January 14th 2018

Chapter 14
Their Adjustment to Secrecy

By the time they all sat on or around their bench, they must have looked like a bunch of people sat in wait of life changing news. Of course in this case, all the others' lives were going to change, too… they just didn't know it yet.

This was a good thing, wasn't it? Them knowing… what little they knew? If they didn't, then they would have been completely blindsided today, when they'd be called to assembly, and none of them would have liked that to happen; no doubt to them, this was why Julianne Shelby had decided to tell them the day before. Still, here they were, weren't they, at the mercy of unanswered questions.

Maya had arrived with her two best friends, finding they were the first to arrive. They had all left sort of early, hadn't they… If any of them had some sort of delusion over their being in possession of patience, they found their eyes pried wide open. Some things could rob them of any sort of ability to manage such a wait. It was to the point where, when Riley spotted Zay and Nadine coming up toward them she had all but leapt to her feet to call them over, as though they would go anywhere else.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm sort of glad you guys look like you got as much sleep as we did," Nadine breathed out, dropping at Maya's side, where the blonde hooked her arm around hers. Lucas insisted he did sleep, that his concerns only surfaced in the morning, but really it all came down to the same point, so he could only shrug and sit back.

Dylan and Asher had approached soon after, making it the earliest, to Maya's recall, that the seven of them had ever all been sat outside school on all the mornings they had done in the past three years. None of them could do anything but be as close to their getting to the bottom of all this as they could.

"We should get extra credit for this," Zay declared. "Has anyone wanted to be inside a school as much as we do now?"

"That actually wanted it because of classes? Probably, yeah," Asher pointed out, and Zay shrugged.

As the minutes advanced, with none of them knowing much of what to say, they could see others arriving, going about their day with the bliss of ignorance, something the seven on or around the bench envied them greatly. They must have looked so weird, but no one really looked at them in any odd way, and that might have made it worse.

"Do we have to be here for this though?" Dylan asked, sounding so defeated it almost didn't seem like his own voice anymore, like he was a whole other person and their friend had disappeared. Riley had gotten up and moved around the bench to put her arms around his shoulders, giving him her best encouraging smile.

"I already suggested we didn't, but Huckleberry here said we did," Maya declared, getting a look from her boyfriend that asked why he was being dragged into this. "He's probably right though," she shrugged, sighed. "It would just make it worse."

"Well then we need to do something, because I'm losing it," Dylan frowned, though he did look on to Riley with gratitude as she went on holding him, like a human shaped security blanket.

"Normally I'd say we go throw a ball around, but that'll only make it worse, right?" Zay balanced from heel to toes and back.

"Oh boy," Nadine sighed.

So for what felt like an eternity – though it couldn't have been much more than twenty minutes – they'd sat there, silence only broken every so often and not for very long. It almost didn't seem possible that it was so early in the morning, really it had to be afternoon, right?

At long last, they could go inside, but even so they weren't out of the woods. The assembly would happen, sure, but when?

"Want to come with me to chemistry?" Maya had asked Lucas, grabbing hold of his arms, trying to lead him off with her and Nadine. When he reminded her she did AP chemistry and he didn't, she shrugged, insisting he'd be fine. "If you get in trouble, just flash that smile of yours, really, it's very convincing."

"I'll see you in French… or at the assembly, if they call us there first." She tried to throw on a pout, but he only kissed her and they went on their separate ways.

The call didn't happen during chemistry. Maya swore she'd forgotten everything, either that or she'd up and lost the ability to understand… whatever language her teacher was going on in. Somehow she did make it through class without incident, which might have been some kind of muscle memory save. It didn't come in algebra either, but then neither did their teacher, so they had the period to do some work they'd been left in her absence. Like she'd done in the middle of the night, she'd devoted herself to the task, preferring that to the alternative of letting her mind wander.

By the time Maya landed in French class, as glad as she was to be reunited with Lucas, and with Riley, the wait had gone on so much longer than she'd expected it to, and it was getting unbearable. She sat there, chin in her hands, frown on her face, when Lucas dropped into his seat at the table they shared. He gave her elbow a cautious nudge, eliciting only a grunt out of her.

"I know," he promised.

By the time they had made it through French, she'd just about had it. She'd marched out of there like a woman on a mission, didn't stop until she reached the history class to find her curly-headed teacher.

"What gives, Matthews, are you guys just going to keep us waiting all…" she started, only to be stopped by his holding up his hand, then pointing to the speaker in the ceiling as the announcement chime rang. Just like that, students were directed to gather in the gym for an assembly. Mr. Matthews would direct his students on their way there, finding seats in the stands. The group of nine, as though gathered in class, sat three by three in neighboring rows, a perfect square of knowledge in a sea of confusion.

Then the principal had come up, standing before a microphone, and the secret was no more. The basketball season, the boys' and the girls' both, was cancelled before ever starting. This initial revelation, as it had done on a smaller scale in the Shelby home the day before, had been received… loudly. It was a minute or two before the principal regained control and was able to go on. Only the square of nine had been respectfully quiet all along, waiting on the part that would follow.

Finally, they learned the reason behind their loss. Their coaches, the man and woman they had relied on to lead them all through the previous year, it seemed, had not been quite the pillars, the mentors they had seen them as. Without going into too much detail, the principal had mentioned something about gambling, through the boys' and girls' seasons. Though the players weren't suspected of any foul play in this, it had been decided that their only course of action was to disband the teams, for the foreseeable future.

So now it was out there. Even as the principal had turned no blame on to them, Maya swore she could see eyes turned to her, to her friends, to her teammates and fellow players dotted through the gym. Was it true? Or were they going to be interrogated? She'd reached for Lucas' hand on one side, Riley's on the other, and she'd looked back to her friends sitting in the rows above. All of them looked as struck as she did. This had to be a joke, right? Like a really, really terrible one?

The rest of the day was pretty much a blur. She went through the motions, they all did, but her mind was blank, and she couldn't have said what she'd heard or done, in English, in drawing, or photography. Hitting the pool in the end, it did have a way of startling her awake, if only so she wouldn't drown, but the whole while she still clung to the hope that she would wake up at any moment, far out of this nightmare. She didn't have nightmares though, did she? And it didn't feel like a dream either, because she felt the cold of the water all around her. Then it was real, it was staying real.

"Really shouldn't have come today…" she'd told herself with a sigh, dunking underwater.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners