July 3rd 2022
Chapter 184
Our Evolution of Students
Marianne would make another trip to the mall a week after she'd gone shopping with her mother, only this time with her father and three of her sisters. It wasn't planned, but they'd been out already, on their way back from visiting the Orlandos, where they'd brought a few things over for the nearly four-year-old Emily and recently two-year-old Megan, when Maya had called. Her yearly order for new sketchbooks and gold pens, which had been late coming, had finally arrived for pick-up. It was getting easier to bring the triplets around without any kind of stroller, though for a trip into the mall they definitely had to bring it out again, especially when there was only one adult among them. It was so easy to lose sight of one of them if they didn't stick together.
It was a lot harder now to get them in the stroller, Remy especially, sometimes Kacey, too. The only one who never really minded it was Lucy. She would sit there and look around like she was on a guided bus tour. Kacey would either fall in line with this or she'd wiggle around, trying to dislodge herself. Remy's attitude toward the stroller now was outright disgust. She'd start screeching the moment they'd take it out of the minivan, she'd fight them when they tried to put her into her seat, and it would be a gamble to see if they could get her to quiet down again, who would do it, or how. Today, it was Lucy, who reached out her hand and got hold of her sister's.
"S'okay, Remy, s'okay," she would tell her, and then Kacey would join in on this, and even though they were all in their stroller, they'd be holding hands, and she might not have been happy about the fact that she wasn't walking, but Remy calmed down.
"You alright there?" Lucas asked Marianne as he watched her push the empty Grandpa cart next to him. He could reach out a hand at any time if she was in trouble, but she was doing fine, so he didn't even need to ask her. The look she threw him said as much. "Alright, just checking," he laughed. "You're not going to think the same thing when those boxes are full."
It was just as well that one of the guys from the art store came along and brought the loaded cart on the way back to the parking lot. For this, Lucas allowed Marianne to walk with Remy out of the stroller, and it was like night and day to how they'd started this stop at the mall.
"Feel better now?" Lucas asked the little blonde as he lifted her to return to her car seat.
"Uh-huh," Remy nodded, and he brought her in for a quick hug and a kiss. He received one in return, and they were soon on their way home.
After lunch, Eliza took charge of the triplets. It might not have been the plan for Maya to immediately tackle the new load of diaries and prepare them for the start of the year, but Marianne loved when she got to help, and she wanted to do it that day, so her mother finally decided 'why not?' The boxes were set up in the kitchen – Mackenzie, too, just in case – and the lists were brought out, so they got to work. The first order of business had nothing to do with school.
"If I write 'Hucklebucket,' is that good?" Maya asked. Marianne laughed and told her no. "What about Pumpkin?" Marianne hesitated… but said no again. "Turtle Queen of Kindergarten?" she offered, and Marianne's laugh veered into a squeal, but she said no. "Alright, alright, Marianne Christine Friar it is," she angled the gold pen to the fresh spine. She had filled out her old sketchbook, so it was time for a new one. "There you go, now that one stays there, and we can get started with the lists. Should we get your dad in here for the XCs?" Without another word, Marianne bolted to go get Lucas and bring him back. Maya had her first books out, senior list open, and she peeked in at Mackenzie while she waited.
As they'd done last year, and then with the partial year before that, they had two exchange campers, a boy with the freshmen and a girl with the seniors. When Lucas came to join them, she asked him about the girl first.
Her name was Britt O'Connell, and she had first applied to come to the ranch last year but had missed her shot in the end. Even when they'd let her know that she wouldn't be coming, she'd replied right back and asked to be put down for the following year's spots. Did she not mind missing out on her last year of high school with her classmates? She did not. She wanted this. So, she was in, and she would be residing at the Farrells' house.
"Really?" Maya asked, surprised. It wasn't as though she didn't think that they would be the type to take in an exchange student, far from that, but with everything their family had been through last year, she might have believed that they'd take this chance for things to be a bit more 'back to normal.' Then again, maybe this was their way of pushing even more life back into their home. "Alright… There you go," Maya finished up her note inside the sketchbook and passed it to Marianne so she could add the gold pen and elastic before placing the completed diary inside the senior box. "Can you get me one from the freshman box, pumpkin?"
"Now?" Marianne asked, looking to the rest of the senior books on the table.
"Yeah, just one exception," Maya assured her, so the book was brought along and handed to Maya. "Alright, Doc, you're up. Raj Patel?" she asked, and he nodded.
"Staying with the vice-principal's family," he told her, which made her smile. Angel's family, Talia's. "Kid's excited about this, he wanted to come down here as soon as classes let out. We could have tried to get him in for the summer camp somehow, but his parents convinced him to wait. He's going to be gone a while, so…"
"Yeah," Maya sighed. She couldn't even think about sending any of her girls away from September through June, much less a full year. "Well, excitement's good, right?"
"It is," Lucas agreed, laughed. "We've already been talking, me and him. He called the ranch a few times with questions."
"Invested, I like it," Maya smiled. The book was passed to Marianne, the marker joined, and then it was brought to the freshman box. "Are you sticking with us?" Maya asked Lucas now that he'd shared his information.
"I am at your disposal," he assured her.
"Great, you're on baby duty," Maya grinned, knowing he could not have been offered a better task. He went and picked up Mackenzie, kept her in his arms as he sat at the table again.
Maya started with the seniors because it just made sense. They made her the most emotional of the four boxes, every time, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this one hit so, so deep. This year's seniors though… She was saying goodbye to Anton, her last Day boy, and even though she had known this for a while, she would not get, as she had once imagined, to mark the passage of all four of Barton and Michelle's boys. Maybe she still would. One of them may have been taken from them, but he had been there, just like his brothers.
She would also say goodbye to Olivia Zhu, and Kelsey Farrell, and Ava Nash… Oh, they wouldn't be gone from her life, not with them being part of We Are Sisters, but it would still feel like the end of an era when they'd be gone from her classroom. She knew, from having heard it out of them on one of their show nights, how much they were looking forward to this next year together, that they wanted to make it a great one. If she could make that happen for them, help it along, she would do it.
When she came to the juniors' box, it had its own signature feeling, the one that had her thinking how these kids were passing from the first half of their time with her to the second. But it was really just a fleeting thought compared to the one she had when she picked up her list and looked down the names. They were all known to her, sure. Lara… Maggie… Nika… But there was one change, and as emotional as it made her to see it there, she could only imagine what it would feel like to that student to see it there, too, ink on paper, official.
Marshall, Jennifer
Oh, they had fought for that one. There had been some unavoidable amount of fear when they'd first approached the school about this change. Necessary as it was if they wanted it to happen, it meant that Jenny had to come out to these people and hope for the best. It had been a lot of back and forth between the school and the family, but when it came down to it, Jenny was going to be Jenny whether it said so on paper or not. They would not deny her. And now it was right there, on a list, and traced in gold on the spine of her sketchbook. Maya was always bringing out her very best hand in writing those names, but oh, how focused she was on this one.
"So-pho-more," Marianne chanted, like she'd always done since she'd learned to say the word, when she watched the blank books get stacked on the table. Maya chuckled and nodded. Good job.
Last year wasn't a wash, far from that, but it still felt to her like this year was going to be a do-over. She'd missed out on the tail end of their freshman run, after she'd gone on leave when she'd done, and now she was finally going to see them through to the end. Even without that gap from February onward last year, she would still have been so, so excited to get these kids back, and not just because they included her sisters and their friends.
It was almost a shame that exchange camper Raj wasn't one year older, with this enthusiasm she'd heard about. That was what this group brought in, across the board, wasn't it? They were so motivated, every single class, every single student, and it had led to some new activities, new challenges, and she couldn't wait to see what they did this time around.
She didn't know if this year's freshmen would be like that, too, but as ever, she looked on to a new year and a new crop of kids she'd get to know, and she was excited. She would get Angel Ríos, and she always loved seeing younger siblings come her way. He was the only one she spotted on the list this year, but then she also saw what was to be the start of a new line… the Bennetts. One girl, three boys, the children of Lucas' newest basketball teammate, Sydney Carter, and grandchildren of his former teammate, Mitchell Carter. The Friars had come to know those kids by now, and especially the eldest, the lone girl. Whenever she'd interacted with her, the joke had always been for them to greet one another as 'Maya with a y' and 'Maia with an i.' Once she'd be in class, well, they'd be Mrs. Friar and Miss Bennett, sure… but they'd still know, and they would smile.
"There, the last one," Maya presented Marianne with the final sketchbook, and the five-year-old took extra time to put her last gold marker on properly before carrying the book to the box. She resettled the lid and turned to her mother, arms in the air. Ta-da! "Thank you for your assistance, both of you. Let's do it again next year."
TO BE CONTINUED
See you tomorrow! - mooners
