Lilah Tov (NaNoWriMo)

sixteen

sorry i didn't post yesterday. two more parts after this. 

sixteen

           “Will, pass your father the bacon, would you?” requested my mother from across the table.

           I diligently picked up the platter of bacon and gave it to my dad.

           “Thank you, William,” said my father.

           “I’m not hungry anymore,” declared Jake, pushing his plate out in front of him to outwardly display his not-hungriness.

           Sara was next to join the satiated bandwagon: “Me neither.”

           “Well, the rest of us are still in the middle of a meal,”—they were actually in the middle of a conversation about health care—“so you two are going to have to wait,” Eden told her children.

           “I’m done,” Lilah piped up, “do you want me to take them down to the pool or something?”

           “Yeah!” exclaimed Jake, followed closely by a, “Yes!” from Sara.

           Eden let out a sigh and then said, “That would be lovely, Lilah. But just make sure that they wear lots of sunscreen.”

           “I will,” she assured her aunt.

           Not wanting to be the only person under twenty in the room (Charlie had gone off to a college orientation a few days ago and was now “exploring the area” with some friends), I quickly volunteered myself as another aide: “I’ll go out with them, too.”

           “Thank you, Will,” Eden said.

           So then everything happened in a bit of a blur. Lilah and I picked up our plates to put them in the kitchen, but Hillary said not to bother, because she would deal with them later. Then I left the house with Jacob Green, Sara Green, and Lilah Tov, because I wasn’t really in the mood to go swimming, meaning that I didn’t need to change. The four of us trekked over to the Greens’ house, and Lilah darted upstairs with the kids (even though we were all, like, kids) while I waited in the kitchen. When the three returned, all except for one were dressed in bathing suits, armed with towels. Evidently, Lilah also didn’t want to go swimming, just like me.

           We exited the house and then went around back to the glistening pool. Not a single drop of water was disturbed, and it looked kind of like a mirror, because it was reflecting the sun and it was clear and just flat. Well, that was until Jake broke the number one rule when being around pools (DON’T RUN) and ran right over to it, cannonballing in with a certain je ne sais quoi—which was a fancy French word that literally meant, “I don’t know”—about it that could only be achieved by Jacob Green. Sara soon followed, though she only tiptoed into the shallow end, barely getting her legs wet.

           Lilah was next to enter the pool premises, and she wandered over to a rocking chair (which was really more of a rocking bench, but calling it a “bench” sounded wrong, so it was a “chair”) and sat down with her legs tucked under her body.

           Because I didn’t want to be an absolute loser and just stare from afar at the scene occurring before me, I joined Lilah and sat next to her on the rocking chair/bench. It creaked and shook a bit when I sat down, but Lilah didn’t seem to mind or notice. She was focused on her cousins, making sure that they didn’t drown each other, despite being on opposite ends of the pool. There was a good amount of space between us on the bench (created mostly by me), because in the presence of two kids related to Lilah whose parents were hosting her for the summer, it felt wrong to be close.