A/N: [October 7th 2024]

October 7th 2023

Chapter 280
We Return For a Festival

In all of that first month back at school, Maya had not had the slightest disagreement with Sandra Davenport. She'd seen her out and about, but she hadn't so much as said a word to her or had one spoken to her from the principal. She wanted to look at this and think that it was good, that it was a relief, but she couldn't. She'd been having this dance with the woman for too long to be fooled. She wasn't going to spiral down into conspiracy about all this, but she had been on her guard all through these last few weeks as she waited for the next turn.

The thing was that, as much as she'd tried not to think about the woman or devote any amount of her energy toward thinking about what she had done or might yet do over the summer, she had been hearing about her. All of it was a lot of hearsay, nothing she could confirm on the whole, but having it all in mind over the start of the school year, some of it had started to feel less like rumor and much more credible. What she was hearing was that things were not going well in Davenport Land. Cracks were creeping in, and between that and the silence she'd been seeing all month long, it gave off the impression of one final battle looming… Winner takes the school… and Maya wasn't about to lose.

That wasn't going to happen right now, not if the principal had a shred of common sense left in her. Today was the first day of the fall festival, and they were expecting a high turnout as they did every year, a lot of them being students from their school along with their families. Maya and Lucas would be out there, too, with their daughters and son, their son-in-law and granddaughters…

Oh, the Friar girls had been so excited for the day to finally come. They had helped with the preparations, but they hadn't seen the final results, and they wanted to see it all so much that they couldn't take it by the end. There was so much of a rush for all of them to get out that there'd been just a bit of a sisterly collision on the way out the door, and they'd had to break out the colorful band-aids to tend to a few small scrapes.

This was going to be their favorite fall festival in a long time, going by how the girls were talking about it as they drove toward the park. Not only was it going to be Ezra's first time, but they had Shonagh, too, and while the nearly ten-month-old boy could stare in wide-eyed amazement with the best of them, he could not exactly show the same kind of wonderment that someone older would, that Shonagh would in this case. Lucas made it a point to not drive past the park itself as they neared the main festival area, so she and the others wouldn't see anything just yet. They would find a spot to stop and get out of the minivan and walk the rest of the way, their little group all together.

They had all been told to stay together, to not run ahead, and this was easy enough for them to achieve as they started off, but the parents knew that this would become a more difficult promise to keep once they got near enough to see… Oh, there were a whole lot of people out there, truly, but it only made it better. They could almost feel their energy radiating out, and it touched them, that along with the sounds, the scents, the sights… To their credit, they didn't run off, but one look at them and it was clear that they were having to resist the urge to move with everything they had in them. Maya, Lucas, Ella, and Taylor had formed a plan ahead of bringing the kids out here though, so they split off according to what everyone wanted to go and see first.

Marianne and Shonagh both were most looking to see what the scavenger hunt looked like this year, and they would all go, of course, so Maya accompanied them to go and sign in, the better to receive their first clue and get on their way as soon as possible. On the way, they ran into Ava and Kelsey, the former accompanied by her uncle and the latter by her parents. The girls shared an apartment now, of course, but they were happy to attend the festival along with their families. Kelsey's younger brother would be joining them in time, as he'd gone to the McAllister house to pick her and her son and daughter up first.

Owen Nash was as happy to run into his niece's former art teacher as Brian and Haruna Farrell were. Both families had faced their share of problems in the time when Ava and Kelsey had been students at the high school, and they would not soon forget the part that Maya had played in rectifying them, just as they could look beyond those, knowing that she still played an important role in both the girls' lives. They weren't the only ones either.

When Lucas and the triplets tracked down the ranch's display for the dog retreat, as led by Bishop, Cristina, Rafa, and Evangeline, they came upon Ash Bell, their father, their younger sister, and their girlfriend. Kennedy Bell was 'visiting' with one of the pups brought along not by the retreat itself but the shelter, in the hopes of finding them a home. As methods for not ending up with another dog or two coming home with them went, it wasn't the best place to start, but who would he have been kidding if he didn't bring the girls here?

Much like Ava and Kelsey, both Ash Bell and Maia Bennett were still very much involved in circles that kept them in contact with their former teacher and her family, and running into Lucas and the triplets here, they all joined one another with little to no need for greeting. Instead, the question became whether or not the puppy would be brought back with the Bells, closely followed by what name they might give her once the first question had been answered with a yes. The decision wasn't made by the time they parted ways, but Kennedy promised to let them know once the name had been selected.

In the meantime, the Friars found one another again, so they could get started on the scavenger hunt. The delay here came as Maya and Lucas made their way to find their eldest and youngest and got pulled into playing around with them for a while. Taylor was keeping a close eye on both his younger daughter and his tiny brother-in-law while Tori played with her younger aunts, her mother looking on with her phone at the ready for any photo she might want to capture.

"Mommy, I got something!" Mackenzie hollered, holding up the small stuffed animal she had tucked under her arm. She ran over to Maya and offered it out to her. On closer inspection, she discovered that it was a turtle.

"You want me to hold it?" Maya asked as she took it.

"It's for you, to keep!" Mackenzie informed her with a proud little grin that made her mother laugh.

"Are you sure? You want me to have it?" she asked. Mackenzie nodded. "Thank you then, I love it!" Maya pulled her daughter into a hug and soon felt her little arms squeezing around her, too. "If you ever want to borrow it, you can do that, okay?" She knew better than to assume that it wouldn't cross the five-year-old's mind sooner or later and, if that was the case, then she really did not want her to feel like she wasn't allowed.

"It's going to smell like you?" Mackenzie asked, as though the likelihood had just dawned on her and made her happy.

"Oh, I'll squeeze it close until it does, sound good?" Maya told her, and her little Macaw thought that this would be a very good plan. The turtle spent the rest of the day with Maya.

At long last – as far as the girls were concerned – the Friars' scavenger hunt began. There were a lot of them out there, especially once the Hunters and the Hart-Lanes joined in, so they decided to split up into four teams, turning it into a bit of a friendly competition. They didn't make too much of figuring out who would be on which team, as it would not end well if the picking made any of them feel left out in any way. They ended up with four teams of twelve, thanks to a few people they managed to snag along the way. Maya took off with her parents and Betsy, Ella and Taylor and the girls, Marianne, Ezra, and Shonagh, and Winnie Grayson. Lucas got the triplets and the little sisters, Wyatt and Finn, Eliza and Ben and their Hannah, and his father.

"Mommy, are you gonna win?" Aubrey asked Maya when they prepared to split off. There was so much earnest wonder in her eyes that the others had to laugh. The preschooler looked so convinced that this would be the outcome, all the while recognizing that the two of them were not going to be on the same team, and she kind of wanted to win, too.

"I'm sure I am… and I'm sure you will, too," Maya informed her, and Aubrey looked confused. "There's not just one winner. You just have to get to the end, too."

"Oh…" Aubrey slowly nodded, and her smile reappeared. She spun around at once and hurried back to her father's side, where Lucy held out her hand to take hers and lead her on her way to find their first destination. Lucas and Maya exchanged a look and a few words mouthed in silence, a challenge. They could all win, yes, but where the two of them were concerned… The competition was on.

"Dad, look!" Kacey pointed as they walked, and at once the rest of the group slowed to a stop, nearly colliding with one another.

"Did you find something, cub?" Lucas asked his daughter.

"No, look who's there," she used a nod to show the way this time, and the others looked along with Lucas, soon to discover what had drawn Kacey's attention.

"Pop-pop!" Finneas squealed in near unison with his cousin Hannah, herself very close to joining him in the two-year-old club.

They were not the only ones to be excited at the sight of James Lane, or at the sight of his entire team, really. He and Abigail had three of their children with them in the form of Sam – with Dora, Francesca, Tim, and Dottie – and Cara – with Mateo, Felix, Manny, and Sara – and Maisie. The two teams briefly forgot that they were on the hunt, telling one another what they had seen so far of the festival, what they were looking forward to, before they remembered what they were up to. Neither team was going to say how many clues they had found or where, no. They still wanted to see who would finish first, so they soon split and continued on their way.

"I found it!" Tori called as quietly as she could in her excitement, showing the card that she had picked up. At once, Marianne, Shonagh, and Winnie hurried over to see it. Marianne had gotten hold of her mother's phone, so she used it to take a picture of the card.

"Quick, put it back, let's go somewhere else," she instructed her niece, and Tori nodded, moving at once while the other girls put out their act of pretending as though they were trying to locate the thing that they had already found. The skill and believability varied from one to the next.

"I'd move a bit faster, if I were you," a voice informed them, and they all jumped and squealed, turning around even as the rest of their group turned to look, too. They found MJ stood there, even as his own group trickled along to join him. He had his three Hunter sisters with him, the eldest two with their boyfriends, the younger having dragged Hunter Matthews with them as Rafa was busy with the adoption drive. Rounding out their team were Emma and Teddy Hart-Lane, the former with Dakota Day, and the latter with Priya and Lily.

"You saw nothing," Katy challenged her son with a smirk and a squint, to which MJ raised his hands in mock surrender.

"Didn't I, Mother? Didn't I?"

"Please, like we can't see through that face of yours," Shawn pointed at MJ, then to himself and his wife. Katy nodded along.

"Would love to test this theory, I would, but we have a hunt to win… I mean, to finish," he tipped his head and waved before the group went on its way, leaving Maya and the others behind.

For the rest of the scavenger hunt, Maya found herself thinking back to the encounter, not for the banter between her brother and their parents or even the possibility that they could have given away anything to the other team, no. She'd just had this impression like she'd seen something else going on with the others, and she couldn't figure out what it was, so she tried to hold on to the memory and replay it over and over again until she somehow untangled the whole thing.

It wasn't until she saw them all again that she found out she hadn't been imagining things, and this not so much for having figured it out herself but because she and all the others were let in on the big secret. As the teams had joined up for a bit of a victory lunch, Teddy and Priya addressed the family at large with one piece of news that soon became two. The first of those was that they were expecting their first child together, in itself an already wonderful bit of news that had everyone falling in around them with congratulations while future big sister Lily had the grin of someone who'd already known. The second announcement was that of the couple's engagement – which had happened on the same day and independent of the pregnancy being discovered – and their intention to wed before the end of the year, in December. The fall festival was already set to be memorable for the Friars that year, but that was really the thing to make it as much of a promise as it could be. By the time they all went home after this first day, they hardly stopped to recall which of them had completed the scavenger hunt first.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners