88 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
88 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 8\par
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Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6\par
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Character UUIDs: 46F0331E-D357-4989-8FC2-3D7D62BCA2D7,F90ECDD8-FBB2-44D5-96A5-EC16818FF442,497498CD-85FE-48E9-B852-18E043365DB6,6C5E6DB4-1A28-408B-BDF9-B3C09F5F1733,9D202BFB-AFF3-4C37-8BEB-E46D5CDE4D30,131DF043-CF40-4C70-B3BB-15CABC26383E,4C148851-817E-40D3-89A9-DBB93CA82C25,D9A89DE0-558A-46FC-B52C-60D538991268\par
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Accepted for editing: 2026-08-27T16:09:07-05:00\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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Hayes cousins (boys) \u8212? three boy cousins on the Hayes side who are close to Emma's age\par
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\par
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### STORY\par
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In a weekday kitchen morning anchored by Elikapeka's transplanted plumeria and her private longing for Oahu, Emma formally opens negotiations over her sixteenth birthday pool party\u8212?presenting a prepared guest list and requesting permission to invite boys\u8212?while Elikapeka deflects Emma's pointed accusation of prejudice with a measured non-promise to judge the boys' list on her own terms, overrules Emma's attempt to exclude the Hayes cousins under threat of canceling the party entirely, and closes the scene with a brief reassuring touch that Emma accepts without pulling away, leaving the boys' list unreviewed, Emma's specific concerns about her mother's biases unresolved, and Lizzie a silent witness throughout.\par
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\par
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While her parents are out, Emma sneaks into their bedroom to phone Susanna, Mai Lin, Hannah, and two others, methodically building a vetted fifteen-name boys list for her party through a series of negotiations that cut Tyler Marsh and added Daniel Park and Harrison Webb; she ends the session unresolved and silently resistant after realizing her mother's rule about counting the boy cousins within the boys total could force three cuts she refuses to pre-emptively accept, and she formulates a logical counter-argument\u8212?cousins as family versus guests as a distinct category\u8212?to deploy when her mother returns.\par
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\par
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### CHARACTERS\par
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Andy Hayes\par
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Father and husband. Works as an aviation maintenance technician at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome. Goes by Andrew (Andy). Tall, handsome, sun-darkened face with a creased look and gray beginning at the temples. Recently started wearing reading glasses.\par
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\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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Ella Hayes\par
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Oldest daughter. To be a high school senior. Highly skilled golfer looking for a college golf scholarship. Tall, haughty, proud, smart. Prefers male friends to female friends. Has never dated and rarely attends parties or after school activities other than golf. Taught golf primarily by her father, a scratch golfer. Daddy\u8217?s girl. Usually impatient with others and likes to play fast.\par
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\par
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Emma Hayes\par
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Middle daughter. High school junior. Social butterfly with dozens of friends.\par
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\par
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Elizabeth (Lizzie) Hayes\par
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Youngest daughter. High school freshman. Bookish girl, very pretty, very shy.\par
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\par
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Bobby Carpenter\par
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Best golfer on the boy\u8217?s high school team and Ella\u8217?s perpetual weekend playing partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
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Age seventeen. Tall, rangy build, still growing into himself. Natural athlete with an effortless ball-striking grace; hits irons on a flat, boring trajectory with a draw.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin Wen\par
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Emma\u8217?s best friend and always up for lounging in the pool at Emma\u8217?s house.\par
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\par
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Alex Carpenter\par
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Father of Bobby Carpenter. Lean man with a quiet humor. Repairs cars for a living. Plays golf to approximately a two handicap. Regular weekend playing partner of Andy Hayes in the same group as their children.\par
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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 counted the cousins. Three boys on the Hayes side who were remotely close to her age, which meant if the total stayed where her mother had said it would\u8212?somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five\u8212?then three boys on her list had to come out to make room for three boys who were going to stand at the edges of the yard and talk about whatever Hayes cousins talked about at parties. Boat engines, probably. Her mother's side had an entire vocabulary about boats and Emma had been unable to acquire it despite years of exposure.\par
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\par
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She looked at the list again.\par
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\par
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She picked up the pen.\par
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\par
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She did not cross anything out, because crossing names out right now would feel like accepting a loss she hadn't actually accepted, and Emma Hayes did not pre-emptively accept losses.\par
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\par
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She tore the page off the notepad and looked at it and thought about the expression on her mother's face that morning when she'd said, *that is not negotiable*, in that voice. The voice that was not louder but was somehow denser, heavier, occupying more of the room than voices usually did. Emma had understood from roughly age eight that when that voice appeared, the conversation had moved into territory where winning looked different than it had a moment before.\par
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\par
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But the cousins counting in the *boys* total was a separate question. That hadn't been explicitly stated. That was an interpretation, and interpretations were subject to argument, and Emma was going to make that argument with the list in her hand and the kind of careful, reasonable logic that her mother occasionally responded to when it was presented without what Elikapeka called *the architecture of grievance,* which was Emma's mother's poetic way of saying *don't be dramatic about it.*\par
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\par
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Emma would not be dramatic.\par
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\par
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She would be precise and reasonable and she would point out that cousins were family, which she now accepted, fully and without reservation, and that the boys she'd invited to her party were *guests* in a different category, and that conflating the two categories was a methodological error.\par
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\par
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She looked at the fifteen names.\par
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\par
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She looked at the ceiling.\par
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\par
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She pressed the notepad to her chest and made a sound that was not quite a word, not quite a scream, but somewhere in between\u8212?the sound of someone who had done everything right and was now confronting the specific injustice of other people's rules.\par
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\par
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Then she got up, smoothed the bedspread, replaced the pillows, and went to wait for her mother to come home.\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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Mid afternoon, Friday, mid June, 2000. Emma's birthday.\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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It was done. The prep for Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen birthday party was complete. Elikapeka stood in her kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. Susan Carpenter, mother of Ella\u8217?s golf partner Bobby, had volunteered to help with the party, was outside talking with the caterers, setting tables on the patio for the thirty-six kids who were expected to begin arriving in a half hour. Emma\u8217?s request for fifteen boys and fifteen girls had been granted, three of her boy cousins added, and then an extra three girls more to balance the sexes. It was the largest party she\u8217?d ever thrown. Ella came in, wearing a coverall over her swimsuit, along with her friend Bobby, whom she\u8217?d invited but wasn\u8217?t on the guest list. Ella had been drafted as the greeter and she\u8217?d wanted help, thus his presence. Ella was something of a loner who had more guy friends than girl friends and she\u8217?d talked him into helping.\par
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Her husband and his friend Alex were on the sailboat docked behind the house with the boat\u8217?s owner Jim, setting up the boat\u8217?s sound system for the party. Emma had provided CDs and a playlist. Music started to play. The men were already drinking beers.\par
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The doorbell rang and Ella answered it. It was Andy\u8217?s sister, Michelle, with the three boy cousins, one her son and the other two the sons of Andy\u8217?s brothers. The girl cousins were all much younger and they\u8217?d decided that they would not attend. Emma came into the kitchen with her friend Mai Lin, both wearing a pretty coveralls over their swimsuits. The bikini that Emma had under her coverall Elikapeka thought too skimpy, but she\u8217?d been overridden by her husband, saying that\u8217?s what the girls were wearing now and she need to chill about it. Emma greeted her cousins and directed them outside to the pool. The boys wore only swimsuits, tee shirts, and flip flops and were in the pool within seconds of doffing the tee shirts and flip flops. They found a Nerf football from somewhere and began throwing it around.\par
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It was going to be chaos.\par
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\par
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### DIRECTIVE\par
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Expand to a maximum of 1500 words. Keep it chaotic and fun.\par
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\par
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### SCENE\par
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} |