117 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
117 lines
11 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: DEB6AE02-B51B-4C55-9E61-D08D32BABBA1,DC6BC0EF-F4CE-4303-99AD-CA12671B9092,BFFEEB84-9E04-41EE-B083-5092D160ADF3,F03D5899-C5FB-43BB-90A7-611E9DCDD98C,091EE601-91DB-497C-A646-B094624414DE,FE16770D-D7B7-48EC-AEFF-E1C0787E8D95,332DAD85-2636-46A0-8336-D2AEAEDF8241,75F58E24-E4EE-4163-A6B3-7703D8D211BD\par
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Accepted for editing: 2026-08-23T20:26:11-05:00\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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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
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\par
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From her parents' bedroom, Emma phones Susanna, Mai Lin, and Hannah in succession to build a vetted boy-invitation list that reaches fifteen names\u8212?adding Nate Oliveira, eliminating Chris DeLuca for calling Mai Lin and Emma interchangeable, and flagging Ryan from the swim team for confirmation\u8212?before calculating that her mother's mandate to include all three boy cousins (Devin, Tyler, and cannonball-prone Marcus) will disrupt her intended gender balance of fifteen boys to ten girls, leaving her without a workable counter-argument to raise the guest cap and only the unresolved notation "cousins don't count\u8212?separate category" starred on her notepad.\par
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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. Manages the team at American Airlines out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport that services its jets. Is a union member with nearly 30 years of experience. Scratch golfer. Large extended family, two brothers and a sister live nearby. Tall and handsome and very attractive to women in general. A leader of men.\par
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Plays golf on Saturday mornings with Ella and Bobby, paired with Alex Carpenter. Drinks two beers and continues to swing with the same untroubled tempo that Ella has noticed and finds both unfair and impressive.\par
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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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Has a calm, unhurried quality she brings to every task. Used to be an avid reader as a girl \u8212? her own mother had to hide books from her. Makes parenting decisions with quiet firmness, neither unkind nor moveable.\par
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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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Has been playing Saturday morning golf with Bobby Carpenter for three years.\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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Orchestrates social events with systematic, general-like deliberateness \u8212? working the phone in sequence, vetting names against multiple trusted sources before committing.\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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Reads at a college level per her English teacher Mrs. Patterson. Aspires to write fantasy fiction in the tradition of Tolkien and McCaffrey. Moves through tasks with focused, urgent efficiency when a book is waiting. Tends to process frustration quietly and internally rather than acting out \u8212? explicitly contrasted with Emma's more reactive temperament.\par
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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 and practice partner. Forever in Ella\u8217?s friend zone.\par
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Has been Ella's Saturday morning golf partner for three years. Has grown significantly taller in the past year \u8212? now legitimately tall \u8212? which has increased his driving distance and created new competitive problems for Ella.\par
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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. Born in America of Chinese immigrants. Beautiful and outgoing, wears the same dress size as Emma. Best friends with Emma since 2nd grade. Serves the secondary role as Emma\u8217?s enforcer in the gang of fashionable girls who orbit around Emma.\par
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Often sleeps over at Emma\u8217?s house or Emma at hers.\par
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\par
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Alex Carpenter\par
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Bobby Carpenter's father. Is an auto mechanic. Plays golf with Andy Hayes on the same Saturday outings as Bobby and Ella. Drinks a lot of beer during a round \u8212? yet apparently still plays adequately nonetheless.\par
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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 worked through the rest of her list of girls, methodically, a conversation here and a conversation there, the names accumulating on the notepad in her lap. Some boys she added. Some she declined before they were fully nominated. One she wrote down and then stared at for a long moment before drawing a slow, deliberate line through his name, for reasons she didn't articulate out loud because she was alone.\par
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\par
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Finally, she sat back against the headboard and counted.\par
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\par
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Fifteen.\par
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\par
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Fifteen boys, all thoroughly vetted, all approved by at least two people she trusted to have opinions worth consulting. It was a good list. It was an excellent list. She looked at it with the satisfaction of a general surveying a well-positioned army.\par
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\par
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And then she thought about Devin.\par
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\par
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And Tyler.\par
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\par
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And the others.\par
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\par
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Her mother's voice came back to her with pristine clarity: *Every last one of them.*\par
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\par
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Emma looked at her list.\par
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\par
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Fifteen boys.\par
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\par
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Twenty-five guests total. Which meant ten girls, herself included\u8212?and she'd already been composing that list in her head separately, so she knew exactly who those ten were. It was wrong. The number of boys and girls needed to balance. She needed her mother to agree to thirty attendees, to properly balance the sexes.\par
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\par
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She counted her cousins.\par
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\par
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There were three boy cousins who would plausibly be invited by her mother's standard of *every last one of them*. Devin, who was fine, she supposed, in the way that a piece of furniture is fine. Tyler, who Lizzie apparently thought she knew, which was hilarious and also somehow annoying. And Marcus, who was fourteen and had gone through a phase last summer of doing cannonballs directly next to whoever was floating quietly in the pool, which was not something Emma was prepared to tolerate at her own birthday party.\par
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\par
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Three cousins.\par
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\par
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Three boys who would have to come off this list.\par
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\par
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She looked at her fifteen names.\par
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\par
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She looked at them for a long moment.\par
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\par
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Then she said something under her breath that she would not have said in front of her mother, picked up the phone again, and started to think very carefully about which argument would work.\par
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\par
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Not the fairness argument. Her mother was impervious to fairness arguments.\par
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\par
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Not the numbers argument. Her mother would simply raise the cap, or suggest she invite fewer girls.\par
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\par
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No. She needed something her mother couldn't easily dismiss. Something that reframed the question. She didn't have it yet.\par
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\par
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She wrote *cousins don't count\u8212?separate category* on the corner of the notepad and starred it three times.\par
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\par
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She'd figure it out. She had time.\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 June, 2000. Late afternoon.\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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} |