The Cherry Trees

Chapter Sixteen: 2013

"Ho-laa!! Are you coming?" Lexi asked me.

I groaned and rolled over on my stomach, stuffing my head into my pillow.

"C'mon! When are you ever going to see a sunrise over the ocean in Roswell? Move it Anne!" she said.

"Ugh."

"Annalise! I am going to sing until you come!"

This made me sit up immediately. Lexi could not sing for the life of her, yer she did it all the time, and it annoyed everybody.

" 'at a girl," she said, throwing my bathing suit and a t-shirt on my bed.

I pulled back the tightly-tucked sheets, and slipped out of my warm, comfortable bed. Then I pulled on my bathing suit and t-shirt, and grabbed some flip- flops. I walked out into the kitchen, where the aroma of pancakes immediately woke me up. I saw Ms. Lotter making sugar strawberries, and Lexi eating her cereal at the breakfast bar. I hated cereal. There was just something about having it get all soggy in your perfectly good milk. I especially despised the cereals with dried fruit in them, and also sugary ones, which turned the milk a weird color. Overall, cereal was just a nasty thing to start the day off with. I walked over to the stove, where a fresh batch of warm buttermilk pancakes sat, with a bowl of the strawberries right next to them. I picked one up, and Lexi spazzed out.

"Anne! If you wanted to have a nice breakfast, you should have gotten up earlier. We are going to miss the sunrise if you have a strawberry pancake, especially at the rate that you eat! Now, just grab a pancake, and you can eat it as we walk down the beach to get the perfect view."

I sighed, not wanting to argue, because there was no way that I could win with Lexi.

"Fine," I said, pulling a pancake from the bottom of the stack. I turned the latch to unlock the door, and was about to open it when Lexi spazzed out again.

"What do you think you are doing?! We can't just walk out without looking! There could be some creeper just waiting for two little girls to walk out, and then he will kidnap us! Now what a great ending that would be to our vacation!" she said.

"No, a great ending would be crashing in an airplane, but atleast we would be together," I said sarcastically.

"Hey, we woud be together if we got kidnapped, too," she said.

"I don't think so. See, all I have to do is outrun you, which I am fairly sure I can do. Then he will proabably just take you, and leave me be. Therefore, you would be kidnapped, and we would not," I replied.

Lexi opened her mouth to say something, but then she realized what I had just said. "You would leave me?" she asked.

"It depends on if you rushed me through breakfast on that certain day," I said.

Lexi seemed to process this before she made her decision. "Fine. Eat your breakfast, but eat it quickly," she said.

And that was the first small battle I ever won against Lexi.

-

"Look! We made it! It is the perfect time, too. Just when the sun is halfway above the waterline. That's when all the beams shoot everywhere and make it pretty and colorful," Lexi said as we sat in the sand watching the sunrise.

"What can I say, I do have perfect timing with these things," I said.

Lexi rolled her eyes.

"So. What to do on our first day here," she said, tapping her chin with her finger.