September 7th 2020

Chapter 251
Their Flight to Sleepover

"Can we sit all the way in the front?" Eliza asked as the group marched on its way from the restaurant where they'd had dinner and over to the movie theater. Maya had been to Tucson a number of times, ever since her siblings had relocated from New York to live here, and by now the city had started to feel much less like a place she was still getting to know and much more like an extension of home. That wasn't just her house, up on the lane, with Lucas and Sam and the dogs, was it? It was anywhere her family was, and a sizable part of that family was here, in Tucson.

"You won't see anything," Cara told her little sister. "You'll hurt your eyes… and your neck."

"They wouldn't put seats there if you couldn't see the screen," Eliza countered, with a self-satisfied smirk. Emma, forever on her side, backed this up with a firm nod.

"You can go and sit in that front row if you want," Maya told the girls. "So long as you don't wander off and I always know where you are, okay? That means if you have to go to the bathroom you need to tell me first." The girls looked very satisfied with this arrangement, and they accepted it at once. "Anyway, we'll save you seats with us for when you figure out that the first row is no good," Maya added, almost in the same breath, and Eliza and Emma frowned, while Cara laughed.

"If they go, I want to go, too," Ginny informed her cousin.

"Me, too!" Sadie piped in, only to have her attention pulled ahead of them. "Look, there's Declan," she pointed to the ticket booth. "He's like us, you know?" she told Maya.

"I do, yeah," Maya confirmed with a smile.

"He's half Asian, like us, except we're Chinese, and he's Japanese," Ginny made sure to specify. But the other half is Irish, that part's the same."

"Thanks for the rundown," Maya nodded. "You guys spend a lot of time together?"

"He's there a lot when we go to Aunt Abby's house," Sadie told her.

Maya didn't know what was more amusing here, her cousins' Declan Report, or how Cara looked caught between wanting them to hurry up and get to the booth and wanting to make sure all this talk wouldn't get anywhere awkward. Apart from her, Riley looked like the only one to grasp this, and laughed when she nudged her oldest sister forward as the last people between them and the booth grabbed their tickets and moved along. The boy behind the glass had already spotted the little group coming along, with his girlfriend there among them, and his gaze had been divided between her and his previous customers. Once they'd gone and he could finally give her his complete attention, his whole face seemed to light up.

"Hey!" he spoke, reaching his hand through the opening in the glass, clasping Cara's hand as she came up to the counter and reached in, too. "I didn't know you guys were coming tonight, and…"

When he took in the rest of the group, he noticed Maya at once. There was really no mistaking who she was related to. He would likely have seen pictures, probably more, as Cara was bound to have shown him band videos, and he didn't look so surprised to find her here, so he had to know about the sleepover, but this was the first time they met, and knowing Cara, she would have painted her big sister as nothing short of an icon in her life. This would have stood level with meeting the parents.

"I hear breathing helps," Maya told him, from behind the pack of girls standing between the booth and her. Cara squeezed the boy's hand and he blinked. From what Maya had been hearing, meeting Abigail and James had been like this.

"I'm paying, remember?" Sadie tapped her cousin's elbow.

"Yes, you've reminded me a few times," Maya teased, reaching in her pocket and handing over the money to her eight-year-old cousin, who pushed ahead of the pack now and dropped the bills in front of Declan, telling him what movie they wanted to see. After a beat, he tapped at his screen, took the money, and grabbed the tickets as they printed. He passed the small stack over to Sadie with the reverence of one who had met this request enough times to treat his small customers with the same respect as the adult ones. The fact that he was very good and very familiar with small girls, from dealing with his little sisters, was a bonus.

"Enjoy your movie," he nodded to the whole group. He gave Maya a nod she took to mean 'it's really nice to meet you.' She came very close to borrowing a move from her husband and tipping an invisible hat to him in passing.

"Text me when you're home," Cara told him as she followed the group. Declan nodded, back to reality and his job.

"Is he always this fidgety?" Maya asked her sister as they went in. The rest of the girls had made a run for the concession stand, Riley chasing after them, reminding them of the fact they'd just had dinner and they had all those things back at the house.

"He'll relax once he gets to know you more," Cara explained, almost blushing. "He just wants to make a good impression. Not that he's not good the rest of the time, but well there's you, and there's Sam back in Texas…"

"Team Big Siblings," Maya grinned.

"Ready to kick his butt if he does anything wrong," Cara laughed.

"Who? Us?" Maya 'defended' herself.

"He's going to be applying to go to school in Austin, too, when I do," Cara revealed, and this was news to her big sister. "Which means he's going to be seeing a lot of you two… and Lucas, too."

"Where's he going to be staying, an apartment, or…"

"He and the guys from his band are looking to get a place together, but if that doesn't work out he'll get in the dorms." She spoke with the confidence of one who had worked out this plan well enough already, probably so that, when she did bring it up, she wouldn't show any kind of uncertainty. Maya couldn't deny she was proud of her in that moment, though she tried not to show it too much and end up taking the fight out of her.

"He'll need a place to practice his music if he does that and he still wants to play. Now if only he had access to someone whose sister had a studio at her disposal…" she hummed. Cara just squealed, side-hugging her sister.

Maya had soon discovered, as she'd been put in a position to do so, that going to the movies with her family, with multiple younger brothers or sisters especially, would often be more memorable for what they had all done together than about the movie itself. Oh, it wasn't as though they didn't pay attention or didn't enjoy it, far from that. But if asked 'how was the movie?' tonight, she would first and foremost talk about meeting Cara's boyfriend, and then Eliza and Emma's adventures in the first row. They'd finally decided to give it a shot when they'd walked into the theater and gone to find their spot. The lights had gone down, the previews had started… Before the movie had even started, they had climbed up to rejoin their Sleepster crew and plopped down into their saved seats without a word.

The ride back to the house had been spent belting out one of the songs from the movie, which had been on enough of a radio rotation already as to be familiar to the girls. The Chen girls were particularly thrilled at getting to exceed their normal bed time because of the sleepover. Their mother had told them that they could stay up until Maya told them it was time to go to sleep, and then they had to do as she told. So long as they weren't sleepy zombies on Monday morning when they went to school, then all was well.

They arrived back to find a quiet house. Teddy sat on the couch, headphones on his head to cut the sound of his game on the big screen while he had his baby sister strapped to his chest, his arms around her until they met at the controller in his hands. Maisie slept, and so did Wyatt, curled up on the couch next to him. When he noticed the others had returned, Teddy paused his game and pulled off the headset.

"Hey," he whispered.

"Wild night here?" Riley asked, smirking much as Maya and Cara did.

"He tried to tough it out, but he was nodding off for a while. Finally gave it up, but I left him here in case he woke up."

"As tempting as it would be to wake him, I think he'll be better off heading up to bed," Maya nodded. Teddy stood now, carefully pulling the babe from the sling and passing her over. Cara deferred to her older sister, and Maya gladly took her, the better to enjoy all the Maisie cuddles she could get while she had the chance. Teddy left the sling on the couch before lifting up his sleeping brother and carrying him up the stairs. He let them know he'd be staying up in his own room, so they could have the living room if they weren't going to bed yet.

"Do we have to go?" Ginny asked, her little sister echoing her 'I don't want to go yet' face. Maya looked at the time, shared a look and a silent conversation with Riley, before turning back to her cousins.

"One hour, or whenever I get a yawn out of either of you. Deal?" The girls agreed. "We are way too dressed for this, go on and get your PJs on, all of you," Maya herded them up the stairs.

A few minutes later, they returned down the stairs after having dropped Maisie off at her crib and grabbing the baby monitor. There was a bit of fascination, as was to be expected, from the Chen girls, when they noticed the flowered branch tattoo peeking out of either side of her camisole strap. They had never seen it before. Next thing they knew, Maya was provided with washable markers and put to work in drawing some temporary tattoos for the rest of the Sleepster crew.

She finished Cara's – who asked for music notes, over her heart – when her phone gave off the chirp of an incoming text, and she disappeared up the stairs, promising to be back in a few minutes. Maya watched her go. Whether she liked it or not, her little sister was growing up. It had been a hard truth to come by when it had been Sam, the one she'd been closest to, always, but he'd always been so much more reserved, awkward, and if it wasn't that he kept getting taller, they would hardly notice that he was getting older for a while.

But Cara… Cara had always been bolder than him, something she shared with their big sister. Here and now, it really felt as though Maya was seeing it more than ever. Her sister may still have been a teenager, but in many ways she was so much more of an adult at this age than their brother had been, and he'd already been in college at the time. If it wasn't that she'd already agreed to take her in at the house over her college years, Maya would have wanted it more than ever, just so that she would be provided with a chance to get to know her little sister and the woman she was growing into.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners