July 24th 2020

Chapter 206
Their Autumn For Decoration

"That's your brother?" Ariel Su blurted out. When Maya turned to look at her, the sophomore girl appeared to remember herself, and the fact that she was speaking to one of her teachers. "I-I mean he seems nice…" she stated now, before quietly bending back over the banner she and a few others were working on, along the gym floor. Maya chuckled, getting up. "How come he doesn't go here?"

"Because he's a big smartypants and he's in his third year of college," she told her student before moving to greet Sam. For Ariel's sake, she would keep private the fact that she found him cute. "Hey, thanks for coming," she told him. Just at the same moment, they both sort of stopped and looked at each other like 'do we hug?' and decided against it.

"Where do you want me?"

"Can you go see how the seniors are doing with the scavenger hunt?" Maya pointed to the table where a handful of her class were bent over a map and arguing. Sam looked at them, turning back a moment later to where he'd seen August Matthews working on signs for the maze with the freshmen.

"Shouldn't he be over there with them?" Sam asked his sister.

"Nothing wrong with some mingling between classes. Come on, off you go," she nudged him off toward the scavengers. Once he'd gone off of his own volition, Maya sighed and looked back to the maze group.

She'd talked to Riley about August, the weekend after her first week. Her best friend had been so eager to hear all about how it went for her at the school, beyond the brief reports she'd gotten over texts. Maya had been happy to fill her in with as many details as she felt able to provide. All the while, she kept thinking about the thing she had been wanting to talk about, trying not to feel like she was pushing it back again and again, like it didn't matter. Finally, Riley had been the one to open to the door for her as she'd gone on to ask about how her brother had been as a student.

"He's great, you know, he… Well, he's less about purple cats than you were," she smiled, and Riley laughed. "He's… He's different than at home," Maya went on.

"What do you mean?" Riley asked. Maya hesitated for a moment.

"Like… a bit closed off? Or just… not like August. And sure, I get how high school can be, we've been there. But I look at him, and it's just coming off him in waves, like… he doesn't want to be there, but he has to be. His father's a teacher there, so he doesn't want to let him down…" Now I'm there, too.

Riley had taken all this in, and Maya could see how her thoughts existed in two places. She was his big sister, and she loved him and had cared for him all his life, even if they had gone through their share of sibling issues when they were younger. She was also a trained psychologist now, and everything she was told now was bound to be clicking through her head, taking paths forged through her years in school, and all her training, until she would get to the end with two possibly opposed responses. Whatever the psych side had to say, Maya was not surprised to find the sister side was the one to gain voice first. If she could help it, that would be the only voice any of them needed.

"I had no idea…" she'd said, sounding at once so deeply saddened to realize it. This was her kid brother, and he'd been having troubles without her seeing it. But then her sadness was twisted with confusion, with just a bit of upset. "Dad knows about this? He has to, he…"

"Him and your mom, yeah," Maya had to confess. "I think they just didn't want to put that on you, too, or… I don't know… Right now, what I'm most concerned about is I have a student that's also like one of my brothers, and his problems have to do with the school, somehow. I can't just sit by, but I don't know how to approach it. If I handle this wrong, he'll shut me out, and he won't let me back in so easily."

"No," Riley replied, agreeing. This much she knew to be true about her brother. "Maybe if you sort of… play 'hide the vegetables' with him?"

"Where the vegetables would be… helping him," Maya slowly stated. Riley nodded. "No matter what's going on with him, your brother is still clever, more than most," Maya reminded her. "What if he sees through me?"

"Hide them real good."

All she'd been able to do over the second week of class was to feed him the occasional 'veggie.' It wasn't as though she wouldn't have done it anyway, but until she knew how to go about things with him, it was all she could do. She continued to hold by his wish for her not to 'reveal' her connection to him outside school, even if she could see the flaw in this plan like the inevitable undoing. It went something like 'many students know about the band' followed by 'if they know the band, they know Riley is part of it' and then 'if they know Riley and August are siblings, then obviously he has to know me, too.' So far, it hadn't come up.

"Watch it!"

Maya had heard that tone shift a number of times by now, and she turned to where she knew she would find Derek, from her junior class. His group was tasked with making some of the smaller signage, for the festival itself, and also to advertise it, around the school, in certain spots in the area and at the park… Last she'd seen him, he'd been zoned in on his own offering to the effort. Someone had very nearly spilled paint over it, and Derek looked ready to either leap at whoever had done it or to just trash his own work and storm off.

"Pete, can you clean that up?" Maya tried to sweep up to the table and defuse the situation as casually as possible. The boy moved off to get paper towels, while the others carefully pulled everything away from the spreading stain. "Did any of it get on some of your posters?" Maya asked the table. It hadn't. "Good, alright," she smiled, looking at everyone's work. "Looks like you guys have a plan going," she added after noticing the common sort of aesthetic they had going, making the whole thing look like a blackboard with an ornate fall-themed frame before adding the text to look like chalk. "You know, we could do one of those around the board in the class," she suggested, indicating the border around Derek's poster as an example. "Maybe the other teachers would like one, too."

The students around the table agreed one by one that they liked the idea and would be up for doing a board somewhere if it came to be that the others were okay with it. When it came down to Derek being the last one to pronounce himself, Maya turned to him. Much as he'd go and present himself like a big talker, he was on the whole as respectful as they came when it came to her, or any of the teachers she'd seen him interact with.

"I can do that, yeah," he spoke quietly, like he was still coming down from his flare up, but didn't want to land so abruptly as make it feel that he had been deflated.

"Great, keep it up. I'll let you know about the classrooms, but just so we're clear… Mine goes first," she declared, making a few of them laugh.

Moving about the gym, checking on this group and that one, Maya felt what Mr. Matthews, and Lindsay, and then Lucas back home, had in one way or another referred to as her 'new teacher glow.' Where her colleagues were concerned, there was just a hint of this coming with a warning, like it might wear off, though she didn't hold to that idea too long. Meanwhile, where Lucas was concerned, the 'accusation' generally led to a bit of kissing and some other affections, so really she welcomed it whenever it came up. It was all true, after all. After a little over two weeks of this, she still felt something like giddiness in her for being here, and she was going to hold to that for as long as she possibly could.

She'd already filled several pages of her first 'teaching sketchbook,' one of the slowly shrinking pile gifted to her around the wedding and of the same batch as the Paris travel log, with some of these giddy feelings of hers. If she ever thought she had started to lose any of those, all she had to do was browse through the pages again. She'd started a series of portraits now, one each to all of her students. She couldn't wait to get to the point where she had some of these in complete series, from freshmen to seniors, all her kids evolving before her eyes.

"Phoebe, how did you even…" Maya stopped and stared at the girl currently sitting on the ground while Stella put the first aid kit to good use and applied a band aid to her classmate's forehead.

"You know, I think it all gets a lot easier if I stop asking 'how' and just go with 'figures.' Ow!" she winced, making Stella startle.

"Sorry, sorry!" she mumbled. "I'm done," she promised, stepping back. Phoebe reached up to feel at her forehead.

"Thanks," she told Stella with a smile, as the other girl let out a breath and nodded before gathering the bits of wrapping from the bandage and scurrying to throw them in the trash.

Maya tried not to look at August any differently from any of the others in this group, though under these circumstances it was kind of hard. Here he sat, with Missy and Kai nearby, those two having their connection to her right there for anyone to know, and then Phoebe Munroe, back again with one of her TXNY shirts. August's eyes kept flicking to it, like it was only a matter of time before someone put together how they knew each other. As happy as he always said he was that she was here as his teacher, sometimes she had to wonder if he really saw it as her making things even more complicated for him. There wasn't much she could do about that.

"Hey, how's it looking out here?" Maya asked the seniors and Sam as she approached their table.

"It's starting to look less like a scavenger hunt and more like a road trip," Milena Janacek reported, looking to her older brother. Tony looked like he was developing a headache. Sam was just casually and very efficiently showing some of the others his techniques for making realistic paper leaves.

"You know the area we're meant to cover, just stick to that," Maya laughed, leaning on her forearms to look across their growing map. "Bring it in, yeah?" she told the group.

"We're going to need a clean map," Milena nodded. Tony went ahead and laid his head on the table top.

"It's going to be great when it's done," Maya declared with confidence, tapping the boy's shoulder before moving off to chat with Lindsay Alcott. The Fall Festival was really coming together. It was really getting to be like the kickoff to her favorite part of the year, and she couldn't wait for it to start.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners