Sortie / Day One / Breakfast
Sara dresses quickly, warm socks and a pair of dark purple leggings under a knee-length, violet skirt matched to a patterned top.
When she gets to the kitchen, breakfast is in full swing. Aside from Karl, damp-haired and truculent, and her father, the breakfast table sports two others: a lean young man in his late teens with strawberry blond hair and a reddish, underdeveloped beard, and the handsome, deeply-tanned young man that was in the shower just before Sara.
| Derek lacks his dorm-mates’ attractive physically. Despite his strawberry blond hair, he shares his younger siblings’ too-thin frame and too-pale skin. He may be 19, but he already has his dad’s hairline.
He is attempting to conceal his elfin chin and high, sharp, effete cheek bones beneath a beard, but the attempt is not going so well. His cheeks are covered with an uneven pelt of tangled red strands that look more like discarded cat-hair secured to his face in clumps. |
By gleaning from the table talk, it becomes apparent that the thinner teen is Sara’s older brother, Derek, and the athletic one is Derek’s dorm mate, Alexander, who ‘crashed’ here last night with the only somewhat belated permission/forgiveness of children’s father.
There is no sign of a mother in the house. Not only is she absent from the table, but from the conversation. Also, the house’s decor, outside of Sara’s room, displays the kind of utilitarian spareness that leads to gentle comments suggesting the a house "could do with a woman’s touch."
Karl continues to snipe at Sara, being careful to keep it below the threshold that would require their father to intervene. The older teens mostly ignore the tweens, talking about the concert they attended last night, while the father, referred to only as "dad" by the family or "Mr. Penrose" by Alexander, splits his time between trying to read something on his phone and trying to keep the table’s maple syrup use within the bounds of sanity.
Breakfast is followed by a scramble to get everyone out the door. Dad is driving to work, but not before seeing to it that Derek and Alexander are on their way back to the campus for classes and that Karl and Sara are be-backpacked and ushered out to a bus stop at the end of the block, not a school bus stop as one might expect, but a municipal stop.
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