Lily Kent’s Story:

In 2022 my family and I went on vacation to Florida with my cousin and my aunt. It was the longest drive ever: 17 hours, 1,148 miles I sat in a car to get to the lovely state of Florida. When we finally arrived at our house, it was in a gated community, so it was really fancy. When we arrived at our house, I was so relieved and excited to finally get out of the car. It was a lot warmer than where I lived in Pennsylvania. It isn’t the first time I went to Florida, so I knew what to expect. When we got out of the car my brother and I ran inside to check the house out and claim our rooms. The first thing we checked out was the pool. After the pool, we checked out the rest of the house. When we were done checking out the house, my brother and I went back out to the car and helped our parents unload all of our luggage. We went back inside to unpack all of our belongings and food that needed to go in the fridge. 

After we were all set, my mom and dad explored the house, and asked us if we wanted to go swimming. We immediately said yes. We ran up to our rooms and quickly threw our bathing suits on and then met our parents at the pool. When I went out the door, to the patio and pool, it was open. Well, my parents must have shut it when I walked away because the AC was on inside. I was just about to get in the pool, when my dad asked me to go inside and get something. I quickly jumped up and ran to go inside, and just as I was about to get inside I suddenly just came to a halt. I was so confused, so I backed up and didn’t know what was going on at the moment, I looked up to see a whole face and hand print on the window. I finally realized what happened, I ran into the door at full running force. I looked around to see my family dying of laughter. I was so confused, and a little mad at myself because how could I not see the glass, and how did the door get closed. It was open two minutes ago when I walked through it. 

Lily Light’s Story:

In July of 2021, I went on a trip to Anna Maria Island in Florida with my aunt, uncle, my sister, and my cousins. We stayed in a really cool house in a gated community right on the ocean. When we got there we unpacked all of our stuff and got situated, then looked around. We brought electric scooters and bikes and rode them around. We went fishing, swimming and watched lots of movies. 

One day when we were fishing we noticed that there were a couple dead fish on the top of the water. I didn’t think anything of it because it was my first time in Florida and maybe it was normal. The next day we went jet skiing. That was probably the worst day out of the week that we were there. When we were jet skiing there were so many dead fish and eels on the top of the water. We stopped at this little beach to rest, and when we were going back, I was on the back of my aunt’s jet ski with my sister, and she turned while a big wave was coming and my sister and I fell off and my sister fell on top of me.  When we went back to the house we were researching about all of the dead fish. We figured out there was a Red Tide in the water and we could not swim in the ocean for the rest of the week. Good thing there was a pool at our beach house because we were all devastated.