October 9th 2021

Chapter 282
Our Outlooks For Returns

Maya had plenty of help getting the diary boxes into the building, which saved her the trouble of bringing in Grandpa the cart. Summer and Taylor escorted Anton off to his first class of the day and she watched them go after wishing them a good morning. She would see them all after lunch.

Alone again in her classroom, she breathed out. This was already her sixth year as a teacher. She still remembered days when she'd worried about when or if she'd ever find herself a post, never guessing she'd end up here of all places, in her old school. She'd made more than the most of what she had, creating Stage Ready and working at the theater for two years, and she was still so proud of what it had become. One could say that it was all thanks to her work at the theater that she got her current job when she did, and she wasn't about to forget it.

Her classroom though… Every time she came back to it in the last stretch of summer, to prepare for the start of the new year, it was a new jolt of excitement. And the kids… Each group was met with its own kind of anticipation. The seniors were back for their final year, and the sophomores were no longer newbies. The freshmen were only just beginning, and the juniors were kicking off the second half of their four years…

First off, she prepared ahead of the seniors' arrival. They were the first group who would be able to say that they had been doing diaries from their first day of high school to the last. She had a thought of asking them to bring in the other three at the end of this year, but then a part of her would have to wonder if some of them might have thrown the finished sketchbooks out once each year had ended…

Well, there was nothing she could do about that. Right now, she went around and placed the fresh new diaries and the gold pens on each station, according to where they'd sat the year before. Although if they wanted to change that, which was sometimes the case depending on new friendships and new relationships, for good or ill… She'd seen those awkward shuffles to find a new seat; they were never any fun.

"Maybe I should just hand them out instead…" Maya mumbled to herself, just as movement out of the corner of her eye was revealed to be Bodhi Thompson. "Hey!" she moved to greet him. "Welcome back Mr. Senior. Your girlfriend's not hanging around out there, is she?" she joked, and he laughed.

"No, no, she's got her own classes to get to. She did ask me to remind you about the quiz team. I told her I wouldn't need to, and you'd let us know, but she insisted, so…" he let the sentence trail off. Maya nodded; she could finish it for herself.

"Well, you were correct," she told him. "I'll do my best, so you can all get started as early as possible. In the meantime, the three of you still with us can carry on."

"We tried to get together over the summer as much as possible, but it wasn't easy. We might be rusty at first."

"Come on, Captain, you've got this," Maya encouraged him. It was good enough.

"Hey!" Ruby Shelby appeared, trailed by twin sister Abby and by Talia Ríos. She looked like she'd grabbed the others and hurried over, hoping to find the last member of their committee along with their teacher before class started. "I just talked to Miss Alcott, she confirmed we have our table at the Fall Festival again, thanks," she told Maya.

"You're welcome," Maya smiled back at her, at all of them.

She couldn't stop thinking about when they'd all been freshmen, walking in here the first time. She'd been here solely to say hello, and to hand out her first batches of diaries, as she'd also been very close to giving birth to Marianne… Now her baby girl was nearly three years old, and these four students standing before her would be graduating at the end of the school year… Time had no patience, did it? No matter what she did, they'd keep growing and moving on, and she would continue to have… absolutely no control over her emotions, by the looks of it.

As the rest of the group started to come along, there were more reunions, and Maya was sort of relieved to find that no social implosions had happened over the summer, and everyone was happy to return to their same stations from junior year. They had the standard start-of-the-year discussion to break the ice, sharing what they'd all done over the last couple of months since they'd been in this room together. By now, Maya was getting pretty good at breaking down the stories into categories. Some had gone on a trip, the hotel and sightseeing kind or the geographically distant family kind. Others had mostly been working at a job, or on projects to further their education, or at whatever sport they were practicing during the school year.

Some of them had seen what Maya would call a family tree shake up. Parents might have separated or divorced, or they would have gotten married again. Some of them had started a new relationship, others had ended one… Overall, there was a lot of excitement over the fact that they were finally seniors. They were looking forward to being graduates, and to going on their trip, of course. Any conversation which skirted near the subject of what would come after graduation and the trip to Europe, as expected, left the new seniors with barely disguised anxiety and apprehension. The whole run up to college and whether they'd actually go… That look in their eyes was starting to be very recognizable to their teacher, too.

After the seniors went on their way, Maya sat down at her desk and breathed. She looked back over to her sophomore box and hummed to herself. She'd gotten lucky with the first group, but she decided that it would be better not to follow the seating from last year for the next groups. Another check in the experience column told her that this next group was more likely to have gone through a bit of a jumble. Then again…

"Morning, Mrs. Friar," Cade Foster greeted her as he walked in, with Henry Hillard and Stevie Brett just behind him, a few minutes after the bell had brought her free period to an end.

"Hey, guys," Maya beamed at the sight of them. How could she not? Time may have had no patience, but sometimes it was also kind, and it had been so very kind to these three kids, from their first day as freshmen to now, as sophomores.

Last year, they'd come along as strangers, spread out across the room. Stevie had easily been the most outgoing of the three, within reason, though this by no means put her in a position to be written off like she would have been fine without those two boys as her best friends. A lot of people could be good friends, and they would have their own value, but there was really something to be said for those great and special friends, and that was what Henry and Cade had become to her.

Of course, as Maya knew and… maybe, to some degree, Stevie would know, too… Henry had longed for something a cut above from friendship when he'd first seen her. Had this changed in the last year? It was hard to say, honestly. Maya didn't doubt that there was still a part of Lucas' young cousin who was experiencing feelings for the science teacher's daughter, but at the same time she was one of his best friends, and once she'd become that to him, the idea of doing anything to jeopardize the friendship… He couldn't bear that, could he? Maya remembered the boy who'd first come into her class, remembered the image he'd had of himself. He thought he was a loser, and no one would want to be his friend. Had Maya been especially determined to prove him wrong because he was family? Not really. She would have been this determined for any of her students. And for that, she'd afforded him the same respect she would have given them, by never under any circumstances trying to help him by creating lies. She hadn't pushed this friendship with the others so much as seen them all and observed a chance. All they had to do was take it and see what would happen, for better or for worse. And it had ended up for the better. His confidence had taken a remarkable surge, and she was thrilled to see it, as his teacher and as his cousin.

For transformations though, there could be none better than Cade Foster's, could there? To go from the boy who had given nothing more to go on last year than three words, two of them his name and the last his age, to the boy here today who practically told her half of his summer story before class even started… It was like he'd been walking around with all his inner lightbulbs turned off, and now every switch had been flipped. He wasn't suddenly bouncing off the walls, he was still very much someone she'd categorize as an introvert, but that didn't make his transformation any less important. Even he seemed to have come in here today, at the start of this new year, as though determined to start over with a blank slate, to put the past behind him. There were still some students out there who would try and come at him, to bring up his mother's secret. Seeing it, hearing it, would still be upsetting to him, but then he wouldn't let it get to him the way it used to, and he would show that, enough so that most of these incidents had been on a decline. His would-be bullies were losing interest because they couldn't get a rise out of him. Whatever he still felt, well, he had his diary (and art class as a whole) as an outlet, and he'd learned to use it well. He was only rarely in trouble anymore and Maya was constantly proud of him.

"Rosemary, hi! What are you doing here?" she smiled when she spotted the newest member of the quiz team standing in the doorway. The rest of the sophomores had been coming along and finding seats, and the bell would ring any second now. "You're going to be late to…" she started to say, before being handed a piece of paper. As soon as she saw what it said, she laughed. She looked back at the girl, who had been found for Born Curious by Summer and who had told Maya that she wasn't taking art, that she didn't think she needed to… That was until now, apparently, as here was a paper that said she'd just been enrolled to this class. "Really?"

"I thought about it all summer and I wasn't sure, so I was going to take what I'd already decided to take. But this morning, I changed my mind. I went and told them I wanted to change my schedule. I was very convincing," the fifteen-year-old nodded.

"You usually are," Maya beamed. The bell brought her back to reality. "Right, well, go and find yourself a seat, anywhere you want. It's alright," she guided her into the room. As soon as she'd get the chance to do it, she'd have to dig out one of the spare sketchbooks and trace Rosemary Adewumi's name on the spine. For having seen some of the work she'd done for herself, for her class notes, Maya couldn't wait to see what she'd do to fill in the pages of this book.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners