AN: new story! This will just be a quick couple of chapters in response to Girl Meets a Christmas Maya. I plan on updating daily until it's done, which will be before Christmas Eve. Enjoy the Christmas fluff or at least I'm hoping for fluff! I'm not really a fluffy writer, so this is really just an experiment. Let me know what you think! Enjoy!
"You know who's the smartest man alive?" Zay asked, scratching his chin.
"Thank you, Zay," Farkle said, pleased someone recognized his genius.
"I wasn't going to say you, I was going to say Lucas."
"Why's Lucas smart? He's not even here. Oh!" His eyes widening at the realization.
"Yeah, where is Lucas?" Riley asked, usually her boyfriend was early to their hangouts at Topanga's.
"He went to Texas for the holidays," Zay informed the brunette.
"How could he have gone without telling me?" Riley asked, confusion evident in her voice as she furrowed her brow.
"Because this is his way out of Secret Santa," Smackle answered, practically shaking in delight.
"He knows even you can't reach him 2000 miles away," Zay teased.
Everyone laughed, except for Riley. She stood up, setting the box down on the coffee table with a decisive thud.
"You know what? I'm tired. If you guys don't want to do Secret Santa, if you want to small pinch me, if Lucas wants to get away from me, we don't have to do this. As a matter of fact, we don't have to do Christmas at all!" Riley declared, throwing her hands in the air.
"Riles, what do you mean?" Maya asked, the mirth gone from her voice, trying to decide if Riley was serious.
But Riley wasn't listening. She had pulled her phone out of her pocket, touching the familiar contact. She waited, tapping her foot impatiently, but as expected Lucas didn't answer.
"Just waiting for the beep," she murmured to her friends, who were all staring at her, wondering where she was going with this, various looks of confusion and concern on their faces.
"Hey, Lucas! It's Riley. I hear you left for Texas to avoid me and Secret Santa," she was still talking in her normal cheery tone, but she was fidgetting, her anger showing in her posture. "Well, I just thought I'd let you know, you're off the hook. You all don't appreciate my holiday cheer, so I'm canceling Christmas. Actually, I'm going to take it a step further and cancel us as well. At least I had the decency to tell you. Goodbye, Lucas."
She hung up the phone and walked to the door without a backward glance to her friends.
"Riley-"
"Sorry, Maya, it looks like if you want to have Christmas you're stuck doing it with your new family. I'm done."
The four friends watched as she left, the bells jingling on the door long after she was gone. The friends sat in shocked silence before Maya sprung into action.
"You!" Maya shouted, lunging at Zay. "You broke Riley!"
"Me?! You're the one who kept pinching her!" Zay accused, running behind his chair to create some distance between him and the fiery blonde.
"It probably didn't help that Lucas left without saying a word to his girlfriend," Smackle put in as Farkle scrolled through his phone.
"Yeah, this is all Huckleberry's fault!" Maya shouted.
"It's all of our faults," Farkle responded distractedly, not looking up from his phone.
He called Lucas, but instead of leaving a message when he didn't answer, he hung up and called again. When Lucas didn't answer a second time, he hung up and dialed the number one more time. He turned his phone on speaker, so his other friends could hear.
"Hey, Farkle! I just got to Pappy Joe's. Is everything okay?" Lucas said, sounding casual.
"Listen to your messages! Call me back!" Farkle abruptly hung up the phone before Lucas had the chance to say anything else.
A few minutes later, Farkle's phone rang.
"Where is she?" Lucas asked without waiting for anyone to say anything, not even a greeting.
"We don't know," Maya said into the phone as they all crowded around Farkle. "She just left."
"She's not answering her phone!" Lucas shouted.
Smackle and Zay tried to call her on their phones and got the same result.
"She must have shut her phone off," Maya said, finally realizing how much they had upset Riley after she didn't answer her either.
"Well, go find her!" Lucas insisted, sounding frustrated. He swallowed heavily. "Do something!"
Farkle took him off speaker and placed the phone against his ear. "I know you're upset, Lucas, but what did you think would happen? You left without telling her."
"I was trying to protect her. I didn't want to hurt her. I knew she would be upset that we were spending our first Christmas together apart," Lucas explained.
"It sounds to me like you were trying to protect yourself from having to see her sad, from listening to her yell or cry. You were just expecting all of us to pick up the slack and make her feel better," Farkle's voice was rising as his anger grew. He gestured for his friends to follow him as he left the bakery. They trailed after him in a small line, Maya taking up the rear as she desperately tried to call Riley over and over again.
"And you all did such a great job! You acted so awful, she canceled Christmas! Riley loves Christmas!"
"I thought you would be more focused on the fact that she canceled the two of you... Whatever that means."
"I think it means she dumped him, my love," Smackle called helpfully from her place directly behind him.
"She didn't dump me!" Lucas insisted. "She just needs some time to calm down."
"When has Riley ever calmed down about anything?" Farkle asked as they approached her fire escape. "We're at her house. I'll call you back in a few."
Lucas nodded even though no one could see him, hanging up the phone. He set the phone down on his nightstand, folding his hands on his lap. After fidgetting for a few seconds, he picked up his phone and tried to call Riley one last time. When she didn't answer, he left another voicemail. The first two he left simply said call me back.
"Riley, I promise you I'm going to make this right...I'm sorry."
He hung up the phone, sighing as he ran a hand over his face. Coming to a decision, he nodded his head, standing up.
"Mama! I need to talk to you," he called, racing through the house to find her.
When they reached Riley's window, her room was uncharacteristically dark and quiet. The Christmas decorations had disappeared, but the girl in question was nowhere to be found.
"That was fast. Her room was decked out like Time Square this morning," Maya said, trying to open window only to find it locked.
"Let's try the door. I'm sure one of the Matthews will buzz us in," Smackle suggested, already making her way down the ladder.
They made their way in relative silence, pushing the call button by the Matthews' apartment number.
"It's Farkle!"
"And Smackle!"
"And Zay!"
"And- Hey!" Maya shouted as someone had already buzzed them in before she could say her name.
By the time they got to the Matthews' apartment, Cory, in his own ridiculous Christmas sweater, was standing with the door wide open.
"What did you do?" he accused, sounding so much like his daughter, Maya couldn't help but smile.
"Where is she?" Farkle asked.
"Whoever do you mean? My lovely wonderful daughter, who left this house this morning delighting in the magical merriment the holiday season signifies?" Cory asked helpfully.
The four kids nodded eagerly.
"I don't know what happened to her! This strange girl, who has as much Christmas spirit as the Grinch, is most certainly not my daughter!" Cory exclaimed. "My daughter would never do this to me!"
He moved out of the way to let the kids in, gesturing around the room, no one saying a word as they looked around the apartment in shock.
"Did you say she was like the Grinch? Or did you actually let the Grinch in here?" Zay asked, taking in his surroundings.
The ornaments had been taken off the tree, even the lights, leaving nothing but a bare tree with needles scattered all over the floor as if she had ripped them off in her haste to de-Christmas it. The lights that had been wrapped around the bay window and the doorways were falling down and flickering dangerously as if there was a short in them. The stockings had been left untouched, except for Riley's, which was noticeably missing.
There was a tray of Christmas cookies, but the heads had been broken off of all the gingerbread men. Garland littered the floor, and the knick-knack decorations that covered every available surface had all been knocked down.
"How did she even do all this? So fast?" Smackle asked in amazement.
Topanga, Auggie, and Ava pushed past the teenagers to enter the apartment, boxes of ornaments in hand.
"Found them!" Ava called out. "She threw them in the dumpster!"
"And there's Cindy Lou Who now!" Zay joked.
"Cindy Lou? What are you, new?" Ava asked in a condescending tone, rolling her eyes as she and Auggie proceeded to pull each ornament out, examining them for damages.
"We couldn't find Riley's stocking," Auggie said.
"Or Riley..." Topanga added, sounding worried.
"She's not here?" Maya asked, officially sounding alarmed.
"No! She came in, canceled Christmas, destroyed everything, and left!" Cory exclaimed. "So again I ask, what did you do?"
Maya shrugged guiltily, not making eye contact.
"Look what she did to her sweater!" Auggie cried, picking it up to display she had pulled a thread until the sweater was nothing more than scraps now.
"This is bad. Real bad!" Farkle shouted, pulling at his hair.
"She loved that sweater," Smackle pouted.
Maya was busy calling Lucas, who didn't answer. Leaving a message, she said, "Ranger Rick! Riley is MIA. I repeat Riley is missing in action. Also, she may have swapped bodies with the Grinch. Or perhaps Mr. Scrooge. Or the Heat Miser. Some kind of evil Christmas character has possessed my best friend. We need reinforcements!"
Cory sighed before coming to a decision, turning on some Christmas music. "You can't decorate or redecorate for Christmas without music. You guys want to help us get this back on track? Maybe by the time we're done, Riley will be home. Seeing all the Christmas lights around the city is sure to put her back in the holiday spirit."
Smackle, Farkle, and Maya came over, grabbing some ornaments. When they realized Zay hadn't joined them, they all turned to see him in the kitchen, shoving the broken cookies in his mouth.
"What? These are still ruined, right?" Zay asked around a mouthful of cookies. He shrugged before shoveling a couple more in his mouth.
Everyone rolled their eyes before returning to the task at hand.
AN: I couldn't bring myself to finish watching Christmas Maya. Lucas would never leave without telling Riley. The kids would never be so mean to her to not want to participate in her Christmas traditions. Maya's condescending him "hahur" was enough to make me turn off the episode. I wanted to give Riley a Merry Christmas. She deserves it.