Chapter 95
This Is Where It Begins

Lucas had had a strange bit of history with this university already. He didn't expect he was the first or the last student by far to decide and change his educational path all of a sudden, but to him it definitely felt kind of chaotic. He'd arrived out here, picking up what he'd started back in Houston after he and Maya had moved back to Austin and settled into the house, with Elliott coming along when he did. And then suddenly they'd gone and found themselves expecting Noah, and the plans changed, the reconnected flow was brought to a standstill once again. It was disconnected from the destination to which it had always been headed, plunged instead into a new course. Here, he'd needed to find his rhythm again, among people who'd already been sailing along ever so swiftly. He could just as easily have drowned. Thank goodness he was not alone.

"We were hoping to catch you both together so we could wish Maya luck for today," Kat greeted him with a great big smile as he approached his first class of the day and came across her and her husband, Wilson. They'd been right there with him, from day one in his new major, which had been a year ago now, the two of them and Trey. The last of their quartet had yet to show.

"Sorry," Lucas smiled back with gratefulness. "We're hoping to meet for lunch though, you guys should come," he offered.

"So long as you don't mind extra company," Wilson told him, and Lucas chuckled.

The 'extra company' in this case would be their three-year-old daughter, Samantha. She was looked after by Wilson's mother in the day while they were at school, but she would be brought out to the university to share meals with her parents, an easy feat due to the fact that they lived just five minutes away on foot from campus. Wilson's father was the president of the university, something he didn't exactly air out to any and all. It wasn't that he didn't like his father or get along with him, far from that, but he still preferred to keep it private from most, and Lucas respected that. He'd only found out sometime close to the end of the previous semester.

"How could anyone mind that?" Lucas told his friends. "Although you might have difficulty keeping her away from Maya once she gets her hands on her," he suggested.

"I can imagine that," Kat nodded, both she and her husband showing sympathy. They knew what that felt like, the first time going back, leaving a child behind. It didn't matter how trusted the sitter was. "All the more reason for her to come along."

He was going to miss them when they were gone. They were on their last semester, all three of his friends here. He had one more year to go after this semester. It was the shortest he could make things before he could graduate and get to work with his father full time. For now he was sort of interning, sitting in on certain things he did, with people he met, whenever he wasn't at school, or working at the bookstore, or at home with Maya and the boys… But his friends here, they had been going at this the regular way, had been at this for three and a half years already. Well, Wilson and Trey had done so. Kat had started a year after them, what with having Samantha, but she'd more than made up for the delay by now, and she would be graduating right when her husband did. The two of them already had plans for what they'd do once they were out.

Once they were gone, he couldn't say for sure who else would be left. He was friendly with others, yes, just not as much as these three. And there would be plenty of others of their classes who would be graduating, too, wouldn't there? Those who would remain would be those with a year left, like him. The sort of… condensed course plan he'd been given, minding that he wasn't a freshman and that he was aiming to graduate as soon as possible, meant that he had one foot among near graduates and one among those who had a longer way to go. Maybe he needed to get closer to some of those now…

All through his classes that morning – he had two – Lucas could not help but think about Maya, wherever she was. It had been so long since the two of them had been in school at the same time. They kept saying how it felt like a lifetime ago, but it was true, wasn't it? Those days where they had been students together, whether this was in middle school, high school, or off in their own programs in college, they were just so far away now. Now, they were in school together again, but they might as well have been just starting, like the rest hadn't happened, or just… it was so far away and he was finally realizing how much he'd missed it. It had never occurred to him, just because their circumstances demanded that they forge ahead with what life demanded. Now…

"Hey, it's my husband. Hello, husband," Maya beamed when they reached one another. They'd set to meet at the university café, and he'd come to find her sitting at one of the tables already, bent over one of her textbooks with her laptop open nearby. She was in it already, like she'd never left, and it was a good sight to see.

"Hello, wife," he retorted in kind, which made her smile even brighter. He leaned to kiss her before taking a seat. "Where are…" she looked around for his friends.

"They're on their way," Lucas casually explained, as much to maintain the pleasant surprise of little Sammie as to get a chance to hear how her morning had gone before the others showed up. "So, how's it going?"

"Oh, well, I only had the one class, we didn't get very far," she explained while closing her computer and her book and slipping them back in her new bag. He was particularly amused at the sight of the two keychains she'd clipped on to it, one a little brussels sprout, the other a bee. Those had been part of the 'special treats' he'd hidden inside the bag before wrapping it up for Christmas. When she'd found them, oh, that laugh, that happy face…

"Looks like you got far enough to get started though," he pointed out.

"I did, yes," she agreed. She looked so different than the Maya he'd left behind earlier, which effectively told him a lot of what he wanted to know. He'd left a Maya who was worrying herself over the return to class after so long, and now he'd come upon another who was… maybe not one hundred percent put at ease, but definitely enough that she found herself back in touch with optimism. The afternoon had the potential to keep that upswing going, and he would do anything and everything he could to encourage it. "The professor's great, I mean… Professor Robinson is a tough act to follow, and I can't help comparing everyone to her, but that doesn't mean everyone else isn't good either."

"I get it," he promised with a nod.

"I'm really looking forward to Professor Patil's class," Maya went on, and he could really see that in her eyes, the spark. He could have said something here, pointed out how she was doing better than she thought she would already, but it felt more reasonable to him to just let it go, to move along. "How about you, how was it?" Maya asked now, tapping his arm.

"Maybe we should wait for the others to get here for that part," Lucas told her, and she agreed. "Anyway, I've been thinking about something and I wanted to run it by you."

"Yeah? What is it?" she asked, presenting herself curious and open.

"I know we are on day one, and we already have our schedules set, but maybe it's actually the perfect time, before we start everything, then we can make it work," Lucas started. She was giving him 'I don't follow' eyes. "I'm wondering if there's any way that we could move things around, to find a class we can both take, together."

"Oh…" she smiled, started small and grew it, as the idea settled in her mind. "We never really looked for one of those, did we?"

"I think we were just so focused, me on where I was and you on where you needed to go."

"I guess I just figured there wouldn't be space for it, but… We should, yeah. I know what I could drop, I don't know about you… and we'd need to find the new one…"

The laptop came back again, and as they waited for Lucas' classmates, they looked into their options. They had already compiled a combined schedule, his and hers together, the better to spot the times when they were both free, and those when they were in class or not. There was also Lucas' work schedule in it and, at some point, there'd be Maya's, too. She was slowly starting the process of finding a job again. Maybe they would come to a point where she could rely on the cakes, until she got her degree and got an actual teaching job, but until then, they needed more.

"We could pick up another language," Maya suggested.

"Or more dancing," Lucas joked. She laughed, showing consideration.

"See, now I don't know…" Up ahead, she spied Trey, Kat, Wilson, and little Samantha. "And they're coming, time's up. Let me know if you think of something this afternoon?"

When she'd left Lucas and found her way to her first class that morning, Maya had still been so caught up in her worries. She couldn't say that she'd allowed her mind to go anywhere beyond reaching that room, finding a seat, getting ready, and then waiting for what would come. She hadn't paid much attention to the other students, and maybe she'd given off an air of not wanting to be disturbed, as no one had attempted contact in any way.

Now, as she walked into her second of three classes that day, she felt very different, she felt ready and open… like those pieces of herself she'd stored away nearly two years ago had resurfaced again. She'd been so scared that they wouldn't fit anymore, but they did. They accepted this new shape of hers, the mother of two, the bereaved daughter. Dr. Eisley had told her that there was something else still holding her back, that she'd figure it out for herself when the time was right. Now, she saw it. A lot of it had to do with getting back after so long, yes, but also it was about her sons, about coming out here, taking a chance, and risking failure and wasting time away from them where she could have watched them grow some more.

She was the first to arrive in class that afternoon. This had often been her way, back in Houston, so there was no surprise in carrying things on back here in Austin, was there? She was able to pick her seat and settle in, all the better to open up the message she'd received from Pappy Joe a minute before.

He'd already sent her and Lucas a couple of updates on how the boys were doing back home. The answer, as she would have expected, was that they were all doing very well. There was no doubt that they would be overjoyed when their parents came home at the end of the day, but for now all was well. The only one who might have been struggling here was her, and it wasn't a struggle, not specifically. She just missed them, missed the call of Elliott's squeaky 'Mama?', the feeling of Noah's hand grasping at her fingers, the way the two of them would display all that brotherly love they had grown into over the months... Elliott would get so protective of Noah, and Noah was starting to almost emulate Elliott at times, to varying degrees of success. They would be alright, she'd tell herself. They had each other.

Maya had only just put her phone down that she noticed she was no longer alone. There were a few other students now, dotted across the room. It just happened that a pair of girls were stepping in her direction as she was looking up. They stopped, and the first of them motioned to the desks next to hers as though to ask 'these seats taken?'

"Oh, no, go ahead," she smiled, and they sat, one next to Maya and the other next to her friend.

She might have turned back to her desk, her things, but then she'd been hit with this amusing notion of how the pair reminded her of other people, friends of hers. They reminded her of Franny and Kayla. It could easily have just been the appearances, with how one of them was tall, slender, dark-skinned, like Kayla, while the other was shorter, striking for the color introduced to her hair, as with Franny. This one had a sort of blueish green dye, much closer to green.

"You're new, aren't you?" Green Hair asked when she caught her looking. Maya passed her a slightly apologetic look and a smile.

"That obvious?"

"We don't see that many people we don't know in these classes by now," the girl explained, with an ease to her that instantly drew the line on her immediate resemblance to Franny, who was much more the type to follow her curiosity right over a stranger's shoulder.

"I started over in Houston the first two years," Maya explained. She didn't want to launch into the whole story right in the first minute. "Then we moved back here, so..." So I haven't been in school for three whole semesters, but who's counting, right?

"Got it," Green Hair nodded before finally giving Maya the means to refer to her by her actual name rather than her hair color. "I'm Diana," she raised her hand in a small wave, which led her friend to do the same and introduce herself as Farah. She had the slightest trace of an accent which Maya could not place but almost sounded French.

"Maya," she tipped her head in return.

As the last minutes before the class began went along, Maya was given a fair run down of what Diana and Farah and their classmates had been up to over the last couple of years in the program. Maya recognized a lot of similar beats to her own classes back in Houston, even if it had been a good while since she'd attended them. In the last weeks coming up to the start of the semester, she had pulled out old textbooks she still had, but especially old notes. Was she ever glad she'd kept those. There were other things which she'd never touched on, and she took down notes on those, the better to dig up some information. Who knew if they'd be called to recall any of those, right?

"I can bring a few things," Diana offered, and Maya thanked her.

After that class ended - the professor had barely kept them fifteen minutes, as Farah had predicted he would - Maya ended up joining the pair for a trip to the coffee cart, and from there they started a slow trip in the general direction of the next class, which they were also all three attending. Diana and Farah started to tell her about Professor Patil, and how nice she was, how interesting, but Maya knew this already, and she mentioned it along with the fact that she both knew and had worked for Meera Patil in the last year.

"You did?" Diana asked. Maya nodded. "In Houston?"

"No, here. I moved back almost two years ago now."

"Oh..." Diana replied, then, "Why the break?"

"Maternity leave," Maya finally just went right ahead and said it. There was no point treating it like some big secret, was there?

"Oh, you have a baby?" Farah asked.

"Two... Sort of came one right after the other or else I would have started school again by now."

"Must be strange, coming back?" Diana asked, her quiet voice reminding Maya vaguely of Leona back in Houston.

"It really is," Maya admitted. She had come to press value into recognizing connections. To meet people and find it so easy to invite them into her truth was not nearly as common as it might seem. You had to be able to spot the difference, and she really saw it here.

Further proof came in how much she learned about the duo in the time until the next class. She could just see it in their eyes, too. It wasn't as though they'd spill the whole story of how they'd met and gotten together to someone they'd only known for all of an hour... usually.

They were Canadian, from Toronto, Diana from birth and Farah from childhood, after her family had moved there from Haiti. They'd met midway through high school, though they had gone to different schools. They had been waitresses, both of them, and it was as co-workers that they met. The restaurant was just across the street from a museum, and they started going out there together to see the exhibits. They were fast friends, though it took a couple of years and the imminent prospect of college to get either one of them to confess the feelings they harbored for one another. From there, a mad little plan had emerged for them to go away to school together. And Texas had won out.

After this long-way-around detour, they were brought back to the subject of Professor Patil and Maya's work with her. She told her new classmates about how she'd been working alongside Professor Robinson back in Houston and then the assistance she had been provided by her now former professor, when she'd found herself suddenly pregnant again and facing the prospect of her education growing further and further away.

"Professor Robinson in Houston, Patricia Robinson?" Diana asked, sounding impressed. Maya nodded. "She guest lectured here a few times, she's amazing…"

"Yeah, she's pretty great," Maya agreed, even as she felt that the words in no way sufficed to describe her feelings on the woman.

When Meera Patil arrived and spotted Maya, she approached her with that great warm smile she'd come to know. To think, they had first met even before Elliott was born, back when she and Lucas had been facing the prospect of moving back to Austin, and what it would mean for their education. Patty had invited them both to dinner at her house, where they'd been brought to mingle among fellow professors, some already teaching Maya at the time, and one well positioned to eventually teach her, too. Finally, the day had come.

"I was hoping to speak with you before class began, but I never got around to writing you. Can you stay a minute after we're done here today? I won't keep you the whole period."

"Sure, of course," Maya nodded.

She'd been looking forward to this class most of all, for obvious reasons, and it did not disappoint. She'd never sat in one of Professor Patil's classes before, she didn't know how she was as a teacher, but she'd worked with her long enough to get the impression she would have a very captivating way of going, not unlike Patty, but in Meera's own style. That was just what she got, and by the time it was all over, Maya really felt like this day had been three direct hits to her worries, until they as good as evaporated away. Time would tell how she'd do once all the work started to accumulate and co-exist with her role and her duties as Elliott and Noah's mother, but today had been really good, and she wasn't about to let new worries get in the way.

She exchanged numbers with Diana and Farah before the two of them went on their way, and then she moved to approach the professor, as requested.

"How was it today?" Meera asked. "I know that you were concerned."

"It was really, really good, actually," Maya smiled. "Not to suck up, but this last part was definitely my favorite."

"I will take it and humbly say thank you," the professor tipped her head with a smile of her own. "I realize now that you are only starting here, and I don't intend to… pile on anything more for you this semester. Looking ahead however, I was wondering if you'd be interested in being a TA next semester, in the fall." Her surprise was undoubtedly all over her face, but she pulled it back in at a respectable pace, and finally she was able to say the reasonable thing.

"I would love to, but do you mind if I think about it for a few days? I'll let you know by next week, I promise."

"Tell me by spring break?" Meera countered, and Maya accepted this at once. "Good. I won't keep you longer. I think you must be eager to get back to your boys."

"The young and the old," Maya confirmed with a smirk. All her Friar boys, three generations of them, waiting for her… After such a day as she'd had, they would be the cherry on top.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you next week! - mooners