July 14th 2021

Chapter 195
Our Goals For Progress

For the first time in this new year, Maya found herself sitting on her bed with a stack of boxes at her side, dozens of diaries to look at, and she was just… thrilled. The initial assignment, like the two previous iterations of this project, was for the students to use their gold pens to decorate the cover of their diary. When she'd collected them in class the day before, she'd gone to the trouble of making sure she wouldn't see any of their work ahead of time, maintaining the surprise until now. She could go ahead and pick them out of the box, one by one, and give them the attention they deserved.

"Right, let's see who we have here," Maya declared aloud, not for her own benefit. Sitting next to her on the bed was her little pumpkin of a girl. Marianne had her sketchbook locked in her arms, kneeling on the mattress, and watching her mother's every move. It was just a bit clearer to them now just what had made her want the book, after she'd been here, on the bed, on the floor, in her old crib, all her life watching her mother look through countless diaries every week. She wanted her own and now she had it. "Oh, this one is Roman's," she read off the spine.

"Roman!" Marianne repeated.

She knew him, recalled him well. When the Friars and the Days would get together, the boys would all have their own way of interacting with her. Dakota, when he was home visiting from college, would be the type to hold the girl in his lap with a casual ease. On the flipside, youngest brother Anton always looked completely uncomfortable around babies and toddlers. Lambert fell much closer to his oldest brother. When Marianne would see him helping with whatever meal they were having, she would immediately want to help, and Lambert would happily take her up as his assistant.

Roman would be the first of his brothers or parents to greet the little Friar girl, and he really was so good with her. When Maya had learned that the senior was looking to study early childhood education, it had made complete and immediate sense. It wasn't just what he wanted to do: it was where he belonged.

"Alright, who's next?" Maya asked 'herself' as she plunged her hand back in the box to pick a book from the stack at random. Marianne watched this process with great curiosity. One by one, Maya would take out a book, read the name, and Marianne would repeat it as best she could, and she would inspect the student's work just as her mother did.

"Rochelle," she spoke the name with care when that book was pulled out. Her R's continued to be a work in progress, but she handled herself very well. Case and point… "Biddy!" she pointed.

"A very beautiful birdy, huh? Look at all those colors," Maya indicated them while Marianne leaned in closer. "Pretty sure she got those from Bodhi."

Time and again she would be reminded of how completely uninterested Rochelle McNeil had been about art class when she'd started out. It had felt like little more than a punishment to her, and bit by bit Maya had formed a connection to her, had found the key to ensure that the girl's presence in her class wouldn't be in vain. And over the past three years it had been something to watch her evolve, to discover her own corner of appreciation in the vast artistic world. It showed in the papers she'd been writing since freshman year, but it did in the rest of her work, too. More and more, Maya would look at it all and see… She was developing her own style and it was really very her. It made her teacher ridiculously happy to see it every time.

"And… Khalil," Maya pulled the last of the senior diaries. Marianne didn't so much repeat the name here as squeal something that sounded like it. He'd been a favored friend ever since the days of the Sleepster when he'd stayed at the Hunter Hart house with the rest of them.

She had one for his sister Desi, too, just as she'd done the year before. There had never even been a question of whether she'd get her own one again. Having the diary had meant so much to her in the year following her mother's passing, and that grief and healing were an ongoing process for the twelve-year-old. When she'd given Khalil not one but two books, he'd received them and immediately understood their purpose. He'd tipped his head in quiet gratitude.

"I'm going to miss him a lot…" Maya reflected as she replaced the diaries in their box. She'd miss all of them, naturally. With Khalil, well… It went to this past year, and to his connection to her sisters, all the way back to the day he'd helped her recover from a wave of nausea in class. How was he already on his final year with them? "Right," she sighed, looking from the boxes back to Marianne. "Which one next?" she asked, indicating each of the remaining three boxes. Marianne looked. After a moment, she pointed to the one in the middle. "Freshmen," Maya smiled.

Alright, so she'd been resisting the urge to dig right into those. How could she not? New kids meant new discoveries, and those were always a must. She'd been with them for a week now, which was just wild. In that handful of days, she couldn't say that she suddenly knew them all the way she knew her older students, but she was starting to get a better grasp of some if not most of them, and the diaries would tell her more.

With some of them it was a much shorter journey. Henry Hillard was at the top of that list, wasn't he? She'd known him since he'd been a kid, and though he now stood just taller than her, everything she'd seen from him this week had felt in line with the boy she knew. She suspected that his covers – a rich homage to the light and the dark sides of the force – were inspired by much more than his long-running love for all things Star Wars. Possibly they were just stuck on his mind because of a certain new classmate of his. Right about now, he hadn't even gotten up the nerve to talk to Stevie Brett, so it was all on him.

All Maya could see when she'd look at him and pick up on those jolts of feelings was that suddenly he had something that made him happy to be at school, and that could be very powerful. It could be very good and also not so good, depending on the outcome of his ever actually speaking to the girl, but they'd cross that bridge when they got to it. For now, he was lifted, and Maya wished nothing except for him to keep on floating.

On the other side of this… situation was Stevie herself, and while Maya couldn't speak to her having any kind of feelings for Henry, she was getting to know her some more, same as the others. Though the family resemblance was strong, between Stevie and her father and Stevie and her older sister Daphne especially, she was absolutely her own person. Her father and her sister were both 'huge science dorks,' as she'd so kindly refer to them, but she was more on the drama side of things. When she'd heard rumblings of the year's new musical – it was inevitable, somehow, it always got out – she'd gone to Maya, the teacher she knew the most at this point out of the muses. She wanted to know if the singing was mandatory.

"I can act, I want to act, but my voice, it's not exactly…" she'd frowned, searching for the right word. "It's just bad… It's so bad…"

"Look, you don't have to worry about any of that just yet, but anytime you want to drop by here at lunch, we can talk it over, alright?"

She hadn't come yet, but Maya didn't doubt she would come around sooner or later. If she'd asked about it now, then it mattered enough to her. She'd be there. Maya didn't worry about her.

The same couldn't be said about everyone, and about one student in particular. Cade Foster. Sixteen. Maybe worry wasn't the right word here, but then again… It had been a week, five days, five classes, and she was getting to know her students, but this boy continued to be a mystery. He'd been almost late three of those days, a minute late on the fourth, and just yesterday he'd been nearly five minutes late, enough that Maya had no choice but to call him on it. He didn't look overly concerned with the prospect of being sent to the principal or put in detention. He gave a sort of non-committal apology and went to his station.

She couldn't even say that he was being rude. That would have required for him to put some emotion, some sentiment into his reaction. Instead, it felt more like his saying 'I see, yes, carry on then.' This was the impression he was making on all of his teachers, and depending on their level of understanding and patience, he was quickly branded as anything from a slacker to 'trouble in the making' by many of them. Maya couldn't pronounce herself just yet, not after five days and especially because… well… Once upon a time, she could have been written off that way, too, and so could more than one of her parents. They were so much more than that, all of them, and maybe Cade was, too. Either way, she wasn't going to abandon him.

He wasn't making it easy on her. Whatever he had to do in class, there was nothing else for her to call it than the absolutely bare minimum. He was a freshman, and this was not just a new school year but a new school. Her class was much less about sitting at a desk and listening to a lecture and taking notes, doing exercises. It was about creation, and they had all signed up for that, but it could take a week or two for some of them to really get comfortable. His diary though… She didn't have it here with her because, when she'd gone to pick them up, she'd found he hadn't done anything to his cover. The thing looked just as it did when she'd given it to him at the start of the week. He couldn't think of anything. She'd given him the weekend to do something, and she would expect to have it back on Monday after lunch.

With the freshman box done, Maya ended up with the sophomore box next. The very first book she got her hands on was Summer Levesque's. There was no mistaking it in the pack, as her cover was not covered in gold marker, or any marker. Instead, it was covered with ripped up bits of magazine she had organized to create an image, one on the front and one on the back. She'd been concerned that her teacher would reprimand her for this, but Maya had instead been very impressed. Summer had looked beyond relieved. Now, she had remained something of a mystery herself, too. Not to the extent of Cade, but still… The girl was attentive, and when she had a task at hand, she would dedicate herself, but beyond that… There was still that impression like she was off in her own head a lot of the time. And she looked tired, much too tired for a girl about to be seventeen. There could be any number of reasons for this, all normal ones, and yet Maya couldn't shake the feeling that there was something she needed to…

Her phone rang, interrupting her flow of thoughts. She put down the diary even as Marianne looked to the screen where it lay on the mattress between them. The toddler squealed excitedly just as her mother hurried to answer. She didn't even need to be told; she knew. Riley was about to have her baby.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners