102 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
102 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Scene: Scene 9\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: 2026-08-23T20:54:29-05:00\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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From Elikapeka's viewpoint at her kitchen counter, the party achieves critical mass as the Hayes cousins (Devin, 16; Tyler, 15; Marcus, 14), Bobby Carpenter, Emma's best friend Mai Lin, and a stream of girls arrive in quick succession, the men remain on Jim's sailboat with cold beers and a working sound system, Susan Carpenter manages the catered tables outside, Michelle Hayes moves through the kitchen with established familiarity, and Elikapeka ends the scene in a state of controlled acceptance\u8212?folding discarded tee shirts, drinking cold coffee, and privately claiming the cheerful chaos as her own\u8212?with thirty-six children now mostly arrived but the full arc of the evening still unresolved.\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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"Emma's idea and Emma's installation. She had Lizzie on the ladder."\par
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\par
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Michelle laughed. "How is Lizzie taking all this?"\par
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\par
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"She has a book," Elikapeka said.\par
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\par
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"Smart girl."\par
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\par
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The doorbell rang again. And then again before she'd taken three steps. And then, before she reached the hallway, a third time, because whoever was on the other side was either impatient or had missed the first attempt and was making up for it. She opened the door to four girls at once, all of them in coveralls, all of them carrying towels in the pastel colors of girls who coordinated these things in advance. They were talking before the door was fully open and did not stop talking as they came through it, and Elikapeka caught their names\u8212?she'd reviewed the list twice\u8212?and matched three of four on the first pass.\par
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\par
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Then more cars. Then more voices at the door. Then the particular compound noise of a party finding its footing, which was different from the noise of one or two or five people gathered in a place. It had a texture to it, something almost physical, and it rose from the backyard and came in through the sliding door and mixed with the music from the sailboat and the caterers' efficient movements and Michelle's steady presence at the counter and the smell of the chafing dish lids just beginning to warm.\par
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\par
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From the pool she heard the distinct and unmistakable sound of a cannonball.\par
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\par
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Then laughter. Then what sounded like protest. Then more laughter.\par
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\par
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Marcus.\par
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\par
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She knew without looking. She would have bet money.\par
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\par
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She was standing at the kitchen counter again\u8212?she kept returning to it, some gravitational pull\u8212?and she picked up her coffee mug and found it had gone cold. She drank it anyway and looked out through the sliding door at the thirty-odd young people filling her backyard by degrees, at the sailboat lit now by the dropping sun with three men on its deck who had earned the right to cold beers, at Susan moving between tables with the assurance of a woman who could set a tablecloth in a canal breeze, at Emma holding court near the pool steps with the easy authority of someone who had always expected this exact outcome.\par
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\par
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Another cannonball.\par
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\par
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More laughter.\par
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\par
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Elikapeka smiled into her cold coffee, because it was chaos, and it was hers, and that was not the worst thing in the world to be able to say.\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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Early evening on a Friday afternoon in June.\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 Lizzie Hayes.\par
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If it had been up to Lizzie, she\u8217?d have stayed in her room and read books, but it wasn\u8217?t up to her and now she stood on the pool deck in the chaos of Emma\u8217?s sweet sixteen party as the party goers began to arrive. Her sister was in the middle of it, greeting and being greeted as if she was queen of the world, and perhaps on this night it was true. The sexes weren\u8217?t really mixing yet, as the boys were mostly in the pool and the girls were mostly on the patio, surrounding Emma.\par
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And then Lizzie saw him. The coolest boy she\u8217?d ever seen, wearing swim trunks and talking with Bobby, Ella\u8217?s golfing buddy. The boy was blonde, muscular, and compact, not so tall as Bobby. He was tan and fit and blue eyed. He was a god, she was sure he was a god. She\u8217?d not once looked at a boy with desire but now she did. It was completely disconcerting.\par
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Suddenly, someone grabbed her arm. It was Emma\u8217?s friend Hannah, who was pretty, stylish, and very slightly chubby and who wore a one piece swimsuit that had jewels on it and must have cost a fortune. She felt herself being dragged along right towards the boy she\u8217?d spotted. Hannah called out his name, Will Fontaine. He looked right at her. And before she could react, Hannah was telling him that Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings, too. And Lizzie felt Hannah let go and leave, and she was left tongue tied, desperately trying to think of something to say to Will.\par
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By whatever magic existed in the universe, Will had her mesmerized as they discussed how Tom Bombadil rescued the hobbits from Old Man Willow.\par
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Expand into 1500 words maximum.\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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} |