July 30th 2020

Chapter 212
Their Surprise From November

"You're going the right way toward a guitar collection, aren't you?" Ree Forster smiled as she picked up the one Maya had received from Charlie's father-in-law, custom made.

"I only have three," Maya shrugged, chuckling.

"Most people have one if they have that at all," Ree pointed out. "You get past two and that's when you find yourself teetering on the edge of 'well I don't have one like that.' Then it's all over and you need a room to put them all in."

"How many do you have?" Maya could only ask.

"Now, let's see," Ree paused to think, which already said a lot. "There are eight of them back in Manchester, and I've got eleven more out here… And I have three going with me wherever I go, so twenty-one," she finally declared, laughing at the stunned look on Maya's face. "One of these days, I'll have to take you with me when I go shopping."

"That… That would be great, actually." She wasn't sure where she would put them all if she ended up with that many, but that was a sufficiently distant issue for her not to feel she needed to think it over so much right here and now. As it was, she was plenty busy.

She made it a point to attend at least one of the weekend sessions of Stage Ready every week, even as she and Lily continued to meet and correspond on Fridays. They were drawing ever closer to the holidays, which proved to be some of their busiest times, apart from summer with the camp. So, they were looking to sort of combine the two points, with a shorter winter camp for kids looking to attend over the break from school. It would be the most time she got to spend at the theater since September had rolled around, as of course the bulk of her time was taken up with being at the school.

With what felt like an impossible two months, going on three months under her belt now, Maya could absolutely say she was where she belonged. Oh, she'd known this before, known it right from the start, but then time advanced, and she couldn't help but be made bolder for the fact that the feeling had not left her, the feeling that told her she loved being in the building, in that room, with those kids every day. All the nerves had gone away, and she really could not understand where they had come from anymore.

In all those weeks, she had seen her kids through highs and lows, and she really got to feel like she understood her own past teachers so much better now. There had been some of them who really got to the point where maybe the work had stopped meaning what it had once meant to them, sure, but there were always plenty more who left a mark on her, and on others, too, who had seen her through the stages of her education. Now she was on the other side, and much as she wasn't surprised at her own ease in getting attached to all those students who walked into her class every day, it was really about how much they all came to mean to her. She called them her kids, and even though they were all anywhere from six to ten years younger than her, their futures mattered so much to her, every last one of their futures.

Their present mattered to her, too, right here and now as they walked her high school halls.

Her being the art teacher didn't exactly place her in the same bracket as anything like English, or Algebra, or Science, but then that wasn't a bad thing, was it? A lot of the kids would chat with her when they saw her around school, sometimes when they ran into her somewhere in town. Maybe her age played into some of that, too, she couldn't say.

But as days had turned to weeks, and the pages on the calendar had turned once, and twice, Maya started to see some of her students start and come to her, to talk to her, not just about some curiosity or discovery they'd made. They'd started to come to her when they needed someone to talk to, when they didn't know who else they might go to. One of her seniors had come to her, at the end of the day, because the girl who had been supposed to be her best friend had done something terribly embarrassing to her and she didn't know how to handle it, how to even go home, to show her face back here the next day. Then, one of her sophomores had seen her out at the grocery store one weekend and sort of trailed around a while before working up the courage to approach her. Even when he'd done this, he'd started to turn and walk away, changing his mind, and might have succeeded if she hadn't spotted him about three aisles back. Rosa had gone on with the basket, leaving Maya and the boy to go and talk.

Then, of course, there was Stella, who had adopted her for a sort of big sister from day one, in the bathroom, and had since been a staple of her classroom at lunch. Between her lunch dates with Lucas on Mondays, and her meetings with Lily on Friday, neither of which would take the entire period, the two of them had easily had the most conversations, more than Maya and any other of her students, those she'd met at the start of the school year anyway. A close second was blooming in the form of Phoebe Munroe, almost by default. Stella was still uneasy about having lunch in the cafeteria with all those loud people, but she was finding a genuine and close friend in Phoebe, the feeling mutual between both girls, so how could she not want to share her meals with her?

The two girls had come up to her after class one day, like they were about to go and present a very important project to their boss. They wanted permission for Phoebe to also have lunch in the art classroom every day.

"You're not going to build a whole club in here? Turning this place into Café Artiste?" The girls had shaken their heads at once. "Alright, fine, we can give it a shot," she'd shrugged, and the girls had smiled. "I'm leaving you in charge," Maya had pointed to Stella, who'd given a clean nod. She understood, and she was happy.

So far, the joint lunches had gone well, no incidents logged, which was saying something with the accident-very-prone Phoebe being part of the equation.

On a Friday night date with Lucas at the movie theater, Maya had come upon Milena Janacek working the concessions stand. It was hard not to remember the days when their friends worked here, when it had been Riley standing behind that counter. The thought now had put a thought in Maya's head, and she'd asked her student if she might have a couple minutes to spare. By chance, she was about to go on break, so she'd stepped out from her spot and followed Maya to one of the tables nearby.

"Look, I might be stepping over some lines here, and if you don't think you can tell me anything, you don't have to." Milena had looked confused, like possibly she'd done something wrong. Maya had quickly reassured her that this wasn't the case. "I want to talk to you about August."

Much as she'd meant to be a bit more direct about the whole thing, so far she had not managed to do a single thing. There were a number of factors for it, a lot to do with timing, but she hadn't forgotten. She would still see him, so unlike the boy he was outside of school. She'd seen him, several times since the start of the year, she could witness it for herself, how his smiles would return, and his bouts of mischief, his energy, would be on the rise as well. And then he'd be at school, and all those switches would be turned off again.

"I was looking at Mrs. Yang's files about all of you guys, from freshman year up to when she left last spring. When I looked at August's file, I…" She couldn't go into details, that would not have been right, she knew. She had to keep herself within some parameters. "The two of you weren't in the same classes until a couple years ago, obviously," she stated. Milena would have been a year behind, until she'd jumped straight from finishing eighth grade to starting tenth along with her brother, and August, too."

"Yeah, I met him when we started tenth grade," Milena nodded. "He was the first person to say hi to me and not 'what's this kid doing here, is she new?'" she recalled. "It was really nice of him." She grew quiet after this, like her mind had gone somewhere, and Maya didn't want to appear so desperate, but she knew… Wherever Milena's mind had gone, that was the place Maya needed to go, too.

"Something changed, didn't it?" she'd asked, and the girl had looked back up to her. "Something happened with August?"

"Your movie is going to start," Milena had spoken after a moment, rising from her seat. Whether she didn't want to get into it here, or whether she didn't want to get into it at all, Maya couldn't say, but that had been the end of it, and so far neither she nor Milena had brought it up again. She went on acting normally whenever they saw each other, but whatever had happened in tenth grade never came up at all.

Deep down, all she could hope was that, in time, August would feel that he could come and speak to her, the way the others had done. She really, really hoped that he would, though she wondered if, for him, she was simply too close to home, like pretty much anyone else in this school where his father worked.

"Maya? Are you ready to begin?"

She blinked, her wandering thoughts returning here, to the Hex, to Ree sitting by her side.

"Yes, no, of course, yes," she straightened up in her seat, looking over the sheet for the two songs they were looking to lay down today, the first two for the album.

"Is something wrong?" Ree asked, naturally seeing right through her response.

"I was just… thinking about my kids… my students," she revealed. "There's so many of them, sooner or later one of them tends to pop up," she went on, which was by no means a lie, though it was definitely a misdirection, turning them away from what she'd been thinking.

"I can imagine, yes," Ree chuckled.

"But I'm here with you now, so I'll just put all that aside," Maya promised.

"Are you sure?" Ree kindly asked.

"Sure," Maya smiled. "I'm really excited to see what we can get done today in here," she touched the controls in front of them. She had used them, had the band in here enough that they were able to get a handle on how everything worked, but now, with Ree here, it felt like they would finally get to see these gifts used to their full potential. "You know I've been teaching Lucas to play?" she revealed, nodding over to her guitar.

"Yeah?" Ree laughed, like she believed her a much more patient person than herself at the thought of doing the same with her own husband. "Is he any good?"

"That whole golden boy thing of his, it might not be a catch all, but every once in a while, he pulls things off like you wouldn't believe. He's getting really good," Maya confirmed.

"Might be time to add a new guitar to your stables then," Ree pointed out with a grin. "How about we move up that shopping day of ours while I'm in town?"

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners