January 17th 2020

Chapter 17
Their Tradition For Music

After hitting a brick wall with her last call, Maya had called it a day, grabbing her things and starting slowly on her way out. She had time to make a few stops, loading up for the night, before Lucas and his friends would get here.

Maya: How much chocolate does it take to feed over thirty people for like five hours?
Rosa: You're done?
Maya: Yup! Waiting for Lucas.
Riley: 100!
Maya: That is not a unit, Ri!
Kayla: I'm at your house. No one's here yet.
Kayla: I have a lot of popcorn.
Nadine: On my way!
Rosa: Can't you come now?
Riley: Just get a whole bunch!
Maya: I told Lucas to meet me here.
Rosa: Yeah, but if you come now, we get to practice longer before they all get there!
Rosa: Please?
Rosa: PLEASE?
Nadine: She's not wrong.
Kayla: The sooner someone with a key gets here… I should have gone to the bathroom.
Maya: Look under the bottom porch step.
Maya: Alright, I'll text Lucas and let him know. TXNY assemble!
Kayla: Found it!

By the time Maya had equipped them for what was to be the great Chocopolypse of 2025 and made her way back home, she found the rest of the band had arrived to join Kayla. The four of them were in the kitchen, sorting through their various offerings for movie night.

"That is so much candy…" Maya blinked. When they turned to her, she could see they'd been sampling this thing and that.

"If there's a lot left, you could be sorted out for Halloween," Rosa teased.

"I don't see a lot of kids making it out here," Maya pointed out, realizing it for herself at the same time. There were only a handful of kids in the immediate area. She wondered what they did when the day rolled around…

"Are you going to have a party here?" Kayla asked. The parties in Houston had been some of their favorite days. The last one had been far from what they would have wanted, with a storm keeping the guests to a slim minimum, and of all of them it seemed a near evident choice for Maya and Lucas to be the ones to host here as well.

"That's the idea, yeah," Maya spoke and signed.

"Practice?" Riley looked around to the bandmates.

"In a minute, I need help getting all that chocolate out of the car."

With the chocolate brought into the kitchen, they made their way into the basement. Maya coaxed the dogs to accompany them, not trusting them to behave with a mountain of sweet treats to tempt them into curiosity. As they'd started for the stairs, Nadine had grabbed a case waiting by the door. The shape and size made quick work of solving the mystery of her choice of new instrument.

"It'll work out with everything else, right?" she asked, hopeful but uncertain as she unclipped and opened the violin case. "It was just the most straightforward option I could think of. I took lessons when I was little, same as my sisters, except I gave it up when I was ten. Hadn't picked one up for over a decade, wasn't sure how it would go and it was rough in the beginning, but I think I've got the handle of it now."

They were able to judge for themselves as she took hold of her instrument and went on to play something for them. When she finished and looked at them, Rosa was the one to summarize what they were all thinking.

"Just how pissed were your parents when you stopped playing? Did your teacher cry?" It made Nadine laugh.

"Think it'll work? I know that Willow played violin on some of the songs, but that was some…"

"Hey, we'll make it work," Maya assured her.

"Yeah, we're not giving that up," Riley chimed in. The others nodded in agreement, which made Nadine laugh and nod. She was relieved, they could see it.

Maya knew how much this meant to her, being back in the band, and with her being unable to resume her old post as the drummer… For as long as she'd known her, Nadine had been all about knowing where her lane was. She'd given up things when she knew she wouldn't be able to devote herself to them enough to be a hundred percent in. The one time she'd tempted fate was when Maya had convinced her to stay on the basketball team when she'd been thinking of quitting. And here, if she couldn't give a proper kind of contribution to the rest of the band, then she didn't want to risk bringing them down for her sake.

"So I know we haven't started yet, but I sort of maybe have a gig for us?" Rosa revealed as they were all moving to join Nadine in getting hold of their instruments. They looked at her.

"A gig?" Kayla asked, like she'd caught it off Rosa's lips but wanted to be sure.

"Yeah, uh, a girl in one of my classes, she's involved with this charity, and they're having a fundraiser. She asked if we'd perform," she explained. "It's in two weeks, she needs to know by Monday."

"I'm available," Riley raised her hand.

"Me, too," Nadine nodded.

"I'm in," Kayla signed.

"Alright, then, two weeks," Maya pressed her hands together. Rosa grinned, bouncing on her heels. "I might actually have a new song for us to debut there," Maya went on to reveal. "Still coming together, but I should have something for us to start working out in a few days. With some violin," she tossed a smile Nadine's way.

"This is something we started doing when we were in Houston and we'd have practice," Riley told their returned bandmate. "We'd start our sessions just playing around for a while. Someone would start us out and the rest would follow. You should start this one," she declared, looking around to see that the others were in agreement.

"Right, I can do that," Nadine smiled, thinking for a moment before pulling her violin into place. "Jump in when you know it," she told Maya, Riley, and Rosa, while also catching Kayla's eye and telegraphing what they'd get to understand was 'look at my foot.'

As she played, she kept the rhythm with it, which Kayla saw and figured out. She started to play, the two instruments lining up into a sound which soon drew in guitar, and bass, and keys, and soon voices. When the song was nearing its end, Rosa picked up the thread by directing them on to a new song, and the others soon followed. They kept up this chain through a third, fourth, and fifth song before pausing, with the exhilaration of finally playing music together again.

Maya had wanted very much for the basement to be ready for them, for the moment when they'd be doing… well, exactly what they were doing now. When she and Lucas had been working to get the house ready, before they truly moved in, she'd insisted on making this her project, and he'd supported it, keeping out of it unless she needed him to step in, which she never ended up needing. Their music room down in the basement in Houston had been a very important place, to the whole band, but she couldn't help being particularly aware of her own attachment to it.

She would remember so many moments in that place, big and small. Rosa's opening up with them, singing that song she'd learned from her father. All of them working on Christmas videos. Helping Shae. She vividly recalled the night of Halloween, nearly four years ago now, when she'd first believed she was pregnant, and there'd been the fiasco with not being able to look at those tests all night, and Lucas having to drive Joseph home when he'd shown up at the party… She'd ended up down there, in the basement, with Willow, and they'd passed some time by playing their instruments.

After four years out there, the place had been bursting with memories, and she'd inherited some of them, objects and memorabilia which now adorned this room. They had some additional benefits in that the room here was both bigger and further away from any neighbors who might take issue with the noise. They'd been lucky enough with who they had as neighbors back in Houston, but they didn't have to worry about any of that here, and they planned to take advantage of it.

"So, should we try and work out what we'll do for that fundraiser first?" Nadine asked, once their warm-up medley had ended and they'd paused to get some water.

"Yeah, definitely," Maya nodded. "Especially if we need to make any adjustments to the track to account for the violin."

Grabbing a pad and marker, Maya sat on the ground and started putting down a few titles, almost like a framework, spaced out over the page. They always started out this way, and it would be for her to do it because by now she'd been the one to write and compose the majority of their songs, and even the ones penned by Isadora were most familiar to her than the others. Once that frame was done, they would start and fill the list in. In this case, each new title was carefully considered, and each one that might need an 'update' was marked with an asterisk. By the time they were done, they had four of those, along with a couple where she'd put in a question mark, which was to say that they sort of thought they wouldn't need to change anything but they still preferred to confirm with a trial run.

"Is that your new song?" Rosa asked, pointing to the space she'd left blank in between brackets.

"Doesn't have a title yet, but what I've got of it so far tells me this is the spot for it," Maya nodded. Rosa gave her a look, with a tilt of her head toward Nadine, and she understood that easily enough. They all had crossed a moment where Maya had penned a song specifically geared to them, to put them in the spotlight. Rosa herself had been the first to get the treatment, but since then they'd all had one, Riley, Kayla, Willow… Now Nadine was back, so shouldn't she get hers? "Not yet," Maya whispered.

She wasn't going to start something and then shift it on to Nadine, it would feel too much like re-gifting. No, when she'd done the others' songs, it had always been theirs, right from the moment the first words or the first bit of melody came to her. This one had just been born of restlessness over hours of phone calls at work.

They'd still been in the middle of testing out those question marked songs when a light started to flash on the wall near the basement door. As they were all facing in that direction as they played and sang, they all saw it and stopped one by one.

"What's that?" Riley asked.

"My warning system," Maya laughed. It was the first chance she'd gotten to test it out. "Basically if it's flashing it means 'hey you're playing really loud so you can't hear it but someone just rang the doorbell so maybe go up there and see who it is.' Except, you know, without all those words," she explained as she pulled her guitar strap from around her neck, set the instrument down, and went dashing up the stairs with the dogs at her heels.

She heard the bell this time, and she hurried to the door to see who it was. She could only spot one person, a girl, from what she saw. Dark hair, tall… She'd only met her a couple times but that was definitely…

"Maeve, hi! Welcome! Please, come in," she smiled as she opened the door to Lucas' new friend from work, who accepted this invitation. She had a bag in either hand, and both seemed loaded with packs of red vines. "Woman after my own heart," Maya nodded.

"Am I early?" Maeve asked, noticing the complete lack of people, but also the presence of curious dogs. She crouched and was received by Trix and Lou, who clearly decided they liked this stranger.

"Depends on how you look at it. Band practice is still going on, you can sit in if you want."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners