February 20th 2023

Chapter 51
We Begin New Chapters

It wasn't until Lucas had started going back for half days at the ranch that Maya had finally told him about Sandra Davenport, her short appearance at the funeral, and her history with Melinda Friar. Were it up to her, he would never have to be bothered with any of that, but then it was one thing to hold it back for courtesy, while he was at the height of his grief, and another to hold it off for too long until it finally came out, which she was certain would have happened sooner or later.

So, one morning, as they'd worked through the lunch and breakfast line, she had shared the encounter and the story as Lee had told it. As it turned out, he'd had part of the tale in his head already, at least one side of it. Somewhere around the time when they'd been setting up the archive, his mother had told him a few stories of her sort of rival, back in her riding days. He had never made the connection to the new principal because he'd been told of a girl called Cassandra Nelson, which they supposed had been shortened and then swapped to a husband's name to become Sandra Davenport.

To hear of it from Lucas, and so from Melinda, she had never understood Cassandra's problem with her. Oh, she'd always been helpful, even back then, and if she would have let her, Melinda would have assisted her fellow rider and classmate in any way she could. That was just never what Cassandra wanted. Now, as to the part about his father, that had been new, which either suggested that she hadn't wanted to mention it to her son, or she had never been aware of the scheming herself. They might have asked Thomas, but this was really not something they wanted to bring up with him, especially these days. He had enough to deal with.

All that being said, now Maya had this new information about her boss, and she really didn't know what to do with it. She'd been back at work since after the funeral, she'd crossed paths and interacted with the principal several times, but even if they both knew that she'd been there that day, Sandra behaved as though it had never happened, and Maya didn't feel like poking the nest and letting the wasps fly. Sandra wouldn't bring it up, then neither would she. But she still knew about it, knew about her past and her connection to the Friars, whether Sandra realized that or not.

Was she working herself up into conspiracies for thinking that the principal had it out for her because she was connected to the Friars? This whole thing with the arts had been going on before they'd ever crossed paths, so it wasn't some personal vendetta, but still... The more she thought about it, she could kind of see it.

She really needed to let it out of her head before it consumed her completely. She had much more important things to think about. High up on the list today was the fact that it had been a month since they'd lost Melinda. She still remembered bringing Michael Sullivan out to the hospital, remembered the two of them seeing her, lying there, dead... She didn't think she would ever forget any part of it, so that couldn't be blamed for it all feeling still so recent. She knew that time had passed, it couldn't be helped. She'd been seeing the effects of that loss on herself, on Lucas, and their girls, on Michael, on Thomas... It was different for all of them because they'd all had different relationships with her, as a daughter-in-law, a son, as granddaughters, and a brother, and a husband, and the weight of that loss might have been distributed differently but it all amounted to the same thing, which was that they were all crushed that she'd been taken from them in this way.

"Hey, you're here early," Maya smiled when she arrived that morning to find Michelle Day in the parking lot.

"I'm not staying," the woman revealed with a nod and a smile. "I won't be able to make it for knitting club today and I was hoping you could take over, only for today."

"I could think of a few of your club members who would be much better at leading it, but I can supervise, sure," Maya assured her. "Is everything alright?"

"Oh, yes, yes," Michelle assured her before handing over the bag she had at her shoulder. It was a familiar sight, whenever she was at the school for club meetings, her big bag of tricks as they would say.

The day Maya had returned to work, Michelle had pulled a great big bundle from it, gifts for Lucas, Thomas, and Michael. She would not forget the part that Melinda Friar had played after Lambert had passed, and now she was the one being mourned. It was the least she could do to memorialize her.

With the bag now hanging from her own shoulder, Maya continued on into the school and toward her class. As she approached, she could already hear the two quiz teams talking in that tone just high enough to suggest they were arguing about something, the respectable volume branding it as an argument of an academic nature.

That had become the way of things, the longer the two quiz teams had existed alongside one another. Born Curious had evolved and become their own thing over the years, seeing members graduate and others take their place. They had grown steady, familiar to the school. As to the new team, which had been so uncertain as to its name that none of their advisors felt secure in getting shirts or jackets made, they were wavering in and out of growing pains as they settled into their team spirit. Maya had worried briefly that it might end up being that she'd tried too hard, that she'd so wanted to piece together another team like Born Curious but that it would end up being impossible.

Eventually, she'd come to the conclusion that she was working herself up over nothing. The new quartet was doing very well for itself, and anyway it really wasn't about them being just like Born Curious. Each team needed to be its own thing, not a copy of one another, and beyond those qualities that would overlap regardless, they were setting themselves apart, as intentionally as unintentionally. Back in their first incarnation, Born Curious had their tone set by their first four members, growing out of what Helena Zimmerman, Ariel Su, Stella Buckley, and Rochelle McNeil had brought to the table. When it came to the new team, they may have been in the middle of an identity crisis as far as their name, but they were a team, and they acted like one.

Sandy Abbott, their senior and captain, would only be with them for a single year, and it was drawing ever nearer to its end now that March was upon them, but that hadn't stopped her from wanting to be a good leader, to do everything she could and leave a mark. Maya doubted it had factored at all into Stella's selection of potential team members, but she exuded so much big sister energy, and where younger brother Austin might wish it didn't come on so strong around him, for the quiz team… She was so much more serious in a setting like this than she was when she was playing basketball, like this could have been two different girls. In some ways, they were. Basketball was Sandy's outlet, had been for over three years throughout high school, and it had worked well for her. When she'd been offered the quiz team, it had given her something somewhere in the middle, mixing learning and play.

The Nilsson sisters, Miley and Marie, had been back-to-back babies and as they'd grown up, they had been an inseparable team in everything, though once they'd started school, with one of them in one grade and the other in the next, they'd had no choice but to be separated. This had given them all the more reason to latch on to everything they could do together, like cheerleading, like the quiz team. Outside of all that, they were builders, tinkerers, and when they worked together, it was like they could read one another's minds. They had a great plan to carry this on once they were through with school, and anyone who got to know them enough would have no doubt that they'd make it work.

Sitting as the only one of them and the first member of their team to have the opportunity to be in it through all four years of high school, Kip Perreault was still hard to read. Maya knew that he sat in the wholly unenviable position of 'bully bait,' same as his new best friend, Austin Abbott. She and other teachers, vice-principal Alistair Song along with them, would do their best to safeguard the boys from that, but they couldn't be everywhere every time. The more she got to see of the boy, especially in the morning, when he and his team would be in her class, the impression she did get was that he had grown up as someone who took shelter in books, in knowledge. She couldn't say how long that had been so, but he would be sitting there, with the team, and they'd be discussing some subject or another, with him there just listening in, and the moment they'd pause, he'd reveal some obscure bit of knowledge he'd dug up, telling them where he'd found it, too, most of the time.

Their energies had taken a bit longer to meld than people might have imagined, like the connection points did exist, just not where they would have come off as obvious. They were finding them now, and the more at ease they grew with the way they existed as a unit, the more they came together as a team to impress. Stood up alongside their school's existing team, Maya could see how especially the juniors and seniors would see the one team, years active and solid, and then the other, new, and finding their footing, and look down on the latter. They had a team already, didn't they? Born Curious was familiar to them, to Maya's surprise even as they were coming in as freshmen. They existed like a great network through the grades, in ways that other groups in the school did not when they might have wanted to.

The new team knew this, could see it very well without anyone having to tell them… which they did, without missing a beat. They did their best not to let it get them down, and generally it didn't. If anything, it lit up the fight in them. They were going to show the place they had in this school, in their community. They had a very good guide in this, with their advisor, Stella Buckley. Even when she'd been a member of Born Curious herself, as shy as she'd been, she could always be counted on as a steadfast team player and supporter.

Now as an advisor today, Maya could see this bit of maternal quality rising in her former student, the way she saw to Sandy, Miley, Marie, and Kip, and it suited her so well. She could not have been happier with her choice for the position, or prouder of her shy bird. She was there with them in the morning, and it was great to see her return to the room where Maya had seen her grow into this woman before her. That was a perk, wasn't it, after teaching as long as she had… She got to see what those kids she'd watched grow turned into, and they made her prouder day by day.

TO BE CONTINUED


See you tomorrow! - mooners