A/N: APRIL 9TH - Hey, guys, so we had a big storm up here on Wednesday the 5th, most people in the area lost power for the last few days, I got mine back yesterday but didn't get my internet back until today, so I couldn't post anything. Going to get the last few days' chapters posted ASAP!

April 7th 2023

Chapter 97
We Change Seasons

It had been several years since Maya had been as directly and constantly involved with the preparations for the Fall Fest as she was on this year. Back when she'd first been part of the committee, she'd been working at the theater still, not yet a teacher, and she also hadn't been a mother. It wasn't as though she couldn't have done it all at once; that had just been her choice, her need to put her focus on her family most of all.

But then they'd called for her. This year would be the hundredth of these festivals, and it would be bigger, longer, and starting earlier than usual. They were calling for all the help they could get. Maya had needed to hear nothing further in order to commit herself to it, but then an idea had struck her all of five minutes later that immediately sent her making calls and sending messages, sharing her idea and at the same time looking to see if it might be met with support. Whether by the benefits of convenient timing or a slightly co-dependent and lengthy friendship, she had her answers very quickly.

Within an hour of committing herself to help with the festival, she'd also submitted several more names of people ready and willing to help. The fact that they would couple this opportunity with another and have themselves a child free sleepover in the midst of it all was only a bonus. They'd done it once before, and it had been a good time for them as much as for their children, wherever they'd ended up, so they would all get something from this, the committee, the turtles, and the junior turtles.

Where the Friar girls were concerned, it couldn't be helped that their parents would hope this weekend would go and get a few things back on track. That remained to be something in their household, and the longer it went on, the harder it got to watch. It was to the point that Maya and Lucas weren't sure whether they all remembered exactly what had made them all this way. They'd say it was likelier that they were stuck on the fact that they had been upset, telling them that they should continue to be. There was just a chance that maybe they were this close to putting it behind them, but the breakthrough was evading them in the meantime.

On Friday, the day before the sleepover and their weekend of festival prep, Maya had received back the diaries from her students, the cover assignment fulfilled. Knowing how busy she would be over the next couple of days, making it next to impossible for her to get a look at all of them then, she had gone through the boxes almost as soon as she'd received them, the seniors and then the sophomores in her morning free periods, which only left the freshmen and juniors. The latter of those she would hold until Monday's breaks, and reasonably she could have done the same with the former, but… well, it was the freshmen. She wanted to see what they'd come up with.

That wasn't to say she didn't feel the same about the other groups, because she was as curious for any of them as the next, and she had been treated to some wonderful gems already with her first two boxes, but the freshmen were brand new, unknowns, and that could not be ignored. So, she started going through them as soon as she made it home, knowing Lucas and the girls would be a while before returning from the ranch. She had some company for this discovery in the form of her little nephew. Wyatt was off to work almost as soon as she came home, so he'd left Finneas in her more than willing care. The baby boy would go back and forth between his seat and his aunt's arms as she went through the box at her side, talking to him all the while and giving no mind to whether he was awake at the time or not.

After a week of classes, she was starting to know her new students, some more than others, and their diary covers were split in this way as well. Some of them helped to further develop her awareness of the kids who'd drawn them. Others only allowed the mystery to go on further.

Amy Dixon had shown herself very confident from day one, and this wasn't exactly new to her neighbor from up the lane, but it still very much gave her the impression that there was so much more left for her to learn about the fifteen-year-old. Her cover was… well, covered. There were words traced all along the front and the back, sparing only the spine where her name was the only other bit of writing and the only one not in her hand. All the words in her hand, Maya eventually realized, were song lyrics from her favorite songs. The only spaces left clear on the front and back cover left behind the shape of an A, one half on either side. Maya liked this. It showed where Amy's mind was at on this first year, so she could look back on it in the future and remember.

Looking to someone like Jake Bennett then, who was also gifted with great confidence, and also someone she knew before he'd ever become her student, there was already a difference. It wasn't that he was closed off in class, but he was very much doing his own thing, and it didn't leave a lot of space for figuring out who he was. His sister would say that he was 'just being Jake,' and Maya could kind of see it. Many of his classmates were very much interested in finding out just what that entailed, especially if they got to hear it directly from him. All Maya seemed able to hear from his 'fan club' was how it was a tough call whether the best was how he looked or how his voice sounded, all deep and impressive. His cover would probably do nothing to diminish the amount of giggling and whispering that followed his passage.

She knew that he could draw, had seem him do so all week and even before, when he would show her his work from time to time, but his cover was easily the best thing he'd done. He'd drawn what could simply be called an ode to his late father, and it was so stunning that Maya found herself spending much more time than expected looking at it, taking in the details, so much so that by the time Lucas and the girls returned, she'd barely made it through half of the box. She didn't even hear them come in. She learned that they'd arrived when Marianne came barging into the room, startling her.

"Hey!" Maya smiled even as her firstborn came and climbed to sit with her, holding out her arms so she might be handed baby Finn. Maya passed him over, a satisfactory transaction for the both of them.

"You started without me," Marianne noted even as she smiled and tilted her head this way and that for the baby.

"I know, I'm sorry about that, but since we're going to be so busy this weekend…" Maya explained, and Marianne nodded. She understood. "But hey, you're here now," Maya went on with a grin that pulled a smile from her girl, and that was all either of them needed to go on. There would be more than enough time for Marianne to go back and see all the ones she'd missed. Right now, she looked like all she wanted was to be close to her mother, and whatever had made that a necessity, she wasn't going to get in the way. She just went and continued with the freshman box.

She was very glad that – as she continued to pull the diaries by a random reach – the next one she got hold of was Kimiko's. When she showed it to Marianne, she was immediately eager to see what the exchange camper had done for her one and only diary… at least unless she was one of those who was so prolific in her work that she would need a second volume before year's end and her return home. Looking at what she'd done with this one here, it was anybody's guess whether she'd need one. If Maya had to classify her from what she'd produced in this first week, she'd say that Kimiko fell in the category somewhere in the middle. She was not a dedicated artist in her day to day life, but she also cared enough being in art class that she gave it her all, and what she got out there had potential… room to grow. She'd drawn her horse, Finch. The front cover showed her back home, and the back showed her here, in Sullivan Stables. She wasn't here, not at the moment, though the plan was to get her back up to Austin as soon as possible. If they'd only known that Kimiko would be spending the year here, they would not have sent Finch on ahead back home at the end of the summer, but they had, and they couldn't manage a second trip out with her so soon. In the meantime, the girl and the horse missed each other, but they still spoke, thanks to Haru, back home, taking his tablet out to the horse when his sister would call.

The further into the box Maya got, the more amused she got that she hadn't come across either one of her Maxes, and when she reached in to grab one of the last three and saw that she still hadn't gotten either one of them, she had to grin. Leave it to them to be the last ones standing, one pull after the next. They were inseparable, in just the way that might have worried their new art teacher into thinking that high school might come along and break them, but those two gave her vibes like her very own turtle friends, the originals, one of them her husband. If those guys had made it through high school and many years since the way they'd done, then so could these two.

She'd been getting to know them both over this week, one as a complete stranger, the other as something close enough to a stranger as to count. She'd known Max Farrell for several years, but most of what she knew about him was second-hand information from his older sister or his parents whenever she'd gotten to interact with them. She wouldn't say that she had really started to know this Max, the present Max until this week. What she'd seen then and what she saw on his sketchbook cover now was a boy who was very much still in the process of finding himself but eagerly made that search.

The same could be said of his best friend. Max McAllister had spent so much of her childhood being one thing and, with that one thing taken away from her and eventually set aside, she'd had to figure out who she was going to be. For her, from what Maya had been able to gather from hearing Max herself and from what some of the other teachers had been saying, it looked as though she might have done a lot of that search as something more like research. She would look at anything that left her perplexed as an invitation to fill in the blanks, and that had made her very good at retaining knowledge. She was already coming along as someone they had their eyes on to be a top student in her year.

Maya could see that curiosity on the girl's cover, and the more she looked at it, and thought about the week's classes with her, it made her smile. It might have been too early to call, but maybe she had herself a solid candidate for their Born Curious recruit of the year…

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners