Add continuity context and update proposals
This commit is contained in:
Joey Grasty
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\f0\fs24 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
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\par
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Continuity update from Scene 4:\par
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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. Reads at a college level per her English teacher Mrs. Patterson. Loves Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series (Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon) and has re-read them multiple times. Owns the complete Tolkien corpus with Alan Lee illustrations, kept on her nightstand and treated with reverence. Aspires to write fantasy fiction in the tradition of Tolkien and McCaffrey. Moves through tasks with focused, urgent efficiency when a book is waiting. Was denied Neil Gaiman's Stardust by her mother as age-inappropriate for now. Tends to process frustration quietly and internally rather than acting out \u8212? explicitly contrasted with Emma's more reactive temperament.\par
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\f0\fs26 \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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}
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"You'll ruin your eyes doing that," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"You say that every morning," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
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\par
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"One morning I'll be right."\par
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\par
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Emma set her spoon down. "Mom. Can we talk about my birthday party?"\par
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\par
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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
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\par
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"What about it," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"Pool party. Evening. Backyard. My birthday is on a Friday, so I can have a party on my birthday for once."\par
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\par
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"That could work."\par
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\par
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"And I want it to be a real party. Not just a family thing."\par
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\par
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"We can have your friends."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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Lizzie turned a page without comment.\par
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\par
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"How many are you thinking?" Elikapeka asked.\par
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\par
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"Maybe forty. Forty-five."\par
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\par
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"For a backyard pool party."\par
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\par
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"The backyard is big."\par
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\par
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"Forty-five children in my backyard at night is not a party, Emma, it's a liability."\par
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\par
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"They're not children. And I was thinking more like\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"Twenty," Elikapeka said. "Twenty-five at the absolute outside."\par
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\par
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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
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\par
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Lizzie looked up from her book for the first time.\par
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\par
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"Boys," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"I'm turning sixteen, Mom. Not twelve."\par
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\par
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"I didn't say anything."\par
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\par
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"You made a face."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"I'll need the names, yes."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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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
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\par
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Elikapeka kept her expression level. "Excuse me?"\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"I have opinions about who comes into my home."\par
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\par
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"I know what your opinions are. I've known since I was little. And I'm just asking you to\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"Give me the list," she said. "I'll tell you who's welcome."\par
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\par
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Emma opened her mouth.\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"Cousins," Emma said.\par
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\par
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"What about them."\par
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\par
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"I don't want to invite all of them."\par
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\par
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Lizzie's mouth curved very slightly at the corner of her page.\par
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\par
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"They're your family," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"Tyler is twelve," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"Exactly."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"Twenty-five friends. You said twenty-five."\par
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\par
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"I said twenty-five."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"No," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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Emma blinked.\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"You've given me nothing except\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"A party on the beach, I know, with the whole\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"With the whole family. All of them. Babies to grandparents. And I was grateful."\par
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\par
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"I'm grateful," Emma said, in a tone that communicated something more ambivalent.\par
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\par
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"You have a funny way of showing it."\par
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\par
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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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"Nobody asked you," Emma said.\par
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\par
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"I'm just saying."\par
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\par
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"You literally don't even know any boys."\par
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\par
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"I know Tyler," Lizzie said pleasantly, and opened her book again.\par
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\par
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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
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\par
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"Emma," she said, without turning around. "Get me your list this week. Names, first and last. I'll let you know."\par
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\par
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She heard her daughter exhale \u8212? not quite a sigh, not quite an acceptance, something suspended between the two.\par
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\par
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"Fine," Emma said.\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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Emma, against what appeared to be her better judgment, almost smiled back.
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}
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 2\par
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Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
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Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T16:14:50-05:00\par
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\par
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### STYLE\par
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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
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\par
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### LEXICON\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### STORY\par
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Scene 1\par
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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
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\par
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### CHARACTERS\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### RECALL\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### PREVIOUS\par
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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
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\par
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---\par
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\par
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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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"Six-forty-five," he said. "I've been here since six-forty."\par
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\par
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"Then you've had five minutes to contemplate your many swing flaws," Ella said, going directly to the counter.\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"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
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\par
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"That was not the wind," Bobby said. "There was no wind."\par
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\par
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"There was some wind."\par
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\par
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"There was no wind, Ella."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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Bobby grinned and shook Andy's hand. "Morning, Mr. Hayes. I've been telling Ella I've been here since six-forty."\par
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\par
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"I know," her father said. "She mentioned it."\par
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\par
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"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
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\par
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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
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\par
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She pushed through the door into the morning light, already thinking about her elbow.\par
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\par
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### NOTES\par
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Early morning at the golf course.\par
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\par
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### BRIEF\par
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This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Andy Hayes.\par
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Expand this into 1500 words max.\par
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\par
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### DIRECTIVE\par
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Expand this into 1500 words maximum. Keep it fun with some snarky dialog.\par
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\par
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### SCENE\par
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}
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@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 3\par
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Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
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Character UUIDs: DC6BC0EF-F4CE-4303-99AD-CA12671B9092,F03D5899-C5FB-43BB-90A7-611E9DCDD98C,091EE601-91DB-497C-A646-B094624414DE\par
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Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T16:43:05-05:00\par
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\par
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### STYLE\par
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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
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\par
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### LEXICON\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### STORY\par
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(none - new storyline)\par
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\par
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### CHARACTERS\par
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Elikapeka Hayes\par
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Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
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\par
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Emma Hayes\par
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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
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\par
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Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
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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
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\par
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### RECALL\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### PREVIOUS\par
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(none)\par
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\par
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### NOTES\par
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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
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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
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\par
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### BRIEF\par
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This scene is told in third person from the viewpoint of Elikapeka Hayes.\par
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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
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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
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\par
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### DIRECTIVE\par
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Expand into 1500 words maximum. Dialog between the protective mother and willful daughter should dominate this scene.\par
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\par
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### SCENE\par
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}
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{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\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
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\par
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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
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\par
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"You'll ruin your eyes doing that," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"You say that every morning," Lizzie said, without looking up.\par
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\par
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"One morning I'll be right."\par
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\par
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Emma set her spoon down. "Mom. Can we talk about my birthday party?"\par
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\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,5 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Dense event summary for Scene 1\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
After the scene is accepted into the book, record one dense event sentence here. The authoring system may propose it; the author may edit or replace it. This approved sentence becomes the STORY entry for future scenes on the same narrative thread.\par
|
||||
}
|
||||
\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,153 @@
|
||||
{\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2868
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf2870
|
||||
\cocoatextscaling0\cocoaplatform0{\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset0 Palatino-Roman;}
|
||||
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
|
||||
{\*\expandedcolortbl;;}
|
||||
@@ -6,6 +6,4 @@
|
||||
|
||||
\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.\
|
||||
Expand into 1500 words. Dialog between the protective mother and willful daughter should dominate this scene.\
|
||||
}
|
||||
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.}
|
||||
@@ -1,5 +1,10 @@
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Complete book lexicon\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
One term per line: term \emdash\ usage note. Keep the complete book-level register here. The author selects a rolling subset for each package.\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
|
||||
\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
|
||||
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
|
||||
{\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 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\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 +1,86 @@
|
||||
{\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 +1,149 @@
|
||||
{\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
|
||||
{\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
|
||||
{\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 +1,149 @@
|
||||
{\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 a few weeks 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 rejected. 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 entire corpus 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 Publix 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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,149 @@
|
||||
{\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 a few weeks 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 rejected. 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 entire corpus 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 Publix 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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@
|
||||
{\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.
|
||||
}
|
||||
@@ -1,7 +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
|
||||
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
|
||||
\f0\fs24 Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)\par
|
||||
\par
|
||||
Continuity update from Scene 4:\par
|
||||
Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. 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. Reads book back covers carefully before approving them for Lizzie. Vetoed Neil Gaiman's Stardust for Lizzie as not yet age-appropriate.\par
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|
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\f0\fs26 \cf0 Wife of Andy Hayes, of Hawaiian origin. Stay at home mom. (eh-lee-la-PEH-ka)}
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}
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@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
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@@ -11,9 +11,9 @@ After breakfast, Lizzie goes to the library and then shopping with her mother. E
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||||
\f1\i Dragonflight
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||||
\f0\i0 novels. In the library, she finds a book by an author by the name of Neil Gaiman called
|
||||
\f1\i Stardust
|
||||
\f0\i0 . 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,
|
||||
\f0\i0 . 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,
|
||||
\f1\i Dragonflight
|
||||
\f0\i0 and others from the series. She decides she\'92ll read Lord of the Rings again, though she doesn\'92t 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\'92d tried to but her mother had rejected the one she wanted to read.\
|
||||
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.\
|
||||
Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Dialog between mother and daughter should dominate this scene.\
|
||||
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\'92s got a new book to read.\
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}
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Reference in New Issue
Block a user