A/N: One day behind...

August 31st 2023

Chapter 243
We Look Through the Pages

The official account as to why Lucas took off with four of the kids that morning and left the other three at home was that Maya needed to get through all four boxes of diaries on this one day and, for that, she would need some very special assistants to help get her through it all. That help would be as active as it would be passive, which would explain Ezra's being counted as part of this team for sure, and Mackenzie and Aubrey, well, they were getting to be big girls, they could totally do whatever their mother needed them do to, and they would do it proudly. Really, now that they had been given the job, they were at once on task. They very nearly nudged their father and their sisters right out the door when it was time for them to go before dashing back to where their mother sat in the living room, holding their baby brother. They climbed on to the couch, on either side of her, until they could scoot up and look at Ezra.

"Mommy, I want to hold him, can I?" Mackenzie turned her head up to look at her mother, all the while holding the baby's little hand.

"Me, too, I wanna," Aubrey chimed in, doing the same on the other side. Ezra, meanwhile, would turn his gaze across the people in his line of sight. 'Intrigued' was a fair description, and small as he still was, 'amused' was for sure another.

"You can both hold him while I get set up, yeah?" Maya suggested, looking from one of her daughter to the other. They looked at one another and nodded, so Maya stood with the baby and, once they'd moved to sit side by side, she settled Ezra across their laps, allowing Mackenzie to be in charge of supporting him as needed. He wasn't nearly as fragile as he'd been when he'd been a newborn, and it showed in how his sisters were so often seen to hold him nowadays. There were countless pictures of him with them already, and it never ceased to be one of the most wonderfully unexpected joys in their lives.

Right here, with how the little sisters held on to him, there was no bit of shoving or suggesting that one was holding him more than the other, none of that. They were of one mind when it came to caring for their baby brother, and there was no better way to describe this than that it was a bittersweet sight, to Maya and Lucas both. It was as clear a sign as they could ask for that their baby girls were growing up. They were always going to be their youngest girls – unless another unexpected something happened in the future – but in this way… They weren't as little as they had once been.

It had been left up to them in what order she would do the boxes – because why not – and they had decided that she should go from the seniors on down, or, as they put it, 'from the big ones to the little ones.' That worked fine for her, so Maya pulled up the first box. Mackenzie and Aubrey both seemed to remember suddenly that they were supposed to help, and so Ezra was settled in his seat, that he may preside over the scene and bring the support he had been selected to give.

It was impossible for the girls not to want to immediately dive for their uncle's diary once they opened that box, but they showed some remarkable patience, practicing a trick that their big sisters had shown them, which was to save the best things for last. It wasn't always easy, but they pulled it off. Maya fully suspected some kind of existential crisis happening in time, as they'd both set themselves under the impression that, if that was what they were doing, then they were also saying that they liked some of the other students' work less, and while it was true, it wouldn't make it easy for them.

Just now, Maya was already considering the prospect of having to remind them that this would be the last year for this group of students to have diaries, that they'd be gone in the fall. It wasn't as though this was the first group of seniors that they had seen go by, but then they had been there the longest, for as long as either of them could remember… It would be a complicated of a goodbye as there could be, and none of them were looking forward to it happening.

As strong as they both proclaimed themselves to be, Maya went ahead and helped her daughters set aside the senior box when it was completed and then pull up the junior box next. Once she'd done this, they both fell in, pulling the lid away and reaching in to pull out the books, one by one and two by two, setting them on the coffee table after handing the first to their mother. Once they'd gotten them all out, they would do as they'd done with the senior diaries, standing at the ready so Mackenzie could put the finished diary in the box when it was handed it to her, while Aubrey would pick up one of the books from the coffee table and hand it out to her mother. Neither of them could read yet, but as had been so with their older sisters in the past, they had gotten to know each of those books' covers well enough since the start of the year that, whether they knew how to recognize the students by name or not, they could see the golden designs on each one and know how they felt about that one student's work and them by association, too.

Where it came to the juniors of this school year, there were plenty of names that stood out for them, those they did recognize as such, and as much as she wouldn't go and play favorites, Maya would have to say that either the girls picked up on her own responses, her own connections, or they just had very similar tastes as she did. They would pick out those ones she'd become closest to, like Agnes Killian, and Noor Kaur and Freddie Jacek, and Austin Abbott… Whenever they got to pass those over to their mother – at the end, of course – they both burrowed themselves as near as they could so that they could see what she was looking at, the newly filled pages of their diaries.

The sophomores' box may have held the most diaries belonging to people that the two girls cared about. They had Jake Bennett, who was part of the extended 'team' from Lucas' basketball playing doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. The boy had long felt like their brother, before they had Ezra with them, for how he'd be with them. Then there was Amy Dixon, their neighbor and sometimes babysitter, whose presence was always thrilling to the girls. That went for Rafa Cruz, too, who may not have been family officially, but then as they knew that he was supposed to be their cousin, and as they kept hearing him referred to as such… To them, he was family, no contest.

There were Max and Max, and one of those had been sort of connected to the family through his older sister and his parents before he'd ever become part of Maya's class. As for his best friend, she had been 'adopted' by the girls thanks to her connection to the quiz team. Maya was willing to bet that, had she been in her class and the owner of one of the diaries in that box, Kinsey would have been another instant favorite for that same reason. It remained one of those silly regrets in her class days that Kinsey was not one of hers. She was almost sure she would have been a revelation, if not for any obvious artistic skill, then for a very distinct creative vision. In the meantime, they had a box full of diaries done once again, which left Maya and her young assistants with only one more to open and dig into.

She could barely get the lid off that the two girls had their hands inside the box, looking with great intent through the books for the ones that they were most interested in. Maya had to remind them both to be careful not to be too forceful with the books, and the girls gave her big nods, though that only barely got them to slow down. Eventually, they found what they were looking for, pulling out those books that they were after in order to set them aside, their treats for the end. Even as they started going through the rest of the box, in as good a pace as they'd done already with the previous boxes, Maya could see them sneaking looks over to the reserved set of sketchbooks, trying to come off as though they were not so eager to get on with those as soon as possible.

When they had finally gotten through all the other books, they both hopped down from the couch together, grabbing the pile and carrying it over, two hands here and two there, a bit off balance, but they made it over and that was what mattered. There were three of them. Hunter Matthews featured, for reasons that might have been obvious to anyone who knew the connection between the extended Hunter and Matthews families, and Madelyn Carter featured, too, their auntie's best friend, so of course the top of the list, for Mackenzie and Aubrey, was Haley Hunter. It was their favorite to look at, next to their uncle MJ's diary. Maya had to hand it to her little sister, she always managed to convey that same spirit, same energy that she carried in herself in her artwork, like there might have been sound words in speech bubbles all over the place.

With the last box closed, no more diaries available to peruse, the only logical next step was for Mackenzie and Aubrey to pull out their own diaries and create some art as well. They, like the triplets, both had books like the students did, a tradition followed up from big sister Marianne's own diaries from across the years. They had a shelf for all the girls to store their completed diaries, whenever they'd be completed, and it was as good as a goal to them all to get their books up there.

"You're still kind of little to get in touch with your artistic side, huh, bud?" Maya hummed as she scooped up Ezra. He gave a good bit of a stretch on his way to her arms, which had been his way as he grew, and it was easily one of the top things Maya knew they would all miss when he grew out of them. The stretch gave way to a settling in, as they settled him against them, and there was no denying that, though he could clearly know next to nothing with regards to where he'd come from and what defined a parent, this was his mama, and he felt safe and content when she held him. She'd feel this connection and it would make her heart flutter, bowing to kiss the top of his head. His birth parents had asked not to be sought out, and she would respect their decision, of course, but also there were so many things that she got to experience with him that left her thinking about them. You were so loved, my sweet fairy boy, and their giving you to us was as loving of a thing as they could have done. "You've got time, yeah? You'll be picking up crayons, pencils, markers… paint… And I can't wait to see what you'll do."

TO BE CONTINUED


See you tomorrow! - mooners