“
Try Evan,” he suggests. “Apart from numbers and heaven, which gets old very quickly, there’s practically nothing.”
“Numbers? Oh! Eleven…seven…” I furrow my brow.
“Devon,” Kelly calls over. “That’s a county in England.”
“Leaven,” I add. “You do it to bread.”
Evan’s expression is comical, his blue eyes stretched as wide as they’ll go as he plucks a string and, in a singsong nursery-rhyme voice, intones:
“From the age of seven to eleven
Before he tragically went to heaven
Evan leavened bread in Devon.”
He throws his hands wide. “See? Not much to work with.”
“At least you don’t have rude stuff that rhymes with you,” Kelly says gloomily. “They called me Smelly Jelly Belly at school for years.”
“And Kendra isn’t that great either. It sort of sounds like bend-ya,” Kendra adds.
I can’t help smiling that Kendra and Kelly are competitive in everything, even down to whose name rhymes with worse stuff.
“Kendra,” Evan sings, playing a chord, “I would never bend ya,
or lend ya
or send ya…
Oh, the words I can engender
thinking about Kendra…”
“‘Engender’!” Kelly exclaims. “That’s really good!”
I pull myself out of the pool and walk over to a lounger, picking up a towel and wrapping it around myself; I sit on one side of Evan, Kelly on the other. Even cool-as-a-cucumber Kendra has sat up to watch Evan playing his guitar.
“What about Paige?” I ask, looking over at his sister, the only one uninterested in her brother’s talent. She’s got a moisturizing pack on her hair--her head is wrapped in the special leopard-skin towel she uses when she’s doing a hair treatment--pink headphones on her ears, and a magazine in her hands as she reclines on her lounger.
“Paige goes into a rage when you tell her she’s not yet legal drinking age--” Evan sings immediately, and Paige, who must have been listening after all, promptly throws her magazine at his head. He ducks easily, and it flies past and lands on the tiles.
”
”