February 5th 2017

Chapter 36
Her Mother With A Night In

After what seemed like weeks and weeks of missed opportunities, it was finally happening. Her friends would be arriving soon for their sleepover. Maya had been preparing since she'd come home from school. She might have looked like a tornado. This night couldn't have felt more important.

The house was never in disorder, not once. Ever since they'd moved in, if felt as though both she and her mother had remained determined to maintain the appearance of their little home, even if they'd had no visitors except for Hildy, her mother's new friend and co-worker, and Hildy's daughter, Sara. Sara was six years old and so well-behaved that it often freaked Maya out.

This wouldn't be Hildy and Sara though. As close as she'd been getting to Lucas, Zay, Nadine, Asher, and Dylan, they had never gone further than her front step, never come into her home. They'd be coming into this part of her world they had never seen, and for better or for worse it would change how they saw her. She had been to each of their homes already, she knew she had learned new things about each of them. Good things, sure, and she could think the same would be true of her, but when had she ever benefitted in trusting anything like that? She needed to get the house ready.

Her mother was still at the theater, might still be a while, which meant her guests should get here, get their look around, all before she came back, though that would only ever take her so far. Eventually her mother would come home and then… well, she wasn't sure how it would go. Her mother could be a wild card that way.

Putting her mother issues aside for the moment, she moved into her room. She had added a few items since they'd arrived, thanks to her mother deciding they needed to dedicate some minimal funds to decorating, to 'find the Texas Harts.' Maya had kept her from going too far off the rails and turn their house into some cattle ranch. It all still looked like them, but it also looked like a piece of clothing you bought but still needed to grow into. Her room still and always would fit her like a glove. And yet…

She looked around at all the drawings she'd now stuck to her walls. Out of the many in black and white and shades of gray, there were also a few that burst with color. These were recent additions, the colored pencils a gift from her mother after seeing how well she'd been doing in school. It was still so new to her, that they could buy something out of the blue, and her reflex would still be to feel that it wasn't right, that they should save up. Her mother wasn't making a fortune at the theater, but it was still more than what she made before, and living here in this house that they owned instead of the apartment they rented…

She felt for a moment like maybe she should take her drawings down from her walls before they arrived. What if they saw them and thought they were bad, or she was weird for hanging them, or… No. She was not going to let herself think that way. Although she had been thinking of reorganizing the sequence, so she would need to start by taking them all down, so she did. But her friends would arrive soon, and she wouldn't have time to reorganize them right away. She'd just have to put them away until she got the time she needed. Her walls looked naked.

There was nothing left for her to do until her guests arrived, and she didn't exactly know what to do with herself, except she really wanted to pull out her sketchbook. She didn't pull pages from it anymore, didn't want to empty it out. Besides, some images were too personal to be put on a wall.

And now she was back to thinking about her mother, to what would happen when the two halves of her Texas life came together. Why did she have to be so afraid, like she would somehow chase them away? Was this the Dad thing again? They were just kids, it wasn't going to be the same. Except these were her friends, her very important friends, important people she would not want to lose and she would do anything to secure those odds… even lie to herself to give herself plausible reason to take down her art. So of course her mother would be enough to get her worried all the same.

Soon, she had ended up in her bay window. She would sit here, and she would close her eyes, she would summon the spirits of her friends, the oldest and dearest. With the ghostly presence of Riley and Farkle, she settled herself down, letting her worries fade away. She wondered what the actual Riley and Farkle would think of their imagined counterparts. All she could say was that, in absence of the real deal, they had been invaluable.

The doorbell rang and she blinked, her old friends blinking out of sight as she stood to go and see who had just arrived. This was it, their first sleepover was about to start.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners