January 8th 2021

Chapter 8
Our Move Toward Weeks

Fridays were getting to be her favorite days of the week. She'd had a few of them now since the start of the school year, and it wasn't even just about her school, and her kids. It was having Lucas home with her, though he would still go in, over at the ranch, for a couple of hours on those weekend days, too. It was having Cara, there, too, spending time with her, seeing her expand in her new world, which now included band practice with Riley, and Rosa, and Nadine, and Morgan. They were going to have their very first show before very long, and she was all over the place and giddy. Maya would be left giggling to see her like that.

But then, Fridays themselves were special for the arrival of those four boxes back in her possession.

To be sure, the level of devotion to the assignments would vary, but she had come to expect as much by now. That didn't matter so much as the fact that they were all doing their part, and while some of them filled the requirements and left it at that, others would really get into it and expand, letting their imagination stretch its legs. She got to see some kids she'd been with from day one of her teaching career, who had always done fine, just start and delve deeper, and it was beautiful to see. Maybe it was this sort of private, introspective aspect of the diaries, which allowed them to get to that level. She was considering keeping the practice going, even as she'd return to active classes next year and onward.

When she had personalized each of the sketchbooks, bought out of her own pocket, gold pens as well, she had written the names on the spines, but she'd also left a note inside the cover. For the freshmen, of course, as she didn't know them yet - mostly - she had written and copied over the same thing, an introduction and an invitation she hoped would let the kids know they could talk to her, ask her questions, if they wanted or needed to. They could slip in a sheet, use a post-it, whatever worked. With her other groups, the ones she'd taught for one or two years already, the notes were personalized, showing how she knew them, and how she could predict they would respond to the diaries or her absence. Like the freshmen, the lines of communication were always open.

The more weeks would go by, the assignments wouldn't always be the same for everyone either. They would be tailored to what she'd already seen, where she felt they might need or be able to go... and the results were there. Barton and she had agreed that he would include updates from what he saw in class, once a month, and Maya was having trouble believing that they had already reached the first of these reports. She had been home for a month already, her body continuing to adjust as the baby grew. They were rounding up to the end, closer every day... Just over a month before she'd be in their arms... Every time she or Lucas would realize it, they would get the smallest jolt of anticipation, with a twinge of anxiety, which they knew was only natural, with the approach of their first child.

Maya opened the Senior box. She always started from the eldest down to the youngest. The boxes would sit on a wheeled cart Lucas had gotten for her, two on one shelf, two on the other, allowing her to bring the whole thing within reach and pull out the sketchbooks as she went, without the effort of lifting the heavy loads. Rosa had hooked him up with one of those they'd use at her mother's bookstore up in Houston.

Ariel Su's cover had been made to look like a bookshelf. The whole thing was covered, front and back, with neatly traced shelves, garnished with a multitude of her favorite books which, Maya suspected, were done to scale. Her diary had already been the means of inquiring after the future of the quiz team, while she wasn't at school. With Helena graduated now, Ariel was the eldest, the senior of the group, and by the way they had built the team of Born Curious last year, she wanted to know if they should seek out a freshman girl themselves or if Maya would point them to one of those herself. She could have told her to go to Mr. Matthews, the other advisor, or to Mr. Brett, who was stepping in to take her place for this year, but Ariel looked to her, and Maya wouldn't deny her. She promised to keep her updated, for now.

Dakota Day's cover, like his assignments, showed in his own way - his younger brother had his own, too - of filling the requests with the awareness that his father might see it all. The diaries were meant to be Maya's thing, but it wasn't as though she'd forbidden the substitute from looking inside, so maybe he did, or he would. It wasn't as though she expected anything inappropriate from either of the Day boys, but the man's presence, and how it sat over his sons, was noticeable, to her at least.

Daphne Brett's cover was a starfield. She hadn't simply dropped dots of gold and called it a day, oh no. The whole thing was detailed, enough that she must have gotten her hands on a finer gold pen on top of the marker. She wasn't the only one. Maya would miss the way she always found a way to relate her assignments back to her sci fi heart, if she found any technicality at all to permit it. Sure, Daphne could have just done her own thing and Maya wouldn't have said a thing, but she preferred this. It compelled the girl's creativity to work harder.

The Senior box would give her those feelings about missing that group's last year. The Junior box would hit her instead with the notion of how close her first freshmen were getting to graduating out, and maybe for her being on the verge of having her baby... That one hit hard, too.

But then these were more of the kids she knew most, and their covers could have come without names. She'd recognize each one. Missy Sanderson had graced the top cover with a pristine, delicate ballerina in a pose. And on the back, oh... the zombie ballerina displayed her own disjointed motion. It had made Maya laugh so much the first time she'd seen it. In the same vein, as she suspected the young couple had done their covers together, Kai Avelino had drawn himself in full basketball glory on the front, before presenting his undead counterpart on the back. It took a couple weeks for her to realize that the two diaries, set side by side, created a single portrait. The ballerina and the athlete, the zombie lovers...

Where Daphne and some of the others had gone and acquired a finer nib, others still took it one step further, with metallic markers of different colors, the better to expand on their options. Stella Buckley was one of those, and Maya expected as much from her shy bird. She still remembered her, the day they'd met, how she'd been going around with paint splattered hands tucked into her sleeves. They still made an appearance, once in a while, and they suggested some big project she would have done over the weekend, or at night on a weekday. Her cover here looked a lot like that. The front looked like a framed painting, showing four girls, shoulder to shoulder, from behind, seemingly victorious. The backs of their shirts were branded Zimmerman, Su, Buckley, and McNeil. Born Curious... The back cover looked like the surface she might have worked on, with splatters, with sketched experiments, with notes... The team had come to mean so much more to her than she'd have imagined.

Every time Maya picked up Phoebe Munroe's diary, it was inevitable. She would just think about the secret, might even look for signs, like maybe she'd come on a clue and figure out the truth. There were none of those. All she found was Phoebe being Phoebe. She wasn't the most skilled in producing anything free handed, but that didn't stop her from experimenting her way around that limitation.

The Sophomore box was not spared the feelings, so really there was something about all her groups. This group... They were the ones she'd only just started with last year, which did make it hard to hit pause and retreat. Roman Day, so like his brother in some ways, different in many more. He made his cover into an underwater scene dominated by a shark.

Khalil Russell... her secret keeper at the end of last year... He made his covers into a pair of movie posters, surrounded by lights, one of them his favorite since childhood, the other his favorite of recent times. He'd cast himself and his family in both. Maya particularly liked seeing little Desi as the star of the childhood favorite.

Picking up Rochelle McNeil's sketchbook diary, Maya had not known what she'd find. The girl had made great strides since coming into her class with the scowl of one who didn't want to be there. She'd been so resistant to the idea of her not being there this year that Maya had feared a retreat. Instead, she found a cover filled side to side with small doodles, in what felt like Rochelle had sat there asking herself how to show who she was and decided to portray the things that made her who she was, like patch work. It was perfect.

Now, the freshman box, oh... She kept it for the end, she had to. As devoted as she was to all her students, this group couldn't help but stand out. She would put more time into looking over their work, in writing messages... The first time she found a post-it, she just smiled...

The Shelby twins had given her something not unlike Missy and Kai in that they belonged together, but in Ruby and Abby's case, she was almost sure that they had done the work separately, only to find that they echoed one another. The subject was the same, like they'd both had the same reference image in their heads, but they had immortalized it in their own fashion. Ruby's was all clean lines and neat surfaces, while Abby was all about taking more chances and embracing the unplanned. To Maya, it showed her all the ways to treat them as individuals while honoring their twin bond. She knew a thing or two about those.

Then she had Talia Ríos, who loved art and wanted to get better at it. One look at her cover, the front and back adorned with portraits of a pair of cats, and Maya could see it. She saw someone with an eye for detail, someone who had probably drawn a fair number of cats before, though not necessarily in the same way each time. In her response to the cover assignment, Maya asked if these were Talia's cats, and they were. They were called Itty and Bitty, a brother and sister she'd had from kittens. They were not nearly so fitted to their names anymore, but there was nothing to do for it.

The first day of the semester, Maya had spotted Bodhi Thompson bent over his drawing all through the class, but she'd never seen what he drew or what it looked like. The first she saw of the boy's work was his diary cover, and it left her in tears, the way some art could just get at your heart. He was another of those who'd dipped for more colors, and he used them to create the image which was to represent him. He'd left the back blank, though Maya suspected it might not stay that way. If he was anything like her with this, he was going to find just the right thing, sooner or later, and he didn't want to throw away the space.

The front though... The front showed a figure almost floating, glowing, and at its feet, all around him, were fragments, as though he'd been locked in a shell and finally burst free to be seen for who he was.

On impulse, she'd written back to Bodhi, asked if she might show his cover to her friend, Colton, who was trans like him. Bodhi had accepted. Colton received the image and replied all of a minute later, thanking her for the share and asking her to let Bodhi know he could reach out to him if he ever needed to talk to anyone, and to give him his number. Maya passed on the message.

The year was still so young, and Maya could not wait to see what the rest of it would bring, how those pages would get filled. At the end of it, she hoped, her students would he left with a reflection of that year... With some luck, it would be a great one.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners