A/N: The new chapter of "We Three Hearts" is now up!

July 22nd 2020

Chapter 204
Their Art of Learning

As Saturday morning rolled around, Lucas woke up with the express desire to let his wife sleep in. They had spent enough nights and mornings next to one another for him to know when she was fast asleep or on the brink of waking. Today, his early bird was curled up deep in her dreams and he could have pulled his arms away and left her there, but he didn't want to. He knew that as soon as she woke up she'd be as joyously alive as she'd been all week, ever since the school year had started.

On Monday morning, when he had left her on that bench outside the school, he could just see how she was still trying to shake away some excess nerves as she prepared to lead her first classes. He had spent all day working at the bookstore feeling that part of his brain was back there in that classroom with her, and he couldn't wait to hear what was likely to be a very long and very animated story. As promised, she had arrived at the store, shortly before his shift ended, to drive them both back home where her family would be joining them for dinner.

"You look like you had a good day," he'd smiled, finding her stepping off the escalator with such an air about her of just… release. She was floating.

"It was kind of perfect, and I'm just reminding myself that it was real," she'd told him, all the while setting herself to clip his pocket watch back at his belt loop and slipping it in his pocket when this had been achieved.

She had started telling him all about it as soon as they'd gotten in the car, and by the time they arrived home she was not done yet. And then there were Shawn and Katy and the kids, and Sam, and Rosa, and the tale was started again, though she kept most of the things she'd been telling him about this student or that student out of it. Later, after their guests had gone away and they had been readying for bed, she had picked up from where she'd left off at the car, back to telling him about her students. She was well at ease sharing these facts with him, he understood. She wouldn't go and air out everyone's business with other people, even if they were family, but then with him it was something else, very much essential to her at the end of the day.

"This morning it was just you and me, now tonight it's you and me and your seventy-six kids?" he'd asked, and she'd answered with a beaming nod. "I did always envision us with a big family," he'd reflected. Maya had laughed and, oh, how she looked ready for the next day.

In the morning, in this new normal of theirs, with the earlier sounding of the alarm clock, Mrs. Friar was up and about with an energy defying the hour. For his part, Mr. Friar was off to school, so they parted ways for the day as they walked out of the house and to their respective vehicles.

Lucas arrived late on Tuesdays this semester. As had been the norm, the others had waited for him before serving dinner, and he drove up to find Maya sitting on the porch, writing in the journal she had started the day before, adding to her notes, now that the day was done, with observations and ideas for the days and weeks to come.

"Hey," he stepped up to join her, leaning to kiss the top of her head.

"How was school?" she asked.

"Long lectures, good ones," he told her. "Gross ones, according to some people. I won't tell you why," he gestured toward the house as a way of saying 'since we're about to eat.'

"Thanks for that," she smiled. "I talked Mr. Matthews, about August?"

"Yeah? What'd he say?" Lucas asked, sitting next to her. She sighed, running her hand through her hair.

"Basically, he told me how he doesn't have the full picture, but August has had problems with some of the other kids, pretty much since the beginning, since they moved out here." Lucas didn't say anything here, but he didn't have to. He had never tolerated bullies, to the point where he'd been suspended after stepping between one of those and Zay, half a lifetime ago. "But he was coping, all this time. He had his friends, he had Michaela…"

"And now they're all gone," Lucas shook his head.

"And he's all alone, exposed," Maya bowed her head. She'd loved that kid for all seventeen years he'd been alive, loved him near enough like her twelfth sibling, and the idea of anyone causing him pain, physical or otherwise, left her with a twisted feeling in her gut.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'll talk to Riley, see if she can't pull anything else out of him. I just don't want him to think that we've all been talking about him behind his back and now it's not just his big sister trying to talk to him but actually his big sister the psychologist suggesting there's something wrong with him."

She hadn't had the chance to get in touch with Riley throughout the rest of the week, though Lucas knew she intended to get to it over the weekend. They were due to stop in at the house to see how she and Dylan were settling in. Until then, all she'd been able to do was to keep doing what she'd been doing, teaching her classes, being there for August while doing her best to maintain this distance like he was any other student and not her best friend's kid brother she had known since he was that thing that kicked inside his mother's belly.

It wasn't so difficult to keep things spread out like that, not when she had all those other kids to attend to, giving them their own share of her attention. Day by day, it got to be that she learned more about all of them, some more than others.

For one thing, she had gotten to understand a bit more about her timid ninth grader. After both Missy and Kai told her that they hadn't known Stella back in middle school, or elementary school, Maya had been left to wonder where she might have gone. As it turned out, the answer as provided by the school secretary was that she hadn't gone anywhere. Up until this year, she had been home schooled, making Monday her very first day in an actual school.

On Wednesday, she'd asked her about it. After the first day, Stella had started out arriving in her classroom ahead of everyone, to the point where Maya would return from lunch to find her sitting by the door, waiting to be let in. That third day, Maya had found her still in the process of eating her packed lunch, which suggested that she had come straight here after her previous class.

"Have you gone to the cafeteria at all?" she'd asked, while the girl collected her things.

"I went on Monday," Stella informed her.

"Too noisy?" Maya guessed, and she nodded. After a moment, getting the door unlocked, she turned to the fifteen-year-old with a thought. "Tomorrow, I'll wait to go until you get here, so you can go in instead of sitting out here, okay?" Stella nodded, at once appreciative. "I heard you were home schooled before?"

"I was," Stella confirmed, moving to put her bag down at her place before turning to her teacher.

"Go ahead, finish your lunch," Maya smiled, nodding back to her belongings. The two of them ended up sitting on a couple of stools.

"When I was going to start, when I was little, we were away from home for almost a year, for my mom's job, so I had a tutor. Then we came back, and it just sort of stayed that way. When we moved out here, my parents asked if I wanted to go to an actual school, and I said no."

"What made you change your mind now?" Maya asked, as Stella took a break and had the rest of her sandwich. She gave off the impression of not being in the habit of talking for very long at a time.

"They did. They kept saying how it could be the perfect time now to give it a shot, if I was going to." One look at her said plenty on how much and how little she was adjusting to the change.

Since that day, as promised, Maya waited in her classroom for Stella to arrive. Once she did, and she settled at her place, Maya went off to the teachers' lounge for lunch. She would return to find the girl either doing homework one day, looking out the window the other. As little as she spoke unless spoken to, Maya was getting to know her in other ways, in the things she did during class time. Her 'introduction' piece had been like a conduit right to the heart of her.

Stella Buckley wasn't the only one to show herself in her art. Regardless of how any one of them would classify their skills, Maya would look at all of it and pick up on what each of those kids had to say in the way they worked. She'd look to Phoebe's work, and she'd see a lot of what she'd said, how she loved to draw but found her skills lacking. What she'd mostly see though was someone who applied herself deeply, regardless of what the results might become in her eyes. She also saw a girl with a head full of ideas, just yearning to bring some of them out into the real world.

Daphne Brett, in tenth grade, was 'all her mother,' as her father had said. This had been shown to her art teacher in the first week. Her father may have been a man of science through and through, but Daphne herself was devoted to creation, to imagination. She was a writer, and she called herself and her father 'science and fiction.' One day, she claimed, the two of them would put their heads together and create 'the greatest space opera the world has ever seen.' Maya believed her.

Of that same group, she could look to someone like Dakota Day. The boy came off as very aloof, and more than once Maya had needed to repeat his name when she would call on him. But then as distracted as he came off on the outside, she would see what he put down on paper and find maybe it wasn't so much that he was distracted but that pulling together the pieces of his mind required that extra time. Once he accomplished it, what he achieved was sort of remarkable.

When Maya's calls to spacy Dakota did not do, it would then fall to stationmate Ariel Su to tap him on the arm until he looked up. The way she told it, she had been named for how she had first kicked in her mother's belly while she was attending the Broadway production of the Little Mermaid. If she could be said to share any other characteristics with the mermaid girl, it would be her curiosity, her need for discovery. She could not leave something incomplete, no matter what. A couple times over the week, whether in Maya's class or another teacher's who then told her about it, she would be on the tail end of reading a chapter of the large novel she carried around as she walked into class, and would be found bent over it and reading as fast as she could when the bell rang.

Maya had finished each day of this first week with the junior class. They were her smallest group, but she saw this as a benefit. It meant she got to spend more time with each of them. Whether she meant to or not, each of her classes inevitably presented her with a few standouts, in one way or another. With her last group, no exception, it came to a pair of boys.

On the one side, in what really felt like a face off, sat Leon Morales. He gave Maya vibes of Lucas' classmate and friend, Bishop Nicholas, for how physically impressive he was. Tall and built like a linebacker... a gentle giant. To see him at his station, balanced on that stool, he really stood out. And then, on his drawn introduction, she would find a lot of what he had said on that first day. He was an athlete, yes, and he also liked to draw. It was peaceful to him, the best way he knew to relax and clear his mind.

On the other side of this was Derek Boggs, who was by no means a small guy, though stood next to Leon could be pinned with a nickname like Pipsqueak. In some ways, this one reminded Maya of Tyler, the boy from Shae's class back in Houston. He had something of an attitude, that could not be denied, and Maya had a feeling that sooner or later she'd have to send him to the principal, or give him detention. But for all of it, what she saw from his work, even from his words, she could almost see it, see the seams of this facade of his. Whether or not he'd ever let her see underneath it in the next two years remained to be seen.

Still, with her seniors, it was hard for her not to be focused on August Matthews, but then the rest of the class commanded her attention all the same. She would look to the Janaceks, who easily infused the room with their connection as brother and sister and the fact that younger Milena's presence would sometimes leave older Tony feeling like his kid sister was encroaching on his world. As much as he'd look quietly annoyed, he clearly loved her more than just about anyone else in the world.

The other thing she saw from them, along with Tony being a remarkable sketch artist, and Milena being a self-proclaimed color fiend, was the beginnings of what might be a new circle forming around lonely August. Tony would always intervene when someone teased him, and this in kind brought Milena to pay more attention to the Matthews boy. There was no telling how this would all resolve itself, but for now... there was promise, hope.

"Morning," Lucas spoke quietly, as Maya began to stir in his arms. He kissed her shoulder, just as she turned toward him. "Happy to sleep in?" he asked, smiling for the smile she gave him.

"I was having a really good dream, now I guess I know why," she nodded. The last week had been so much about the school. Now, these days were for him and her.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners