September 27th 2020

Chapter 271
Their Party For Students

Plenty of people would probably have been annoyed at suddenly finding themselves tasked with being the teenager sitter at their own party. Lucas didn't mind it so much. He had a solid technique down, wherein he would keep an eye on the pack all while chatting with some guests or others who happened to be allowing him to spot Missy, Kai, Stella, and Phoebe and ensure they weren't getting themselves into anything that might come back to bite any of them.

Also, he just liked being around them. These were Maya's students, some of her 'kids.' It had always been and would continue to be one of his greatest joys to see happiness in his wife, and this past year had been one of if not the very best year for that. Ever since she had started her job as an art teacher at their old high school, she had been taken with a most singular purpose, and to see how much she thrived from it… She had become the thing she'd been yearning to be, and she excelled at it as much as she benefited from it. And when Lucas saw those kids, here tonight, it was easy to see they were not here just to say they had snuck into their teacher's house and her party. No, they were here because for as much as they had all come to mean something to her in this past year, she had also come to mean something to them, and they wanted to be here.

If they noticed him keeping watch, they never showed any sign of it. They all danced a while, which warranted only the slightest 'surveillance' out of him. He would see Missy and Kai continue to be just completely blind to what was right in front of them. This whole situation of pretending to be a couple, which they somehow seemed to be carrying on here tonight despite there being no one here they needed to fool, was just ridiculous. They had to realize what was happening between them, right? They were smart kids, the both of them, but then… well, he guessed this was the one thing that could make the smartest people turn into some of the dumbest. All he could hope for was the same thing he'd heard out of Maya when he'd shared the conversation he'd had with Missy in the car earlier. He didn't want either one of them to make the wrong move and get hurt.

Balancing that concern, he had the other two to contend with. Stella was clearly not at ease with putting herself on display, even when it meant dancing in the middle of people who would potentially not even notice that she was there. Lucas had seen the girl almost every week this year, most Mondays in the fall, and Fridays in the winter, when he would go up to the school to have lunch with Maya, and it would feel as though he had seen the incremental growth, for her and Phoebe both. As far as Stella went, those increments felt very close to one another, so that by year's end it could feel like she had crossed a much smaller distance than her best friend, but that wasn't the important part, was it? What mattered wasn't the distance crossed but that distance had been crossed. She'd started out the year where the very idea of even introducing herself to her class had sent her hiding in the bathroom. She had ended up where… well, she still looked like she hated every second of it, but at least she was able to stand in front of classmates and give a presentation. She had spent all year eating in the art room, but at the very end of it had reintegrated the cafeteria, if with the aid of earplugs.

If she worried about anyone looking at her, she kind of didn't have to, not so long as Phoebe was there dancing near her. She pulled focus with the power of exuberance. For having seen how much she had grown into her skills as a dancer, the way she went here felt more like something of a happy medium between that and the chronically clumsy girl who had started out the year traveling with a first aid kit wherever she went. Possibly, she was working now to get her best friend to let herself go, whatever that looked like in Stella's case.

When they'd had their fill of dancing, Lucas had watched the group wander off over to the table loaded with food and grabbed some plates. Once they'd grabbed what they wanted, they had made their way out through the kitchen and out the back door, as others had done, to go and eat outside. Lucas moved his 'totally not spying dad mode' off to check in with some of the other guests enjoying the yard. While he got to chatting with Bishop and Simon, he could see Missy and the others as they watched the trampoline. Presently, it was occupied with Jenna, who bounced along and made her watching girlfriend look both amused and terrified.

"Friends of Sam's?" Bishop asked, and Lucas turned back to him.

"Huh? Oh, no, they're actually some of Maya's students," he told his classmates. "Well, Missy there is also our neighbor, you've met her, at the wedding?" They had, and they nodded as the memory came to them. Lucas caught them up on the whole sneaking in situation. The guys laughed.

Much as he assumed the trampoline would be the thing that held their attention, it wasn't long that the group ended up turning to the Hex. Phoebe had spotted the structure adjacent to the house and pointed to it, probably asking the others what it was. Missy knew what it was, of course, as she had been inside a few times by now, and she appeared to tell the others, as they soon made their way over and tried to peek through the windows. After this went on for a few minutes, Lucas pulled out his phone, snapped a picture, and sent it to Maya. Tag, you're it.

After she'd excused herself from Morgan and her three-dates-coming-on-to-boyfriend friend, Maya wove through the party into the kitchen, grabbing the Hex keys before continuing on her way out. Tossing a few signs toward Lucas where she spotted him in passing, she followed the path. Stella was the first to see her coming, and she immediately tapped at Phoebe's arm, creating a wave of head turns when Missy and Kai each turned as well.

"This place looks amazing!" Phoebe declared.

"The window doesn't do it justice," Maya told her, trying not to feel too much like Santa taking some nosy kids into the workshop. Unlocking the door and tapping in the alarm code just inside – an addition Shawn had insisted on – she flipped on the lights and stepped aside. It might have seemed silly to some, but she decided to let them see the studio for this very moment, this reaction of total awe and surprise. She still got that feeling, every once in a while, but it was never so much as when she'd seen it for the first time.

"Woah…" Kai blinked, walking with the pace of someone very conscious of his surroundings, the better not to run into anything of value and end up breaking it. The champ in this task would naturally be Stella, but then that tended to be her natural pace, so it wasn't as though it stood out from her day to day. While Missy stood watch with Maya, as she'd already seen it all, Kai would peer at the console and all its controls, while Phoebe peered through the booth door at the various instruments either sitting in wait of a player or hung on display. Stella still remained near the door, specifically looking at the print outs and clippings on the walls.

"I met her once," she pointed to a picture on the wall, turning her head to her teacher. Maya stepped up with a smile, looking at the picture of her and Ree, on stage, the night when she'd joined her for a duet. It had been just a year and a half ago, and yet it felt so long ago already, with everything that had happened in between. She could see so much of the nerves and the giddiness in her eyes, still so new to being in direct contact with the singer. And now here they were, about to go on tour together in a year's time.

"You did?" Maya asked Stella, who nodded.

"She did a cameo on one of my mom's movies," she explained.

"Oh, yeah!" Maya recalled at once, laughing at the memory of her mother's surprise upon seeing her. She didn't remember or hadn't known the part about Stella's mother, and with what she'd done for her mother, she was getting to think she needed to remedy that.

"I was six," Stella went on. "My mom would take me to the sets sometimes, and I was there the day she was filming her scene. She was really nice, I remember that."

"Wait, that was you?" Phoebe asked, and Maya and Stella turned now to find she'd wandered over to see the picture, too, and now had awe in her eyes, staring from the picture to her art teacher and back.

"Yeah," Maya laughed. "Were you there?"

"I was supposed to go, but I broke my leg two days before," Phoebe shrugged with her usual casual tone over her various injuries.

"How did that happen?" Kai asked, joining them, too.

"I borrowed my sister's bike. Barely made it out of the driveway and…" she mimed with her hands, recreating as best she could what came off like a spectacular fall. "That's when I got this one," she pointed to a scar on her leg, trailing along her knee from below the edge of her skirt. "My sister and my cousin still went, all they said was that she brought out a songwriter to sing with her, they never told me it was you," she went on. Recalling how, unaware of her new teacher's identity, Phoebe had shown up on the first day of school in a TXNY shirt, the small bit of delayed annoyance at her sister and cousin only made it harder for Maya to keep from laughing.

"I know that song," Stella stated, looking back to Phoebe, who had likely introduced her to a lot of her music, whether she realized it or not. Oh, how much she wanted to tell them about the tour right then, just to see the looks on their faces… She resisted, had to.

So, instead, she told them about writing that first song for Ree, and then the one for the Violets, and the one Marika Marsden had recorded for the 'Just For One Day' soundtrack… The way they looked at her, with rising awe in their eyes, like she'd suddenly become so much more than who she'd been a moment ago. As much as she'd been trying to keep that from happening, she knew it could only be a matter of time, especially the closer they got to the tour. Lucas had told her the novelty would wear off in time, and he was probably right. There was no way around it anyway. They would all find out eventually.

"Alright, come on, you guys didn't come out here for this, huh?" she herded her students back out of the Hex and locked up once they'd had their fill of it. "You guys want to say hi to the rest of the band? They're all back there," she nodded to the house.

"Yeah, she knows," Stella nodded, tipping her head to Phoebe. "She wanted to go say hi to one of them but she was near the trampoline and Phoebe didn't want to take the risk." Maya bit back a laugh.

"Wise move, good choice."

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners