June 28th 2023

Chapter 179
We Remind of Beginnings

Even though they lived with their sister, shared a room in her house, Nellie and Gracie Hunter also had boyfriends, who for their part had an apartment, which they shared with Rolly McNeil and Tre Whitley, where each pair of brothers shared a room. And some nights, there would be a bit of a twin swap happening, with one of the Hunters - usually Gracie - would be at the apartment, and one of the Davises - usually Bobby - would be at the house. And Maya and Lucas were not always aware that such a swap had happened until the morning, when the pair who'd slept upstairs came down for breakfast. They didn't take issue with this; it was hardly new to them at this point.

On the night before, at least, they were confident that the only people up in that room would be the sisters. Maya may or may not have insinuated that it would be a good idea for the brothers not to be around the following morning, and her little sisters had understood. Little...

Penelope and Grace Hunter had just turned twenty years old. It felt so monumental to think that so much time could have gone by, and yet the proof was right there for them to see. When Maya snuck up to their room, she found them asleep, side by side in Nellie's bed like, as much as they probably had gone to sleep talking to one another, they had also prepared to be pounced on by their big sister in the morning. They had been correct, obviously, and they laughed and fell in to hug her back as she wished them both a great twentieth. They all lived together now for moments like this, didn't they, to make up for lost time. It was always, always worth the choice.

When Maya asked them what they wanted to do on their birthday, the twins needed no time to think. They wanted one thing only, and it was to go to the mall with their sister, join her in acquiring and then preparing the year's batch of diaries. It wasn't so long ago that they had been on the receiving end, but now they were on the other side... and some people they had known at the school were still in class lists. Basketball teammates, musical buddies... one little brother... and now one little sister, too.

Far from being above any shenanigans of the kind, Maya was very happy to indulge them both. She might have recruited MJ and Haley in this and made it a Hunters outing, but it would have ruined the surprise, on the first day of school, wouldn't it? So, it would be just the three of them, which would be a treat in itself. Maya did have to promise her daughters that they would be involved in prepping the diaries when they'd get back. It was one of their favorite things, and the littler ones were still being brought into the fold.

They went off, empty boxes at the ready. They had recently been given a bit of fix recently as Stella had tended to the corners and other spots that had met wear and tear from use. Maya had watched her do this so delicately, all the while getting the great privilege of looking after little Mattie Lejeune. She looked more and more like her mother as she developed, though her eyes felt very touched by her father's side. She already had such a love for colors, no surprise with who her mother was.

With boxes filled, the sisters returned home victorious and ready for an afternoon of diary prep. The girls were all ready to go, dashing to the kitchen even as their father went to help with the boxes, Wyatt along with him.

"Are you helping us, too, Finny?" Maya intoned sweetly as the boy stood by his cousin Aubrey and held her hand.

"With me," she informed her mother, who simply grinned and nodded. As of late, Aubrey had as good as adopted the one-year-old as 'her baby,' her little brother, and it never stopped feeling like the sweetest thing to see the care and maturity she showed with him. If both children were put down for a nap at the same time, Finneas would not be able to lie still if he didn't have the little blonde there with him, and she'd feel the same.

"You got this," Kacey went up to her mother and presented her with a large, padded envelope.

"I did?" Maya asked with easy surprise. When she saw the return address, she smiled. "Oh, I know what this is," she declared, and the girls closed in on her, because they had clearly been curious about it themselves. "One of my juniors... well, seniors now... said they'd send me something they made after that field trip we did a few weeks ago."

The girls did know, sort of, but they were always up for hearing more stories of their mother and her students. It quickly became an easy backdrop as they all made their way through the many stacks of diaries. They had their assembly line, as always, with many more hands than they needed this year, it felt, but no one was about to go and point that out. They were all having fun anyway. Impossible to ignore was the utter cuteness that was Finneas Hart-Lane grabbing one gold pen after another, as guided by his cousin Aubrey, and handing it out to whoever would attach the next one with only as much understanding as it took for him to know that he was having fun.

The rest of them, as concentrated as they were on their given tasks, were also taken with Maya's stories of the summer field trip. It hadn't been mandatory, but there had been the promise of extra credit, which did have a way of motivating attendance. As each sketchbook would be marked with a name and a greeting, she could recall what the students in question had done or said on the trip, if they had been there, and it'd be hard, especially for the birthday twins, not to smirk and see how much she knew and cared for her students.

She had plenty of tales about the likes of Agnes Killian, and Noor Kaur, Freddie Jacek, and Austin Abbott among her soon-to-be juniors, or Max Farrell and Max McAllister, Amy Dixon, Jake Bennett, and Rafael Cruz, future sophomores, and of course those of the Critically Bookish, even if they weren't her students directly. But then there were her seniors, about to begin their final year with her… Lamar Whitley, and Lydia Sullivan-Reyes, Ash Bell, and one Matthew Jonathan Hunter… That group felt as though it had gone through so much more than could be seen to fit in a three-year period, like they might have been days away from graduating, not a year. Maybe some of that emotion came from seeing another of her siblings get closer still to leaving her as a student, but either way… This year was going to be a big one.

They had plenty of kids coming along to add to the population, which was inevitably exciting, to Maya at least and, she hoped, to others, too. One of the first things she'd end up keeping an eye out to discover would be those familiar names, familiar because of siblings who'd previously crossed her classroom. She found one of those quickly enough in Killian, Jonah. Agnes had spoken of her younger brother enough times over the past two years for his name to both ring a bell and bring a smile to Maya's face.

She had another one of those in McNeil, Martin. It didn't seem so long ago that she first heard that name, through big sister Rochelle. But in that time she had already seen another McNeil, and a couple of Whitleys, and whether they had been bonded to her by two parents or a stepparent, they had been her brothers. This one, she knew, would be a bit of both, as one of Rochelle and Rolly's two half-brothers. Martin had been born out of the union between the pair's father and the Whitleys' mother, and he might have been said to have something of Mary Bailey-Ryan in how he had smoothed some cracks in the two sides of his family by his mere existence.

The name game wasn't just in siblings who'd been students, though he had that, too. But when Maya saw Matthews, Hunter on the list, it was hard for her not to smile so, so brightly and think of someone who had not been student but classmate, but… friend, best friend. It didn't feel all that long ago that he'd even been born, that Maya and Riley had been over the moon, thinking about how both of their parents were expecting a baby at the same time. And yet Hunter had gone and celebrated his fifteenth birthday over the summer, same as Haley had done, and he would be in Maya's class. She would be very interested to see the kind of spirit he would bring into the school, especially when it'd be him and Haley both out there.

They'd grown up together those two, how could they not? They may not have ended up as the kind of best friends that their respective fathers had done, respective sisters, too, but they had something pretty good on its own, too, a lot of banter already on the way their names kind of intertwined… She couldn't wait.

Things could never be just what they might have been, she knew that much, and the difference all revolved around one name on her freshman list. Carter, Madelyn. Her parents had given her the option of not going to school this year, of staying home over the rest of her pregnancy, to study with a tutor and return to class after she had her baby, either this year, after Christmas, or the fall of next year, all of it in the hopes of making things easier on her. The pregnancy had been so difficult on her mentally, all of it, and if it wasn't for her best friend sticking by her side, and having Max, and Marie, it could have been so much worse.

Maybe for that, the three girls had collectively seen to helping Madelyn decide to forego the tutor and instead attend freshman year with her classmates. They didn't see her being isolated as something that would do her good and, for her part, Maya could not disagree. She would personally do all she could to make sure she never regretted her choice.

"Wait, give it here," Nellie reached out her hand when she knew that the next diary being prepared would be Haley's. Gracie had the very same grin on her face as the book as passed, the better for both twins in turn to add very small doodles on either side of their baby sister's name on the spine, doodles she would see and at once recognize for the hands that had created them. "I can't believe she's going to be in high school already," Nellie sighed, with a melancholy that made Maya come very close to teasing her with a bit of 'welcome to my world.'

Her last little Hunter… They were only just beginning, and yet it felt like she'd just blink and it would all be over. That was always how it went, wasn't it? Oh, but she would do all she could to enjoy those four years to come, just as she'd done with MJ before her, and Nellie and Gracie before him.

"Mommy, what about them?" Lucy asked when she looked at the completed row of freshman diaries.

"What about them what?" Maya asked her.

"They only have their names, but she has more," Lucy explained, and it made Maya grin at once. Leave it to her bun-bun to have fairness on the brain in all this.

"Yeah, but that's a code between us, you know? One day, it'll be your name on one of these books, and you know I'm going to make it extra special because you're my one and only bunny girl," Maya told her daughter, and she got a good, good smile in return, followed by a hug. You're about to be six… There's still years ahead of us before you sit in my class, but it won't feel that way forever, will it? I'll blink, and then…

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners