8217?d not once looked at a boy with desire but now she did. It was completely disconcerting.\par
|
||||
Suddenly, someone grabbed her arm. It was Emma\u8217?s friend Hannah, who was pretty, stylish, and very slightly chubby and who wore a one piece swimsuit that had jewels on it and must have cost a fortune. She felt herself being dragged along right towards the boy she\u8217?d spotted. Hannah called out his name, Will Fontaine. He looked right at her. And before she could react, Hannah was telling him that Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings, too. And Lizzie felt Hannah let go and leave, and she was left tongue tied, desperately trying to think of something to say to Will.\par
|
||||
By whatever magic existed in the universe, Will had her mesmerized as they discussed how Tom Bombadil rescued the hobbits from Old Man Willow.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,131 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The morning had settled into its quieter register by the time Elikapeka rinsed the last of the breakfast bowls and set them in the rack. Lizzie sat at the kitchen table with her book open but not really reading it, listening to the ordinary sounds of the house\u8212?Emma's footsteps overhead, the drip of the faucet, the refrigerator's low mechanical hum.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Library first," her mother said, without turning from the sink. "Then Safeway. Get your shoes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was the best kind of Saturday.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma appeared in the doorway in the way she sometimes did, drawn by sounds of departure. "Where are you going?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Library," Lizzie said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her with the mild incomprehension she reserved for Lizzie's reading habits, as though Lizzie had announced a trip to observe industrial piping. "I'll stay here."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," their mother said, drying her hands. She picked up her purse from the counter and glanced at Lizzie. "Two minutes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was ready in ninety seconds.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The library was cool and smelled of paper and air conditioning and the faint ghost of carpet cleaner, and Lizzie felt something loosen in her chest the moment they pushed through the glass doors. Her mother went toward the new releases display near the front while Lizzie moved with practiced efficiency into the stacks, already half-composing her summer in her head. A book a day was not ambitious; it was simply what summer was for.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was working through the fiction section when the spine caught her eye.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
*Stardust.* Neil Gaiman. The cover showed a falling star against a dark sky, and the weight of it in her hands felt exactly right\u8212?the right thickness, the right heft. She turned it over and read the back and felt the particular quickening she associated with books that were going to matter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She brought it to her mother.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was standing near the periodicals, a gardening magazine held loosely in one hand. She took the book, read the back cover with the focused efficiency she applied to most things, and then paged through it. Not quickly\u8212?she was actually reading, sampling sentences, checking for whatever it was she checked for. Lizzie waited.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother handed it back. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Why not?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not appropriate."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom, it's fantasy. It's about a star\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I read the back cover, Lizzie. I also read several pages." Her mother returned her attention briefly to the gardening magazine and then set it down. "The answer is no."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at the book in her hands and then placed it carefully back on the display shelf, because the alternative was holding it while they walked away from it, which would be worse. "It's a fairy tale," she said. "It literally says so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was no appeal from that tone. Lizzie knew this the way she knew her multiplication tables\u8212?not as a conclusion she'd reasoned her way to but as a fact about the structure of the world. Her mother did not raise her voice and did not repeat herself and did not change her mind once it was made, and the punishments for sustained dissent were specifically calibrated: no books. Not for a day, sometimes two. It was the most effective punishment her mother had ever devised, and she seemed to know it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie went back into the stacks.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She moved through the shelves with less direction now, running her fingers along spines without reading them. Then she stopped, because of course. She pulled *Dragonflight* from the shelf, and then *Dragonquest*, and the third one, and stood with them in the crook of her arm feeling something settle.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew these books the way she knew certain songs\u8212?not just the plot but the specific texture of sentences, the way Lessa's voice sounded in her head, the particular quality of the Weyr at night. She had read them so many times that the paperback spines were soft and the pages at her favorite chapters fell open on their own. She thought sometimes about Anne McCaffrey sitting somewhere writing these, not knowing that a girl in Washington would one day read them over and over and want, more than almost anything, to do what she had done. Make something out of nothing. Put a world on paper that hadn't existed before.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She added *The White Dragon* and went to find her mother.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at the stack with the expression she sometimes wore when she was being patient. She took the top book, glanced at it, handed it back. "You've read these."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Several times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There's no shortage of books in this library, Lizzie. Don't you want to read something you haven't read before?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at her. "I tried to. You said no."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A short pause. Her mother's expression shifted almost imperceptibly\u8212?not softened, exactly, but recalibrated. "That one wasn't appropriate."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. You said." Lizzie held her stack a little more firmly. "These are appropriate. You've already decided they're appropriate. Can I check them out?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at the books again. Lizzie watched her work through whatever she was working through. Outside the library's tall windows, the late May light was very bright.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're also going to read Lord of the Rings this summer?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have my own copies. I don't need to check those out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's four books. For today."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not all for today. It's for the week." She paused. "Maybe less."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother picked up the Dragonflight paperback and examined it, turning it over, looking at the cover art of a dragon against a red sky with an expression Lizzie couldn't fully read. Then she handed it back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," she said. "Check them out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie went to the circulation desk before her mother could reconsider.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Safeway was crowded in the particular Saturday-morning way, and Elikapeka moved through it at a deliberate pace that Lizzie had learned to find maddening. Her mother shopped as she did most things\u8212?methodically, completely, attending to each decision as though it deserved full consideration. Lizzie loved her deeply and would have traded her shopping habits for almost any other arrangement.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Can I take the list?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at her. "Why?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I can get half of it while you're doing the other half. It'll be faster."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What's the hurry?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie glanced at the bag of library books hanging from her shoulder. Her mother followed her gaze and something crossed her face that might, in a different woman, have been amusement.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The produce section," she said. "Everything on the list that comes from produce. Then the dairy aisle. Come back to me after that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie took the list and went.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She moved through the store with the focused efficiency of someone who knew exactly what she wanted to get back to. Oranges, she could find oranges. Green onions. The small container of grape tomatoes her mother liked to put in salads. She navigated around a man studying yogurt with too much deliberation and threaded between two carts near the leafy greens and was back with the produce items in four minutes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was in the cereal aisle. Lizzie held up the bag.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good." Elikapeka inspected each item briefly as she transferred them to the cart. "Dairy next. Butter and the shredded mozzarella. The low-moisture kind, it comes in the green bag."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie went.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The dairy aisle was cold and long and she found the butter quickly. The mozzarella took an extra minute because someone had moved the green bags behind the whole-milk variety, but she located them and was back before her mother had reached the end of the cereal aisle.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Done," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at the items, looked at the list, and nodded. "You're efficient when you're motivated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm always motivated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're motivated by specific things." Her mother pushed the cart forward. "That's different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie fell into step beside her, the library bag knocking gently against her hip. Through the bag she could feel the familiar soft weight of the books, the worn Dragonflight paperback at the top of the stack.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They moved through the rest of the store together, her mother pausing at the things that required pausing and Lizzie ranging ahead when she was allowed to, and Lizzie thought about the afternoon\u8212?the particular quality of her bedroom in late May light, the smell of her own copy of Lord of the Rings, which was different from the library's smell, more personal somehow. She thought about Anne McCaffrey in whatever room she'd written in, and about whether Neil Gaiman had written other books she might be allowed to read, and about whether she would someday put a world on paper that a girl somewhere would read so many times the spine went soft.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Probably not, said the part of her brain that was practical.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Maybe, said everything else.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother set a can of tomatoes in the cart and moved on, and Lizzie followed, and outside the long windows of the store the Saturday light was very bright and the summer had barely started.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 5\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-24T21:30:11-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
At 5:47 a.m. on a Saturday, seventeen-year-old Ella Hayes \u8212? already dressed in golf shoes and obsessively prepared with a self-annotated yardage book and an hour-long warm-up plan \u8212? pressures her large, unhurried father Andrew into leaving their Pompano Beach canal-side home for a 7:24 tee time, overcoming his deliberate second cup of coffee through persistent argument and a pointed declaration that her rigorous work ethic has made her the better golfer, a claim he does not deny; he rinses his mug and concedes, and she leads them out into the pre-dawn blue-gray air with her bag on her shoulder, the day unresolved but full of competitive promise.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At the Pines course, Andy and Alex Carpenter watch their children \u8212? Ella and seventeen-year-old Bobby \u8212? warm up together on the range and then compete head-to-head from the black tees under a dollar-a-hole gross-score bet, with Bobby outdriving Ella by thirty yards but both halving the first hole, while Andy registers Ella's Stanford ambitions against Bobby's Florida plans and observes his daughter's precision and self-possession with quiet, chest-level pride, leaving the match and their dynamic unresolved as the round begins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
He grinned. He was never actually done, Andy knew, but he had the sense to let it rest for a few seconds.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy and Mark stepped up to the white tees, which asked a shorter and kinder question of the same fairway. Alex went first and hit a straight, workmanlike drive down the right side. Andy took a little extra with his driver and got all of it, finishing past Alex's ball and feeling his back register its mild objection and ignoring it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nice ball," Alex said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Not bad," Andy said, and he meant the morning and the hole and the whole thing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The first green was a gentle test \u8212? undulating, sloped back-left to front-right, a couple of benign tiers. Ella was up first from a hundred and forty yards, hit a low spinner that released to twelve feet below the hole, a perfect angle. Bobby's approach from one hundred ten pulled up to eighteen feet above, which was the worse of the two shots and he knew it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby walked the line of his putt twice, crouched behind it, walked it once more. Ella watched him with her arms folded and her putter resting against her shoulder.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Sometime today," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The read is complicated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It breaks left and it's downhill. It's really not complicated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you, I'm going to stand here for the rest of my natural life."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He stood up and made his stroke and the ball rolled down the tier and swung left and fell into the center of the cup with a sound that was deeply, infuriatingly conclusive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby spread his arms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood over her putt for perhaps four seconds. She stroked it, and the ball tracked the slope and found the edge of the cup and went in, and she pulled it out of the hole without breaking stride and walked to her bag.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Halve the hole," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Barely," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A half is a half."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy marked his scorecard and looked at Alex, who was already looking back at him with the specific expression of a man performing arithmetic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cart girl does the front nine," Andy said quietly. "What time does she usually come around?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eighth hole, maybe ninth," Mark said. "If we play fast."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy looked at his daughter, who was already twenty yards down the second fairway with her yardage book open.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We'll play fast," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Pompano Beach Golf Course \u8212? A frequently played course with Andy and Ella. Two eighteen hole courses, the shorter and easier Palms course and the longer and harder Pines course.\par
|
||||
Before noon, Saturday, late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Ella Hayes.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby sat at a table on the patio outside of the golf course restaurant having a snack. They\u8217?d finished eighteen holes in three and a half hours, but they still had an hour to kill before they could start the next round on the Palms course. Their fathers were inside at the bar, drinking more beer. Sometimes Ella wondered how her father could drink beers and still play solid golf, but he rarely seemed to be affected at all.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby had finished the round tied at two under. The trash talk had gone back and forth during the round, but neither player had ever gotten more than one hole up on the other. It was to be a grunge match on the easier course in the heat of the afternoon. This time, they\u8217?d take a cart rather than walk in the humidity and heat. Ella would drive; she refused to let Bobby drive the cart as one time he\u8217?d almost driven them into a pond. \par
|
||||
Bobby asked her out again. She rolled her eyes and said he\u8217?d always be in the friend zone. He just grinned, knowing what she\u8217?d say. She\u8217?d never gone out with any of the boys on the golf team, though she was friendly with all of them and been asked by several of them.\par
|
||||
At last, it was time to play again. They went to the clubhouse and got the key to a cart. Ella drove. She always drove. And she always gave him crap about it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to 1500 words maximum. Playful, flirty dialog between the two teenagers.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Lizzie had negotiated her outfit for twenty minutes, standing in front of her mirror in a way she almost never did, because she almost never cared and now she did, which was its own kind of betrayal. She'd settled on a white cover-up over her suit, which felt like a compromise between being at a pool party and being invisible, which was, in the end, what she wanted. To be invisible at a pool party. To perhaps find a corner where she could exist adjacently to the event without being fully absorbed by it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had a book in her room. She knew exactly which page she was on.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie, you cannot bring a book," Emma had said, in the flat tone of someone who had already won this argument.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
So there was no book, and now there was this.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six people, her mother had said, though thirty-six felt conservative from where Lizzie stood on the pool deck, pressed against the low fence near the hibiscus, watching the yard fill with people who all seemed to know exactly what to do with themselves at a party. The music was coming from somewhere, competing with the water sounds, and the Hayes cousins \u8212? Travis and Corey were in the pool already, Derek had apparently never left \u8212? had established a physics of chaos in the deep end that sent regular concussive waves against the tile. Someone had already knocked over one of the tiki torches and Jorge had come around the side of the house at a near-jog to right it with the expression of a man managing infrastructure in a war zone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood and watched.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was at the center of it, as Emma always was, moving between clusters of arriving girls with the ease of someone who had been trained for exactly this. Which she had, in a way. Emma had been training for this her whole life. She had the gift of making each person feel briefly, convincingly, like the most important arrival. Lizzie had watched her do it from the time they were small, had catalogued it the way she catalogued things she found genuinely mysterious, like tides and long division and the way some people slept through thunderstorms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin was with her, laughing at something, and then Susanna Barnes materialized out of nowhere in a red two-piece and headband and immediately began conducting some kind of census near the cooler. Hannah Eliot was behind her, tall and deliberate in a jeweled one-piece that caught the afternoon light in a way that suggested it had cost more than Lizzie's entire wardrobe. Hannah moved through the patio like she was accustomed to spaces making room for her, which, in Lizzie's experience, they did.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At the pool, the boys were a separate civilization.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was normal, Lizzie knew. She'd read enough to understand the social anthropology of it, the initial segregation, the gradual permeation, the later entanglements. It was documented behavior. Knowing it was documented did not make it less loud.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had the football again and was threatening Corey with it and one of Emma's friends shrieked when the splash came and Derek rose from the water laughing and wiped his face and looked extremely pleased with himself, and there was Bobby Carpenter at the far edge of the pool deck, out of the splash radius, talking to someone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at the someone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the someone for perhaps four seconds before she understood something had changed, some prior version of herself had been quietly retired, and here was the new one standing in the same white cover-up by the same hibiscus, and everything was slightly different now and it was completely disconcerting.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was blonde. Not the washed-out kind but the sun-saturated kind that looked like it had been bleached from the outside in over years. Compact and muscular in the way that was different from just big, the kind of build that suggested it was not accidental, that the whole structure was organized and intentional. He stood with his weight slightly forward, talking to Bobby, and he laughed at something Bobby said and looked briefly at the pool and then looked away, and he was tan and blue-eyed at a distance and Lizzie felt her face do something without her permission.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had not, not once, looked at a boy with anything resembling the feeling she was currently having.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She found it extremely inconvenient.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked away. She looked at the plumeria on the kitchen windowsill through the glass slider, which she could see from here. She looked at the tiki torch. She looked at Derek's abandoned towel crumpled near the steps. She looked, briefly, back at the boy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was still there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Someone grabbed her arm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh good, you're here," Hannah Eliot said, as though she'd been looking for Lizzie specifically, which seemed unlikely. Hannah had a drink in her free hand and a look of focused intention that Lizzie recognized, in retrospect, as the look of someone in the middle of executing something. "Come with me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm\u8212?" Lizzie started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah was already moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was dragged across the pool deck at a pace that left no time for objection, weaving through a cluster of girls she half-recognized from Emma's lunch table and past the cooler where Susanna was making notes in her phone and past the cousins who were now engaged in some kind of underwater wrestling that had attracted a small audience, and then they were on the far side of the pool and there was Bobby Carpenter and he turned and said "hey, Lizzie," because Bobby knew everyone in the Hayes household, and then there was the boy standing right there at close range and Lizzie's peripheral vision did something unhelpful.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Will," Hannah said, with the tone of someone completing a transaction. "This is Emma's sister Lizzie. Lizzie, this is Will Fontaine." She said the last name the French way, Fon-TEN, and it sounded like it had always been a name, like it had been a name since long before this afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will Fontaine looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He had blue eyes. This was confirmed at close range.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings too," Hannah said, and there was something in the way she said it, satisfied and slightly amused, that suggested she had already considered and completed whatever calculus had led her here, and then Lizzie felt the hand release her arm and when she looked, Hannah was already three steps away and angling back toward Emma's orbit with the efficiency of someone who had done what she came to do.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby found somewhere else to be. He was tactful, Bobby. She'd give him that.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then it was just Lizzie and Will Fontaine and the noise of the party continuing around them like it didn't know or care, and her mind, which was usually reliable, had gone essentially blank.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will tilted his head slightly. "She just leave you standing there?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She does that," Lizzie said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Something about that seemed to land correctly. He smiled \u8212? not the performative kind she'd been watching boys do all afternoon near Emma, but a real one, slightly asymmetric. "So you're Emma's sister."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yeah."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's like\u8212?" He gestured at the party generally, at Emma's orbit visible across the water. "A different person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She is a different person," Lizzie said. "We both are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded. "Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a crash in the pool behind them and Derek's voice emerged from the water and several people yelled and the music shifted to something louder and Will glanced at the pool and then back at her and said, with apparent genuine curiosity, "Hannah said Lord of the Rings. Like the books or the\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The books," Lizzie said, faster than she meant to. "The books are\u8212? the movies aren't out yet, so. The books."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Right." He nodded. He had the look, she realized, of someone who was actually going to continue this. "Okay, question then. Tom Bombadil. You think he should have gone to the Council of Elrond?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The question hit her so directly in the center of something she'd genuinely thought about that she lost, briefly, the thread of being nervous. "No," she said. "Because he wouldn't have taken the Ring seriously and they'd all have been standing around having an existential crisis while he was singing about the river." She paused. "But I think he should have sent a message. A message would have been appropriate."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will stared at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody says that," he said. "That's\u8212? nobody says the message thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's the obvious gap," Lizzie said, because it was, it absolutely was, Tolkien leaves it completely unaddressed, Bombadil simply does not engage with the council at all, there's no indication he even knows it's happening\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, but he pulls them out of Old Man Willow\u8212?" Will started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Which he only does because they happened to be in his territory\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"But that's\u8212? wait, so you think he's purely reactive?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I think he's the oldest thing in the world and he operates by completely different logic and I think Gandalf knew better than to invite him because the invitation itself would have required him to care\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The Hayes cousins crashed into the shallow end together and the wave came over the lip of the pool and ran cold across the deck and hit both their feet and Lizzie looked down at the water spreading over the sun-warmed concrete and Will laughed again and she looked up and the party was loud and bright around them and she thought, with one small, private part of her mind: she could close the book later.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 From Elikapeka's viewpoint at the kitchen window, the final half-hour before Emma's party begins sees logistics resolved (tiki torches placed, chairs sourced by Jorge, Bobby Carpenter proving unexpectedly gifted at welcoming arrivals), the Hayes cousins immediately causing pool chaos upon arrival, Emma absorbing the day's accumulated negotiations and concessions before stepping outside to claim the afternoon on her own terms, and the first guest car arriving as Elikapeka, steadied by Susan's competent company and the sight of Andy at ease in the yard, sets down her cup and declares herself ready.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The coffee was going cold.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka had poured it twenty minutes ago and set it on the counter and then been pulled away by a question from the caterer about whether the tiki torches went along the fence line or grouped near the patio, and then by the discovery that someone had miscounted the folding chairs, and then by Susan Carpenter appearing at the back slider with a clipboard and an expression of capable cheerfulness that Elikapeka had come to understand meant *I have solved three problems you don't know about yet.* She liked Susan. Susan had the particular competence of a woman who had raised two children and had learned to make decisions without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the coffee cup now and drank it cold, standing at the kitchen window, watching the canal.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon light came off the water in long flat angles, the kind of light that made the whole backyard look like somewhere else, somewhere slightly idealized, the way places looked in memory before the difficult parts returned. Out on the sailboat\u8212?Jim's boat, the big one, the one that overhung the dock in a way that had bothered her for three years\u8212?she could hear the men. Andy's laugh came across the water first, that particular sound, unhurried, the laugh of a man who was genuinely comfortable. Then Alex Carpenter's voice, lower, and Jim's, and then music began, something with a bass line that moved across the water and came in through the window glass.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had given them the CDs herself. A playlist. She had presented it with the same organized seriousness she'd brought to the guest list negotiations, which Elikapeka had thought about more than once in the weeks since. The methodological error argument. Cousins as family, guests as a distinct category. Emma had made the case with such carefully assembled calm that Elikapeka had let her finish entirely before explaining that the answer was still no, and had watched her daughter absorb this with the contained dignity of someone who intended to remember it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had given her the extra girls instead. Three more, to balance the cousins. Emma had accepted this with a graciousness that was only slightly performative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six teenagers were arriving in a half hour.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka drank the coffee and breathed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The back slider opened and Susan came in, still holding the clipboard. "Tiki torches are along the fence," she said. "The chair situation is resolved. Jorge found four more in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He had four chairs in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He has a great deal in that truck." Susan looked at the cold coffee cup. "I'll make a fresh pot."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You don't have to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm making one for myself." She moved to the coffee maker with the ease of someone familiar with the kitchen, which she was, having spent several Saturday mornings here after the children's golf rounds, and Elikapeka let her, because the coffee genuinely needed to be made and there was something clarifying about Susan's company, her lack of surplus motion.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set the cup down and started toward the front of the house, but Ella was already there\u8212?she'd heard the door, she always heard the door, even when she appeared not to be paying attention to anything domestic. Ella had come in twenty minutes ago in her coverall, Bobby Carpenter behind her in board shorts and a t-shirt, the two of them with the easy unselfconsciousness of people who had been in each other's company so long they'd stopped performing anything for each other. Elikapeka had assigned Ella the greeter role without much expectation that she'd embrace it. Ella had responded by recruiting help, which was, she supposed, its own kind of initiative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard Michelle's voice in the front hall, and the heavier sound of boys, male voices that had mostly finished changing and not yet settled into what they'd become, and then the particular quality of noise that the Hayes cousins produced simply by being in a space together, which was a noise like something slightly loosely assembled, liable to spill.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She reached the front hall.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle had her arms around her, kissing her cheek, saying happy birthday to Emma's mama, and the boys were already moving, already past the introductions, Travis with his hair still damp from wherever they'd come from, Corey a full head taller than the last time she'd seen him at Christmas, and the third one, Derek, Andy's brother Michael's son, who still wore the expression he'd had at age seven of someone who had recently been accused of something and was reserving his defense.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go find your uncle," Elikapeka said. "He's on the boat."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They were gone. The back slider was still moving when Emma came into the kitchen from the hallway, Mai Lin a step behind, both of them in coveralls, both of them bright with it, the day, the occasion, the thing finally actually happening. Emma's coverall was a pale yellow that worked with her coloring and she had done something with her hair that Elikapeka recognized as effort and approved of. The bikini underneath she had opinions about and had agreed with Andy to set aside, which she had done, mostly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're here?" Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Outside. Your father's on the boat, I sent them out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went to the window. Mai Lin drifted to the counter and picked up a grape from the fruit tray Susan had arranged and ate it with the unceremonious comfort of a girl who had been in this kitchen enough times to be furniture, which was accurate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Outside, the cousins had found the Nerf football.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't know where it had come from. They had not put it out deliberately. It had materialized, the way things materialized when you introduced enough boys into a space with a pool\u8212?objects appeared, projectiles were launched, someone was going to be in the water before the first guest arrived.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Corey threw a spiral the length of the pool. Derek caught it and immediately fell backward into the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my god," Emma said, not entirely without affection.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your father's watching," Elikapeka said. She could see Andy on the deck of the sailboat, beer in hand, already laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music got louder. She could hear Andy shout something at the boys, the cousins shouting back, the easy call-and-response of the Hayes male frequency which she had been decoding for twenty years and still sometimes missed a word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan appeared beside her at the window with two fresh cups of coffee. Elikapeka accepted hers and they stood together watching Derek surface, still holding the football, raising it above his head like he'd recovered something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's good with the door," Susan said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mm."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good at\u8212?" Susan paused, searching for the precise version. "He knows how to make people feel they're expected."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka thought about that. It was true. She'd watched him in the front hall, just briefly, the slight forward attention he gave to whoever came in, not performative, just present. It was a quality you didn't teach. "Ella does not have that quality," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan smiled into her coffee. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had gotten the football now and was standing at the edge of the pool and Corey was in the water and Travis threw it directly at his face from four feet away and Corey caught it and pulled Travis in by the wrist in a single fluid movement and there was a crash of water and Emma made a sound at the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're going to break something," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Probably," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go, mija. Go outside. Your party is starting."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her with the particular look she had, the one that held several things at once: the residue of negotiations, the awareness of concessions made and not made, the birthday, the day, the afternoon light. Then she crossed the kitchen and went out the back slider and Mai Lin followed her, and Elikapeka heard Emma's voice shift the moment the door opened, warmer, louder, already calling out to the cousins, already entering the afternoon on her own terms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music moved across the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle wandered into the kitchen looking for a glass and Elikapeka found her one and poured her the last of the old coffee, which she took without complaint. Outside, Andy had stepped off the boat onto the dock and was crossing the yard toward the pool, beer still in hand, and he had the look he got when things were going well, that particular ease, the long unhurried movement of a man who felt himself to be in the right place.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six kids.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She could already hear the first car pulling into the driveway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan put down her clipboard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready?" Susan said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took a breath, looked at the plumeria on the windowsill, its single open flower going gold in the afternoon light, and set down the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes," she said.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 While her parents are out, Emma sneaks into their bedroom to phone Susanna, Mai Lin, Hannah, and two others, methodically building a vetted fifteen-name boys list for her party through a series of negotiations that cut Tyler Marsh and added Daniel Park and Harrison Webb; she ends the session unresolved and silently resistant after realizing her mother's rule about counting the boy cousins within the boys total could force three cuts she refuses to pre-emptively accept, and she formulates a logical counter-argument\u8212?cousins as family versus guests as a distinct category\u8212?to deploy when her mother returns.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\'92s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 A boy at Emma's sixteenth birthday party. Engaged in sustained, flirtatious pool play with Mai Lin Wen; compact enough to be dunked and good-humored enough to hand her a towel afterward. Mai Lin regards him as worth spending time on.\par
|
||||
Kissed Emma Hayes during a chicken fight at the party.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The patio behind the restaurant was in shade for another twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before the sun would clear the line of palms along the cart path and make sitting outside genuinely unpleasant. For now it was tolerable. A ceiling fan turned overhead without much conviction, and a mockingbird somewhere in the palms was cycling through its repertoire with the manic energy of something that had nowhere to be.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella had a Sprite and a sleeve of Oreos she'd bought from the vending machine inside. Bobby had a Gatorade, orange, and a bag of pretzels. This was their standard intermission configuration, established over enough Saturday mornings that it had the quality of tradition.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The scorecard was on the table between them, flattened under Ella's elbow. Two under each. Eighteen holes of trading the lead and giving it back and taking it again, neither of them pulling more than one hole clear at any point. It was the kind of round that was satisfying and infuriating in equal measure, and Ella had spent the last quarter mile of the walk back to the clubhouse turning over the par five on sixteen where she'd three-putted from twelve feet and handed him a push when she should have won the hole outright.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You want to talk about sixteen?" Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because I'm happy to talk about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying, that second putt\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"If you finish that sentence I'm going to eat all of these Oreos and not give you any, and I was going to give you some."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He leaned back in his chair and held up both hands. "Not another word about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed three Oreos across the table. He took them without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They sat for a moment in the particular comfortable silence that was one of the things Ella actually valued about Bobby Carpenter\u8212?not many people she could be quiet with without it becoming awkward, but Bobby was one of them. He'd been her Saturday morning for three years now, through two swing coaches and a growth spurt and the whole evolving calculus of what she needed to become the golfer she intended to be. He'd seen her cry exactly once, after the district tournament junior year, and he had said nothing then either, which was exactly right.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know I'm going to birdie six, seven, and eight."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've been threatening to birdie six, seven, and eight since February and you've done it exactly zero times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Today's the day."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that about a lot of days."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm an optimist." He ate an Oreo in one piece, which Ella found obscurely irritating. "Whereas you are a pessimist who happens to play golf well enough that it looks like confidence."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's the most wrong thing you've ever said, and you once told me I was gripping the club like I was trying to strangle a raccoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was not."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your knuckles were white, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She drank her Sprite. The mockingbird had moved closer, or found a more ambitious portion of its repertoire. Somewhere inside, through the glass, she could see her father at the bar with Alex, two cold beers between them, deep in whatever conversation fathers had when their children were occupied. She had never fully understood how her father could drink two beers at the turn and then go out and shoot thirty-eight on the back nine with the same untroubled swing he'd had on the front. It didn't seem fair and it didn't seem physiologically consistent with what she'd learned in health class.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby was watching her watch her father.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's fine," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know he's fine. I've seen him chug a beer and make a forty-foot putt."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad's on his third."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your dad is not fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad is going to birdie six anyway because he doesn't know enough about the hole to be scared of it." Bobby pulled his chair slightly forward and rested his elbows on the table. He had, Ella noticed with mild irritation, gotten significantly taller in the last year. He was now legitimately tall rather than just taller-than-average, which was part of what was doing things to his driving distance and creating new problems for her. "Hey, so. Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She recognized the tone. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I haven't said anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I might have been about to say literally anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to ask me to the movies or something and I'm telling you no in advance so we can skip the whole part where you ask and I say no and then you pretend you don't care."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned. He had an aggravating grin, easy and undefeated, the grin of someone who had asked a question so many times that the answer had stopped landing. "Would you consider dinner instead of movies?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just dinner. There's that Italian place in Sunrise that you like."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I like the bread there. The bread is the absolute best. That's not the same as liking going to dinner. With you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You could go for the bread."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not going to dinner with you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about just the bread then, strictly a bread-acquisition errand, no romantic implications\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You are in the friend zone," Ella said. "You have been in the friend zone. The friend zone is, for you, a permanent and non-negotiable territory with clearly established borders. There is no diplomatic mission that gets you out of the friend zone."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't stop grinning. "I appreciate the clarity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't know why you keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because one day you're going to run out of metaphors for the friend zone and you'll have to say yes by default."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have an unlimited supply of friend zone metaphors. I could do this all afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We have an hour."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm very efficient."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He ate another Oreo, this one in two pieces, which felt like a concession of some kind. Outside the shade perimeter, the sun was doing serious work on the cart path, and the heat coming off the asphalt had a visible quality to it, a slight atmospheric distortion that made the distant palms look like they were breathing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For the record," Bobby said, "I'm going to keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not a thing I'm going to stop doing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just wanted to be transparent about my intentions."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your intentions are transparent. They've always been transparent. You're not exactly a complicated person, Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yet here you are, spending your entire summer playing golf with me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I always spend my summers playing golf," Ella said. "You happen to be the best available opponent. Don't read into it more than that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's going in my memory as reading into it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything to that. The fan turned. The mockingbird finished one cycle and started another. Her father laughed at something Alex said, the sound coming through the glass slightly muffled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At ten minutes to noon, Ella stood, gathered her Sprite and the remaining Oreos, and nodded toward the clubhouse. "Let's go get the cart."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The clubhouse was cool and dark inside after the patio, and the woman at the counter handed over the key without ceremony. Cart fourteen. Ella took the key before Bobby's hand was halfway across the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm driving," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You always drive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because you tried to put us in the water on eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was one time and the path curves."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The path has always curved. It curved the week before that and the week before that. The curve is not a new development." She pushed through the side door into the cart barn, found fourteen, and swung into the driver's seat with the efficiency of someone claiming territory. Bobby came around the other side and got in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know," he said, "in certain cultures, letting the passenger drive occasionally is considered a mark of social maturity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good thing I don't live in those cultures."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just noting that you have control issues."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't have control issues. I have correct-decision-making habits. These are different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He settled back against the seat and put his arm along the back of it, easy and comfortable, and she was aware of this peripherally and in a way that she filed immediately into the category of things she didn't examine. Bobby Carpenter was her Saturday morning. He was her best opponent and the person who'd seen her three-putt from twelve feet and not said anything devastating about it. He was funny and tall and an infuriating driver of golf carts, and none of that was relevant to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She started the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms, hole one," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hole one," he agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart rolled forward out of the staging area and into the white blaze of the afternoon, and ahead of them the Palms course opened up wide and shimmering in the heat, soft and forgiving and ready to be argued over, hole by hole, for the rest of the day. As she drove off, she saw her father and Bobby's father come out and walk towards the cart barn. It was time to play golf.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The seventeenth hole had given Andy a moment of hope for her, which was the cruelest thing a golf course could do.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd watched her striped six-iron from the fairway settle four feet from the pin, watched her read the putt with the focused economy of motion he'd spent years teaching her, and watched the ball fall dead center into the cup. She'd allowed herself one tight nod\u8212?not a fist pump, not a word\u8212?and picked up her ball and walked to the eighteenth tee with the bearing of someone who had not yet lost anything. That was his daughter. That was three years of Saturday mornings made visible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One shot back, needing a birdie. Playing the eighteenth on the Palms course, which was not the Palms course's idea of a good time for anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy hung back near the cart path with Alex while the kids played up ahead. Alex had cracked his third beer of the back nine and offered one across with a sociable tilt of the can. Andy shook his head. He'd finished his second on sixteen and he was done. He needed to watch this clearly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's going to be fine," Alex said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's right back in it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she is."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex looked at him. "You're not actually worried about the match."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not worried about anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've got that face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy didn't answer because Alex wasn't entirely wrong and because there wasn't anything useful to say about it. He'd been watching Ella golf since she was nine years old gripping a cut-down seven-iron on the driving range, and he could read her like a stock chart. The back nine today had been uneven in a way that had nothing to do with her swing. Her swing was fine. Her swing was always fine. It was the thing behind the swing that had been slightly out of adjustment, the internal temperature she usually managed without thinking about it. She'd been managing it today, but only just.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He knew what that kind of management cost.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had played beautifully all afternoon. The kid had grown into something this year\u8212?not just the height, though that was part of it, the extra leverage translating directly into yards that Ella no longer had a comfortable cushion against. It was also just the general settling of him, the way he moved through a round without the peaks and valleys that defined most high school golfers, without the miniature crises over a bad bounce or an unlucky kick. He had his father's ease on a golf course, if not Alex's liquid assistance in achieving it. Bobby played like someone who expected to be there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella played like someone who intended to win, which was a different thing entirely, and usually it was the difference that made her the best player on any course she stepped onto. Today it had been working against her in small, compounding ways.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Sixteen had been the disaster.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy had seen it coming from the moment she'd pulled the wrong club on her second shot\u8212?he'd seen it and said nothing because there was nothing to say, she didn't want help and wouldn't have taken it, and part of learning to be a golfer was making your own mistakes in your own time. The penalty had been two shots she couldn't fully recover from, and he'd watched her absorb them with a controlled anger that was visible only if you knew what you were looking at. A tightening around the jaw. The way she replaced the divot with slightly too much force.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now Bobby was standing by the eighteenth green waiting with a ball two feet from the pin and a birdie as inevitable as weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella was in the bunker.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy walked up to the edge of the green and stopped. Alex came alongside him. Neither of them spoke.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see the lie from where he stood and he felt it in his stomach before his mind had fully processed it\u8212?the ball settled down into the sand at an angle that meant the back edge of the bunker's lip had gotten involved, burying it into a small depression that a pro golfer would curse quietly and privately before playing for nothing more than a clean exit. Any lie in a bunker was manageable. A buried lie in a bunker, with the pin thirty feet away and the match on it, was a different conversation.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella stood at the edge looking down at it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see her temper from forty feet away. Not in any obvious gesture\u8212?she wasn't the kind of girl who wore it openly. It was in the stillness of her, the way she went very quiet in the way that preceded something precise and controlled and likely insufficient. She was doing the math the same way he was doing the math, and she was arriving at the same answer, and she was refusing to accept it on principle.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That was his daughter too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stepped down into the bunker. Addressed the ball with her sand wedge. Took her stance, adjusted it slightly, took it again. He watched her set her jaw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had drifted to the far side of the green to stay out of her sightline, which was a considerate piece of golf etiquette and probably also self-preservation. The kid understood her better than most.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She swung.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was a full, committed swing\u8212?no half measures, no protective caution\u8212?and the sand exploded upward in a white burst that caught the afternoon light and hung for a moment before dispersing. The ball came up high and clean out of it, which was the part that gave Andy one half second of irrational hope, the ball up in the air and possible, everything possible while it was in the air\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It hit the green eight feet past the hole and rolled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He watched it. Everyone watched it. The break was left to right and it ran with the break, slowing, slowing, and stopped three feet beyond the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The sand had barely settled in the bunker before Ella was climbing out of it, rake in hand. She raked the sand with the clipped, efficient movements of someone who has moved past the event and does not intend to discuss it. She walked up onto the green and looked at Bobby, who was already extending his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shook it. One clean shake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good round," she said. Her voice was entirely level.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You too," Bobby said. He was keeping his face straight with visible effort.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She conceded his putt with a nod that didn't require words, and then she looked at her own ball for a moment and did the thing that Andy had watched her do before\u8212?the thing that was entirely Ella and that he had never quite managed to talk her out of\u8212?she stepped to the edge of the green where it dropped away toward the small decorative pond that ran along the cart path, drew her foot back, and kicked the ball cleanly off the green and into the water with a small, satisfying splash.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't watch it land. She was already walking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby let her go. Andy caught his eye briefly and Bobby shrugged, one shoulder, with the half-grin of a kid who had earned something rare and wasn't going to waste it on commentary. He was right to let her walk. Andy had raised her and he would have let her walk too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He and Alex fell in behind her at a reasonable distance.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Alex said. "Bobby just played slightly better, specifically on sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Let's not quantify it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They drove the cart in comfortable silence back toward the cart barn. The afternoon was long and hot and the shadows were beginning to stretch across the fairways in the way they did in late May when the day had given everything it had and was finally starting to let go. Ahead of them, Ella's back was straight and her stride was fast and she was not looking at anything except where she was going.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck, Andy gave her the silence she needed. He merged onto Federal Highway heading north and let the air conditioning run and watched the road and said nothing. She sat with her arm along the window ledge and her jaw still set and her eyes on the landscape going past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. Every player on tour, every professional who'd ever put a ball in the air for a living, won less than a quarter of the time they entered. The best players in the world lost three tournaments for every one they won. She knew this. He'd told her and she'd understood it and filed it away and it made not one bit of difference to her when she was the one doing the losing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Every time. Every single time, it hit her exactly like the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't think this was something he needed to fix. He thought it might be what made her good.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. The radio was on low, country music playing. She stared out the window and let the miles do the work that miles were for, and eventually her jaw unclenched by a small degree, and he saw it, and said nothing about that either.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 Emma\'92s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\'92s house.}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 From her parents' bedroom, Emma phones Susanna, Mai Lin, and Hannah in succession to build a vetted boy-invitation list that reaches fifteen names\u8212?adding Nate Oliveira, eliminating Chris DeLuca for calling Mai Lin and Emma interchangeable, and flagging Ryan from the swim team for confirmation\u8212?before calculating that her mother's mandate to include all three boy cousins (Devin, Tyler, and cannonball-prone Marcus) will disrupt her intended gender balance of fifteen boys to ten girls, leaving her without a workable counter-argument to raise the guest cap and only the unresolved notation "cousins don't count\u8212?separate category" starred on her notepad.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The breakfast dishes were still on the table when Elikapeka Hayes poured herself a second cup of coffee and settled into the chair at the head of the table. Through the sliding glass doors she could see the backyard, the pool catching the late May morning light, the canal beyond it glittering, and the tall white mast of Frank Bellardi's sailboat swaying gently at the dock. Andy and her mother had been gone just over an hour. She had the morning ahead of her, quiet except for her daughters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was working through a bowl of cereal with the focused efficiency she applied to anything she considered a preliminary to something more interesting. Lizzie had barely touched her toast and was reading a paperback she'd propped against the orange juice glass, something with a dragon on the cover.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll ruin your eyes doing that," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that every morning," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"One morning I'll be right."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma set her spoon down. "Mom. Can we talk about my birthday party?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at her over the rim of her cup. Emma was fifteen, and would be sixteen in June, and there were mornings when Elikapeka looked at her second daughter and felt something almost like vertigo \u8212? the girl was so thoroughly, effortlessly herself, so completely certain of her own orbit. She had Andy's easy confidence and none of his self-doubt, and she had Elikapeka's stubbornness without the patience that usually accompanied it. A complicated gift.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about it," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Pool party. Evening. Backyard. My birthday is on a Friday, so I can have a party on my birthday for once."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That could work."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And I want it to be a real party. Not just a family thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can have your friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know, but that's the thing." Emma pulled her knees up onto the chair in a way that Elikapeka had been asking her not to do since she was eight. "I have a lot of friends, Mom. I'm going to have to cut the list down. There are people who are going to be upset if they don't get invited and I need to think about it strategically."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie turned a page without comment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How many are you thinking?" Elikapeka asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Maybe forty. Forty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For a backyard pool party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The backyard is big."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Forty-five children in my backyard at night is not a party, Emma, it's a liability."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're not children. And I was thinking more like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty," Elikapeka said. "Twenty-five at the absolute outside."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma made a face that communicated the full tragedy of this constraint. "Okay, I can work with twenty-five. But there's something else." She paused, and Elikapeka recognized the pause \u8212? it was the same pause Emma had used at age six when she wanted a second dessert, the brief moment of gauging whether the ground was firm enough to stand on. "I want to invite boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked up from her book for the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm turning sixteen, Mom. Not twelve."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You made a face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm allowed to make a face in my own kitchen." Elikapeka set her cup down and folded her hands on the table. "You can invite boys. Within reason."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously within reason." Emma's tone carried the faint implication that her mother's concept of reason was narrower than the average person's. "So I'll put together a list for you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll need the names, yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just\u8212?" Emma pointed at her. "Just look at the list and trust me a little. Don't go being racist about it, okay?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The word landed in the room with a particular weight. Lizzie's eyes moved from her sister to her mother and back to her sister, and then, wisely, returned to her book.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka kept her expression level. "Excuse me?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying. You have opinions about who I'm allowed to be friends with. Or who counts as appropriate." Emma put small sarcastic emphasis on the last word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have opinions about who comes into my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know what your opinions are. I've known since I was little. And I'm just asking you to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're asking me not to be a racist," Elikapeka said. "That is what you just said to me, in my kitchen, about my home."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had the grace not to smirk, but she met her mother's eyes without flinching. "I didn't say you were a racist. I said don't be racist about the list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was quiet for a moment. She was not going to have this argument in full \u8212? not now, not with Lizzie sitting three feet away pretending to read about dragons. There were things she believed that she had never dressed up in pretty language, and she wasn't going to start doing it because her fifteen-year-old daughter had learned the vocabulary of a challenge. She would look at the list. She would make her decisions. The decisions themselves were not going to change.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Give me the list," she said. "I'll tell you who's welcome."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma opened her mouth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's not a negotiation, Emma. You asked for a party, I'm giving you a party. You want to invite boys, I'm allowing boys. You give me the list, I look at the list, and that is how it works in this house." She picked up her coffee cup again. "Next item."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma sat back, not quite defeated, recalibrating. Elikapeka knew that look too. It meant the subject was being filed away for a later attempt, not abandoned.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cousins," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't want to invite all of them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie's mouth curved very slightly at the corner of her page.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're your family," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're our family," Emma said, then immediately adjusted: "I mean \u8212? they're family, yes, I know. But Malia and Koa are fine and Auntie Lena's kids are fine but if I have to invite the Pahoa cousins then I'd honestly rather not have a party at all, because Devin is going to spend the entire night complaining about the music and Tyler is going to eat everything and not talk to anyone and\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tyler is twelve," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Exactly."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's twelve and you want to exclude him from your birthday party so you can have a more sophisticated evening with your forty friends."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty-five friends. You said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I said twenty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yes." Emma pressed forward, undeterred. "Is it wrong to want my own birthday party to be fun? I see these cousins at every single family thing. At Christmas, at Easter, at Grandma's \u8212? can I have one thing that's just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma blinked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They'll all be invited. Every last one of them. Devin, Tyler, all of them. And you will be gracious about it or there won't be a party." Elikapeka said it the way she said most things she was certain about \u8212? without heat, without performance, simply as the shape of reality. "Don't push me on this, Emma. I have given you a lot of ground this morning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"An evening pool party with boys for your sixteenth birthday," Elikapeka said. "In this backyard. When I was your age, do you know what I got for my sixteenth birthday?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie chose this moment to set her paperback down and observe, with the mild, studied disinterest of someone who had clearly been following every word: "Stinky boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned the full weight of her attention on her younger sister. The look was slow, deliberate, the kind that communicated a detailed opinion about the immaturity of the person receiving it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She rose and carried her cup to the sink, looking out through the window over the water. The morning was already warm and would be hot by noon, and Jim Kowalski's sailboat rocked in its gentle patient way against the dock, going nowhere.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." Elikapeka turned back from the window and smiled at her, the full warm smile that she knew her daughter found difficult to stay annoyed at. "It's going to be a beautiful party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The moment the Honda cleared the end of the driveway, Emma was moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was through the kitchen, down the hall, and into her parents' bedroom before the sound of the engine had faded off the street. The room smelled faintly of her mother's perfume and the coconut oil her father used on his hair on weekends, and the bed was made with the military precision that Elikapeka applied to all horizontal surfaces in the house. Emma arranged three pillows against the headboard, settled herself against them, pulled the notepad from where she'd tucked it under her arm, and lifted the receiver.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Outside, through the window, the canal caught the late-morning light and threw it back at the sky in broken pieces.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna picked up on the second ring.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I need your brain," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning. I need your brain. I'm making the boys list for my party and I need you to tell me who is worth inviting and who I should throw into the ocean."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a pause, and Emma could hear Susanna rearranging herself, getting comfortable, taking this seriously the way Susanna took anything involving boys seriously\u8212?which was to say with the focused intensity she usually reserved for game-day stunts. Susanna had been a varsity cheerleader since sophomore year and she maintained a mental catalog of every boy in their class with the thoroughness of a librarian who happened to be seventeen and deeply opinionated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," Susanna said. "Who do you have so far?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have nobody. That's why I'm calling you. Start talking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tyler Marsh."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it down. "Okay, yes, obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Jake Ferraro."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's going to spend the whole party trying to do backflips off the diving board."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma. That is literally the best possible thing to have at a pool party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote it down. "Fair point. Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna went through names with the brisk efficiency of someone reading off a grocery list she'd memorized. Emma wrote, hesitated, crossed out, wrote again. When Susanna said Drew Cavanaugh, Emma made a sound like a small animal had been stepped on.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Absolutely not."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's funny."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He told Jessica Bowen that her swimsuit looked like a shower curtain. At a pool party, Susanna. Who does that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, fair, cross him off. What about\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Already crossed off. Keep going."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
By the time they hung up, Emma had seven names on the notepad and her hand was slightly cramped. Seven boys. She looked at the list with something close to satisfaction and then reminded herself that she had at least four more calls to make and that the list was going to change, because lists always changed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She dialed Mai Lin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen answered on the fourth ring, sounding like she'd been awake for exactly as long as it took to reach the phone. "What."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's me. Are you still sleeping? It's almost eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was reading. What do you want."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I want you to help me make the boys list for my party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A pause. Emma could hear Mai Lin sitting up, could practically hear her becoming alert. "Read me what you have."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma read the list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Mai Lin said immediately.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No to Tyler Marsh."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma's pen hovered. "He's at the top of everyone's list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He spent forty-five minutes at Sarah's party telling me about the differences between various types of fishing rod. Forty-five minutes, Emma. I timed it. He had no idea I was timing it because he had no idea I was a person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good-looking, though."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"So is the canal behind your house and I don't want to have a conversation with it either. Cross him off."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma crossed him off with the pen stroke of someone who had been pushed into something she wasn't entirely sure about. "Fine. What about Jake Ferraro?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Jake can stay. Jake is funny."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's going to do backflips off the diving board."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. It's going to be great. Keep Jake."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They went through the rest. Mai Lin cut one more\u8212?Carter Somebody who Emma had barely remembered adding and felt no grief about losing\u8212?and added one, a quiet boy named Daniel Park who Mai Lin said was extremely interesting and also happened to look like something out of a magazine, which Emma filed under relevant data. The call ended with six names, and Emma looked at the reduced list and felt the particular satisfaction of collaboration.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three more calls, and the list rebuilt itself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot was the call Emma made with a slightly clenched jaw, because Hannah was unavoidable the way weather was unavoidable\u8212?you could dislike it, but you couldn't not account for it. Hannah came from the kind of money that had its own gravitational field and she moved through high school social life accordingly. Emma didn't hate her. She just found her exhausting in the way that overly confident people were exhausting when you were also an overly confident person and there was only so much room for it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Harrison Webb," Hannah said immediately.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Isn't he a senior?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it down. There was nothing else to say about that. Hannah added one more, someone Emma vaguely recognized from a basketball game in February, and the number crept back up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
On it went. Calls four and five were easier\u8212?shorter, sharper, more about confirming names she already had than adding new ones\u8212?and by the end of call five she was looking at fifteen names on the notepad. She'd used two pages, crossing out and rewriting until the handwriting looked like a construction project. But fifteen. Fifteen boys, vetted, approved, sorted through by the collective wisdom of her closest friends and at least one enemy she was maintaining for strategic reasons.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the pen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She put the pen down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about what her mother had said that morning, which was that the boy cousins counted in the total, which was a position so absurd on its face that Emma had let it pass without full engagement because she'd been dealing with the larger battle over the Hayes cousins and couldn't fight on two fronts simultaneously.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She counted the cousins. Three boys on the Hayes side who were remotely close to her age, which meant if the total stayed where her mother had said it would\u8212?somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five\u8212?then three boys on her list had to come out to make room for three boys who were going to stand at the edges of the yard and talk about whatever Hayes cousins talked about at parties. Boat engines, probably. Her mother's side had an entire vocabulary about boats and Emma had been unable to acquire it despite years of exposure.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the list again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the pen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She did not cross anything out, because crossing names out right now would feel like accepting a loss she hadn't actually accepted, and Emma Hayes did not pre-emptively accept losses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She tore the page off the notepad and looked at it and thought about the expression on her mother's face that morning when she'd said, *that is not negotiable*, in that voice. The voice that was not louder but was somehow denser, heavier, occupying more of the room than voices usually did. Emma had understood from roughly age eight that when that voice appeared, the conversation had moved into territory where winning looked different than it had a moment before.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But the cousins counting in the *boys* total was a separate question. That hadn't been explicitly stated. That was an interpretation, and interpretations were subject to argument, and Emma was going to make that argument with the list in her hand and the kind of careful, reasonable logic that her mother occasionally responded to when it was presented without what Elikapeka called *the architecture of grievance,* which was Emma's mother's poetic way of saying *don't be dramatic about it.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma would not be dramatic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She would be precise and reasonable and she would point out that cousins were family, which she now accepted, fully and without reservation, and that the boys she'd invited to her party were *guests* in a different category, and that conflating the two categories was a methodological error.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the fifteen names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the ceiling.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pressed the notepad to her chest and made a sound that was not quite a word, not quite a scream, but somewhere in between\u8212?the sound of someone who had done everything right and was now confronting the specific injustice of other people's rules.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she got up, smoothed the bedspread, replaced the pillows, and went to wait for her mother to come home.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Elikapeka Hayes.\
|
||||
The two younger girls Emma and Lizzie are at the breakfast table and the discussion turns to Emma\'92s upcoming sweet sixteen birthday party. Emma is a social butterfly with dozens of friends and she\'92ll have to whittle down the list, as she wants an evening pool party in the backyard. And, she says, she wants to invite boys for the first time. Lizzie makes a snarky remark about stinky boys as she\'92s shown little interest in them so far. Emma gives her sister the stink eye.\
|
||||
Elikapeka wants a list of the boys Emma wants to invite so she can check them out and reject any that aren\'92t suitable. Emma rolls her eyes and says she\'92ll give her mother a list but she insists that her mother \'93not be racist,\'94 knowing that her mother will not be allowing any black or hispanic boys to come to the party. Emma had heard from her mother since she was little that the only suitable boys for her girls would be white or Hawaiian or perhaps Asian. Emma continues that she wants to limit which of her cousins can come to the party, complaining that some of them are just no fun at all. Elikapeka tells Emma that all of them will be invited and Emma shouldn\'92t push her luck or there would be no party at all.}
|
||||
@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The seventeenth hole had given Andy a moment of hope for her, which was the cruelest thing a golf course could do.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd watched her striped six-iron from the fairway settle four feet from the pin, watched her read the putt with the focused economy of motion he'd spent years teaching her, and watched the ball fall dead center into the cup. She'd allowed herself one tight nod\u8212?not a fist pump, not a word\u8212?and picked up her ball and walked to the eighteenth tee with the bearing of someone who had not yet lost anything. That was his daughter. That was three years of Saturday mornings made visible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One shot back, needing a birdie. Playing the eighteenth on the Palms course, which was not the Palms course's idea of a good time for anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy hung back near the cart path with Alex while the kids played up ahead. Alex had cracked his third beer of the back nine and offered one across with a sociable tilt of the can. Andy shook his head. He'd finished his second on sixteen and he was done. He needed to watch this clearly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's going to be fine," Alex said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's right back in it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she is."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex looked at him. "You're not actually worried about the match."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not worried about anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've got that face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy didn't answer because Alex wasn't entirely wrong and because there wasn't anything useful to say about it. He'd been watching Ella golf since she was nine years old gripping a cut-down seven-iron on the driving range, and he could read her like a stock chart. The back nine today had been uneven in a way that had nothing to do with her swing. Her swing was fine. Her swing was always fine. It was the thing behind the swing that had been slightly out of adjustment, the internal temperature she usually managed without thinking about it. She'd been managing it today, but only just.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He knew what that kind of management cost.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had played beautifully all afternoon. The kid had grown into something this year\u8212?not just the height, though that was part of it, the extra leverage translating directly into yards that Ella no longer had a comfortable cushion against. It was also just the general settling of him, the way he moved through a round without the peaks and valleys that defined most high school golfers, without the miniature crises over a bad bounce or an unlucky kick. He had his father's ease on a golf course, if not Alex's liquid assistance in achieving it. Bobby played like someone who expected to be there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella played like someone who intended to win, which was a different thing entirely, and usually it was the difference that made her the best player on any course she stepped onto. Today it had been working against her in small, compounding ways.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Sixteen had been the disaster.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy had seen it coming from the moment she'd pulled the wrong club on her second shot\u8212?he'd seen it and said nothing because there was nothing to say, she didn't want help and wouldn't have taken it, and part of learning to be a golfer was making your own mistakes in your own time. The penalty had been two shots she couldn't fully recover from, and he'd watched her absorb them with a controlled anger that was visible only if you knew what you were looking at. A tightening around the jaw. The way she replaced the divot with slightly too much force.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now Bobby was standing by the eighteenth green waiting with a ball two feet from the pin and a birdie as inevitable as weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella was in the bunker.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy walked up to the edge of the green and stopped. Alex came alongside him. Neither of them spoke.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see the lie from where he stood and he felt it in his stomach before his mind had fully processed it\u8212?the ball settled down into the sand at an angle that meant the back edge of the bunker's lip had gotten involved, burying it into a small depression that a pro golfer would curse quietly and privately before playing for nothing more than a clean exit. Any lie in a bunker was manageable. A buried lie in a bunker, with the pin thirty feet away and the match on it, was a different conversation.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella stood at the edge looking down at it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see her temper from forty feet away. Not in any obvious gesture\u8212?she wasn't the kind of girl who wore it openly. It was in the stillness of her, the way she went very quiet in the way that preceded something precise and controlled and likely insufficient. She was doing the math the same way he was doing the math, and she was arriving at the same answer, and she was refusing to accept it on principle.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That was his daughter too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stepped down into the bunker. Addressed the ball with her sand wedge. Took her stance, adjusted it slightly, took it again. He watched her set her jaw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had drifted to the far side of the green to stay out of her sightline, which was a considerate piece of golf etiquette and probably also self-preservation. The kid understood her better than most.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She swung.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was a full, committed swing\u8212?no half measures, no protective caution\u8212?and the sand exploded upward in a white burst that caught the afternoon light and hung for a moment before dispersing. The ball came up high and clean out of it, which was the part that gave Andy one half second of irrational hope, the ball up in the air and possible, everything possible while it was in the air\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It hit the green eight feet past the hole and rolled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He watched it. Everyone watched it. The break was left to right and it ran with the break, slowing, slowing, and stopped three feet beyond the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The sand had barely settled in the bunker before Ella was climbing out of it, rake in hand. She raked the sand with the clipped, efficient movements of someone who has moved past the event and does not intend to discuss it. She walked up onto the green and looked at Bobby, who was already extending his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shook it. One clean shake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good round," she said. Her voice was entirely level.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You too," Bobby said. He was keeping his face straight with visible effort.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She conceded his putt with a nod that didn't require words, and then she looked at her own ball for a moment and did the thing that Andy had watched her do before\u8212?the thing that was entirely Ella and that he had never quite managed to talk her out of\u8212?she stepped to the edge of the green where it dropped away toward the small decorative pond that ran along the cart path, drew her foot back, and kicked the ball cleanly off the green and into the water with a small, satisfying splash.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't watch it land. She was already walking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby let her go. Andy caught his eye briefly and Bobby shrugged, one shoulder, with the half-grin of a kid who had earned something rare and wasn't going to waste it on commentary. He was right to let her walk. Andy had raised her and he would have let her walk too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He and Alex fell in behind her at a reasonable distance.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Alex said. "Bobby just played slightly better, specifically on sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Let's not quantify it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They drove the cart in comfortable silence back toward the cart barn. The afternoon was long and hot and the shadows were beginning to stretch across the fairways in the way they did in late May when the day had given everything it had and was finally starting to let go. Ahead of them, Ella's back was straight and her stride was fast and she was not looking at anything except where she was going.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck, Andy gave her the silence she needed. He merged onto Federal Highway heading north and let the air conditioning run and watched the road and said nothing. She sat with her arm along the window ledge and her jaw still set and her eyes on the landscape going past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. Every player on tour, every professional who'd ever put a ball in the air for a living, won less than a quarter of the time they entered. The best players in the world lost three tournaments for every one they won. She knew this. He'd told her and she'd understood it and filed it away and it made not one bit of difference to her when she was the one doing the losing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Every time. Every single time, it hit her exactly like the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't think this was something he needed to fix. He thought it might be what made her good.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. The radio was on low, country music playing. She stared out the window and let the miles do the work that miles were for, and eventually her jaw unclenched by a small degree, and he saw it, and said nothing about that either.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 In a weekday kitchen morning anchored by Elikapeka's transplanted plumeria and her private longing for Oahu, Emma formally opens negotiations over her sixteenth birthday pool party\u8212?presenting a prepared guest list and requesting permission to invite boys\u8212?while Elikapeka deflects Emma's pointed accusation of prejudice with a measured non-promise to judge the boys' list on her own terms, overrules Emma's attempt to exclude the Hayes cousins under threat of canceling the party entirely, and closes the scene with a brief reassuring touch that Emma accepts without pulling away, leaving the boys' list unreviewed, Emma's specific concerns about her mother's biases unresolved, and Lizzie a silent witness throughout.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,31 +1,46 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Complete book lexicon\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One term per line: term \u8212?usage note. Keep the complete book-level register here. The author selects a rolling subset for each package.\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 1:\par
|
||||
Pompano Beach Golf Club \u8212? the public golf course where the Hayes family plays regularly, approximately a twenty-minute drive from the Hayes home.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Kowalski, Jim \u8212? rents the dock on the canal behind the Hayes house; owns a large white fifty-foot sailboat kept at that dock.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 2:\par
|
||||
Pines course \u8212? the course at Pompano Beach Golf Club that is Andy Hayes's favorite layout. He knows every hole intimately. Opening hole (hole 1) is a 412-yard par four with a slight dogleg right; the fairway narrows toward the corner. Played from the back (black) tees it is a genuine driving test; the white tees present a shorter, more forgiving version of the same hole. The first green is gently undulating, sloped back-left to front-right with a couple of benign tiers.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 3:\par
|
||||
Hayes cousins \u8212? Andy Hayes has a large extended family (two brothers and a sister nearby); their children are Emma's cousins on the Hayes side. Emma regards some of them as socially awkward at parties. Elikapeka insists all cousins be invited to family events without exception.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 4:\par
|
||||
Mrs. Patterson \u8212? Lizzie's English teacher; assessed Lizzie as reading at a college level.\par
|
||||
Lighthouse Point \u8212? the Hayes family's town; the story is set here.\par
|
||||
Lighthouse Point library \u8212? small public library, the one Lizzie and Elikapeka visit regularly. Smells, to Lizzie, like the best possible version of being indoors. Located in Lighthouse Point, distinct from the Hayes home area but a routine destination for Lizzie and her mother.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Dragonriders of Pern series (McCaffrey, Anne) \u8212? Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon. Lizzie's most-reread books; she has read each approximately seven times. The library's copies are older editions with different covers from her own.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Stardust (Gaiman, Neil) \u8212? novel with a pale, old-fashioned painted cover depicting a young man and woman against a dreamlike sky. Encountered by Lizzie at the Lighthouse Point library. Elikapeka judged it not yet appropriate for Lizzie at fourteen; indicated it might be suitable in approximately a year.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 5:\par
|
||||
Palms course \u8212? a second course layout at Pompano Beach Golf Club, distinct from the Pines course. Ella and Bobby play it as their afternoon round on the same day they walk the Pines course in the morning. Cart use is standard for afternoon play in high heat.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Anhinga \u8212? large, common South Florida waterbird found around water hazards at Pompano Beach Golf Club. Bobby Carpenter claimed not to have seen one before, despite growing up in Pompano Beach; Ella regarded this as implausible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 6:\par
|
||||
Susanna Greer \u8212? head cheerleader at Emma and Mai Lin's school; treated as the authoritative arbiter of which boys are socially viable.\par
|
||||
Jake Ferreira \u8212? boy approved for Emma's party list; Susanna's first and obvious nomination.\par
|
||||
Chris DeLuca \u8212? boy struck from Emma's party list after it emerged he told Hannah Prescott that Emma and Mai Lin were interchangeable.\par
|
||||
Brandon Hicks \u8212? boy approved for Emma's party list.\par
|
||||
Tyler Kim \u8212? boy excluded from Emma's party list; Mai Lin reported he stared at her strangely in third period.\par
|
||||
Nate Oliveira \u8212? boy added to Emma's party list on Mai Lin's nomination; was kind to Mai Lin at a track meet.\par
|
||||
Hannah Prescott \u8212? popular with boys, comes from money; Emma uses her as a social resource while harboring no illusions about her motives. Nominated Marcus Webb and Corey Janssen for the party list.\par
|
||||
Marcus Webb \u8212? boy added to Emma's party list via Hannah.\par
|
||||
Corey Janssen \u8212? boy added to Emma's party list via Hannah.\par
|
||||
Ryan (swim team) \u8212? potential party invitee; recently broke up with his girlfriend per Hannah; status marked for confirmation by Emma.\par
|
||||
Devin \u8212? one of Emma's three boy cousins; considered tolerable by Emma.\par
|
||||
Tyler (cousin) \u8212? one of Emma's three boy cousins; Lizzie has claimed some acquaintance with him, which Emma finds both amusing and faintly annoying.\par
|
||||
Marcus (cousin) \u8212? youngest of Emma's three boy cousins, age fourteen; notorious for performing cannonballs next to people floating quietly in the pool; Emma does not want him at her party.\par
|
||||
Hayes cousins (boys) \u8212? three boy cousins on the Hayes side who are close to Emma's age; Emma expects them to stand at the edges of the yard at parties.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 7:\par
|
||||
Palms course \u8212? the golf course where Saturday morning rounds are played; the eighteenth hole is considered particularly punishing.\par
|
||||
Eighteenth hole, Pines course \u8212? finishing hole at Pompano Beach Golf Club's Pines course. The green is elevated slightly above the fairway. A bunker sits on the right side with a steep face and soft sand capable of producing plugged lies. A water hazard runs alongside the green.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Federal Highway \u8212? road Andy Hayes drives north on when returning home from Pompano Beach Golf Club.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 8:\par
|
||||
Hayes cousins (boys, named) \u8212? Travis, Corey, and Derek.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 9:\par
|
||||
Jim \u8212? adult friend of Andy Hayes and Alex Carpenter; owns a sailboat docked at the canal behind the Hayes house; was present on the dock during Emma's party.\par
|
||||
Tom Bombadil \u8212? ancient, enigmatic character in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; his absence from the Council of Elrond and his relationship to the Ring were the subject of Lizzie and Will Fontaine's first conversation at Emma's party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Old Man Willow \u8212? malevolent tree in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; referenced by Will Fontaine in the Bombadil discussion.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Hayes birthday cake \u8212? two-tier chocolate cake with pink and white real buttercream frosting and a hidden raspberry filling, made for Emma's sixteenth birthday party. Prepared by or at the direction of Elikapeka Hayes without telling Emma about the raspberry layer.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The moment the Honda cleared the end of the driveway, Emma was moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was through the kitchen, down the hall, and into her parents' bedroom before the sound of the engine had faded off the street. The room smelled faintly of her mother's perfume and the coconut oil her father used on his hair on weekends, and the bed was made with the military precision that Elikapeka applied to all horizontal surfaces in the house. Emma arranged three pillows against the headboard, settled herself against them, pulled the notepad from where she'd tucked it under her arm, and lifted the receiver.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Outside, through the window, the canal caught the late-morning light and threw it back at the sky in broken pieces.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna picked up on the second ring.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I need your brain," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning. I need your brain. I'm making the boys list for my party and I need you to tell me who is worth inviting and who I should throw into the ocean."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a pause, and Emma could hear Susanna rearranging herself, getting comfortable, taking this seriously the way Susanna took anything involving boys seriously\u8212?which was to say with the focused intensity she usually reserved for game-day stunts. Susanna had been a varsity cheerleader since sophomore year and she maintained a mental catalog of every boy in their class with the thoroughness of a librarian who happened to be seventeen and deeply opinionated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," Susanna said. "Who do you have so far?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have nobody. That's why I'm calling you. Start talking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tyler Marsh."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it down. "Okay, yes, obviously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Jake Ferraro."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's going to spend the whole party trying to do backflips off the diving board."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma. That is literally the best possible thing to have at a pool party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote it down. "Fair point. Who else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna went through names with the brisk efficiency of someone reading off a grocery list she'd memorized. Emma wrote, hesitated, crossed out, wrote again. When Susanna said Drew Cavanaugh, Emma made a sound like a small animal had been stepped on.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Absolutely not."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's funny."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He told Jessica Bowen that her swimsuit looked like a shower curtain. At a pool party, Susanna. Who does that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay, fair, cross him off. What about\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Already crossed off. Keep going."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
By the time they hung up, Emma had seven names on the notepad and her hand was slightly cramped. Seven boys. She looked at the list with something close to satisfaction and then reminded herself that she had at least four more calls to make and that the list was going to change, because lists always changed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She dialed Mai Lin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen answered on the fourth ring, sounding like she'd been awake for exactly as long as it took to reach the phone. "What."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's me. Are you still sleeping? It's almost eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was reading. What do you want."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I want you to help me make the boys list for my party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A pause. Emma could hear Mai Lin sitting up, could practically hear her becoming alert. "Read me what you have."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma read the list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Mai Lin said immediately.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No what?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No to Tyler Marsh."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma's pen hovered. "He's at the top of everyone's list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He spent forty-five minutes at Sarah's party telling me about the differences between various types of fishing rod. Forty-five minutes, Emma. I timed it. He had no idea I was timing it because he had no idea I was a person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good-looking, though."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"So is the canal behind your house and I don't want to have a conversation with it either. Cross him off."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma crossed him off with the pen stroke of someone who had been pushed into something she wasn't entirely sure about. "Fine. What about Jake Ferraro?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Jake can stay. Jake is funny."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's going to do backflips off the diving board."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. It's going to be great. Keep Jake."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They went through the rest. Mai Lin cut one more\u8212?Carter Somebody who Emma had barely remembered adding and felt no grief about losing\u8212?and added one, a quiet boy named Daniel Park who Mai Lin said was extremely interesting and also happened to look like something out of a magazine, which Emma filed under relevant data. The call ended with six names, and Emma looked at the reduced list and felt the particular satisfaction of collaboration.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three more calls, and the list rebuilt itself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot was the call Emma made with a slightly clenched jaw, because Hannah was unavoidable the way weather was unavoidable\u8212?you could dislike it, but you couldn't not account for it. Hannah came from the kind of money that had its own gravitational field and she moved through high school social life accordingly. Emma didn't hate her. She just found her exhausting in the way that overly confident people were exhausting when you were also an overly confident person and there was only so much room for it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Harrison Webb," Hannah said immediately.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Isn't he a senior?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma wrote it down. There was nothing else to say about that. Hannah added one more, someone Emma vaguely recognized from a basketball game in February, and the number crept back up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
On it went. Calls four and five were easier\u8212?shorter, sharper, more about confirming names she already had than adding new ones\u8212?and by the end of call five she was looking at fifteen names on the notepad. She'd used two pages, crossing out and rewriting until the handwriting looked like a construction project. But fifteen. Fifteen boys, vetted, approved, sorted through by the collective wisdom of her closest friends and at least one enemy she was maintaining for strategic reasons.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the pen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She put the pen down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about what her mother had said that morning, which was that the boy cousins counted in the total, which was a position so absurd on its face that Emma had let it pass without full engagement because she'd been dealing with the larger battle over the Hayes cousins and couldn't fight on two fronts simultaneously.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She counted the cousins. Three boys on the Hayes side who were remotely close to her age, which meant if the total stayed where her mother had said it would\u8212?somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five\u8212?then three boys on her list had to come out to make room for three boys who were going to stand at the edges of the yard and talk about whatever Hayes cousins talked about at parties. Boat engines, probably. Her mother's side had an entire vocabulary about boats and Emma had been unable to acquire it despite years of exposure.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the list again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the pen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She did not cross anything out, because crossing names out right now would feel like accepting a loss she hadn't actually accepted, and Emma Hayes did not pre-emptively accept losses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She tore the page off the notepad and looked at it and thought about the expression on her mother's face that morning when she'd said, *that is not negotiable*, in that voice. The voice that was not louder but was somehow denser, heavier, occupying more of the room than voices usually did. Emma had understood from roughly age eight that when that voice appeared, the conversation had moved into territory where winning looked different than it had a moment before.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But the cousins counting in the *boys* total was a separate question. That hadn't been explicitly stated. That was an interpretation, and interpretations were subject to argument, and Emma was going to make that argument with the list in her hand and the kind of careful, reasonable logic that her mother occasionally responded to when it was presented without what Elikapeka called *the architecture of grievance,* which was Emma's mother's poetic way of saying *don't be dramatic about it.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma would not be dramatic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She would be precise and reasonable and she would point out that cousins were family, which she now accepted, fully and without reservation, and that the boys she'd invited to her party were *guests* in a different category, and that conflating the two categories was a methodological error.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the fifteen names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at the ceiling.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pressed the notepad to her chest and made a sound that was not quite a word, not quite a scream, but somewhere in between\u8212?the sound of someone who had done everything right and was now confronting the specific injustice of other people's rules.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she got up, smoothed the bedspread, replaced the pillows, and went to wait for her mother to come home.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The candles were still smoking when Emma understood that she was, without question, the luckiest girl alive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood in the warm June dusk with the last of the Happy Birthday chorus dissolving into applause and laughter around her, her face wet in a way she hadn't anticipated and couldn't entirely explain, and thought: *this*. This exact second. This is the one she would keep.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty faces in the soft golden light of the tiki torches. The pool glowing turquoise behind them. The smell of chlorine and jasmine and sunscreen and birthday cake. Mai Lin whooping with both hands raised. Hannah Eliot holding up her Solo cup in a toast. Even Harrison Webb, who Emma had half-expected to be too senior, too cool, to actually show up, was clapping with what appeared to be genuine enthusiasm. The music was going. The yard smelled like summer.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother had been so worried. Emma had watched her worry all day from across the kitchen counter, seen the logistics and the phone calls and the chair situation and whatever the thing with the tiki torches had been, and now here was the yard full and the night beginning and her mother standing at the back edge of the crowd next to Susan Carpenter and smiling, actually smiling, and Emma thought: I should remember to tell her. Later. I should tell her she did it perfectly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But not yet. Right now there was cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The flash hit her before she expected it and the whole world became white for two seconds and she stood there blinking stars out of her vision while everyone laughed and someone\u8212?Mai Lin, it had to be Mai Lin\u8212?said something about her face and Emma laughed too because she couldn't help it and then she could see again and there was the cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Two tiers. Pink and white buttercream. Sixteen candles still tracing the last of their smoke upward into the darkening air.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She closed her eyes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I want this to last. Not just tonight. All of it. I want this whole summer to last the way this moment is lasting right now, every person I love in a backyard with cake and music and the pool going and my mother happy and my father\u8212?she could feel her father somewhere behind her left shoulder, that specific gravity she had always been able to locate without looking\u8212?my father watching.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She blew.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The applause came up like a wave and she opened her eyes to smoke and dark wicks and thirty people who had come to her yard on a Friday night because they wanted to, because she had asked, because they were hers, and she was theirs, and Emma Hayes pressed both hands to her face and cried with the absolute unselfconscious ease of a girl who has never once been afraid of being seen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my God," Mai Lin said, arriving at her elbow immediately. "You're *crying*."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not," Emma said, which was completely false.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You are literally\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Shut up and give me a piece of cake."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother appeared with the knife and pressed it into her hand, and Emma understood she was meant to do the ceremonial first cut, the way she'd seen in wedding pictures, and she felt a small peculiar dignity about that, about being the center of a ritual that had rules and a shape, and she pressed the knife through the bottom tier and everyone said *ooh* because of course they did and then her mother, with the smooth efficiency Emma had watched all her life, extracted the knife, patted her hand once, and pivoted toward Susan Carpenter, and the two of them were cutting and plating before Emma had fully registered that the ceremony portion was complete.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was, she thought, accepting the first plate back from Susan's capable hands, an absolutely perfect cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Chocolate. The buttercream was the real kind, not the sugary thick kind that sat wrong in your stomach. There was a layer of something\u8212?raspberry, maybe\u8212?in the middle that she hadn't known about, and the first bite hit her with the clean force of something genuinely unexpected, and she thought: *Mom*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked across the yard and found her mother's face. Elikapeka met her eyes and smiled, a small private smile, and Emma held up her fork in a salute that meant *I see you* and *thank you* and *you knew about the raspberry* and her mother gave one tiny nod that meant *of course I did*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned back to her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty people, cake plates, the pool, the music, the tiki torches throwing orange warmth against the deep blue of the early summer sky. She let herself have a single slow moment of it, panoramic and grateful, like taking a photograph with her eyes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then, because she was Emma Hayes and there was a persistent item still outstanding on the evening's agenda, she let herself consider the question of the boys.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There were, she thought, tallying, approximately eleven viable candidates present. This was a high number. She had worked hard for this number. Harrison Webb was talking to someone near the cooler and had, objectively speaking, excellent arms. Daniel Park, whom Mai Lin had delivered on every promised count\u8212?interesting, extremely good-looking, both confirmed\u8212?was sitting on the steps of the pool with his feet in the water and had looked at Emma twice during the song. There were other possibilities. The evening was young.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father was standing near the far edge of the patio.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She watched him. He had his arms crossed and he was talking to Bobby Carpenter's father, the two of them in that easy men's conversation that involved long pauses and barely visible nods, and he was not obviously watching the party, but Emma Hayes had known her father for sixteen years and she understood at a molecular level that he was watching everything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I would have to be *very* sneaky.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: surely God has some kind of birthday exemption policy.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: one kiss. Just one. Just to mark the occasion. It was, she felt, genuinely sacramental.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The air smelled like jasmine and chlorine and cake. Somewhere across the pool someone cannonballed and the splash made a dozen people shriek and laugh. The music shifted to something with a bass line that could be felt in the chest.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma was mid-consideration\u8212?Harrison Webb's arms again, Daniel Park's attentiveness, a third option she was still evaluating\u8212?when she caught something out the very corner of her eye, near the shallow end.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her sister.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was standing with a boy whose name Emma was now reconstructing\u8212?*Will, Hannah brought him, she'd barely registered him at the time*\u8212?and they were talking the way you talk when you've forgotten the party around you exists. Standing close. Their body language had that specific unguarded quality that Emma, as a student of these things, recognized immediately and catalogued with some precision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her sister reached out and touched the boy's hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stopped moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie. Her *sister*. Her bookish, shy, perpetually reading, forever-in-her-own-world, had to be practically dragged to any social event within a five-mile radius sister. Lizzie, who had brought a book to the party. Lizzie, who had looked at Emma with that patient, tolerant expression approximately forty-five minutes ago that clearly meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That Lizzie was touching a boy's hand and laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stared.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The boy\u8212?Will\u8212?said something and Lizzie shook her head and said something back and the boy's face did the thing that faces do when a person says something genuinely surprising and good, that involuntary bright opening, and he laughed, and Lizzie laughed, and they were still standing close and neither of them was looking anywhere else.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma felt something move through her chest that took her a second to identify.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was not envy, exactly. It was more like wonder. Like watching something grow faster than you expected.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: *Lizzie.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: my nerdy baby sister is doing better in the boy department than I am at my own party and I cannot even be angry about it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: good for her. I mean it. *Good for her.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned back to her own side of the party, smiling with the full warmth of it, and found Mai Lin at her elbow again with two new plates of cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Second piece?" Mai Lin said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Absolutely," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the plate. The night was warm and the pool was lit and her thirty closest friends were all around her and someone was taking another photo and the flash went off again and this time Emma was ready for it, was already grinning into it, was already mid-laugh when the white light bloomed across the yard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I still need a kiss.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I have all night.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: this is the best birthday I have ever had.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took a bite of cake and let herself back into the party.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,15 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;\f1\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Italic;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\
|
||||
If it had been up to Lizzie, she\'92d have stayed in her room and read books, but it wasn\'92t up to her and now she stood on the pool deck in the chaos of Emma\'92s sweet sixteen party as the party goers began to arrive. Her sister was in the middle of it, greeting and being greeted as if she was queen of the world, and perhaps on this night it was true. The sexes weren\'92t really mixing yet, as the boys were mostly in the pool and the girls were mostly on the patio, surrounding Emma.\
|
||||
And then Lizzie saw him. The coolest boy she\'92d ever seen, wearing swim trunks and talking with Bobby, Ella\'92s golfing buddy. The boy was blonde, muscular, and compact, not so tall as Bobby. He was tan and fit and blue eyed. He was a god, she was sure he was a god. She\'92d not once looked at a boy with desire but now she did. It was completely disconcerting.\
|
||||
Suddenly, someone grabbed her arm. It was Emma\'92s friend Hannah, who was pretty, stylish, and very slightly chubby and who wore a one piece swimsuit that had jewels on it and must have cost a fortune. She felt herself being dragged along right towards the boy she\'92d spotted. Hannah called out his name, Will Fontaine. He looked right at her. And before she could react, Hannah was telling him that Lizzie loves
|
||||
\f1\i Lord of the Rings
|
||||
\f0\i0 , too. And Lizzie felt Hannah let go and leave, and she was left tongue tied, desperately trying to think of something to say to Will.\
|
||||
By whatever magic existed in the universe, Will had her mesmerized as they discussed how Tom Bombadil rescued the hobbits from Old Man Willow.\
|
||||
Expand into 1500 words maximum. \
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,101 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 If it had been up to Lizzie, she would have spent the evening exactly where she'd spent the afternoon: cross-legged on her bed with a pillow behind her back and four hundred pages of uninterrupted Ursula K. Le Guin ahead of her. That had been the plan. That had been a good plan. But her mother had appeared in the doorway an hour ago with a look that required no translation, and the book was currently face-down on her nightstand waiting for her return, and Lizzie was standing on the pool deck in the middle of something that seemed to be expanding outward in every direction at once.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was loud. It was remarkably, impressively loud for a backyard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma's party had hit some kind of critical threshold in the last twenty minutes, the way a fire goes from tentative to committed, and now the whole space had a pulse to it. Music came from Jim's sailboat out on the dock\u8212?she could see the three men on the deck, her father and Bobby's father and Jim, silhouettes tilting bottles in the direction of the sun, which was going orange over the canal and throwing long shadows across the pool. The water in the pool was bright and churned. Six or seven boys had claimed it entirely, splashing with the territorial confidence of boys who had decided a pool was theirs. The girls were mostly on the patio side, gathered around Emma in overlapping clusters, talking in the animated, overlapping way of people who had been looking forward to this specific gathering for two weeks.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood slightly to one side of all of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had a can of soda she wasn't drinking and a towel draped over her shoulder she wasn't using and she was doing the thing she sometimes did at parties, which was watch, because watching was more interesting than participating and required considerably less energy. Emma didn't understand this about her and probably never would, but Emma was currently at the center of eight separate conversations and was not thinking about Lizzie at all, which was fine. Lizzie watched her sister hold court near the pool steps\u8212?Emma in the green swimsuit she'd deliberated over for three days, sun-bright and completely at ease, laughing at something Mai Lin had just said\u8212?and thought, not unkindly, that Emma genuinely couldn't imagine anyone not wanting this exact thing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From the pool there was a concussive boom of water and then a wave sloshed over the coping onto the deck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Marcus!" Three voices said it at once.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Laughter followed, including, reluctantly, from Lizzie.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Marcus surfaced with his arms out, grinning without remorse, and she could see cousin Devin shaking his head with the weary tolerance of a sixteen-year-old who had been dealing with Marcus since birth. Tyler, the middle one, was already retaliating by splashing in Marcus's direction, which caused a general escalation, which caused two of the older boys to drag themselves up onto the coping to avoid the crossfire.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One of them was Bobby.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie knew Bobby well enough\u8212?he'd been coming around on Saturdays for years, always polite, always deferential to her parents in the particular way of a boy who understood he was a guest. He pulled himself up to sitting on the pool edge and shook water from his hair, and he was talking to someone still in the pool, and then that person grabbed the edge and came up beside him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't mean to look the way she looked. It wasn't a decision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was maybe her age, maybe a year older\u8212?it was hard to tell. Blond. Blue-eyed in the fading early-evening light, the kind of blue that looked almost gray in shade and then resolved clearly when the sun hit. Compact and muscular and tan in the way of boys who spent real time outdoors, not just backyard hours. He was laughing at something Bobby had said, his head tilted back slightly, and there was something about his laugh that was\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie redirected her eyes to the middle distance and took a long sip of soda she didn't taste.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was disorienting. She had read extensively about this experience\u8212?it appeared in literature with remarkable frequency\u8212?but she had not previously encountered the actual firsthand version, and now that she had, she found herself unprepared for how thoroughly it disrupted normal cognition. She was a person who prided herself on normal cognition.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was still there. Obviously he was still there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was trying to decide whether to go back inside\u8212?the book was there, the book was reliable, the book did not cause this problem\u8212?when something grabbed her arm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She startled badly enough to slosh soda on her wrist.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Come on," Hannah said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah was Emma's friend, not hers, a pretty and slightly curvy girl in an extraordinary one-piece with a pattern of dark jewels at the neckline that had probably cost more than everything in Lizzie's closet. She had the manner of someone who was constitutionally incapable of allowing a social situation to go unimproved, and she had Lizzie by the elbow with the grip of someone who had made a decision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll thank me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I really don't think\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But they were already moving. Hannah navigated the pool deck with the breezy confidence of a girl who'd never once been ungraceful, steering around a cluster of boys and a folding chair someone had dragged to the edge, and Lizzie was doing an inventory of every conversational inadequacy she possessed and finding the list alarmingly long when Hannah called out, "Will!"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The blond boy looked up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked directly at Lizzie.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stopped breathing for a moment, which was a physiological response she now understood was not metaphorical.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"This is Lizzie," Hannah said. "Emma's sister. She loves Lord of the Rings."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a half-beat of silence in which Lizzie became acutely aware that Hannah had already let go of her arm and taken a step back and was in the process of a departure so smooth it was nearly invisible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah\u8212?" Lizzie said, but Hannah was already gone, absorbed by a group of girls near the food tables with the seamlessness of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had zero intention of explaining it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood there. Bobby had drifted off somewhere. It was just her and Will Fontaine on the edge of the pool, the party going loud and bright and chaotic around them, Marcus launching another cannonball into the far end.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Will Fontaine," he said, and held out his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shook it. "Lizzie Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He had an easy, unguarded quality, like someone who hadn't yet learned to be self-conscious. "You actually read it?" he said. "Or Hannah's just doing the thing where she says people have things in common to make them talk?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah does that?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Constantly." He said it without malice. "So?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read it three times," Lizzie said. "And the Silmarillion twice, which I'm aware most people don't finish."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Something in his expression shifted. Reorganized. "Okay," he said. "Okay, you actually read it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Do you?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read the trilogy four times and I have opinions about Tom Bombadil that most people find excessive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And there it was\u8212?that thing that happened occasionally, rare enough to be notable, where the unpromising situation inverted itself completely. Lizzie felt the tightness in her chest release a fraction.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tom Bombadil," she said, "is the most interesting problem in the whole book and nobody talks about it seriously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He turned more fully toward her. "Nobody," he agreed, "because everyone gets stuck on whether he's a god or a nature spirit and misses the actual interesting part, which is that the Ring has absolutely no effect on him\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?which means either he's outside the power structure that makes the Ring meaningful, or he simply doesn't desire anything the Ring could amplify\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Exactly." He was animated now, water still running down his shoulder, the pool noise and the music from the sailboat and the accumulated roar of thirty-six teenagers reduced somehow to a middle distance. "Because Sauron's whole thesis is that everything wants. That every will can be captured. And Bombadil disproves that just by existing. He rescues the hobbits from Old Man Willow without ceremony, without drama. He just\u8212?does it. Like it's obvious."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Like it costs him nothing," Lizzie said, "because he has nothing to lose."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Or everything he has can't be taken." He looked at her with a directness that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn't been so clearly intellectual. "Does that mean he's the most powerful being in the story, or the least powerful? Like, the Ring is the whole axis of the story. If you're immune to it, are you even in the same story?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie had thought about this exact question before. She had written two pages about it in her journal and not arrived anywhere conclusive. She sat down on the pool coping, because this was going to take a minute, and he sat beside her, and somewhere behind them Marcus detonated another wall of water and a girl shrieked in protest and everyone laughed, and the sun went lower, and the music from the dock drifted over them, and the party went on being what it was.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,125 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The range was visible through the chain-link fence that ran along the cart path, and Andy could see Ella out there at the far end, hitting iron after iron with a rhythm that looked almost mechanical. Bobby had gone out too, though he'd stopped after about ten balls and was now mostly watching her, which said something about the kind of competitor he was\u8212?size up what you're dealing with before you commit to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy stood at the first tee with Bobby's father, Greg, who was a solidly built man with a salesman's handshake and a seven handicap he wore like a badge of office. They'd played together enough times that the pleasantries were handled in under a minute.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How's she hitting it?" Greg asked, nodding toward the range.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Asked me about her elbow for about forty-five minutes on the drive over."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby watched YouTube videos until midnight. I could hear the narration through the wall."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy smiled. "What's his plan after high school? Ella ever mention if he's got schools in mind?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Florida." Greg said it simply, the way you say something you've already made peace with. "Wants to go to UF. Play for the Gators. I think it's realistic, honestly. Kid's gotten long."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy nodded. That was true. Bobby had added at least fifteen yards since October, which was what happened when a boy went from fourteen to fifteen and every cell in his body decided to cooperate simultaneously.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ella's got Stanford in her head," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Stanford." Greg gave a low whistle. "Women's program there is no joke."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No, it is not." Andy said it evenly, though what he felt was something more complicated\u8212?pride wound around worry, the way it always was with her, the way it had been since she was nine years old and told him she was going to be a professional golfer with the same voice another kid might use to say she was going to have a sandwich.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The kids came off the range at 7:21 and walked toward the first tee with their bags, already talking, already disagreeing about something\u8212?the natural state of their friendship, as far as Andy could tell.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?doesn't count as a warmup if you're just steering it," Bobby was saying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I wasn't steering anything. I was managing trajectory."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Those are the same thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They are genuinely not the same thing, Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They arrived at the tee, and Andy watched as Ella walked straight past the white markers without slowing, continuing to the tips, the black tees. Bobby followed without comment, which meant it had already been established between them. This was how it always went\u8212?the girls' program at her school never saw the back tees, some combination of tradition and tournament rule that Ella regarded as a bureaucratic insult to her specifically. Every time she had access to a course without a committee telling her otherwise, she went back as far as the course would let her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Dollar a hole," Bobby said, setting his bag down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously." Ella was already pulling her driver. "Automatic press on two down."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Agreed. Who flips?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella pulled a tee from her bag and held it up. "Tee flip. Call it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She tossed it. Bobby said point. The tee landed grip-side down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Point," Ella said. "I'm away."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby spread his hands magnanimously. "Ladies first."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was away before you made it a gender thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She teed up a Titleist, took two practice swings with the deliberate, slightly exaggerated elbow position that told Andy she was still working on whatever she'd been chewing over in the car, and then stepped into her address. She went still for a moment\u8212?that familiar stillness that had always struck him, even when she was small\u8212?and then swung.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball came off the face with a crack that carried in the morning air, starting just left of center and drawing back toward the middle, climbing, holding its line, and landing in the short grass about 240 yards out with a small bounce that kicked it further still. It was, by any reasonable measure, a very good golf shot.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at it for a moment. "Not terrible," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you so much."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He teed up, stood over the ball for about three seconds, and hit it. There was no equivocating about what Bobby Carpenter's swing had become over the past year\u8212?it was long and loose and catastrophically effective. The ball went high and straight and came down thirty yards past Ella's, still in the fairway, rolling.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at her. "Not terrible," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a sigh and picked up her tee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have an eight-iron in," she said, which was not directed at Bobby but was also clearly intended for Bobby to hear.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a gap wedge," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. You've been thirty yards past me since April and you've been quietly smug about it since April and I've been watching you miss greens from a hundred yards while I've been getting up and down from everywhere, so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's hole one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's a pattern."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy watched this exchange with the quiet pleasure of a man who had spent thirteen years watching his daughter negotiate the world entirely on her own terms. He looked over at Greg, who had the expression of a spectator at a tennis match.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Should we?" Greg said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We should," Andy agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They teed off from the white markers\u8212?Andy striping a drive down the left center, Greg pushing his slightly but finding the fairway\u8212?and followed the cart path in the general direction of the morning, which was already warm in that particular South Florida way that suggested the afternoon would be nearly intolerable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"First beer of the day," Greg said, scanning the course. "What do you think is reasonable? Eight o'clock?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight seems aggressive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-thirty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy thought about it. The cart girl came around on a rotation, and he'd clocked her at about forty-five minutes on previous rounds. "First time she passes the third green is probably eight-fifteen or so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Greg said. "That's almost dignified."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The first green was a generous size, slightly elevated, with a false front that the course's designers had apparently included as a personal slight against the golfing public. Ella and Bobby had both hit their approaches and were already standing over their balls by the time their fathers arrived. Ella was pin-high left, maybe eighteen feet. Bobby was further out, twenty-two or twenty-three, below the hole, which was the favorable position.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're away," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know I'm away," Bobby said, already reading his putt, walking the line from behind the ball and then crouching to look at it from the side.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy stood quietly near the fringe and watched. This was his favorite part of watching Ella play\u8212?not the drives, which were impressive but mechanical, but the moments on the green when she went still and read the thing like a text she was translating rather than a surface she was navigating. She was doing it now, not to her own putt but to Bobby's, watching to see what the green would tell her before she had to ask it herself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby pulled the trigger. The ball tracked right to left, losing speed at exactly the rate the slope demanded, and fell into the front of the hole with a sound that was almost apologetic about how good it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yeah," Bobby said, to no one in particular.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella waited for him to retrieve his ball and step clear, and then she stood over her own putt, slightly uphill, minimal break. She looked at the hole once, looked down, and hit it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It went in. It went in as though it had not seriously considered any other outcome\u8212?tracking straight, holding its speed, rattling the back of the cup and dropping.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at Bobby.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a very good short game," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have seen your short game."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then this should not be surprising to you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy wrote the halved hole on his scorecard and glanced at Greg. Two kids walking toward the second tee already arguing about something, their bags on their backs, their whole summers arranged around this\u8212?eighteen holes today, eighteen more after lunch, and the days that followed full of the same, the slow accumulation of something that Andy suspected was going to be important later in ways that were impossible to name yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Greg said again, watching them go.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Andy confirmed, and followed his daughter down the fairway in the early morning heat.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Turned sixteen at her backyard birthday party, attended by approximately thirty guests. Cried openly and unselfconsciously during the birthday song, and spent part of the evening observing Lizzie's unexpected connection with Will Fontaine.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx360\tx720\tx1080\tx1440\tx1800\tx2160\tx2880\tx3600\tx4320\fi360\sl264\slmult1\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs26 \cf0 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Ella Hayes.\
|
||||
Ella and Bobby sat at a table on the patio outside of the golf course restaurant having a snack. They\'92d finished eighteen holes in three and a half hours, but they still had an hour to kill before they could start the next round on the Palms course. Their fathers were inside at the bar, drinking more beer. Sometimes Ella wondered how her father could drink beers and still play solid golf, but he rarely seemed to be affected at all.\
|
||||
Ella and Bobby had finished the round tied at two under. The trash talk had gone back and forth during the round, but neither player had ever gotten more than one hole up on the other. It was to be a grunge match on the easier course in the heat of the afternoon. This time, they\'92d take a cart rather than walk in the humidity and heat. Ella would drive; she refused to let Bobby drive the cart as one time he\'92d almost driven them into a pond. \
|
||||
Bobby asked her out again. She rolled her eyes and said he\'92d always be in the friend zone. He just grinned, knowing what she\'92d say. She\'92d never gone out with any of the boys on the golf team, though she was friendly with all of them and been asked by several of them.\
|
||||
At last, it was time to play again. They went to the clubhouse and got the key to a cart. Ella drove. She always drove. And she always gave him crap about it.\
|
||||
Expand to 1500 words max. Playful, flirty dialog between the two teenagers.}
|
||||
@@ -1,80 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 5\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: BFFEEB84-9E04-41EE-B083-5092D160ADF3,FE16770D-D7B7-48EC-AEFF-E1C0787E8D95\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T17:48:31-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Scene 1\par
|
||||
At 5:47 a.m. on the first weekend of summer, thirteen-year-old Ella Hayes\u8212?golf bag packed, glove handled nervously, mind fixed on a downswing elbow flaw\u8212?endures her father Andy's unhurried breakfast routine before he drives her to Pompano Beach Golf Course, arriving at 6:45 to meet their waiting partner Bobby Carpenter, with the 7:24 tee time for thirty-six holes still unmet and Ella already moving toward the range with nineteen minutes and unresolved mechanical anxiety.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Scene 2\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes and Alex Carpenter exchange information about their children's college ambitions\u8212?Ella targeting Stanford's women's golf program, Bobby aiming for Florida\u8212?while observing the kids on the range, then the four begin their round from the black tees (Ella's insistence), halve the first hole after Bobby outdrives Ella by thirty yards with a birdie but Ella matches him with a holed eighteen-footer, establishing the central competitive dynamic: Bobby's new distance advantage versus Ella's superior short game, with the unresolved tension of whether Ella can close that gap before the stakes of college recruitment make it matter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing and practice partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
The first green was a generous size, slightly elevated, with a false front that the course's designers had apparently included as a personal slight against the golfing public. Ella and Bobby had both hit their approaches and were already standing over their balls by the time their fathers arrived. Ella was pin-high left, maybe eighteen feet. Bobby was further out, twenty-two or twenty-three, below the hole, which was the favorable position.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're away," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know I'm away," Bobby said, already reading his putt, walking the line from behind the ball and then crouching to look at it from the side.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy stood quietly near the fringe and watched. This was his favorite part of watching Ella play\u8212?not the drives, which were impressive but mechanical, but the moments on the green when she went still and read the thing like a text she was translating rather than a surface she was navigating. She was doing it now, not to her own putt but to Bobby's, watching to see what the green would tell her before she had to ask it herself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby pulled the trigger. The ball tracked right to left, losing speed at exactly the rate the slope demanded, and fell into the front of the hole with a sound that was almost apologetic about how good it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yeah," Bobby said, to no one in particular.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella waited for him to retrieve his ball and step clear, and then she stood over her own putt, slightly uphill, minimal break. She looked at the hole once, looked down, and hit it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It went in. It went in as though it had not seriously considered any other outcome\u8212?tracking straight, holding its speed, rattling the back of the cup and dropping.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at Bobby.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a very good short game," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have seen your short game."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then this should not be surprising to you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy wrote the halved hole on his scorecard and glanced at Alex. Two kids walking toward the second tee already arguing about something, their bags on their backs, their whole summers arranged around this\u8212?eighteen holes today, eighteen more after lunch, and the days that followed full of the same, the slow accumulation of something that Andy suspected was going to be important later in ways that were impossible to name yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Alex said again, watching them go.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Andy confirmed, and followed his daughter down the fairway in the early morning heat.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Pompano Beach Golf Course \u8212? A frequently played course with Andy and Ella. Two eighteen hole courses, the shorter and easier Palms course and the longer and harder Pines course.\par
|
||||
Late morning, Saturday, late May, 2000, first round finished.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Ella Hayes.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby sat at a table on the patio outside of the golf course restaurant having a snack. They\u8217?d finished eighteen holes in three and a half hours, but they still had an hour to kill before they could start the next round on the Palms course. Their fathers were inside at the bar, drinking more beer. Sometimes Ella wondered how her father could drink beers and still play solid golf, but he rarely seemed to be affected at all.\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby had finished the round tied at two under. The trash talk had gone back and forth during the round, but neither player had ever gotten more than one hole up on the other. It was to be a grunge match on the easier course in the heat of the afternoon. This time, they\u8217?d take a cart rather than walk in the humidity and heat. Ella would drive; she refused to let Bobby drive the cart as one time he\u8217?d almost driven them into a pond. \par
|
||||
Bobby asked her out again. She rolled her eyes and said he\u8217?d always be in the friend zone. He just grinned, knowing what she\u8217?d say. She\u8217?d never gone out with any of the boys on the golf team, though she was friendly with all of them and been asked by several of them.\par
|
||||
At last, it was time to play again. They went to the clubhouse and got the key to a cart. Ella drove. She always drove. And she always gave him crap about it.\par
|
||||
Expand to 1500 words max. Playful, flirty dialog between the two teenagers.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to 1500 words max. Playful, flirty dialog between the two teenagers.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Andy Hayes's sister-in-law, arriving with the Hayes cousins Travis, Corey, and Derek for Emma's party. Warm and affectionate.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,133 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The kitchen clock read 5:47 when Ella came downstairs, her golf shoes already on her feet, bag propped against the wall by the garage door. She'd been awake since five, lying in bed listening to the mockingbirds outside her window, running through her swing in her mind the way her father had taught her to do. First weekend of summer. Thirty-six holes ahead of her. She could hardly stand it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was at the stove, sliding eggs onto a plate without being asked, because Elikapeka Hayes always knew what her daughters needed before they knew themselves.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Sit," her mother said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella sat, but only on the edge of the chair.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She ate quickly, cleaned her plate, drank her orange juice in three swallows, and carried everything to the sink. It was 6:02. Their tee time was 7:24. Pompano Beach was twelve minutes away, maybe fifteen with the light on Sample Road. She wanted forty-five minutes on the range, minimum. That left them needing to leave the house no later than six-thirty, and even that was cutting it closer than she liked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Upstairs, her sisters were still asleep. She could hear the particular silence of rooms full of sleeping people. And from the direction of the master bedroom she heard the low murmur of the television her father turned on every morning while he dressed, and she knew from long experience that the television was a bad sign. The television meant he was not rushing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went back to the kitchen and sat down again, this time not even pretending to be relaxed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father came out of the master bedroom at 6:09 in his golf shirt and khaki shorts, his hair still damp, and went directly to the coffee maker. He poured a cup and leaned against the counter and looked out the window at the canal, where the first light was going silver and pink across the water. The sailboat in their dock shifted almost imperceptibly against its lines.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We need to leave before six-thirty," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She exhaled through her nose. "Good morning. We need to leave before six-thirty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father smiled at his coffee cup, and that smile\u8212?patient, unhurried, the smile of a man who had been doing this for thirty years and believed there was very little in life that required actual rushing\u8212?made her want to tip the cup out of his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's probably already there," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby can wait."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby doesn't like to wait. Neither do I."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then Bobby and you are well matched." He sipped his coffee. "Your mother made eggs?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There's some in the pan. Dad. We need a good warm-up. I need a good warm-up. You can hit six balls and walk to the first tee, but I need time on the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll have time on the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Not if we leave at seven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say we were leaving at seven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're on your first cup."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at her over the rim of the mug. "This is my second cup."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood up from the table and walked to her golf bag and crouched down and unzipped the front pocket and took out her glove and put it on and took it back off again. She had no reason to do this. She did it anyway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Behind her she heard the scrape of a skillet, her mother serving her father his eggs, and then the soft sound of them exchanging some words she couldn't quite make out, and her mother's quiet laugh, and the terrible, leisurely normalcy of it all. It was 6:14.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went out the back door and stood beside the pool. The water was still and dark blue in the early light, and the neighbor's bougainvillea spilled over the fence in a great cascade of orange-pink that was almost violent in its color. She breathed in the morning air, which smelled like canal water and cut grass and the faint diesel memory of some boat that had gone out before dawn. She tried to think about her swing. She'd been working on keeping her right elbow closer to her body on the downswing, something her father had shown her three weeks ago at the range, and she'd had it and then she'd lost it and she wanted to find it again before she was standing over a shot on the first hole.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The door opened behind her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Five minutes," her father said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned. He was carrying his coffee cup. Still.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're bringing that?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm finishing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck," he agreed, and something in his tone told her he'd been planning to leave at six-thirty all along and had simply declined to tell her, because he found her impatience amusing and saw no reason to relieve it prematurely. This was, she knew, a form of love. It did not feel like one.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up her bag and went through the house to the garage without waiting for him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They drove north on Federal Highway with the windows down, her father's coffee cup sitting in the holder between them, still half full. The morning was already warm the way South Florida mornings were in late May, the air thick and sweetly humid, and the palm trees along the road were motionless in the stillness before the sea breeze came up. Ella sat with her left knee bouncing and her arm out the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You need to stop rushing the range," her father said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't rush the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You rush the range. You go too fast and you don't let the feelings settle. You hit twelve balls when you should hit eight."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby hits fifty balls."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's habits are Bobby's business."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked out the window. A sprinkler system was running in the parking lot of a strip mall, arching water across the empty asphalt for no apparent reason. "I just want to be ready," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're already ready. You've been ready since you woke up." He glanced at her. "Probably since last night."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How long have we been doing this?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Since I was six."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And have I ever not gotten you to the course in time for a proper warm-up?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about it longer than he deserved to wait. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay then."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She let her knee stop bouncing. He reached over without looking and turned on the radio, and they drove the rest of the way with the windows down and the warm air coming in and a country station playing low enough that it was almost just texture rather than sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The parking lot at Pompano Beach Golf Course was mostly empty when they pulled in, only a handful of cars clustered near the clubhouse entrance. Ella had her door open before the truck stopped rolling, which earned her a single patient look from her father that she ignored. She shouldered her bag and walked fast toward the entrance, her spikes clicking on the asphalt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the glass door she could see Bobby Carpenter already inside, sitting on the bench beside the pro shop counter with his arms folded, his own bag leaning against the wall beside him. He was wearing a Pompano Beach Golf hat and a green shirt, and when he saw her come through the door he made a show of checking his watch.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Six-forty-five," he said. "I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you've had five minutes to contemplate your many swing flaws," Ella said, going directly to the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My swing flaws." Bobby unfolded his arms and stood up. "You're the one who started blocking it right under pressure last month. What was that on sixteen at the district qualifier?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was the wind." She slid her father's credit card across the counter to the young man working the register. "Two, on the Pines. Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was not the wind," Bobby said. "There was no wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was some wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was no wind, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too, Bobby," her father said, coming through the door behind her, carrying nothing, having left both his golf bag and his apparently now-finished coffee in the truck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned and shook Andy's hand. "Morning, Mr. Hayes. I've been telling Ella I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know," her father said. "She mentioned it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't mention it," Ella said, signing the receipt and taking the card back. "I acknowledged it. There's a difference." She picked up her scorecard from the counter and turned toward the door that led to the range. "We have nineteen minutes. I'm going to go use them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father looked at Bobby and Bobby looked at her father and some small communication passed between them that she caught only from the corner of her eye and chose to ignore entirely.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed through the door into the morning light, already thinking about her elbow.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The Pines course was Andy's favorite in the way that a familiar argument is a favorite \u8212? he knew every turn of it, every place it could hurt him, and he respected it for that. He pulled the cart to a stop near the bag drop and watched Ella climb out before he'd fully braked, her bag already off her shoulder and swinging down in one motion, cleats clicking on the path.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter was already there. Of course he was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The kid was leaning against his own cart with his arms crossed and the particular posture of a seventeen-year-old boy who believes himself to be very cool and has not yet received conclusive evidence to the contrary. He was tall \u8212? taller than Ella, which wasn't nothing \u8212? with the rangy build of someone still assembling himself, and he wore the same kind of expression he always wore around Ella, which was somewhere between amusement and wariness, the expression of a person who has touched a hot stove before.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're late," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We have forty minutes before our tee time," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. I've been here for an hour."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you wasted twenty minutes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at Andy. "She's delightful in the morning," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Always has been," Andy said. He shook Bobby's father's hand \u8212? Alex Carpenter, a lean man with a quiet humor about him who repaired cars and played to about a two handicap and never once in Andy's experience complained about a bad shot, which Andy respected. "How long have you been here?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Since six," Mark said. "Bobby had me up at five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy looked at his daughter. She had already started walking toward the range and did not look back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mine too," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They followed at the pace of men who had learned there was no percentage in hurrying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
On the range, he watched them. That was mostly what he did. He hit his own balls \u8212? a half bucket, loosening up the back, working through the irons in no particular order, the way he'd always done it \u8212? but his attention kept drifting down to where Ella and Bobby had set up six feet apart and were methodically taking the range apart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby was a beautiful ball striker. Andy could admit that honestly. The boy had a natural athletic grace, the kind that looks effortless and is mostly effortless, and he hit his irons with a flat trajectory and a draw that seemed to bend toward the target at the end like it was being called home. He was going to be good. He already was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby thinking about where he wants to play in college?" Andy asked. Mark was standing next to him, watching the same thing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mark smiled. "Florida," he said. "Wants to be a Gator. You know how it is."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy nodded. Gainesville. Good program. He looked at Ella, who was on her seventh iron and clearly counting the reps in her head with the focused expression she got that reminded him of her mother. "Ella's got her eye on Stanford," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mark raised his eyebrows slightly. "That's a long way."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's aware."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They stood watching in silence for a moment. Ella stripped another seven iron, ball position tweaked back, that clean descending strike she'd been working on, and the ball came off low and penetrating and landed in the middle of the range and checked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's really something," Mark said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know it," Andy said, and he let himself feel that for just a second before he went back to hitting balls.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The first tee on the Pines course sat up slightly from the fairway, a low rise that gave you a look at the opening hole, a four-hundred-and-twelve-yard par four with a slight dogleg right and a fairway that narrowed toward the corner. A good driving hole if you were long enough to take the corner on. From the back tees it asked a real question.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella walked past the white markers without looking at them.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby followed her to the black tees and stood there with his driver in his hand. "You sure about this?" he said. "Your legs are shorter. The yardage is going to be punishing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My legs are proportional to my height," Ella said. "And you're terrified."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm terrified," Bobby agreed. "Shake on the bet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Dollar a hole, gross score."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Dollar a hole," he said, and they shook hands with the brisk formality of people who have done this before and take it seriously.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella produced a tee from her pocket, held it up, and spun it. When it stopped, the point was aimed at Bobby. She picked it up, held it again, and spun it a second time. The point came back to her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ladies first," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't call me that on a golf course."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She teed the ball up with precise movements \u8212? same height every time, Andy had noticed, she had a template for it in her hands \u8212? and went through her routine. Feet, club, feet, one look, one waggle, and then she was into the swing and the sound of the driver on that particular morning in that particular air was a sound Andy had heard her make before but that still landed somewhere in his chest when he heard it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball started left of center, held its line for two hundred yards, and then turned right with a gentle fade, finishing in the middle of the fairway, about two-seventy from the back tee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good ball," Andy said, because it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella stepped back without looking at it. She knew.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby stepped up and went through his routine, which was shorter and looser and had the quality of a natural athlete who trusts himself and doesn't need the ceremony. He swung, and the ball left the face with that flat, boring trajectory and it went where it was going to go, which was past Ella's ball by thirty yards, easily, finishing right in the fairway at about three hundred.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby took his tee out of the ground and looked at Ella. "I could give you a head start," he said. "Like a running start. You'd have a little momentum."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Are you done?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I could just kick it down there for you. Save you the\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"*Are you done.*"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He grinned. He was never actually done, Andy knew, but he had the sense to let it rest for a few seconds.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy and Mark stepped up to the white tees, which asked a shorter and kinder question of the same fairway. Alex went first and hit a straight, workmanlike drive down the right side. Andy took a little extra with his driver and got all of it, finishing past Alex's ball and feeling his back register its mild objection and ignoring it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nice ball," Alex said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Not bad," Andy said, and he meant the morning and the hole and the whole thing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The first green was a gentle test \u8212? undulating, sloped back-left to front-right, a couple of benign tiers. Ella was up first from a hundred and forty yards, hit a low spinner that released to twelve feet below the hole, a perfect angle. Bobby's approach from one hundred ten pulled up to eighteen feet above, which was the worse of the two shots and he knew it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby walked the line of his putt twice, crouched behind it, walked it once more. Ella watched him with her arms folded and her putter resting against her shoulder.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Sometime today," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The read is complicated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It breaks left and it's downhill. It's really not complicated."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you, I'm going to stand here for the rest of my natural life."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He stood up and made his stroke and the ball rolled down the tier and swung left and fell into the center of the cup with a sound that was deeply, infuriatingly conclusive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby spread his arms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood over her putt for perhaps four seconds. She stroked it, and the ball tracked the slope and found the edge of the cup and went in, and she pulled it out of the hole without breaking stride and walked to her bag.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Halve the hole," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Barely," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A half is a half."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy marked his scorecard and looked at Alex, who was already looking back at him with the specific expression of a man performing arithmetic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Cart girl does the front nine," Andy said quietly. "What time does she usually come around?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eighth hole, maybe ninth," Mark said. "If we play fast."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy looked at his daughter, who was already twenty yards down the second fairway with her yardage book open.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We'll play fast," he said.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,101 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 If it had been up to Lizzie, she would have spent the evening exactly where she'd spent the afternoon: cross-legged on her bed with a pillow behind her back and four hundred pages of uninterrupted Ursula K. Le Guin ahead of her. That had been the plan. That had been a good plan. But her mother had appeared in the doorway an hour ago with a look that required no translation, and the book was currently face-down on her nightstand waiting for her return, and Lizzie was standing on the pool deck in the middle of something that seemed to be expanding outward in every direction at once.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was loud. It was remarkably, impressively loud for a backyard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma's party had hit some kind of critical threshold in the last twenty minutes, the way a fire goes from tentative to committed, and now the whole space had a pulse to it. Music came from Jim's sailboat out on the dock\u8212?she could see the three men on the deck, her father and Bobby's father and Jim, silhouettes tilting bottles in the direction of the sun, which was going orange over the canal and throwing long shadows across the pool. The water in the pool was bright and churned. Six or seven boys had claimed it entirely, splashing with the territorial confidence of boys who had decided a pool was theirs. The girls were mostly on the patio side, gathered around Emma in overlapping clusters, talking in the animated, overlapping way of people who had been looking forward to this specific gathering for two weeks.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood slightly to one side of all of it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had a can of soda she wasn't drinking and a towel draped over her shoulder she wasn't using and she was doing the thing she sometimes did at parties, which was watch, because watching was more interesting than participating and required considerably less energy. Emma didn't understand this about her and probably never would, but Emma was currently at the center of eight separate conversations and was not thinking about Lizzie at all, which was fine. Lizzie watched her sister hold court near the pool steps\u8212?Emma in the green swimsuit she'd deliberated over for three days, sun-bright and completely at ease, laughing at something Mai Lin had just said\u8212?and thought, not unkindly, that Emma genuinely couldn't imagine anyone not wanting this exact thing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From the pool there was a concussive boom of water and then a wave sloshed over the coping onto the deck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Marcus!" Three voices said it at once.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Laughter followed, including, reluctantly, from Lizzie.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Marcus surfaced with his arms out, grinning without remorse, and she could see cousin Devin shaking his head with the weary tolerance of a sixteen-year-old who had been dealing with Marcus since birth. Tyler, the middle one, was already retaliating by splashing in Marcus's direction, which caused a general escalation, which caused two of the older boys to drag themselves up onto the coping to avoid the crossfire.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One of them was Bobby.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie knew Bobby well enough\u8212?he'd been coming around on Saturdays for years, always polite, always deferential to her parents in the particular way of a boy who understood he was a guest. He pulled himself up to sitting on the pool edge and shook water from his hair, and he was talking to someone still in the pool, and then that person grabbed the edge and came up beside him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't mean to look the way she looked. It wasn't a decision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was maybe her age, maybe a year older\u8212?it was hard to tell. Blond. Blue-eyed in the fading early-evening light, the kind of blue that looked almost gray in shade and then resolved clearly when the sun hit. Compact and muscular and tan in the way of boys who spent real time outdoors, not just backyard hours. He was laughing at something Bobby had said, his head tilted back slightly, and there was something about his laugh that was\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie redirected her eyes to the middle distance and took a long sip of soda she didn't taste.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was disorienting. She had read extensively about this experience\u8212?it appeared in literature with remarkable frequency\u8212?but she had not previously encountered the actual firsthand version, and now that she had, she found herself unprepared for how thoroughly it disrupted normal cognition. She was a person who prided herself on normal cognition.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was still there. Obviously he was still there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was trying to decide whether to go back inside\u8212?the book was there, the book was reliable, the book did not cause this problem\u8212?when something grabbed her arm.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She startled badly enough to slosh soda on her wrist.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Come on," Hannah said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah was Emma's friend, not hers, a pretty and slightly curvy girl in an extraordinary one-piece with a pattern of dark jewels at the neckline that had probably cost more than everything in Lizzie's closet. She had the manner of someone who was constitutionally incapable of allowing a social situation to go unimproved, and she had Lizzie by the elbow with the grip of someone who had made a decision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll thank me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I really don't think\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But they were already moving. Hannah navigated the pool deck with the breezy confidence of a girl who'd never once been ungraceful, steering around a cluster of boys and a folding chair someone had dragged to the edge, and Lizzie was doing an inventory of every conversational inadequacy she possessed and finding the list alarmingly long when Hannah called out, "Will!"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The blond boy looked up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked directly at Lizzie.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stopped breathing for a moment, which was a physiological response she now understood was not metaphorical.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"This is Lizzie," Hannah said. "Emma's sister. She loves Lord of the Rings."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There was a half-beat of silence in which Lizzie became acutely aware that Hannah had already let go of her arm and taken a step back and was in the process of a departure so smooth it was nearly invisible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah\u8212?" Lizzie said, but Hannah was already gone, absorbed by a group of girls near the food tables with the seamlessness of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and had zero intention of explaining it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood there. Bobby had drifted off somewhere. It was just her and Will Fontaine on the edge of the pool, the party going loud and bright and chaotic around them, Marcus launching another cannonball into the far end.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Will Fontaine," he said, and held out his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shook it. "Lizzie Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He had an easy, unguarded quality, like someone who hadn't yet learned to be self-conscious. "You actually read it?" he said. "Or Hannah's just doing the thing where she says people have things in common to make them talk?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hannah does that?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Constantly." He said it without malice. "So?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read it three times," Lizzie said. "And the Silmarillion twice, which I'm aware most people don't finish."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Something in his expression shifted. Reorganized. "Okay," he said. "Okay, you actually read it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Do you?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read the trilogy four times and I have opinions about Tom Bombadil that most people find excessive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And there it was\u8212?that thing that happened occasionally, rare enough to be notable, where the unpromising situation inverted itself completely. Lizzie felt the tightness in her chest release a fraction.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Tom Bombadil," she said, "is the most interesting problem in the whole book and nobody talks about it seriously."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He turned more fully toward her. "Nobody," he agreed, "because everyone gets stuck on whether he's a god or a nature spirit and misses the actual interesting part, which is that the Ring has absolutely no effect on him\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?which means either he's outside the power structure that makes the Ring meaningful, or he simply doesn't desire anything the Ring could amplify\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Exactly." He was animated now, water still running down his shoulder, the pool noise and the music from the sailboat and the accumulated roar of thirty-six teenagers reduced somehow to a middle distance. "Because Sauron's whole thesis is that everything wants. That every will can be captured. And Bombadil disproves that just by existing. He rescues the hobbits from Old Man Willow without ceremony, without drama. He just\u8212?does it. Like it's obvious."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Like it costs him nothing," Lizzie said, "because he has nothing to lose."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Or everything he has can't be taken." He looked at her with a directness that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn't been so clearly intellectual. "Does that mean he's the most powerful being in the story, or the least powerful? Like, the Ring is the whole axis of the story. If you're immune to it, are you even in the same story?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie had thought about this exact question before. She had written two pages about it in her journal and not arrived anywhere conclusive. She sat down on the pool coping, because this was going to take a minute, and he sat beside her, and somewhere behind them Marcus detonated another wall of water and a girl shrieked in protest and everyone laughed, and the sun went lower, and the music from the dock drifted over them, and the party went on being what it was.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,8 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Helvetica;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
\pard\tx560\tx1120\tx1680\tx2240\tx2800\tx3360\tx3920\tx4480\tx5040\tx5600\tx6160\tx6720\pardirnatural\partightenfactor0
|
||||
|
||||
\f0\fs24 \cf0 Bobby Carpenter's father. Is an auto mechanic. Plays golf with Andy Hayes on the same Saturday outings as Bobby and Ella. Drinks a lot of beer during a round \'97 yet apparently still plays adequately nonetheless.\
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1 +0,0 @@
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter’s father. A very fine golfer who has been Bobby’s principal instructor. He is an auto mechanic at a Pompano Beach shop. He met Andy when Ella and Bobby were 13.
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of birthday girl Emma Hayes.\par
|
||||
The party was winding down. Emma had her coverall over her red bikini and stood in the doorway of her house amidst the mess of the gift unwrapping. Her mother had made her keep a careful list of who gave her what during the unwrapping, and now, as the party concluded, she accepted birthday wishes as the party goers made their way out the door. It had been the greatest event of her life, exceeding even her own high expectations, and she could barely hold back the tears as she bid them goodbye.\par
|
||||
She\u8217?d gotten kissed. Or rather, in the chaos of yet another chicken fight in the pool, she\u8217?d surprised Tyler with a peck on his lips. The look on his face had been priceless but another girl had climbed onto his back before she could get any other reaction and that was that. It would have to serve.\par
|
||||
The front door was barely shut when she heard a commotion in the kitchen. She arrived just in time for her sister to yell out, \u8220?I kissed him, so what!\u8221?\par
|
||||
Lizzie was mad as a hornet, glaring at her mother. Her father was holding a beer and quite obviously trying not to burst out laughing. Ella was there, too, more shocked than even her mother.\par
|
||||
Lizzie turned around and stalked up the stairs. Emma was stunned. Little miss \u8220?boys are stinky\u8221? had kissed a boy! That was the craziest thing she\u8217?d ever heard. And then she was jealous, just a little, as Will was quite a handsome boy. Whereupon an argument ensued between her mother and father, on why he thought it was funny that Lizzie had kissed the boy. Then Mai Lin came down the stairs and wondered why she\u8217?d seen Lizzie crying. Emma could barely keep from shrieking with laughter as her mother charged up the stairs. Emma filled her in on the drama.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Elikapeka Hayes, alone with daughters Emma and Lizzie after Andy and Ella leave, grants Emma a Friday-evening backyard pool party capped at twenty-five guests and permits boys, but refuses to exclude any family cousins and deflects Emma's pointed accusation of racial bias in the guest-list vetting process\u8212?asserting she will review all names and decide who is welcome\u8212?leaving Emma's challenge to her mother's social prejudices unresolved and filed away for a later attempt.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 6\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-24T21:48:44-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
In a weekday kitchen morning anchored by Elikapeka's transplanted plumeria and her private longing for Oahu, Emma formally opens negotiations over her sixteenth birthday pool party\u8212?presenting a prepared guest list and requesting permission to invite boys\u8212?while Elikapeka deflects Emma's pointed accusation of prejudice with a measured non-promise to judge the boys' list on her own terms, overrules Emma's attempt to exclude the Hayes cousins under threat of canceling the party entirely, and closes the scene with a brief reassuring touch that Emma accepts without pulling away, leaving the boys' list unreviewed, Emma's specific concerns about her mother's biases unresolved, and Lizzie a silent witness throughout.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
A beat passed. Emma picked up her spoon again and then put it back down. "Can we talk about cousins?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because some of them are just\u8212?" she searched for the word\u8212? "they're not fun, Mom. Specifically the Hayes side. They're going to stand around and be weird and eat all the food and not talk to anybody and it's my birthday and I just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?want it to be a good party and I feel like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma." Elikapeka's voice dropped half a register, not louder but denser, which both her daughters had learned years ago was the relevant signal. "All of your cousins will be invited."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"All of them?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Every single one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma closed her eyes briefly. "Mom."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The Hayes side included."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They don't even like parties."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They love parties. They just express it differently than you do." Elikapeka lifted her mug. "And before you say anything else on this subject, I want you to think carefully, because we are getting close to the point in this conversation where there isn't a party at all."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went very still.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie appeared to find something interesting to look at on the wall to her left.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm serious," Elikapeka said, not unkindly. "Your cousins are your family. Your birthday is a family event. You can have your friends there\u8212?thirty, thirty-five, we'll figure out the number\u8212?and the boys you want to invite, you'll give me the list and I'll think about it. But your cousins will be invited and they will be welcomed in this house the same way every guest is welcomed in this house. That is not negotiable."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The morning light had shifted slightly, spreading further across the floor. From somewhere outside came the sound of a car starting on the street.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma picked up her orange juice and drank. She set the glass down and looked at her list, which sat folded beside her bowl. After a moment she unfolded it and picked up the pen she'd also, apparently, brought to breakfast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," she said again, though this time the word was smaller and had less architecture to it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good." Elikapeka rose to refill her coffee. "And Emma?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It will be a good party." She paused by her daughter's chair and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. "I'll make sure of it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma didn't say anything, but she didn't shrug the hand away either.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie, very quietly, reopened her book.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
Before lunch, Saturday, late May, 2000.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Emma Hayes.\par
|
||||
As soon as her mother and sister drove off, Emma was on the phone, sitting on the bed in her parents\u8217? bedroom, as the phone was on the nightstand and she could sit comfortably against the headboard of the bed with a pillow. In her lap was a notepad, and she planned to quiz all of her friends about what boys she should invite to her birthday party. It wouldn\u8217?t do to invite a boy her friends didn\u8217?t like, that would not do at all.\par
|
||||
First up was her friend Susanna. She was a cheerleader and had an encyclopedia knowledge of all of the boys, good and bad. If she didn\u8217?t like a boy, the boy would not get on her list, even if Emma liked the guy. By the time they\u8217?d hung up the phone, she had seven boys on her list. She was shockingly, almost halfway done with one call. Next up, her best friend Mai Lin. She was Chinese, a major league cutie, and she and Mai Lin were constantly up for the yearbook \u8220?best looking\u8221? in the class. Mai Lin was also extremely picky and the call ended with two boys scratched off and only one added. The third call was with Hannah, who Emma didn\u8217?t much like, but she had to be invited, as she came from a wealthy family and was popular with the boys. Two boys added. On and on the calls went, and finally, she had fifteen boys on the list, all vetted by her friends. And that\u8217?s when she realized she\u8217?d have to dump three of them for her boy cousins. She screamed in frustration, preparing herself to argue with her mother than her cousins didn\u8217?t count in the total.\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Emphasize snarky dialog with her friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Emphasize snarky dialog with her friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 12\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268,F3A0BCE3-9F1F-4EB2-9490-F185AF944E53,EC970280-C7C1-4B26-B531-4D083A6626FB,DE370E46-CBAB-4C99-9D5F-45FF0AA2FAEE,CA099051-6C98-4DFF-BCFF-86B96AC3B704,E3BCC7D7-8DBC-4A37-AFCE-73851FCFD0CA,703B03BF-51F9-4BEA-A388-126886494B96,DD8A5DEA-9396-4B98-9D1F-E84EED0A2923\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-27T17:25:02-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
From her vantage point at Emma's birthday pool party, Mai Lin flirts with and is dunked by Tyler Marsh (who earns approval by handing her a towel), participates in a chaotic chicken-fight collision engineered with Emma, and observes from across the yard that Lizzie Hayes is in an absorbed, animated, apparently mutual conversation with Hannah's date Will\u8212?a development Mai Lin notes is already on Emma's radar and files away as something clearly just beginning.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Organized Emma's sixteenth birthday party with careful logistics; the cake was two-tier chocolate with real buttercream and a hidden raspberry filling, chosen without telling Emma. Shares a private, wordless shorthand with Emma across a crowded room.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Turned sixteen at her backyard birthday party, attended by approximately thirty guests. Cried openly and unselfconsciously during the birthday song, and spent part of the evening observing Lizzie's unexpected connection with Will Fontaine.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy. Met Will Fontaine at Emma's sweet sixteen party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna Barnes\par
|
||||
Friend of Emma Hayes. Varsity cheerleader since sophomore year. Maintains a thorough mental catalog of every boy in their class and takes anything involving boys with focused, game-day intensity. Brisk and efficient when going through names. First person Emma called when building the boys list for her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot\par
|
||||
Peer of Emma Hayes, maintained by Emma as a frenemy for strategic reasons. Comes from significant money with its own social gravitational field; moves through high school social life accordingly. Emma finds her exhausting in the way overly confident people are exhausting. Unavoidable, like weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Daniel Park\par
|
||||
Quiet boy recommended by Mai Lin Wen for Emma's party guest list. Described by Mai Lin as extremely interesting and very good-looking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Harrison Webb\par
|
||||
A senior, suggested by Hannah Eliot for Emma's party guest list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan Carpenter\par
|
||||
Wife of Alex Carpenter and mother of Bobby Carpenter. Competent, decisive, and low on surplus motion; a trusted presence in the Hayes household.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle Hayes\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes's sister-in-law, arriving with the Hayes cousins Travis, Corey, and Derek for Emma's party. Warm and affectionate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will Fontaine\par
|
||||
A boy at Emma's party, introduced to Lizzie by Hannah Eliot. Sun-bleached blonde hair, blue eyes, compact and muscular build; last name pronounced Fon-TEN. A genuine Tolkien reader who engages seriously with the books.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
She was mid-examination of this theory, and also mid-examination of Tyler Marsh, when she caught something at the edge of her peripheral vision and looked over.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie Hayes was standing at the far edge of the pool deck, at the quiet end near the fence, with the blonde boy Hannah had brought. Will something. She hadn't paid much attention to him when he arrived\u8212?he was cute but Hannah had claimed him in that territorial way Hannah had\u8212?but now he was completely absorbed in talking to Emma's little sister, and Emma's little sister was completely absorbed in talking back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin paused.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew Lizzie. You couldn't be Emma's best friend for three years without knowing Emma's sister. Lizzie was the one with the books. Lizzie was the one who showed up to things with that gentle apologetic expression that meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*. Lizzie was extremely pretty in a way she didn't seem to fully understand yet and extremely smart in a way she understood completely but tried not to flaunt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was not usually standing close to boys, talking fast, using her hands.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
But she was doing that now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was doing that right now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin watched Lizzie shake her head at something the boy said, very definite, very certain, and say something back that made him look like she'd surprised him in the best possible way, and she thought: *oh, interesting.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She filed this away. It was clearly something, and the something of it was clearly just beginning, and she thought Emma probably needed to know about it, and then she remembered the expression on Emma's face earlier\u8212?that wide, wondering, full-warmth smile\u8212?and realized Emma had already seen it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That was good. That was Emma being a good sister. Emma was good at that.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned back to Tyler, who was looking at her in the way that boys looked at her when they were trying to figure out what she was thinking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"More cake?" she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I could eat," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Come on then," she said, and they went toward the table in the warm evening light, the pool behind them still glittering with chaos, the music from the patio threading through everything, and somewhere across the yard Lizzie Hayes was still talking to a boy named Will as if they were the only two people at the party, which Mai Lin thought was maybe exactly what they were.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Early evening, Friday, mid June, 2000. Emma's birthday.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of birthday girl Emma Hayes.\par
|
||||
The party was winding down. Emma had her coverall over her red bikini and stood in the doorway of her house amidst the mess of the gift unwrapping. Her mother had made her keep a careful list of who gave her what during the unwrapping, and now, as the party concluded, she accepted birthday wishes as the party goers made their way out the door. It had been the greatest event of her life, exceeding even her own high expectations, and she could barely hold back the tears as she bid them goodbye.\par
|
||||
She\u8217?d gotten kissed. Or rather, in the chaos of yet another chicken fight in the pool, she\u8217?d surprised Tyler with a peck on his lips. The look on his face had been priceless but another girl had climbed onto his back before she could get any other reaction and that was that. It would have to serve.\par
|
||||
The front door was barely shut when she heard a commotion in the kitchen. She arrived just in time for her sister to yell out, \u8220?I kissed him, so what!\u8221?\par
|
||||
Lizzie was mad as a hornet, glaring at her mother. Her father was holding a beer and quite obviously trying not to burst out laughing. Ella was there, too, more shocked than even her mother.\par
|
||||
Lizzie turned around and stalked up the stairs. Emma was stunned. Little miss \u8220?boys are stinky\u8221? had kissed a boy! That was the craziest thing she\u8217?d ever heard. And then she was jealous, just a little, as Will was quite a handsome boy. Whereupon an argument ensued between her mother and father, on why he thought it was funny that Lizzie had kissed the boy. Then Mai Lin came down the stairs and wondered why she\u8217?d seen Lizzie crying. Emma could barely keep from shrieking with laughter as her mother charged up the stairs. Emma filled her in on the drama.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Maximum of 1500 words. Keep the scene comical.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,132 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 11\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268,F3A0BCE3-9F1F-4EB2-9490-F185AF944E53,EC970280-C7C1-4B26-B531-4D083A6626FB,DE370E46-CBAB-4C99-9D5F-45FF0AA2FAEE,CA099051-6C98-4DFF-BCFF-86B96AC3B704,E3BCC7D7-8DBC-4A37-AFCE-73851FCFD0CA,703B03BF-51F9-4BEA-A388-126886494B96,DD8A5DEA-9396-4B98-9D1F-E84EED0A2923\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-27T17:10:08-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
From Elikapeka's viewpoint at the kitchen window, the final half-hour before Emma's party begins sees logistics resolved (tiki torches placed, chairs sourced by Jorge, Bobby Carpenter proving unexpectedly gifted at welcoming arrivals), the Hayes cousins immediately causing pool chaos upon arrival, Emma absorbing the day's accumulated negotiations and concessions before stepping outside to claim the afternoon on her own terms, and the first guest car arriving as Elikapeka, steadied by Susan's competent company and the sight of Andy at ease in the yard, sets down her cup and declares herself ready.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At Emma's pool party, Lizzie\u8212?ordinarily bookless and reluctant\u8212?is deliberately positioned by Hannah Eliot and introduced to Will Fontaine, a sun-blonde, blue-eyed boy whose presence triggers Lizzie's first-ever involuntary romantic awareness; their immediate, unguarded argument about Tom Bombadil and the Council of Elrond reveals a rare intellectual compatibility that dissolves her anxiety, leaving them mid-debate beside the pool, the prior version of Lizzie\u8212?defined by detachment and her book\u8212?quietly retired, and the nature of their connection still unresolved but clearly begun.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From Emma's close-third viewpoint on her sixteenth birthday, she blows out her candles, shares a wordless raspberry-cake acknowledgment with her mother Elikapeka, surveys roughly eleven male prospects including Harrison Webb and Daniel Park, and is arrested by the unexpected sight of her bookish younger sister Lizzie making spontaneous, absorbed contact with a boy named Will brought by Hannah\u8212?a development Emma registers with genuine wonder rather than envy\u8212?while her unnamed father monitors the yard from the patio's edge, leaving Emma's goal of a first kiss unresolved but deferred with confident optimism into the remainder of the night.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Organized Emma's sixteenth birthday party with careful logistics; the cake was two-tier chocolate with real buttercream and a hidden raspberry filling, chosen without telling Emma. Shares a private, wordless shorthand with Emma across a crowded room.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 10:\par
|
||||
Turned sixteen at her backyard birthday party, attended by approximately thirty guests. Cried openly and unselfconsciously during the birthday song, and spent part of the evening observing Lizzie's unexpected connection with Will Fontaine.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy. Met Will Fontaine at Emma's sweet sixteen party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susanna Barnes\par
|
||||
Friend of Emma Hayes. Varsity cheerleader since sophomore year. Maintains a thorough mental catalog of every boy in their class and takes anything involving boys with focused, game-day intensity. Brisk and efficient when going through names. First person Emma called when building the boys list for her party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Hannah Eliot\par
|
||||
Peer of Emma Hayes, maintained by Emma as a frenemy for strategic reasons. Comes from significant money with its own social gravitational field; moves through high school social life accordingly. Emma finds her exhausting in the way overly confident people are exhausting. Unavoidable, like weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Daniel Park\par
|
||||
Quiet boy recommended by Mai Lin Wen for Emma's party guest list. Described by Mai Lin as extremely interesting and very good-looking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Harrison Webb\par
|
||||
A senior, suggested by Hannah Eliot for Emma's party guest list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan Carpenter\par
|
||||
Wife of Alex Carpenter and mother of Bobby Carpenter. Competent, decisive, and low on surplus motion; a trusted presence in the Hayes household.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle Hayes\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes's sister-in-law, arriving with the Hayes cousins Travis, Corey, and Derek for Emma's party. Warm and affectionate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Will Fontaine\par
|
||||
A boy at Emma's party, introduced to Lizzie by Hannah Eliot. Sun-bleached blonde hair, blue eyes, compact and muscular build; last name pronounced Fon-TEN. A genuine Tolkien reader who engages seriously with the books.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
Lizzie was standing with a boy whose name Emma was now reconstructing\u8212?*Will, Hannah brought him, she'd barely registered him at the time*\u8212?and they were talking the way you talk when you've forgotten the party around you exists. Standing close. Their body language had that specific unguarded quality that Emma, as a student of these things, recognized immediately and catalogued with some precision.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her sister reached out and touched the boy's hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stopped moving.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie. Her *sister*. Her bookish, shy, perpetually reading, forever-in-her-own-world, had to be practically dragged to any social event within a five-mile radius sister. Lizzie, who had brought a book to the party. Lizzie, who had looked at Emma with that patient, tolerant expression approximately forty-five minutes ago that clearly meant *I love you but I am here under mild duress*.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That Lizzie was touching a boy's hand and laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stared.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The boy\u8212?Will\u8212?said something and Lizzie shook her head and said something back and the boy's face did the thing that faces do when a person says something genuinely surprising and good, that involuntary bright opening, and he laughed, and Lizzie laughed, and they were still standing close and neither of them was looking anywhere else.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma felt something move through her chest that took her a second to identify.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was not envy, exactly. It was more like wonder. Like watching something grow faster than you expected.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: *Lizzie.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: my nerdy baby sister is doing better in the boy department than I am at my own party and I cannot even be angry about it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: good for her. I mean it. *Good for her.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned back to her own side of the party, smiling with the full warmth of it, and found Mai Lin at her elbow again with two new plates of cake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Second piece?" Mai Lin said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Absolutely," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took the plate. The night was warm and the pool was lit and her thirty closest friends were all around her and someone was taking another photo and the flash went off again and this time Emma was ready for it, was already grinning into it, was already mid-laugh when the white light bloomed across the yard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I still need a kiss.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: I have all night.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought: this is the best birthday I have ever had.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She took a bite of cake and let herself back into the party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
Early evening, Friday, mid June, 2000. Emma's birthday.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This episode is told in third person from the viewpoint of Mai Lin Wen.\par
|
||||
Mai Lin was having a fabulous time at Emma\u8217?s party. She wore a white string bikini which accented her black hair, tanned skin, and dark eyes. She\u8217?d done her makeup to make her eyes appear larger and she wore red lipstick. She knew she was a babe and she was flirting incessantly with every one of the cute boys, especially that hunky boy Tyler Marsh. She was a good girl; she\u8217?d never let the boys take advantage of her but that didn\u8217?t mean she didn\u8217?t want the boys to try. That was part of the fun.\par
|
||||
After the cake was served and eaten, the boys and girls began to mix in a chaotic frenzy. Music was playing and some girls were dancing with cute boys on the patio. Naughtiness was at a minimum as the adults were keeping a close watch on the party, keeping things under control. She sat on the edge of the pool, kicking her feet, splashing cute boys in the pool, and they splashed her back playfully. Tyler was in the pool and she used both feet to splash him, succeeding perfectly in driving water straight into his face. She giggled hysterically as the boy grabbed her feet, pulled her into the water and dunked her. She surfaced with a mouthful of water and spit it into his face, which shocked the boy and gave her an intense fit of giggles as she escaped from his attempted grasp. One of the other boys dunked him and she turned her attention to the other boys in the pool.\par
|
||||
She saw Emma dive into the deep end, swim underwater and come up behind Tyler, jumping on his back and attempting to dunk him. Somehow the girl got on his shoulders. Another girl did the same, and suddenly a half dozen girls found themselves on boys shoulders and the shrieks of laughter filled the air. Mai Lin found a boy, one of Emma\u8217?s cousins, climbed onto his back and joined in the fun. The boy declared his intention to dunk Emma, so off they went, Mai Lin on his shoulders, to dislodge Emma from Tyler\u8217?s shoulders.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep the atmosphere giddy and fun.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,86 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 4\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: DC6BC0EF-F4CE-4303-99AD-CA12671B9092,091EE601-91DB-497C-A646-B094624414DE\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T17:19:37-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Scene 3\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes, alone with daughters Emma and Lizzie after Andy and Ella leave, grants Emma a Friday-evening backyard pool party capped at twenty-five guests and permits boys, but refuses to exclude any family cousins and deflects Emma's pointed accusation of racial bias in the guest-list vetting process\u8212?asserting she will review all names and decide who is welcome\u8212?leaving Emma's challenge to her mother's social prejudices unresolved and filed away for a later attempt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. To be a high school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, shy. She has three close friends, all of which are bookworms like herself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
"And yes." Emma pressed forward, undeterred. "Is it wrong to want my own birthday party to be fun? I see these cousins at every single family thing. At Christmas, at Easter, at Grandma's \u8212? can I have one thing that's just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma blinked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They'll all be invited. Every last one of them. Devin, Tyler, all of them. And you will be gracious about it or there won't be a party." Elikapeka said it the way she said most things she was certain about \u8212? without heat, without performance, simply as the shape of reality. "Don't push me on this, Emma. I have given you a lot of ground this morning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"An evening pool party with boys for your sixteenth birthday," Elikapeka said. "In this backyard. When I was your age, do you know what I got for my sixteenth birthday?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie chose this moment to set her paperback down and observe, with the mild, studied disinterest of someone who had clearly been following every word: "Stinky boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned the full weight of her attention on her younger sister. The look was slow, deliberate, the kind that communicated a detailed opinion about the immaturity of the person receiving it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. She rose and carried her cup to the sink, looking out through the window over the water. The morning was already warm and would be hot by noon, and Jim Kowalski's sailboat rocked in its gentle patient way against the dock, going nowhere.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." Elikapeka turned back from the window and smiled at her, the full warm smile that she knew her daughter found difficult to stay annoyed at. "It's going to be a beautiful party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
It is Saturday morning in May, 2000 in Lighthouse Point, FL.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
Told in third person from the viewpoint of Lizzie Hayes.\par
|
||||
After breakfast, Lizzie goes to the library and then shopping with her mother. Emma is not much of a reader and declines to go. It\u8217?s the start of summer and Lizzie can easily read a book a day. Her mother\u8217?s rare punishments are usually withholding books from Lizzie. She wants to be a writer of fantasy books like the Lord Of the Rings and Anne McCafferty\u8217?s Dragonflight novels. In the library, she finds a book by an author by the name of Neil Gaiman called Stardust. Her mother reads the blurb on the back cover and takes a quick scan through it and declines to let her read it. Her mother brooks no dissent. \par
|
||||
Lizzie goes back into the stacks and looks for other books, deciding to read, for the nth time, Dragonflight and others from the series. She decides she\u8217?ll read Lord of the Rings again, though she doesn\u8217?t need to check them out, as she has a boxed set already. She returns to her mother, who looks through the books and approves of them, noting that Lizzie has read them before, and perhaps it would be better to find something new. Lizzie grumpily said she\u8217?d tried to but her mother had rejected the one she wanted to read.\par
|
||||
In the grocery store, to save time, Lizzie runs about the store collecting items on the list, to speed up getting back home where she can read and read and read. Her mother is never in a hurry at the grocery store and that annoys Lizzie when she\u8217?s got a new book to read.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Dialog between mother and daughter should dominate this scene.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,151 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The kitchen smelled of coffee and the sweetness of cut pineapple, and morning light came through the sliding glass door in long warm rectangles across the linoleum. Elikapeka stood at the counter with her mug, watching the yard. The plumeria she'd planted along the back fence had finally taken hold after three years of coaxing, and this morning its pale blossoms caught the early sun like something she might have seen back home, back on Oahu before she'd followed Andy to the mainland and learned to love seasons she still didn't entirely trust.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Behind her she heard the scrape of chairs and the particular percussion of her daughters arriving at the breakfast table\u8212?Emma first, heavy-footed and purposeful, then Lizzie, quieter, already carrying a paperback.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're reading at the table again," Emma announced, as though this were a moral failing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're breathing at the table again," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka turned from the window and set her mug on the counter. "Good morning to both of you." She moved to the refrigerator and began pulling out the orange juice. "Lizzie, put the book down while you eat. Emma, pour your sister some juice."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma made a production of reaching across the table, nearly knocking the book from Lizzie's hands in the process. Lizzie finally closed it, one finger tucked inside to hold her place, and looked at her sister with the practiced expression of someone accustomed to being annoyed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They settled into breakfast\u8212?the cereal boxes, the spoons, the ordinary clatter of a weekday morning. Then Emma put both elbows on the table and leaned forward slightly, which Elikapeka recognized as her daughter's posture for wanting something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom. We need to talk about my party."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We do," Elikapeka agreed, sitting down across from her with her coffee. "What's on your mind?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay so." Emma pulled a folded piece of notebook paper from the pocket of her robe. Elikapeka raised her eyebrows. The girl had come to the breakfast table prepared. "I've been working on the guest list and it's kind of a problem because I have a lot of people I want to invite and the pool isn't that big."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The pool is a perfectly good size."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For a family, yeah. For a party it's like, medium. So I need to cut it down." She unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat against the table. Elikapeka could see two columns of names, some with checkmarks, some with question marks. "I'm thinking thirty people max. Maybe thirty-five."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's still a lot of food."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll help with the food," Emma said quickly, which told Elikapeka she had no intention of helping with the food.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was spooning cereal with the air of someone watching a nature documentary. She didn't look particularly invested, but Elikapeka knew better.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And the other thing," Emma said, glancing up from her list with a slightly different quality of attention in her eyes, "is that I want to invite boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka wrapped both hands around her mug. "Boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm turning sixteen, Mom. It's a pool party. In the evening. Of course there will be boys."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Stinky boys," Lizzie said pleasantly, turning a page of her closed book as though the remark had emerged entirely on its own.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma turned and gave her sister a long look of such withering contempt that Lizzie appeared to shrink approximately one inch.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie," Elikapeka said mildly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You can be just saying somewhere else if you can't be kind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie subsided, though the faint trace of a smile remained.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked back at Emma. "Boys," she said again, without inflection, considering the word the way she might consider a produce item she hadn't decided on yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Boys," Emma confirmed. "Specifically, a few boys from school that I like. That we like. My friends and I. Nobody weird."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll need a list."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I figured." Emma tapped the paper. "I was going to add them to this."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A separate list," Elikapeka said. "Their full names. And if you know which school they go to, which grade."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma's expression suggested this was a significant imposition. "Mom, they're just guys. They're not like, applying for something."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Humor me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine." Emma picked up her spoon and pointed it loosely at her mother in a gesture that wasn't quite accusatory. "But I need you to promise me something."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I need you to promise that you're not going to be racist about it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird moved through the plumeria.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set down her mug with a small, careful click. "That's a serious word."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know what it means."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you do. I taught you what it means." She kept her voice even. "What exactly are you asking me?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma met her mother's gaze and didn't flinch, which Elikapeka noted with a complicated kind of pride even as she felt the edges of her patience beginning to firm up. "I'm saying that when I give you the list of boys, I don't want you to say no to someone just because of\u8212?" she paused, choosing her words with a precision that suggested she'd practiced this\u8212? "just because of who their family is."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Their family," Elikapeka repeated.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Their background." Emma put her spoon down. "Mom, I've heard you. My whole life I've heard you. And I just want you to promise that you'll be fair."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka was aware of Lizzie sitting very still now, watching the middle distance in the way she did when she was paying extremely close attention to something while pretending not to. The book lay forgotten beside her bowl.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I will look at the list," Elikapeka said. "And I will make decisions that I believe are right for this family and right for this house. That is the only promise I am able to give you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's not\u8212?" Emma stopped. She pressed her lips together. "That's not a promise, that's just saying you'll do whatever you want anyway."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I am your mother."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"This is my house."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you understand," Elikapeka said quietly, "that understanding something and liking it are two different things. You don't have to like it. But you do have to respect it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma stared at her for a moment that stretched slightly too long, and then looked down at her list. The paper made a small sound as she folded it back along its crease.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," she said. "I'll give you names."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A beat passed. Emma picked up her spoon again and then put it back down. "Can we talk about cousins?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We can."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because some of them are just\u8212?" she searched for the word\u8212? "they're not fun, Mom. Specifically the Hayes side. They're going to stand around and be weird and eat all the food and not talk to anybody and it's my birthday and I just\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?want it to be a good party and I feel like\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Emma." Elikapeka's voice dropped half a register, not louder but denser, which both her daughters had learned years ago was the relevant signal. "All of your cousins will be invited."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"All of them?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Every single one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma closed her eyes briefly. "Mom."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The Hayes side included."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They don't even like parties."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They love parties. They just express it differently than you do." Elikapeka lifted her mug. "And before you say anything else on this subject, I want you to think carefully, because we are getting close to the point in this conversation where there isn't a party at all."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went very still.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie appeared to find something interesting to look at on the wall to her left.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm serious," Elikapeka said, not unkindly. "Your cousins are your family. Your birthday is a family event. You can have your friends there\u8212?thirty, thirty-five, we'll figure out the number\u8212?and the boys you want to invite, you'll give me the list and I'll think about it. But your cousins will be invited and they will be welcomed in this house the same way every guest is welcomed in this house. That is not negotiable."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The morning light had shifted slightly, spreading further across the floor. From somewhere outside came the sound of a car starting on the street.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma picked up her orange juice and drank. She set the glass down and looked at her list, which sat folded beside her bowl. After a moment she unfolded it and picked up the pen she'd also, apparently, brought to breakfast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fine," she said again, though this time the word was smaller and had less architecture to it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good." Elikapeka rose to refill her coffee. "And Emma?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It will be a good party." She paused by her daughter's chair and put one hand briefly on her shoulder. "I'll make sure of it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma didn't say anything, but she didn't shrug the hand away either.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie, very quietly, reopened her book.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The coffee was going cold.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka had poured it twenty minutes ago and set it on the counter and then been pulled away by a question from the caterer about whether the tiki torches went along the fence line or grouped near the patio, and then by the discovery that someone had miscounted the folding chairs, and then by Susan Carpenter appearing at the back slider with a clipboard and an expression of capable cheerfulness that Elikapeka had come to understand meant *I have solved three problems you don't know about yet.* She liked Susan. Susan had the particular competence of a woman who had raised a son largely by herself and had learned to make decisions without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up the coffee cup now and drank it cold, standing at the kitchen window, watching the canal.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The afternoon light came off the water in long flat angles, the kind of light that made the whole backyard look like somewhere else, somewhere slightly idealized, the way places looked in memory before the difficult parts returned. Out on the sailboat\u8212?Jim's boat, the big one, the one that overhung the dock in a way that had bothered her for three years before she'd made peace with it\u8212?she could hear the men. Andy's laugh came across the water first, that particular sound, unhurried, the laugh of a man who was genuinely comfortable. Then Alex Carpenter's voice, lower, and Jim's, and then music began, something with a bass line that moved across the water and came in through the window glass.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had given them the CDs herself. A playlist. She had presented it with the same organized seriousness she'd brought to the guest list negotiations, which Elikapeka had thought about more than once in the weeks since. The methodological error argument. Cousins as family, guests as a distinct category. Emma had made the case with such carefully assembled calm that Elikapeka had let her finish entirely before explaining that the answer was still no, and had watched her daughter absorb this with the contained dignity of someone who intended to remember it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She had given her the extra girls instead. Three more, to balance the cousins. Emma had accepted this with a graciousness that was only slightly performative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six children were arriving in a half hour.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka drank the cold coffee and breathed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The back slider opened and Susan came in, still holding the clipboard. "Tiki torches are along the fence," she said. "The chair situation is resolved. Jorge found four more in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He had four chairs in his truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He has a great deal in that truck." Susan looked at the cold coffee cup. "I'll make a fresh pot."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You don't have to\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm making one for myself." She moved to the coffee maker with the ease of someone familiar with the kitchen, which she was, having spent several Saturday mornings here after the children's golf rounds, and Elikapeka let her, because the coffee genuinely needed to be made and there was something clarifying about Susan's company, her lack of surplus motion.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka set the cup down and started toward the front of the house, but Ella was already there\u8212?she'd heard the door, she always heard the door, even when she appeared not to be paying attention to anything domestic. Ella had come in twenty minutes ago in her coverall, Bobby Carpenter behind her in board shorts and a t-shirt, the two of them with the easy unselfconsciousness of people who had been in each other's company so long they'd stopped performing anything for each other. Elikapeka had assigned Ella the greeter role without much expectation that she'd embrace it. Ella had responded by recruiting help, which was, she supposed, its own kind of initiative.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She heard Michelle's voice in the front hall, and the heavier sound of boys, male voices that had mostly finished changing and not yet settled into what they'd become, and then the particular quality of noise that the Hayes cousins produced simply by being in a space together, which was a noise like something slightly loosely assembled, liable to spill.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She reached the front hall.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle had her arms around her, kissing her cheek, saying happy birthday to Emma's mama, and the boys were already moving, already past the introductions, Travis with his hair still damp from wherever they'd come from, Corey a full head taller than the last time she'd seen him at Christmas, and the third one, Derek, Andy's brother Michael's son, who still wore the expression he'd had at age seven of someone who had recently been accused of something and was reserving his defense.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go find your uncle," Elikapeka said. "He's on the boat."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They were gone. The back slider was still moving when Emma came into the kitchen from the hallway, Mai Lin a step behind, both of them in coveralls, both of them bright with it, the day, the occasion, the thing finally actually happening. Emma's coverall was a pale yellow that worked with her coloring and she had done something with her hair that Elikapeka recognized as effort and approved of. The bikini underneath she had opinions about and had agreed with Andy to set aside, which she had done, mostly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're here?" Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Outside. Your uncle's on the boat, I sent them out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma went to the window. Mai Lin drifted to the counter and picked up a grape from the fruit tray Susan had arranged and ate it with the unceremonious comfort of a girl who had been in this kitchen enough times to be furniture, which was accurate.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Outside, the cousins had found the Nerf football.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't know where it had come from. They had not put it out deliberately. It had materialized, the way things materialized when you introduced enough boys into a space with a pool\u8212?objects appeared, projectiles were launched, someone was going to be in the water before the first guest arrived.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Corey threw a spiral the length of the pool. Derek caught it and immediately fell backward into the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Oh my god," Emma said, not entirely without affection.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your father's watching," Elikapeka said. She could see Andy on the deck of the sailboat, beer in hand, already laughing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music got louder. She could hear Andy shout something at the boys, the cousins shouting back, the easy call-and-response of the Hayes male frequency which she had been decoding for twenty years and still sometimes missed a word.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan appeared beside her at the window with two fresh cups of coffee. Elikapeka accepted hers and they stood together watching Derek surface, still holding the football, raising it above his head like he'd recovered something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's good with the door," Susan said quietly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mm."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's good at\u8212?" Susan paused, searching for the precise version. "He knows how to make people feel they're expected."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka thought about that. It was true. She'd watched him in the front hall, just briefly, the slight forward attention he gave to whoever came in, not performative, just present. It was a quality you didn't teach. "Ella does not have that quality," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan smiled into her coffee. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Travis had gotten the football now and was standing at the edge of the pool and Corey was in the water and Travis threw it directly at his face from four feet away and Corey caught it and pulled Travis in by the wrist in a single fluid movement and there was a crash of water and Emma made a sound at the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They're going to break something," Emma said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Probably," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Go, mija. Go outside. Your party is starting."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her with the particular look she had, the one that held several things at once: the residue of negotiations, the awareness of concessions made and not made, the birthday, the day, the afternoon light. Then she crossed the kitchen and went out the back slider and Mai Lin followed her, and Elikapeka heard Emma's voice shift the moment the door opened, warmer, louder, already calling out to the cousins, already entering the afternoon on her own terms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The music moved across the water.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Michelle wandered into the kitchen looking for a glass and Elikapeka found her one and poured her the last of the old coffee, which she took without complaint. Outside, Andy had stepped off the boat onto the dock and was crossing the yard toward the pool, beer still in hand, and he had the look he got when things were going well, that particular ease, the long unhurried movement of a man who felt himself to be in the right place.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Thirty-six kids.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She could already hear the first car pulling into the driveway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Susan put down her clipboard.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ready?" Susan said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took a breath, looked at the plumeria on the windowsill, its single open flower going gold in the afternoon light, and set down the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes," she said.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The patio behind the restaurant was in shade for another twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before the sun would clear the line of palms along the cart path and make sitting outside genuinely unpleasant. For now it was tolerable. A ceiling fan turned overhead without much conviction, and a mockingbird somewhere in the palms was cycling through its repertoire with the manic energy of something that had nowhere to be.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella had a Sprite and a sleeve of Oreos she'd bought from the vending machine inside. Bobby had a Gatorade, orange, and a bag of pretzels. This was their standard intermission configuration, established over enough Saturday mornings that it had the quality of tradition.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The scorecard was on the table between them, flattened under Ella's elbow. Two under each. Eighteen holes of trading the lead and giving it back and taking it again, neither of them pulling more than one hole clear at any point. It was the kind of round that was satisfying and infuriating in equal measure, and Ella had spent the last quarter mile of the walk back to the clubhouse turning over the par five on sixteen where she'd three-putted from twelve feet and handed him a push when she should have won the hole outright.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You want to talk about sixteen?" Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because I'm happy to talk about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying, that second putt\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"If you finish that sentence I'm going to eat all of these Oreos and not give you any, and I was going to give you some."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He leaned back in his chair and held up both hands. "Not another word about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed three Oreos across the table. He took them without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They sat for a moment in the particular comfortable silence that was one of the things Ella actually valued about Bobby Carpenter\u8212?not many people she could be quiet with without it becoming awkward, but Bobby was one of them. He'd been her Saturday morning for three years now, through two swing coaches and a growth spurt and the whole evolving calculus of what she needed to become the golfer she intended to be. He'd seen her cry exactly once, after the district tournament junior year, and he had said nothing then either, which was exactly right.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know I'm going to birdie six, seven, and eight."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've been threatening to birdie six, seven, and eight since February and you've done it exactly zero times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Today's the day."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that about a lot of days."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm an optimist." He ate an Oreo in one piece, which Ella found obscurely irritating. "Whereas you are a pessimist who happens to play golf well enough that it looks like confidence."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's the most wrong thing you've ever said, and you once told me I was gripping the club like I was trying to strangle a raccoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was not."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your knuckles were white, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She drank her Sprite. The mockingbird had moved closer, or found a more ambitious portion of its repertoire. Somewhere inside, through the glass, she could see her father at the bar with Alex, two cold beers between them, deep in whatever conversation fathers had when their children were occupied. She had never fully understood how her father could drink two beers at the turn and then go out and shoot thirty-eight on the back nine with the same untroubled swing he'd had on the front. It didn't seem fair and it didn't seem physiologically consistent with what she'd learned in health class.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby was watching her watch her father.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's fine," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know he's fine. I've seen him drink a beer and make a forty-foot putt."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad's on his third."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your dad is not fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad is going to birdie six anyway because he doesn't know enough about the hole to be scared of it." Bobby pulled his chair slightly forward and rested his elbows on the table. He had, Ella noticed with mild irritation, gotten significantly taller in the last year. He was now legitimately tall rather than just taller-than-average, which was part of what was doing things to his driving distance and creating new problems for her. "Hey, so. Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She recognized the tone. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I haven't said anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I might have been about to say literally anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to ask me to the movies or something and I'm telling you no in advance so we can skip the whole part where you ask and I say no and then you pretend you don't care."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned. He had an aggravating grin, easy and undefeated, the grin of someone who had asked a question so many times that the answer had stopped landing. "Would you consider dinner instead of movies?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just dinner. There's that Italian place on Federal that you like."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I like the bread there. That's not the same as liking going to dinner."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You could go for the bread."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not going to dinner with you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about just the bread then, strictly a bread-acquisition errand, no romantic implications\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You are in the friend zone," Ella said. "You have been in the friend zone. The friend zone is, for you, a permanent and non-negotiable territory with clearly established borders. There is no diplomatic mission that gets you out of the friend zone."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't stop grinning. "I appreciate the clarity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't know why you keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because one day you're going to run out of metaphors for the friend zone and you'll have to say yes by default."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have an unlimited supply of friend zone metaphors. I could do this all afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We have an hour."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm very efficient."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He ate another Oreo, this one in two pieces, which felt like a concession of some kind. Outside the shade perimeter, the sun was doing serious work on the cart path, and the heat coming off the asphalt had a visible quality to it, a slight atmospheric distortion that made the distant palms look like they were breathing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For the record," Bobby said, "I'm going to keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not a thing I'm going to stop doing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just wanted to be transparent about my intentions."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your intentions are transparent. They've always been transparent. You're not exactly a complicated person, Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yet here you are, spending your entire summer playing golf with me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I spend my summer playing golf," Ella said. "You happen to be the best available opponent. Don't read into it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's going in my memory as reading into it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything to that. The fan turned. The mockingbird finished one cycle and started another. Her father laughed at something Alex said, the sound coming through the glass slightly muffled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At ten minutes to one, Ella stood, gathered her Sprite and the remaining Oreos, and nodded toward the clubhouse. "Let's go get the cart."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The clubhouse was cool and dark inside after the patio, and the woman at the counter handed over the key without ceremony. Cart fourteen. Ella took the key before Bobby's hand was halfway across the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm driving," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You always drive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because you tried to put us in the water on eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was one time and the path curves."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The path has always curved. It curved the week before that and the week before that. The curve is not a new development." She pushed through the side door into the cart staging area, found fourteen, and swung into the driver's seat with the efficiency of someone claiming territory. Bobby came around the other side and got in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know," he said, "in certain cultures, letting the passenger drive occasionally is considered a mark of social maturity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good thing I don't live in those cultures."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just noting that you have control issues."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't have control issues. I have correct-decision-making habits. These are different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He settled back against the seat and put his arm along the back of it, easy and comfortable, and she was aware of this peripherally and in a way that she filed immediately into the category of things she didn't examine. Bobby Carpenter was her Saturday morning. He was her best opponent and the person who'd seen her three-putt from twelve feet and not said anything devastating about it. He was funny and tall and an infuriating driver of golf carts, and none of that was relevant to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She started the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms, hole one," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hole one," he agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart rolled forward out of the staging area and into the white blaze of the afternoon, and ahead of them the Palms course opened up wide and shimmering in the heat, soft and forgiving and ready to be argued over, hole by hole, for the rest of the day.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -2,4 +2,8 @@
|
||||
\f0\fs24 World notes\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Maintain reusable setting and physical-continuity facts here. Scene-specific NOTES are selected from these facts or entered for the scene when preparing its package.\par
|
||||
}
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 6:\par
|
||||
The Hayes parents' bedroom smells faintly of Elikapeka's perfume and the coconut oil Andy uses on his hair on weekends. The bed is made with military precision. The bedroom window looks out over the canal, which catches late-morning light.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -3,5 +3,6 @@
|
||||
It was done. The prep for Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen birthday party was complete. Elikapeka stood in her kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. Susan Carpenter, mother of Ella\u8217?s golf partner Bobby, had volunteered to help with the party, was outside talking with the caterers, setting tables on the patio for the thirty-six kids who were expected to begin arriving in a half hour. Emma\u8217?s request for fifteen boys and fifteen girls had been granted, three of her boy cousins added, and then an extra three girls more to balance the sexes. It was the largest party she\u8217?d ever thrown. Ella came in, wearing a coverall over her swimsuit, along with her friend Bobby, whom she\u8217?d invited but wasn\u8217?t on the guest list. Ella had been drafted as the greeter and she\u8217?d wanted help, thus his presence. Ella was something of a loner who had more guy friends than girl friends and she\u8217?d talked him into helping.\par
|
||||
Her husband and his friend Alex were on the sailboat docked behind the house with the boat\u8217?s owner Jim, setting up the boat\u8217?s sound system for the party. Emma had provided CDs and a playlist. Music started to play. The men were already drinking beers.\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang and Ella answered it. It was Andy\u8217?s sister, Michelle, with the three boy cousins, one her son and the other two the sons of Andy\u8217?s brothers. The girl cousins were all much younger and they\u8217?d decided that they would not attend. Emma came into the kitchen with her friend Mai Lin, both wearing a pretty coveralls over their swimsuits. The bikini that Emma had under her coverall Elikapeka thought too skimpy, but she\u8217?d been overridden by her husband, saying that\u8217?s what the girls were wearing now and she need to chill about it. Emma greeted her cousins and directed them outside to the pool. The boys wore only swimsuits, tee shirts, and flip flops and were in the pool within seconds of doffing the tee shirts and flip flops. They found a Nerf football from somewhere and began throwing it around.\par
|
||||
It was going to be chaos.
|
||||
It was going to be chaos.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,133 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The kitchen clock read 5:47 when Ella came downstairs, her golf shoes already on her feet, bag propped against the wall by the garage door. She'd been awake since five, lying in bed listening to the mockingbirds outside her window, running through her swing in her mind the way her father had taught her to do. First weekend of summer. Thirty-six holes ahead of her. She could hardly stand it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was at the stove, sliding eggs onto a plate without being asked, because Elikapeka Hayes always knew what her daughters needed before they knew themselves.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Sit," her mother said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella sat, but only on the edge of the chair.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She ate quickly, cleaned her plate, drank her orange juice in three swallows, and carried everything to the sink. It was 6:02. Their tee time was 7:24. Pompano Beach was twelve minutes away, maybe fifteen with the light on Sample Road. She wanted forty-five minutes on the range, minimum. That left them needing to leave the house no later than six-thirty, and even that was cutting it closer than she liked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Upstairs, her sisters were still asleep. She could hear the particular silence of rooms full of sleeping people. And from the direction of the master bedroom she heard the low murmur of the television her father turned on every morning while he dressed, and she knew from long experience that the television was a bad sign. The television meant he was not rushing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went back to the kitchen and sat down again, this time not even pretending to be relaxed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father came downstairs at 6:09 in his golf shirt and khaki shorts, his hair still damp, and went directly to the coffee maker. He poured a cup and leaned against the counter and looked out the window at the canal, where the first light was going silver and pink across the water. The sailboat in their dock shifted almost imperceptibly against its lines.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We need to leave at six-thirty," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Morning, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She exhaled through her nose. "Good morning. We need to leave at six-thirty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father smiled at his coffee cup, and that smile\u8212?patient, unhurried, the smile of a man who had been doing this for thirty years and believed there was very little in life that required actual rushing\u8212?made her want to tip the cup out of his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's probably already there," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby can wait."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby doesn't like to wait. Neither do I."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then Bobby and you are well matched." He sipped his coffee. "Your mother made eggs?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There's some in the pan. Dad. We need a good warm-up. I need a good warm-up. You can hit six balls and walk to the first tee, but I need time on the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You'll have time on the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Not if we leave at seven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't say we were leaving at seven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're on your first cup."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at her over the rim of the mug. "This is my second cup."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stood up from the table and walked to her golf bag and crouched down and unzipped the front pocket and took out her glove and put it on and took it back off again. She had no reason to do this. She did it anyway.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Behind her she heard the scrape of a skillet, her mother serving her father his eggs, and then the soft sound of them exchanging some words she couldn't quite make out, and her mother's quiet laugh, and the terrible, leisurely normalcy of it all. It was 6:14.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went out the back door and stood beside the pool. The water was still and dark blue in the early light, and the neighbor's bougainvillea spilled over the fence in a great cascade of orange-pink that was almost violent in its color. She breathed in the morning air, which smelled like canal water and cut grass and the faint diesel memory of some boat that had gone out before dawn. She tried to think about her swing. She'd been working on keeping her right elbow closer to her body on the downswing, something her father had shown her three weeks ago at the range, and she'd had it and then she'd lost it and she wanted to find it again before she was standing over a shot on the first hole.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The door opened behind her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Five minutes," her father said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She turned. He was carrying his coffee cup. Still.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're bringing that?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm finishing it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"In the truck," he agreed, and something in his tone told her he'd been planning to leave at six-thirty all along and had simply declined to tell her, because he found her impatience amusing and saw no reason to relieve it prematurely. This was, she knew, a form of love. It did not feel like one.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She picked up her bag and went through the house to the garage without waiting for him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They drove north on Federal Highway with the windows down, her father's coffee cup sitting in the holder between them, still half full. The morning was already warm the way South Florida mornings were in late May, the air thick and sweetly humid, and the palm trees along the road were motionless in the stillness before the sea breeze came up. Ella sat with her left knee bouncing and her arm out the window.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You need to stop rushing the range," her father said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't rush the range."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You rush the range. You go too fast and you don't let the feelings settle. You hit twelve balls when you should hit eight."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby hits fifty balls."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby's habits are Bobby's business."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked out the window. A sprinkler system was running in the parking lot of a strip mall, arching water across the empty asphalt for no apparent reason. "I just want to be ready," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're already ready. You've been ready since you woke up." He glanced at her. "Probably since last night."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How long have we been doing this?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Since I was four."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And have I ever not gotten you to the course in time for a proper warm-up?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about it longer than he deserved to wait. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay then."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She let her knee stop bouncing. He reached over without looking and turned on the radio, and they drove the rest of the way with the windows down and the warm air coming in and a country station playing low enough that it was almost just texture rather than sound.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The parking lot at Pompano Beach Golf Course was mostly empty when they pulled in, only a handful of cars clustered near the clubhouse entrance. Ella had her door open before the truck stopped rolling, which earned her a single patient look from her father that she ignored. She shouldered her bag and walked fast toward the entrance, her spikes clicking on the asphalt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Through the glass door she could see Bobby Carpenter already inside, sitting on the bench beside the pro shop counter with his arms folded, his own bag leaning against the wall beside him. He was wearing a Pompano Beach Golf hat and a green shirt, and when he saw her come through the door he made a show of checking his watch.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Seven-oh-four," he said. "I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then you've had twenty-four minutes to contemplate your many swing flaws," Ella said, going directly to the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My swing flaws." Bobby unfolded his arms and stood up. "You're the one who started blocking it right under pressure last month. What was that on sixteen at the district qualifier?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was the wind." She slid her father's credit card across the counter to the young man working the register. "Two, on the Pines. Hayes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was not the wind," Bobby said. "There was no wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was some wind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"There was no wind, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good morning to you too, Bobby," her father said, coming through the door behind her, carrying nothing, having left both his golf bag and his apparently now-finished coffee in the truck.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned and shook Andy's hand. "Morning, Mr. Hayes. I've been telling Ella I've been here since six-forty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know," her father said. "She mentioned it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I didn't mention it," Ella said, signing the receipt and taking the card back. "I acknowledged it. There's a difference." She picked up her scorecard from the counter and turned toward the door that led to the range. "We have nineteen minutes. I'm going to go use them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her father looked at Bobby and Bobby looked at her father and some small communication passed between them that she caught only from the corner of her eye and chose to ignore entirely.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed through the door into the morning light, already thinking about her elbow.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,117 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 8\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: DEB6AE02-B51B-4C55-9E61-D08D32BABBA1,DC6BC0EF-F4CE-4303-99AD-CA12671B9092,BFFEEB84-9E04-41EE-B083-5092D160ADF3,F03D5899-C5FB-43BB-90A7-611E9DCDD98C,091EE601-91DB-497C-A646-B094624414DE,FE16770D-D7B7-48EC-AEFF-E1C0787E8D95,332DAD85-2636-46A0-8336-D2AEAEDF8241,75F58E24-E4EE-4163-A6B3-7703D8D211BD\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T20:26:11-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes, alone with daughters Emma and Lizzie after Andy and Ella leave, grants Emma a Friday-evening backyard pool party capped at twenty-five guests and permits boys, but refuses to exclude any family cousins and deflects Emma's pointed accusation of racial bias in the guest-list vetting process\u8212?asserting she will review all names and decide who is welcome\u8212?leaving Emma's challenge to her mother's social prejudices unresolved and filed away for a later attempt.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
From her parents' bedroom, Emma phones Susanna, Mai Lin, and Hannah in succession to build a vetted boy-invitation list that reaches fifteen names\u8212?adding Nate Oliveira, eliminating Chris DeLuca for calling Mai Lin and Emma interchangeable, and flagging Ryan from the swim team for confirmation\u8212?before calculating that her mother's mandate to include all three boy cousins (Devin, Tyler, and cannonball-prone Marcus) will disrupt her intended gender balance of fifteen boys to ten girls, leaving her without a workable counter-argument to raise the guest cap and only the unresolved notation "cousins don't count\u8212?separate category" starred on her notepad.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Manages the team at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport that services its jets. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome and very attractive to women in general. A leader of men.\par
|
||||
Plays golf on Saturday mornings with Ella and Bobby, paired with Alex Carpenter. Drinks two beers and continues to swing with the same untroubled tempo that Ella has noticed and finds both unfair and impressive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka Hayes\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Has a calm, unhurried quality she brings to every task. Used to be an avid reader as a girl \u8212? her own mother had to hide books from her. Makes parenting decisions with quiet firmness, neither unkind nor moveable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
Has been playing Saturday morning golf with Bobby Carpenter for three years.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma Hayes\par
|
||||
Middle daughter. To be a high school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends. She\u8217?s the unacknowledged highest status girl in her class. In her mother\u8217?s words, the sun around which the other girls orbit.\par
|
||||
Orchestrates social events with systematic, general-like deliberateness \u8212? working the phone in sequence, vetting names against multiple trusted sources before committing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
|
||||
Youngest daughter. To be a high school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, shy. She has three close friends, all of which are bookworms like herself.\par
|
||||
Reads at a college level per her English teacher Mrs. Patterson. Aspires to write fantasy fiction in the tradition of Tolkien and McCaffrey. Moves through tasks with focused, urgent efficiency when a book is waiting. Tends to process frustration quietly and internally rather than acting out \u8212? explicitly contrasted with Emma's more reactive temperament.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing and practice partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
Has been Ella's Saturday morning golf partner for three years. Has grown significantly taller in the past year \u8212? now legitimately tall \u8212? which has increased his driving distance and created new competitive problems for Ella.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Mai Lin Wen\par
|
||||
Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house. Born in America of Chinese immigrants. Beautiful and outgoing, wears the same dress size as Emma. Best friends with Emma since 2nd grade. Serves the secondary role as Emma\u8217?s enforcer in the gang of fashionable girls who orbit around Emma.\par
|
||||
Often sleeps over at Emma\u8217?s house or Emma at hers.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter's father. Is an auto mechanic. Plays golf with Andy Hayes on the same Saturday outings as Bobby and Ella. Drinks a lot of beer during a round \u8212? yet apparently still plays adequately nonetheless.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
She worked through the rest of her list of girls, methodically, a conversation here and a conversation there, the names accumulating on the notepad in her lap. Some boys she added. Some she declined before they were fully nominated. One she wrote down and then stared at for a long moment before drawing a slow, deliberate line through his name, for reasons she didn't articulate out loud because she was alone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Finally, she sat back against the headboard and counted.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys, all thoroughly vetted, all approved by at least two people she trusted to have opinions worth consulting. It was a good list. It was an excellent list. She looked at it with the satisfaction of a general surveying a well-positioned army.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And then she thought about Devin.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And Tyler.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
And the others.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother's voice came back to her with pristine clarity: *Every last one of them.*\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma looked at her list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Fifteen boys.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Twenty-five guests total. Which meant ten girls, herself included\u8212?and she'd already been composing that list in her head separately, so she knew exactly who those ten were. It was wrong. The number of boys and girls needed to balance. She needed her mother to agree to thirty attendees, to properly balance the sexes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She counted her cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
There were three boy cousins who would plausibly be invited by her mother's standard of *every last one of them*. Devin, who was fine, she supposed, in the way that a piece of furniture is fine. Tyler, who Lizzie apparently thought she knew, which was hilarious and also somehow annoying. And Marcus, who was fourteen and had gone through a phase last summer of doing cannonballs directly next to whoever was floating quietly in the pool, which was not something Emma was prepared to tolerate at her own birthday party.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three cousins.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Three boys who would have to come off this list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at her fifteen names.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at them for a long moment.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she said something under her breath that she would not have said in front of her mother, picked up the phone again, and started to think very carefully about which argument would work.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the fairness argument. Her mother was impervious to fairness arguments.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not the numbers argument. Her mother would simply raise the cap, or suggest she invite fewer girls.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
No. She needed something her mother couldn't easily dismiss. Something that reframed the question. She didn't have it yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She wrote *cousins don't count\u8212?separate category* on the corner of the notepad and starred it three times.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She'd figure it out. She had time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Hayes house \u8212? The Hayes family lives in a two story house built in the 1960s on a deep water canal (meaning, the canal can be used for boats going out to the Atlantic ocean). The house has a boat dock, rented out to a friend who has a fifty foot sailboat. The house has a small pool in the backyard which is often used by the family for gatherings.\par
|
||||
Mid June, 2000. Late afternoon.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Elikapeka Hayes.\par
|
||||
It was done. The prep for Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen birthday party was complete. Elikapeka stood in her kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. Susan Carpenter, mother of Ella\u8217?s golf partner Bobby, had volunteered to help with the party, was outside talking with the caterers, setting tables on the patio for the thirty-six kids who were expected to begin arriving in a half hour. Emma\u8217?s request for fifteen boys and fifteen girls had been granted, three of her boy cousins added, and then an extra three girls more to balance the sexes. It was the largest party she\u8217?d ever thrown. Ella came in, wearing a coverall over her swimsuit, along with her friend Bobby, whom she\u8217?d invited but wasn\u8217?t on the guest list. Ella had been drafted as the greeter and she\u8217?d wanted help, thus his presence. Ella was something of a loner who had more guy friends than girl friends and she\u8217?d talked him into helping.\par
|
||||
Her husband and his friend Alex were on the sailboat docked behind the house with the boat\u8217?s owner Jim, setting up the boat\u8217?s sound system for the party. Emma had provided CDs and a playlist. Music started to play. The men were already drinking beers.\par
|
||||
The doorbell rang and Ella answered it. It was Andy\u8217?s sister, Michelle, with the three boy cousins, one her son and the other two the sons of Andy\u8217?s brothers. The girl cousins were all much younger and they\u8217?d decided that they would not attend. Emma came into the kitchen with her friend Mai Lin, both wearing a pretty coveralls over their swimsuits. The bikini that Emma had under her coverall Elikapeka thought too skimpy, but she\u8217?d been overridden by her husband, saying that\u8217?s what the girls were wearing now and she need to chill about it. Emma greeted her cousins and directed them outside to the pool. The boys wore only swimsuits, tee shirts, and flip flops and were in the pool within seconds of doffing the tee shirts and flip flops. They found a Nerf football from somewhere and began throwing it around.\par
|
||||
It was going to be chaos.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep it chaotic and fun.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,195 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The patio caught whatever breeze came off the course, which wasn't much. A ceiling fan overhead stirred the humid air into slow circles without cooling anything, and the umbrella over their table threw shade that felt warm rather than cool. Ella had a lemonade and a basket of onion rings she was working through methodically. Bobby had a Coke and a club sandwich he was destroying with the focused efficiency of someone who'd just walked thirty-six holes of Broward County in late May.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You got lucky on eleven," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I made a twenty-foot putt on eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"After you blocked your tee shot into the rough and punched out sideways. The putt was the one good thing that happened to you on that hole."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I halved the hole."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm aware." She pulled an onion ring apart and ate half of it. "My point is you shouldn't have."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby leaned back in his chair and looked at her with the expression he wore when he was deciding how much trouble he wanted to get into. It was a look she knew the way she knew her own yardage book. "Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I shot two under."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And I shot two under and I didn't need a twenty-foot miracle to do it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We finished even."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Barely," she said, which was what he'd said to her on the first green, and she watched him register it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He pointed at her. "You've been saving that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Since the first hole."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He laughed, a short, genuine laugh, and drank his Coke. Inside the clubhouse, through the tinted glass, she could see the bar where her father and Alex Carpenter were sitting on stools with what appeared to be their third beers. Her father was big and easy on the barstool and Alex was leaning forward with his elbows on the bar, and both of them were laughing at something. She wondered sometimes how he could put away beer on a Saturday like this and still make pars. She'd watched him carefully over the years for some sign of it \u8212? a shortened backswing, a loose grip, anything \u8212? and she had never found it. It seemed profoundly unfair.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You nervous about the afternoon?" Bobby asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked back at him. "Why would I be nervous?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Heat. We walked this morning. You might be tired."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not tired."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You might be."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby, I could play thirty-six holes in a sauna and beat you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He considered this. "That's probably not true."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's absolutely true and you know it." She finished the other half of the onion ring. "Anyway, we're taking a cart this afternoon. Unlike some people, I don't require motorized assistance to compete."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We're taking a cart because it's ninety-three degrees."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ninety-four," she said. She'd checked the thermometer on the wall by the pro shop on their way through. "And I'm driving."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He opened his mouth.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I just think\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The pond, Bobby. I'm going to say one word to you and that word is pond."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was eighteen inches from the pond."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You drove a golf cart eighteen inches from a water hazard with me in it and I had my bag on the back and it was the second hole."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was looking at a bird."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were looking at a bird," she repeated. She stared at him. "A bird."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It was an unusual bird."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It was an anhinga. They're everywhere."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I hadn't seen one before."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You grew up in Pompano Beach."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He had no answer for that. He ate the last corner of his sandwich and chased it with Coke and had the decency to look mildly embarrassed. Ella gathered the last of the onion rings into a neat pile, ate two more, and pushed the basket toward him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Finish those if you want them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you." He took one. "Hey, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at him. The afternoon light was direct and flat on the patio and it caught the angles of his face, which had gotten sharper in the last year. He was taller than she'd realized when they were both standing at the bag drop that morning. She filed this observation away somewhere and didn't examine it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You want to get dinner sometime? After a round?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She let three full seconds go by. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just dinner."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm talking about food. You eat food."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're in the friend zone. You've always been in the friend zone. You will remain in the friend zone until one of us is dead, and possibly after."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's a really long time."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He nodded as though she'd confirmed something he already knew. There was no wound in it, no bruised quality to the silence. This was the thing about Bobby Carpenter that she couldn't quite explain to anyone \u8212? he asked, she declined, and they went right on being whatever they were without it costing either of them anything. The boys at school who'd asked her out had looked destroyed afterward, or angry, and she'd felt obscurely blamed for it. Bobby just grinned.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He was grinning now.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What," she said again.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Nothing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're grinning."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I grin. It's a thing I do."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You think you're going to outlast me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I think," he said, "that you're going to Stanford in a year and I'm going to Florida, and I'm making the most of my available time."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That is the most optimistic interpretation of available time I have ever heard."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm an optimistic person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're a delusional person."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Those are sometimes the same thing." He finished the onion rings. "Your backswing got shorter today. On the back nine. Did you notice that?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The shift was so clean she almost missed it. This was also Bobby \u8212? the way golf could appear in a sentence like a key in a lock. She sat up slightly. "It didn't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Seven and eight both. Your takeaway stayed connected but the shoulder turn stopped a little early. Still made good contact but you lost maybe five yards."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She thought about seven and eight. The seven iron on seven, the six on eight. She'd been slightly under the green on both, had chipped and scrambled. She'd attributed it to the lie on seven and the wrong read on eight. "That's not what happened."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Okay," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The lie on seven was\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Flat lie, tight fairway. You were a club short. You hit your seven like a seven and a half."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was quiet for a moment. The ceiling fan made its slow revolution overhead. "When did you start noticing my backswing?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I always notice your backswing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's either very analytical or very creepy."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's both." He said it cheerfully. "I'm telling you because we're playing the Palms in an hour and it's ninety-four degrees and your shoulder is going to tighten up more, not less, and if you don't make a conscious adjustment on the first tee you're going to give me two holes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella looked at him. His face was open and even and entirely sincere. This was also Bobby. The grin and the dinner invitations and the look on the first green when he drained the putt and spread his arms \u8212? and then this. The information offered straight because it was information, because she would use it, because he wanted the match to mean something.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She hated that he was right about her shoulder.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're welcome."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes. Inside the bar, her father said something and Alex threw his head back and laughed. "We should get the cart key."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yep."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They cleared the table and carried their plates inside to the bin by the kitchen and passed the bar where Andy looked up and tracked them with the unhurried ease of a man who had nowhere else to be.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Round two?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Twenty minutes," Ella told him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't get in a hurry. It's hot out there."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are." He turned back to Alex and whatever they'd been saying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She and Bobby went to the counter and she got the key from the kid behind it, a summer hire with a slow smile who said something to Bobby about the Marlins that Bobby answered without stopping. Outside in the cart lot it was bright and sharp and the afternoon heat sat on everything with its full weight.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart was a standard white two-seater with a canopy. She went to the driver's side without ceremony, put the key in, adjusted the seat. Bobby loaded both bags onto the back rack and got in on the passenger side and stretched his long legs out into the footwell.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at him.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What?" he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I just want to make sure you're not looking at any birds."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I won't look at any birds."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Any unusual waterfowl of any kind."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Herons. Egrets. Anything in that general category."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'll close my eyes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Please don't close your eyes." She put the cart in reverse. "One down at the turn," she said. "That's what I'm thinking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm thinking two up at the turn," he said. "But I'm an optimist."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She backed the cart out and pointed it toward the Palms.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,153 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The patio behind the restaurant was in shade for another twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before the sun would clear the line of palms along the cart path and make sitting outside genuinely unpleasant. For now it was tolerable. A ceiling fan turned overhead without much conviction, and a mockingbird somewhere in the palms was cycling through its repertoire with the manic energy of something that had nowhere to be.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella had a Sprite and a sleeve of Oreos she'd bought from the vending machine inside. Bobby had a Gatorade, orange, and a bag of pretzels. This was their standard intermission configuration, established over enough Saturday mornings that it had the quality of tradition.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The scorecard was on the table between them, flattened under Ella's elbow. Two under each. Eighteen holes of trading the lead and giving it back and taking it again, neither of them pulling more than one hole clear at any point. It was the kind of round that was satisfying and infuriating in equal measure, and Ella had spent the last quarter mile of the walk back to the clubhouse turning over the par five on sixteen where she'd three-putted from twelve feet and handed him a push when she should have won the hole outright.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You want to talk about sixteen?" Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because I'm happy to talk about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just saying, that second putt\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"If you finish that sentence I'm going to eat all of these Oreos and not give you any, and I was going to give you some."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He leaned back in his chair and held up both hands. "Not another word about sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pushed three Oreos across the table. He took them without ceremony.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They sat for a moment in the particular comfortable silence that was one of the things Ella actually valued about Bobby Carpenter\u8212?not many people she could be quiet with without it becoming awkward, but Bobby was one of them. He'd been her Saturday morning for three years now, through two swing coaches and a growth spurt and the whole evolving calculus of what she needed to become the golfer she intended to be. He'd seen her cry exactly once, after the district tournament junior year, and he had said nothing then either, which was exactly right.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms this afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know I'm going to birdie six, seven, and eight."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've been threatening to birdie six, seven, and eight since February and you've done it exactly zero times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Today's the day."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You say that about a lot of days."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm an optimist." He ate an Oreo in one piece, which Ella found obscurely irritating. "Whereas you are a pessimist who happens to play golf well enough that it looks like confidence."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's the most wrong thing you've ever said, and you once told me I was gripping the club like I was trying to strangle a raccoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was not."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your knuckles were white, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She drank her Sprite. The mockingbird had moved closer, or found a more ambitious portion of its repertoire. Somewhere inside, through the glass, she could see her father at the bar with Alex, two cold beers between them, deep in whatever conversation fathers had when their children were occupied. She had never fully understood how her father could drink two beers at the turn and then go out and shoot thirty-eight on the back nine with the same untroubled swing he'd had on the front. It didn't seem fair and it didn't seem physiologically consistent with what she'd learned in health class.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby was watching her watch her father.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"He's fine," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know he's fine. I've seen him chug a beer and make a forty-foot putt."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad's on his third."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your dad is not fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"My dad is going to birdie six anyway because he doesn't know enough about the hole to be scared of it." Bobby pulled his chair slightly forward and rested his elbows on the table. He had, Ella noticed with mild irritation, gotten significantly taller in the last year. He was now legitimately tall rather than just taller-than-average, which was part of what was doing things to his driving distance and creating new problems for her. "Hey, so. Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She recognized the tone. "No."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I haven't said anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I might have been about to say literally anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You were about to ask me to the movies or something and I'm telling you no in advance so we can skip the whole part where you ask and I say no and then you pretend you don't care."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby grinned. He had an aggravating grin, easy and undefeated, the grin of someone who had asked a question so many times that the answer had stopped landing. "Would you consider dinner instead of movies?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just dinner. There's that Italian place in Sunrise that you like."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I like the bread there. The bread is the absolute best. That's not the same as liking going to dinner. With you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You could go for the bread."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not going to dinner with you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What about just the bread then, strictly a bread-acquisition errand, no romantic implications\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You are in the friend zone," Ella said. "You have been in the friend zone. The friend zone is, for you, a permanent and non-negotiable territory with clearly established borders. There is no diplomatic mission that gets you out of the friend zone."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't stop grinning. "I appreciate the clarity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't know why you keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because one day you're going to run out of metaphors for the friend zone and you'll have to say yes by default."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have an unlimited supply of friend zone metaphors. I could do this all afternoon."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We have an hour."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm very efficient."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He ate another Oreo, this one in two pieces, which felt like a concession of some kind. Outside the shade perimeter, the sun was doing serious work on the cart path, and the heat coming off the asphalt had a visible quality to it, a slight atmospheric distortion that made the distant palms look like they were breathing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"For the record," Bobby said, "I'm going to keep asking."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not a thing I'm going to stop doing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Just wanted to be transparent about my intentions."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your intentions are transparent. They've always been transparent. You're not exactly a complicated person, Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"And yet here you are, spending your entire summer playing golf with me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I always spend my summers playing golf," Ella said. "You happen to be the best available opponent. Don't read into it more than that."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's going in my memory as reading into it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything to that. The fan turned. The mockingbird finished one cycle and started another. Her father laughed at something Alex said, the sound coming through the glass slightly muffled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At ten minutes to noon, Ella stood, gathered her Sprite and the remaining Oreos, and nodded toward the clubhouse. "Let's go get the cart."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The clubhouse was cool and dark inside after the patio, and the woman at the counter handed over the key without ceremony. Cart fourteen. Ella took the key before Bobby's hand was halfway across the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm driving," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You always drive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because you tried to put us in the water on eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was one time and the path curves."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The path has always curved. It curved the week before that and the week before that. The curve is not a new development." She pushed through the side door into the cart barn, found fourteen, and swung into the driver's seat with the efficiency of someone claiming territory. Bobby came around the other side and got in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know," he said, "in certain cultures, letting the passenger drive occasionally is considered a mark of social maturity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good thing I don't live in those cultures."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just noting that you have control issues."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't have control issues. I have correct-decision-making habits. These are different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He settled back against the seat and put his arm along the back of it, easy and comfortable, and she was aware of this peripherally and in a way that she filed immediately into the category of things she didn't examine. Bobby Carpenter was her Saturday morning. He was her best opponent and the person who'd seen her three-putt from twelve feet and not said anything devastating about it. He was funny and tall and an infuriating driver of golf carts, and none of that was relevant to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She started the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms, hole one," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hole one," he agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart rolled forward out of the staging area and into the white blaze of the afternoon, and ahead of them the Palms course opened up wide and shimmering in the heat, soft and forgiving and ready to be argued over, hole by hole, for the rest of the day. As she drove off, she saw her father and Bobby's father come out and walk towards the cart barn. It was time to play golf.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The seventeenth hole had given Andy a moment of hope for her, which was the cruelest thing a golf course could do.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He'd watched her striped six-iron from the fairway settle four feet from the pin, watched her read the putt with the focused economy of motion he'd spent years teaching her, and watched the ball fall dead center into the cup. She'd allowed herself one tight nod\u8212?not a fist pump, not a word\u8212?and picked up her bag and walked to the eighteenth tee with the bearing of someone who had not yet lost anything. That was his daughter. That was three years of Saturday mornings made visible.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One shot back, needing a birdie. Playing the eighteenth on the Palms course, which was not the Palms course's idea of a good time for anyone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy hung back near the cart path with Alex while the kids played up ahead. Alex had cracked his third beer of the back nine and offered one across with a sociable tilt of the can. Andy shook his head. He'd finished his second on sixteen and he was done. He needed to watch this clearly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's going to be fine," Alex said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"She's right back in it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know she is."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex looked at him. "You're not actually worried about the match."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm not worried about anything."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You've got that face."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy didn't answer because Alex wasn't entirely wrong and because there wasn't anything useful to say about it. He'd been watching Ella golf since she was nine years old gripping a cut-down seven-iron on the driving range, and he could read her like a stock chart. The back nine today had been uneven in a way that had nothing to do with her swing. Her swing was fine. Her swing was always fine. It was the thing behind the swing that had been slightly out of adjustment, the internal temperature she usually managed without thinking about it. She'd been managing it today, but only just.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He knew what that kind of management cost.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had played beautifully all afternoon. The kid had grown into something this year\u8212?not just the height, though that was part of it, the extra leverage translating directly into yards that Ella no longer had a comfortable cushion against. It was also just the general settling of him, the way he moved through a round without the peaks and valleys that defined most high school golfers, without the miniature crises over a bad bounce or an unlucky kick. He had his father's ease on a golf course, if not Alex's liquid assistance in achieving it. Bobby played like someone who expected to be there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella played like someone who intended to win, which was a different thing entirely, and usually it was the difference that made her the best player on any course she stepped onto. Today it had been working against her in small, compounding ways.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Sixteen had been the disaster.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy had seen it coming from the moment she'd pulled the wrong club on her second shot\u8212?he'd seen it and said nothing because there was nothing to say, she didn't want help and wouldn't have taken it, and part of learning to be a golfer was making your own mistakes in your own time. The penalty had been two shots she couldn't fully recover from, and he'd watched her absorb them with a controlled anger that was visible only if you knew what you were looking at. A tightening around the jaw. The way she replaced the divot with slightly too much force.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Now Bobby was standing on the eighteenth green waiting with a ball two feet from the pin and a birdie as inevitable as weather.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella was in the bunker.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy walked up to the edge of the green and stopped. Alex came alongside him. Neither of them spoke.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see the lie from where he stood and he felt it in his stomach before his mind had fully processed it\u8212?the ball settled down into the sand at an angle that meant the back edge of the bunker's lip had gotten involved, burying it into a small depression that a pro golfer would curse quietly and privately before playing for nothing more than a clean exit. Any lie in a bunker was manageable. A buried lie in a bunker, with the pin thirty feet away and the match on it, was a different conversation.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella stood at the edge looking down at it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He could see her temper from forty feet away. Not in any obvious gesture\u8212?she wasn't the kind of girl who wore it openly. It was in the stillness of her, the way she went very quiet in the way that preceded something precise and controlled and likely insufficient. She was doing the math the same way he was doing the math, and she was arriving at the same answer, and she was refusing to accept it on principle.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
That was his daughter too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She stepped down into the bunker. Addressed the ball with her sand wedge. Took her stance, adjusted it slightly, took it again. He watched her set her jaw.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby had drifted to the far side of the green to stay out of her sightline, which was a considerate piece of golf etiquette and probably also self-preservation. The kid understood her better than most.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She swung.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It was a full, committed swing\u8212?no half measures, no protective caution\u8212?and the sand exploded upward in a white burst that caught the afternoon light and hung for a moment before dispersing. The ball came up high and clean out of it, which was the part that gave Andy one half second of irrational hope, the ball up in the air and possible, everything possible while it was in the air\u8212?\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It hit the green eight feet past the hole and rolled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He watched it. Everyone watched it. The break was left to right and it ran with the break, slowing, slowing, and stopped three feet beyond the cup.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Not in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The sand had barely settled in the bunker before Ella was climbing out of it, rake in hand. She raked the sand with the clipped, efficient movements of someone who has moved past the event and does not intend to discuss it. She walked up onto the green and looked at Bobby, who was already extending his hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She shook it. One clean shake.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good round," she said. Her voice was entirely level.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You too," Bobby said. He was keeping his face straight with visible effort.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She conceded his putt with a nod that didn't require words, and then she looked at her own ball for a moment and did the thing that Andy had watched her do before\u8212?the thing that was entirely Ella and that he had never quite managed to talk her out of\u8212?she stepped to the edge of the green where it dropped away toward the small decorative pond that ran along the cart path, drew her foot back, and kicked the ball cleanly off the green and into the water with a small, satisfying splash.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't watch it land. She was already walking.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby let her go. Andy caught his eye briefly and Bobby shrugged, one shoulder, with the half-grin of a kid who had earned something rare and wasn't going to waste it on commentary. He was right to let her walk. Andy had raised her and he would have let her walk too.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He and Alex fell in behind her at a reasonable distance.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Your kid played well today," Alex said. "Bobby just played slightly better, specifically on sixteen."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Let's not quantify it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fair enough."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They walked in comfortable silence back toward the cart barn. The afternoon was long and hot and the shadows were beginning to stretch across the fairways in the way they did in late May when the day had given everything it had and was finally starting to let go. Ahead of them, Ella's back was straight and her stride was fast and she was not looking at anything except where she was going.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
In the truck, Andy gave her the silence she needed. He merged onto Federal Highway heading north and let the air conditioning run and watched the road and said nothing. She sat with her arm along the window ledge and her jaw still set and her eyes on the landscape going past.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She knew the numbers as well as he did. Every player on tour, every professional who'd ever put a ball in the air for a living, won less than a quarter of the time they entered. The best players in the world lost three tournaments for every one they won. She knew this. He'd told her and she'd understood it and filed it away and it made not one bit of difference to her when she was the one doing the losing.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Every time. Every single time, it hit her exactly like the first time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He didn't think this was something he needed to fix. He thought it might be what made her good.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He drove. The radio was off. She stared out the window and let the miles do the work that miles were for, and eventually her jaw unclenched by a small degree, and he saw it, and said nothing about that either.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,149 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The library was cool and smelled the way libraries always smelled \u8212? paper and time and the particular quiet that collected in places where people came to be alone together. Lizzie walked through the glass doors ahead of her mother and felt her shoulders drop about two inches.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Don't go far," Elikapeka said, which was what she always said, which was unnecessary, because Lizzie never went far in a library. She went deep.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Emma had declined to come, predictably. Emma's relationship with books was polite but not passionate. She had stayed home with some intention involving the phone and the pool and whatever complicated social machinery was required to plan a birthday party three months in advance. Lizzie had not been sorry to leave her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She moved through the new releases first, the way she always did, not because she expected to find anything but because you never knew. The spines passed under her fingers. A lot of things she'd already read. A lot of things she had no interest in. And then one cover stopped her hand.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
*Stardust.* Neil Gaiman.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She pulled it out. A wall. A town on one side, something else \u8212? something wild and dark and other \u8212? on the other side. She turned it over and read the back and then read it again, and something in her chest did a small, certain thing, like a key turning.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom." She crossed the floor to where her mother was standing near the periodicals, leafing through nothing in particular with the calm unhurried quality she brought to every task. "Look at this one."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka took the book. She read the back cover with care, which Lizzie appreciated even as she found it agonizing. Then she fanned the pages \u8212? a quick, practiced inspection, reading a line here and there.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No," she said, and handed it back.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie stood still for a moment. "Why not?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't think it's for you yet."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read Lord of the Rings."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you have."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I've read Dragonflight. Multiple times."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too." Her mother's voice was the same voice she had used with Emma at breakfast \u8212? the one that was not unkind but that was also not going to move. "This is different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Different how?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The content." Elikapeka set the magazine back on the rack and looked at her directly. "Not yet, Lizzie. Maybe in a year or two."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"A year or two." Lizzie looked down at the cover. The wall. The other country beyond it. "I'm going to be in high school."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know where you're going to be."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I read at a college level. Mrs. Patterson said so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mrs. Patterson is your English teacher and she's right," Elikapeka said pleasantly. "And I'm your mother. Put it back."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie put it back. She did not slam it. She was not Emma.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went back into the stacks and stood for a moment in the fiction section, in the particular silence that came after a refusal, and let herself feel the frustration without acting on it. Then she moved toward the F's, because there was no point in standing around feeling sorry for herself when there were books within reach.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Dragonflight was there \u8212? it was always there, because apparently no one else in Lighthouse Point needed it on any given Saturday, which said something about Lighthouse Point. She took it down and held it and felt some of the annoyance leave her, because she loved it, had always loved it, the dragons and the Thread and Lessa's furious stubborn intelligence. She picked up Dragonquest too, and The White Dragon, and held the stack with both arms.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Then she stood in front of the T's for a while, looking at the Tolkien. She didn't need to check them out \u8212? she had the boxed set at home, the one with the Alan Lee illustrations that she kept on her nightstand and treated with the seriousness of a sacred object \u8212? but she stood there anyway, looking at the spines.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She went back to her mother with the McCaffrey books.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka looked at them. She turned Dragonflight over, read the back, and made a small sound that was not quite amusement. "You've read these."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"All of them. More than once."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know that too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother looked at her over the books. "Wouldn't you rather find something new? Something you haven't read?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at her. "I tried to."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
A pause.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lizzie\u8212?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I found one. You said no." She didn't say it with heat. She said it the way her mother said things she was certain about \u8212? as the shape of reality. "So these are what I'm checking out."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was quiet for a moment. Then she checked them out.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
---\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The grocery store was the wrong place to be when you had books waiting.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie understood, in the abstract, that grocery shopping was necessary, that families required food, that her mother's habit of slow and deliberate progress through the Winn-Dixie served some purpose she would probably appreciate more when she was older. She understood all of this. She still found it almost unbearable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Can I just\u8212?" she started.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Here." Her mother handed her the list. "You know what we need. Get the things on the right side. I'll do the left."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
This was the arrangement that worked. Lizzie took the list and went.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She moved fast, the way she moved through everything when there was a book waiting \u8212? with a focused, slightly urgent efficiency that made other shoppers step aside. Cereal. Juice. The specific bread her father liked that was on the second shelf and not the first. Milk. She knew this store the way she knew the library \u8212? where everything lived, how to cut through the produce section to save forty seconds, which checkout lines moved and which ones didn't.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She was back at the cart inside seven minutes.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother was standing in the cereal aisle, reading the side panel of something, which was not on the list.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Mom." Lizzie set her items in the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hmm."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I got everything on my half."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I see that." Her mother set the box down and considered the one next to it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Are we almost done?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We'll be done when we're done."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie leaned on the cart and looked at the ceiling. "I just \u8212? I have books."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm aware you have books. You have books you've already read." Her mother moved down the aisle with no discernible increase in pace. "I would think a book you've read before would be somewhat less urgent."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's not less urgent. It's\u8212?" Lizzie considered how to explain this. "It's like visiting someone. Someone you like. You still want to get there."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Her mother glanced at her, and something in her expression shifted in a way that Lizzie recognized \u8212? the small, private thing that meant she was pleased, though she wouldn't say so directly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's a nice way to put it," Elikapeka said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I want to go visit Lessa," Lizzie said. "She's been waiting."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Lessa has been waiting since 1968. She can wait another twenty minutes."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's easy for you to say."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It is." Her mother lifted two cans of tomatoes from the shelf, read both labels, placed one in the cart. "You know, I used to read like you do. When I was your age."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie looked at her. Her mother didn't say things like this very often \u8212? the when-I-was-your-age things that weren't pointed at a lesson, that were just offered, plainly.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"What did you read?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Everything I could." She moved toward the pasta. "My mother had to hide books from me to get me to do anything else."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That's what you do to me."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know." There was no apology in it, but no defensiveness either. "It worked on me. I turned out fine."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm going to write them someday," Lizzie said. "Books. Not just read them."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know you are."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Fantasy. Like Tolkien. Like McCaffrey." She pushed the cart forward to keep pace. "There aren't that many women writing it. But McCaffrey did. I can too."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You can," her mother said, in the same tone she used when she said things like the cousins are coming to the party and the bread is on the second shelf \u8212? simply, as the established nature of things.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie was quiet for a moment. The store moved around them, Saturday-morning sounds, other carts and other conversations, the low music from speakers somewhere above.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Can we go after the pasta?" she asked.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Elikapeka picked up the pasta, read the weight, placed it in the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"After the pasta," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Lizzie pushed the cart toward the checkout and tried not to go faster than her mother's pace, and mostly succeeded, and the whole time she was thinking about fire-lizards and dragons and a woman named Lessa who was small and fierce and refused to be told what she could not do.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,95 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 7\par
|
||||
Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
|
||||
Character UUIDs: DEB6AE02-B51B-4C55-9E61-D08D32BABBA1,BFFEEB84-9E04-41EE-B083-5092D160ADF3,FE16770D-D7B7-48EC-AEFF-E1C0787E8D95,75F58E24-E4EE-4163-A6B3-7703D8D211BD\par
|
||||
Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T19:19:10-05:00\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STYLE\par
|
||||
The style of the novel is in the style but not substance of Ken Follett. Each scene is in third person from the perspective of one of the characters.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### LEXICON\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### STORY\par
|
||||
Scene 5\par
|
||||
Ella and Bobby, evenly matched after an 18-hole morning round with a tradition of Oreos and Gatorade, share a comfortable silence on the shaded patio while Bobby makes his routine, gently deflected romantic overture\u8212?met again with Ella's firm but unexamined "friend zone" declaration\u8212?before she claims the cart keys and drives them out to the Palms course for the afternoon round, with both fathers emerging behind them, as Ella privately registers but refuses to inspect her awareness of Bobby's easy physical presence.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### CHARACTERS\par
|
||||
Andy Hayes\par
|
||||
Father and husband. Manages the team at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport that services its jets. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome and very attractive to women in general. A leader of men.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 5:\par
|
||||
Plays golf on Saturday mornings with Ella and Bobby, paired with Alex Carpenter. Drinks two beers and continues to swing with the same untroubled tempo that Ella has noticed and finds both unfair and impressive.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella Hayes\par
|
||||
Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 5:\par
|
||||
Has been playing Saturday morning golf with Bobby Carpenter for three years.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter\par
|
||||
Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing and practice partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 5:\par
|
||||
Has been Ella's Saturday morning golf partner for three years. Has grown significantly taller in the past year \u8212? now legitimately tall \u8212? which has increased his driving distance and created new competitive problems for Ella.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Alex Carpenter\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 5:\par
|
||||
Bobby Carpenter's father. Plays golf with Andy Hayes on the same Saturday outings as Bobby and Ella. Drinks a lot of beer during a round \u8212? yet apparently still plays adequately nonetheless.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### RECALL\par
|
||||
(none)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### PREVIOUS\par
|
||||
"It's going in my memory as reading into it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She didn't say anything to that. The fan turned. The mockingbird finished one cycle and started another. Her father laughed at something Alex said, the sound coming through the glass slightly muffled.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
At ten minutes to noon, Ella stood, gathered her Sprite and the remaining Oreos, and nodded toward the clubhouse. "Let's go get the cart."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The clubhouse was cool and dark inside after the patio, and the woman at the counter handed over the key without ceremony. Cart fourteen. Ella took the key before Bobby's hand was halfway across the counter.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm driving," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You always drive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Because you tried to put us in the water on eleven."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"That was one time and the path curves."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"The path has always curved. It curved the week before that and the week before that. The curve is not a new development." She pushed through the side door into the cart barn, found fourteen, and swung into the driver's seat with the efficiency of someone claiming territory. Bobby came around the other side and got in.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You know," he said, "in certain cultures, letting the passenger drive occasionally is considered a mark of social maturity."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Good thing I don't live in those cultures."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I'm just noting that you have control issues."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I don't have control issues. I have correct-decision-making habits. These are different."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He settled back against the seat and put his arm along the back of it, easy and comfortable, and she was aware of this peripherally and in a way that she filed immediately into the category of things she didn't examine. Bobby Carpenter was her Saturday morning. He was her best opponent and the person who'd seen her three-putt from twelve feet and not said anything devastating about it. He was funny and tall and an infuriating driver of golf carts, and none of that was relevant to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She started the cart.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Palms, hole one," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Hole one," he agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The cart rolled forward out of the staging area and into the white blaze of the afternoon, and ahead of them the Palms course opened up wide and shimmering in the heat, soft and forgiving and ready to be argued over, hole by hole, for the rest of the day. As she drove off, she saw her father and Bobby's father come out and walk towards the cart barn. It was time to play golf.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### NOTES\par
|
||||
Pompano Beach Golf Course \u8212? A frequently played course with Andy and Ella. Two eighteen hole courses, the shorter and easier Palms course and the longer and harder Pines course.\par
|
||||
Late Saturday afternoon, late May 2000, on the golf course.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### BRIEF\par
|
||||
This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Andy Hayes.\par
|
||||
Andy could see Ella had her temper barely under control as she stepped into the bunker with a bad lie and a difficult shot that she had to hole to tie with Bobby in their grudge match after the first round of the day ended a tie. Ella had struggled on the back nine of the Pines course but nevertheless had kept it even until a disastrous double bogey on the sixteenth. She\u8217?d picked up a shot on the seventeenth, but her shot to the green on eighteen had buried in the soft sand, whereas Bobby had hit a perfect iron to about two feet and was eagerly waiting to tap in the putt for birdie and win the match. From her lie, a pro golfer would be happy just to get the ball on the green, but she had to hole it or lose the match. She went into the bunker, sneered at the ugly lie of her nearly buried ball, and took a mighty swing with her sand wedge. The ball popped high into the air, the sand nearly blinding her, and the ball rolled past the hole and the match was lost.\par
|
||||
She angrily raked the sand and went up on the green and shook Bobby\u8217?s outstretched hand, conceding his putt, kicking her ball into the pond, turned and stalked off the green. Bobby knew she was furious and let her go without any trash talking. He couldn\u8217?t help grinning, though. It wasn\u8217?t often that he\u8217?d beaten her; she was by far the best player on the high school team, man or woman. She was good enough, he thought, to go pro, once she\u8217?d had a few seasons in college to polish her game.\par
|
||||
In the truck on the way home, Andy let her fume. She knew, as well as he did, that even the best golfers in the world won fewer than one-fourth of their tournaments. But it always made her angry to lose, every darn time.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### DIRECTIVE\par
|
||||
Expand to 1500 words maximum. Keep it dramatic.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
### SCENE\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 From Emma Hayes's viewpoint at her sixteenth birthday party's close, she registers both the near-kiss with Tyler Marsh during the chicken fight (mentally filed as unfinished) and the shocking kitchen revelation that her previously boy-dismissive fourteen-year-old sister Lizzie kissed\u8212?or was kissed by\u8212?party guest Will, which Lizzie announced defiantly to their mother before retreating upstairs, leaving their father suppressing laughter, Ella disengaging, their mother ascending to pursue the matter, and Emma and overnight-guest Mai Lin collapsed in the hallway over the absurdity while the evening's giddy fullness remains unresolved and ongoing.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Andy Hayes and Alex Carpenter exchange information about their children's college ambitions\u8212?Ella targeting Stanford's women's golf program, Bobby aiming for Florida\u8212?while observing the kids on the range, then the four begin their round from the black tees (Ella's insistence), halve the first hole after Bobby outdrives Ella by thirty yards with a birdie but Ella matches him with a holed eighteen-footer, establishing the central competitive dynamic: Bobby's new distance advantage versus Ella's superior short game, with the unresolved tension of whether Ella can close that gap before the stakes of college recruitment make it matter.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,125 +0,0 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 The range was visible through the chain-link fence that ran along the cart path, and Andy could see Ella out there at the far end, hitting iron after iron with a rhythm that looked almost mechanical. Bobby had gone out too, though he'd stopped after about ten balls and was now mostly watching her, which said something about the kind of competitor he was\u8212?size up what you're dealing with before you commit to anything.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy stood at the first tee with Bobby's father, Alex, who was a solidly built man with a salesman's handshake and a seven handicap he wore like a badge of office. They'd played together enough times that the pleasantries were handled in under a minute.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"How's she hitting it?" Greg asked, nodding toward the range.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Asked me about her elbow on the drive over."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Bobby watched golf on the VCR until midnight. I could hear the narration through the wall."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy smiled. "What's his plan after high school? Ella ever mention if he's got schools in mind?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Florida." Alex said it simply, the way you say something you've already made peace with. "Wants to go to UF. Play for the Gators. I think it's realistic, honestly. Kid's gotten long."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy nodded. That was true. Bobby had added at least fifteen yards since October, which was what happened when a boy went from fourteen to fifteen and every cell in his body decided to cooperate simultaneously.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Ella's got Stanford in her head," Andy said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Stanford." Alex gave a low whistle. "Women's program there is no joke."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"No, it is not." Andy said it evenly, though what he felt was something more complicated\u8212?pride wound around worry, the way it always was with her, the way it had been since she was nine years old and told him she was going to be a professional golfer with the same voice another kid might use to say she was going to have a sandwich.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The kids came off the range at 7:21 and walked toward the first tee with their bags, already talking, already disagreeing about something\u8212?the natural state of their friendship, as far as Andy could tell.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"\u8212?doesn't count as a warmup if you're just steering it," Bobby was saying.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I wasn't steering anything. I was managing trajectory."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Those are the same thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"They are genuinely not the same thing, Bobby."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They arrived at the tee, and Andy watched as Ella walked straight past the white markers without slowing, continuing to the tips, the black tees. Bobby followed without comment, which meant it had already been established between them. This was how it always went\u8212?the girls' program at their high school never saw the back tees, some combination of tradition and tournament rule that Ella regarded as a bureaucratic insult to her specifically. Every time she had access to a course without a committee telling her otherwise, she went back as far as the course would let her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Dollar a hole," Bobby said, setting his bag down.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Obviously." Ella was already pulling her driver. "Automatic press on two down."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Agreed. Who flips?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella pulled a tee from her bag and held it up. "Tee flip. Call it."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She tossed it. Bobby said point. The tee indicated Ella.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Point," Ella said. "I'm away."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby spread his hands magnanimously. "Ladies first."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I was away before you made it a gender thing."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She teed up a Titleist, took two practice swings with the deliberate, slightly exaggerated elbow position that told Andy she was still working on whatever she'd been chewing over in the car, and then stepped into her address. She went still for a moment\u8212?that familiar stillness that had always struck him, even when she was small\u8212?and then swung.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The ball came off the face with a crack that carried in the morning air, starting just left of center and drawing back toward the middle, climbing, holding its line, and landing in the short grass about 260 yards out with a small bounce that kicked it further still. It was, by any reasonable measure, a very good golf shot.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at it for a moment. "Not terrible," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Thank you so much."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He teed up, stood over the ball for about three seconds, and hit it. There was no equivocating about what Bobby Carpenter's swing had become over the past year\u8212?it was long and loose and catastrophically effective. The ball went high and straight and came down thirty yards past Ella's, still in the fairway, rolling.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
He looked at her. "Not terrible," he said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella made a sound somewhere between a scoff and a sigh and picked up her tee.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have an eight-iron in," she said, which was not directed at Bobby but was also clearly intended for Bobby to hear.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a gap wedge," Bobby said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know. You've been thirty yards past me since April and you've been quietly smug about it since April and I've been watching you miss greens from a hundred yards while I've been getting up and down from everywhere, so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's the first hole, Ella."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"It's a pattern."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy watched this exchange with the quiet pleasure of a man who had spent nine years watching his daughter negotiate the world entirely on her own terms. He looked over at Alex, who had the expression of a spectator at a tennis match.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Should we?" Greg said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"We should," Andy agreed.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
They teed off from the white markers\u8212?Andy striping a drive down the left center, Greg pushing his slightly but finding the fairway\u8212?and followed the cart path in the general direction of the morning, which was already warm in that particular South Florida way that suggested the afternoon would be nearly intolerable.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"First beer of the day," Alex said, scanning the course. "What do you think is reasonable? Eight o'clock?"\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight seems aggressive."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-thirty."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy thought about it. The cart girl came around on a rotation, and he'd clocked her at about forty-five minutes on previous rounds. "First time she passes the third green is probably eight-fifteen or so."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Greg said. "That's almost dignified."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
The first green was a generous size, slightly elevated, with a false front that the course's designers had apparently included as a personal slight against the golfing public. Ella and Bobby had both hit their approaches and were already standing over their balls by the time their fathers arrived. Ella was pin-high left, maybe eighteen feet. Bobby was further out, twenty-two or twenty-three, below the hole, which was the favorable position.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"You're away," Ella said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I know I'm away," Bobby said, already reading his putt, walking the line from behind the ball and then crouching to look at it from the side.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy stood quietly near the fringe and watched. This was his favorite part of watching Ella play\u8212?not the drives, which were impressive but mechanical, but the moments on the green when she went still and read the thing like a text she was translating rather than a surface she was navigating. She was doing it now, not to her own putt but to Bobby's, watching to see what the green would tell her before she had to ask it herself.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby pulled the trigger. The ball tracked right to left, losing speed at exactly the rate the slope demanded, and fell into the front of the hole with a sound that was almost apologetic about how good it was.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Yeah," Bobby said, to no one in particular.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Ella waited for him to retrieve his ball and step clear, and then she stood over her own putt, slightly uphill, minimal break. She looked at the hole once, looked down, and hit it.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
It went in. It went in as though it had not seriously considered any other outcome\u8212?tracking straight, holding its speed, rattling the back of the cup and dropping.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Bobby looked at her.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
She looked at Bobby.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have a very good short game," she said.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"I have seen your short game."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Then this should not be surprising to you."\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Andy wrote the halved hole on his scorecard and glanced at Alex. Two kids walking toward the second tee already arguing about something, their bags on their backs, their whole summers arranged around this\u8212?eighteen holes today, eighteen more after lunch, and the days that followed full of the same, the slow accumulation of something that Andy suspected was going to be important later in ways that were impossible to name yet.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Alex said again, watching them go.\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
"Eight-fifteen," Andy confirmed, and followed his daughter down the fairway in the early morning heat.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy. Met Will Fontaine at Emma's sweet sixteen party. Kissed Will Fontaine at the party (or was kissed first, by her account), then announced this at full volume in the kitchen to her mother, chin up and unrepentant, before walking upstairs with deliberate dignity. Was heard crying in her room shortly after.\par
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
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Reference in New Issue
Block a user