September 19th 2020

Chapter 263
Their Step to Depart

Monday afternoon – 11th grade field trip

"Alright, I'm going to need everyone to stop moving around so I can count you off before you get on the bus!" Maya called over the milling group of kids as they stood out in the parking lot. She may have graduated high school seven years ago already, but she remembered exactly what this feeling was right here, as they waited to leave school for a field trip. For that, she couldn't very well blame them for this hyperactivity, but she also developed a brand new bit of sympathy for her teachers, when they'd had to wrangle her and her classmates. This wasn't even like those big outings where they had several bus loads to look after, only one class at a time, and she was used to dealing with those groups one by one.

After a floating chorus of 'Sorry' or 'Okay' or 'Sorry, Mrs. Friar,' they came to a standstill, and she was able to check them off from the list in her head. At the beginning of the year, she had them memorized in alphabetical order, and she would count them out that way. By now, it was more like she would visualize them all sitting at their stations and she'd work through each one, from door side to window side. Everyone was present and accounted for… Well, just about.

"So, we're all here?" Derek Boggs asked, when her hand went down.

"The class is all here, yes," Maya confirmed, and he started to move toward the bus, which led the others to follow. "Hey, now, hold on, not yet," Maya stalled them. "We're still waiting on a couple people, who are running late," she informed them, the latter end of her statement coming as she turned to look at the street, hoping to see a car turn into the lot at that moment.

"Who else is coming?" Leon Morales inquired. Finally, she spotted the familiar car and smiled.

"You're about to find out," she told him. Now the rest of the group was watching the car, too, made curious by the statement. They could all see that there were two people in the front of the car, and when it came to a stop, the passenger door opened. When said passenger emerged, it got the entire group clamoring, none more than Derek, who was suddenly all smiles as he jogged to reach and embrace his best friend.

Almost as soon as the field trips had been approved by the principal, and set up with the museum, the idea had come to Maya. It was the kind of idea you just couldn't abandon once you had it, at least that was the case for Maya. It had been all too easy to pull off, too. She had access to her students' contact information, and so she had reached out to the Zimmerman family, especially to their daughter, Helena. The seventeen-year-old, soon to be eighteen, had come on to the call sounding at once like she knew the stranger on the phone, which told Maya that she'd been kept up to date on school developments by her best friend, everything from the regular gossip to the presence of a new art teacher. The way she spoke, it gave Maya the impression that Derek had mentioned her a lot, and with high standings.

When she'd asked her if she would like to join the group for their field trip to the museum, Helena had jumped at the chance. And then when Maya had suggested they surprise everyone else with her presence, she'd jumped at that, too. No one had known. Derek had definitely not known. As much as he had been looking forward to her return, the others had done so, too. They had all of them been in classes together, most of them as far back as pre-school. Her being sick, her being gone, it had left a void they were very happy to find closed with her return.

"What took you so long?" Maya turned to Lucas after he came over to join her.

"We had to drive back halfway," Lucas explained, before giving her the whole story.

His part of the surprise had been simple enough. Go pick up Helena, bring her to the school. Well, he had gone to the Zimmerman house, and he'd rung the bell, where he'd been greeted by the girl's mother. As it turned out, Helena's mother knew his mother, through some social group or another, so at the very least he came into that house trusted to depart with the woman's teenage daughter.

When she'd been called down, the girl had come practically bounding down the stairs, sending her ponytail swishing along. Her mother had seen her out the door with so many questions and demands, and Helena showed patience mixed with 'oh, please, can I just go already' in her eyes, answering each query as it came before finally kissing her mother's cheek and turning to follow her future new teacher's husband. They got in the car, and they chatted for a couple minutes as they drove off, but then she grew quiet.

"You nervous about seeing them?" Lucas had asked.

"Huh? Oh… A little, I guess," Helena admitted, seeming to realize why he asked a moment later. "But that's not, I…" She hesitated, looking at him, out the window, down at her hands, up at her reflection in the rear-view mirror… "Can you pull over for a minute?" she finally asked, and Lucas did as asked before turning to her.

"What's going on?"

The girl looked nervous now, but only for a moment. After that, she seemed to be admonishing herself for that feeling. Then, she reached up with both hands, her fingers slipping along her hairline. Even as Lucas realized what she was doing, Helena lifted the mass of brown hair from her head, revealing it to be a wig. Underneath, her head was covered by a very short but strengthening bit of hair just a shade or two lighter. She ran a hand over it, like she was still getting used to it being there again.

"I spent all morning deciding whether to wear it or not," she explained, looking to the wig now sitting in her lap, instantly made to look out of place in its heap, even as she tried to maintain its shape. "None of them have ever seen me like this," she pointed to her head. "Only Derek. I don't know if I'm ready, but… it feels like I should." Lucas let her work it through on her own. He would only intervene if he felt she needed him to. "My mom says 'it's just hair,' but it's not, at least not out there. It's like… when I'm at home, it doesn't matter. They've seen me through all of it, the low parts, and the parts even lower than that. But at school, they just… I left one day, looking like me, and now I'm going back like this. I don't want them looking at me like all I am is what happened to me."

"It happened," Lucas nodded. "Past tense. You're here now. You made it through. You get to decide what you want them to see."

A minute later, he was turning the car around, and they were driving back to the Zimmerman house, where Helena dashed out, placed the wig in her mother's custody, and returned to the car. When she stepped out again, in the school lot, she did so with not a hint of a slouch. And whether or not her classmates took notice of her hair, the only thing they expressed was how happy they were to see her, and to know that she would be among them in the fall, for their senior year.

"I've never seen him smile like that," Lucas nodded over to where Derek stood, next to Helena, as everyone took their turn hugging her, greeting her…

"I did, a couple of times," Maya smiled. She was doing her best not to go and get overly emotional, watching her juniors be so happy. "I think I'll be seeing it a lot more now." She couldn't stop thinking of the boy she'd met, at the beginning of the year, how much her perception of him had changed, informed as it was from the journey of all those months from strangers to where they were now, like a family unit that existed within the walls of their school.

"Should we get going?" Lucas asked her, nodding to the bus driver, who was staring back at them and pointing to his watch. Maya blinked and moved.

"Yeah…" she headed toward the students and Lucas followed. "Continue the reunion on the bus, guys, we gotta go," she clapped her hands together to get their attention and they started to move, climbing on to the bus and taking their seats.

The ride to the museum very nearly cost them the participation of their driver for the remainder of the week, as the kids all kept trying to get their turn at talking with Helena, asking her questions, telling her about some thing or another that had happened at school while she had been gone. The girl might have been overwhelmed by it all, but then it soon came to feel as though she was much too happy to be around them all again, and so she welcomed the non-stop conversation. Possibly securing the driver's continued presence was Lucas, talking to him and giving him other things to think about, while Maya tried to get the students to not move around the moving vehicle so much.

Maya didn't get a chance to really speak with the returning girl until after they had returned to the school after the museum. Part of the deal for bringing Helena along with them had been that she would be driven to and from the school, and so as Lucas drove them, Maya sat in the back with her student.

"I never got the chance to say thank you," Helena told her. "I really needed this. I think if I had to see them all again on the first day of school in the fall, I would have been so much more freaked out. Now that part is done at least."

"It was my pleasure," Maya smiled. "And I got to finally meet you. The way Derek, and Mr. Brett, and… pretty much anyone I've talked to have spoken about you, I couldn't wait." Now Helena was the one to smile, like she already felt a kinship to her new art teacher.

"Would it be okay if I did the project, too? The final you talked about back at the museum. I did a lot of drawing when I was stuck at home, or at the hospital, but I'd like to really get to do something more now. Plus, I think I already have a few ideas, from what we saw on our tour."

"Of course it would be okay," Maya nodded at once, opening her bag to find one of the instruction sheets she'd handed out to the group. She also found a pen and wrote down her e-mail address. "When you're done, you let me know, and we'll go from there," she gave Helena the paper. She remembered how Derek had told her Helena was eager to return to school, for so many reasons, and here she definitely saw it in the girl's face.

"Thanks, Mrs. Friar."

"Any time," Maya told her. "I'd really like to see those drawings you did, too, if you're up for sharing some of them sometime." Helena's smile renewed.

"You can come up and see them when we get to my house if you've got time."

"I think I do," Maya looked to the rear-view mirror, getting quick confirmation from Lucas at the wheel. "I can't wait to see."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners