April 3rd 2023

Chapter 93
We Change the Order

Maya would do her best to leave home at home when she would head into school. It felt like the thing to do, right? Except how was she going to do that when home felt like home in her head and could not be shut out so easily? That morning, seeing her daughters off to school and seeing how they were just not feeling it the way they'd envisioned, all of them, as the day had approached... It left her with this weight on her heart that she couldn't stamp down very easily. All she could do was breathe, and let the day settle in, let the promise of good things see her through.

"Hey! Oh... Still grumpy faces?" Dylan asked when they ran into each other in the parking lot, his grin disappearing when he saw her expression.

"Very much," she confirmed, and he responded with a friendly hug, just the kind that she needed at a time like this. He was very good with those. "I get that big feelings can be complicated for them, but mostly it just feels like constant dominos. If anyone looks like they might be picking themselves up again, someone else will be upset, too, and they'll pull them right back down."

"There's going to be a way. They won't stay like this forever," Dylan promised her.

"Better not. My nerves couldn't take it," she hummed.

"Well, if you need something to smile about, I've got one," Dylan smiled, nodded past her. Maya turned and yes, she did smile when she saw her former student, now just a few months from being a mother for the first time and showing it well.

"Hey, Mama Bird," she held out her arms as Stella neared, and they hugged. "Welcome back. How are you feeling? Sleeping better now?" she asked sympathetically.

"Yeah, I'm alright," Stella promised. "François has been really good about getting me through that."

"That's good. Nothing like starting a year to exhaust you on top of everything..."

Seeing friends and colleagues helped immensely to get her mind to calm and start focusing on what was ahead. Getting to her classroom, getting started with her first setup of the year - which was mostly just about preparing the diary piles and double checking that everything was good for the rest of the week - helped her that much more. By the time the first of her seniors showed up, she had a great smile waiting for them.

"Miss Bennett... Maia with an I," she greeted her, also spotting Ash Bell continuing on behind her, off to their own first period, waving as they went. "And Mr. Ríos," Maya looked to Angel. She would not have pegged those two for becoming as close of friends as they had become over the past three years, but knowing how that friendship had come to exist, she knew how glad they both were for having it, and each other, too.

"It feels so weird to be here this early," Maia commented, firmly installing herself in the category of the nostalgic seniors, and very early, too. For her, the sudden idea of leaving this place felt sad, and it was easy to realize that a lot of that came from her having had a great high school experience where others wouldn't have, but it didn't take the worth away from what she felt either.

"Yeah, especially after last year when it was at the end," Angel added, and Maia gave a big nod. "I liked having it to look forward to."

"Well, maybe look at it from a sort of 'starting the day off on a good note' way. That could help," Maya suggested, and they liked that.

"Speaking of which," Maia Bennett started, and her teacher held up a finger that said, 'I'm going to stop you right there.'

"Do you all just practice that look together? Like a right of passage, captain to captain?" she asked, making the girl grin and mime touching a sword to one shoulder and another. "No, I don't have any ideas about your new freshman, okay, I haven't even seen them yet. I will let you know as soon as I have anything, okay?"

"Alright, I can be patient," Maia promised. "Can't say the same about Lydia or Agnes. They both want it to be an all-girl team this year. Not because they wouldn't want someone identifying in any other way, just because they thought it'd be fun."

"I will keep that in mind then," Maya tipped her head. She could have told her that she had someone in mind, off an inkling, but seeing as that person would be attached to the new team instead of hers, it wouldn't have helped.

The class started to fill up, the stations, too. The start of a new year usually meant at least one or two shuffles on the first day, some students seeking a new seat after a relationship soured or ended, and this year was no exception. She did not want any of this to get her thinking about her daughters and their situation, so she did her best not to.

One thing that helped was to focus on the good things more than the bad, and she could see plenty of those. She would look to the likes of Luke Ryan and Meadow Bailey, or as the list and their diaries now showed, Luke and Meadow Bailey-Ryan. When she'd seen the change, bringing the pair of them one under the other on the list, she'd been so surprised, so left to wonder how they had finally come to both use one another's family names – and how they felt about it – that when it came time for her to identify their sketchbooks, she'd gone and asked them. It was easy to do, as they like so many students past and present in the area were doing a stint working at Nando's Diner over the summer, she as a waitress, he as a bus boy.

As soon as she mentioned the name change to them though, she could tell that the change had not been forced on them in the slightest. They had approved of it, had even requested it, so they might be as one with little sister Mary. They had come a long way since they had first become stepsiblings. Seeing them now, maybe not stuck at the hip but definitely connected as brothers and sisters would be, it was a lot easier to look to them and see reconciliation for her girls rather than the struggle of station relocations.

After her first free period, which she unashamedly spent fixated on her daughters' artwork as posted in their spot, the sophomores came along for their go around at their first art class of the year. They had been her new kids not too long ago, starting out, and now they were part of her returners… She had missed them all, and as she was prone to do on the first days, she asked them all about how their summer had gone, what they looked forward to.

She could generally count on at least a few of her freshmen to show a profound change – physically, sure, but in everything else most of all – by the time they made it to their second year. Off that year's set, it was difficult not to look toward someone like Austin Abbott as being most changed. It had been slow coming, as his immediate face-off with a new class of bullies had started off his year stuck between a small locker space and a locked door. He'd gone and joined the cheerleading squad when it had been announced, and it had seemed very briefly that this would be just the thing to turn things around for him. It had done that, yes… for about as long as no one had seen the squad perform, and then his brief escape had no chance of properly getting off the ground, not until very close to the end of the year, when things really had started to change, thanks to the squad's 'guardian angels' and their new coach, Mrs. Friar. Maybe for that, Austin looked like he was heading into his sophomore year with unprecedented optimism. She hoped he got to hold on to it.

Of all the things Maya loved to follow over the four years of her students' time at the school, one of her favorites that she had was watching the friendships she got to see grow, from year to year. In this class, she had to look no further than the likes of Noor Kaur and Freddie Jacek. When she'd first met them a year ago, they had essentially just met… again. They'd been very freshly reunited, after years apart. The former foster siblings had embarked on their high school adventures together, and there was no separating them in this. They were indispensable to one another as they advanced, neither of them on their own.

That wasn't to say that they accomplished nothing on their own merits. They were each of them assets to the basketball teams, on the boys' side and the girls'. Then Freddie, well… No one who shared a class with him would be ignorant of the fact that his speech impediment was at times very pronounced, which would then make his being a part of the musical in his first year feel like someone must have gotten it wrong, like this had to be another boy named Freddie Jacek who happened to attend their school as a freshman. But it very much was him, and though it wasn't some miracle fix, he actually did very well in his first outing, and they looked forward to having him again this year.

For her part, Noor had countered her days on the court by sitting among the growing numbers of the knitting club at lunch time. She had once told Maya how she felt that she needed this, needed something to balance out the noise and the activity that came with basketball. She could not have found a better match than the knitting club. Maya would watch her sometimes, the complete concentration that blotted out… everything else. She knew, in looking at her, how much it would have become part of her now, in and beyond school, too.

Of all her new sophomores, the one she had gotten to know the most was definitely Agnes Killian, thanks to her post playing with Born Curious, popping up in her classroom more mornings than not, and occasionally at the house when the team had gathered there. Sooner or later, she would be their captain, and all Maya had to say there was that she would be a great one. Some of them would give off captain vibes and Agnes had been one of those… maybe from day one and definitely as that first year of hers had progressed. While Maia had very briefly approached the subject of the new freshman for their team, Agnes would look at her art teacher and advisor like she might have been attempting to read her mind and locate information, a name, anything. With the way she'd be looking at her, Maya wasn't so sure she didn't actually have psychic powers, and if she did have something that could be gleaned from her thoughts…

There was only one face among those she found spread across her classroom that morning that wasn't as readily known as the rest, and it wasn't a new kid who'd just moved to Austin or anything like that. No, the boy in question was new, but he would only be with them for a year, as an exchange camper through Sullivan Stables.

Her impressions of Dean Winston so far were that he was happy to be there but also nervous about making it through the year, which was understandable. He was just recently fifteen, had never gone anywhere without his parents or his siblings there with him. He was also the youngest of five children, seen to by his brother and sisters as well. He'd been in Austin – the city – and living with Austin – the boy – long enough now that he'd had time to settle in, but today, starting school, that was as good as putting him right back to square one, nerves on edge. But he was in art class now, Maya's class, and she would look out for him, as she would any new addition, freshman or not. By the time he went home, she hoped, he would be even gladder to have made the journey to Texas.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners