The Battle of Odette's Beach [TBOB]

Chapter One

CHAPTER one:

Every summer my mother takes me to this private beach in Florida.

My mother told me that my father who she refers to as her late husband, bought this beach when he was still alive and gave it to my mother as a present for their wedding anniversary.

My father died from an aneurysm in his brain when I was only six months old. In honor of my father she brings me there every summer. I didn't mind until one summer a man and his kids showed up at our beach and started a war.

It was the summer when I was thirteen when Nick, my father's childhood friend, showed up at my beach with his five sons. He showed up with a mischievous grin and a paper that proved that he and his sons owned half of the beach as well. My mother threw a major temper tantrum and called every lawyer in the area, but in my father's will it clearly stated that Nicholas Whitner and his five sons owned 50% of Odette's Beach, my father's beach.

My mother soon agreed to letting Nick and his bunch of rambunctious sons live there after Nick confesses that he gambled their house away and had no where to live. My mother some how felt sympathy for this man and let them build a house on our beach.

Now it was rounding around that time of the year where we pack up our swimsuits and head off to Odette's Beach to our small beach house and the raggedy house beside it for the next two months. For the last two summers it wasn't quint or placid as it had been the last summers. It was the exact opposite.

Nick's sons who ranged from the ages of seven to nineteen had one specialty--they could pull stunts that were outrageous. From running naked and hollering at five in the morning to harassing tourists to the point of calling the cops to releasing an army of crabs in one's house, meaning my summer home. They were ruthless and extremely annoying.

My mother would remain with a migraine during the summer and a glass of wine in one hand and a cell phone in the other. She was forever on the phone with Yvonne, my aunt.

Today was the day we board up on the plane and leave my happy, quiet home to hell on earth.

"Emma! Hurry up, the plane is leaving in thirty minutes!" my mother screamed from downstairs. I groaned and continued to shove clothes into my polka-dotted suitcase with an embroidered 'E' in the center that I've been having since I was six. Before zipping up my suitcase I slipped in my journal.

Thought I might as well document my experience while I was there. You see my dream is to become a writer and be able to publish my works. I have been carrying around a journal and documenting my life since I was ten. In a tub underneath my bed were notebooks and journals filled almost to the top. When I get bored I would read through my experiences and laugh and cry at my humility.

"I'm coming!" I say after I push on a pair of sunglasses up the bridge of my nose. I lug the enormous suitcase down the staircase to my impatient mother who was behind three larger suitcases and a small dog carrier.

My mother's Chihuahua, Romeo, was barking and yipping inside his prison begging for me to let him out. I scowl at the carrier and contemplated whether or not to kick the thing over, but I decided not to get into a fuss with my mother today and set my suitcase down next to her's.

She hollered for the taxi driver to come and get our bags as we climbed into the car with Romeo in my mother's lap. My mother doesn't own a car, not because she couldn't afford one or because she doesn't like to drive, but because her license was suspended after an incident last year where she hit a pedestrian with her car because the man was being "rude" for not giving her directions. It turned out the man had a hearing disability and didn't hear my mother. He sued her for his injuries that cost her two thousand dollars, a few months in anger management class, and suspending her license for 36 months.