March 27th 2024

Chapter 87
The Tension in Recovery

Maya had predicted early on that Kristen Weller would make it into her second volume by Christmas, and she couldn't have been more on point. The junior had spent the last minutes of their last class before the break filling the very last page of her first diary, sitting up and closing the back cover with a satisfied smile just as the bell rang and her classmates started to scramble to leave. Maya had chuckled, reaching in the box and presenting her with her new sketchbook, already identified and waiting for her.

It was almost too bad that the two volumes were split while she had it, as Kristen's wraparound design on her first cover had been extended to continue across her second cover. This one was filling up, too, after a couple of months, and Maya was as determined to get the book back to its owner as soon as possible as she was to consider preparing her a third volume, just in case… or for summer. When she did, she made a promise to her student. She'd have senior year with her, of course, but afterward, if she wanted to carry on with her outlet, Maya would keep her supplied in sketchbooks.

Though she had not been as prolific as Kristen Weller - so few ever were - the sketchbook diaries had been a solid outlet for others, too. It was that for Madelyn Carter, no doubt to it, and she'd mentioned it herself. Maya was glad to hear it, even more so to see it. She could see how much thought and attention went into filling every one of the pages she had filled already. She would fulfill the assignment of the week, for sure, but in the midst of doing it, her mind would trail on, a natural progression from where she began to where it led her, and that was the part that Maya inevitably looked forward to every time.

That was one benefit, here and with others, that she had come across since she'd had to collect diaries on alternating weeks. It gave her double the number of new pages to discover, and with someone like Madelyn, this was great to look forward to. She had always been the quieter of the two in her friendship with Haley, to no surprise, but in high school she had shown such an interesting contemplative side, one that Maya had to suspect had developed through her having and giving up her baby boy. The pages that followed his birthdays, and the few times she knew Madelyn had unexpectedly run across August and Milena with little Adam… They were as full with heart and mind as ever, and Maya could feel it all.

Her supplies of siblings in class were dwindling down at this point, with one sister here and another currently finishing out middle school, but then the universe tended to give her other options, and one of those was Hunter Matthews. If she was seeking one family above all others to count as family, she needed to go no further than the Matthews family. They had counted her as one of their own in so many ways over the years, and as protective as she felt toward Riley, that affection also extended to the likes of August, and to the youngest of the siblings.

Hunter Matthews had been named for her father, and the age gap had never been cause sufficient to make him question where she fit into the picture, seeing as she was just about the same age as his sister. He'd grown up before her eyes, into that lanky kid with such a focused face when he drew, and she loved to imagine him that way when she looked at his work. It reflected right there on the page.

In a similar way, when she looked at Jonah Killian's diary pages, she saw a lot of him, too, she did. But at the same time, lately, what she kept on seeing in his art was her son. She saw something of Ezra. It was normal that her mind would associate them, she had to remind herself. They were biologically related after all, even if Jonah didn't know it. They'd met, several times now, whether at school when Lucas would sometimes come and get her while Jonah had been in detention with her, or at her parents' house, or her own house, when he was hanging out with Haley. That had been happening a lot more now, since the dance, though the words boyfriend and girlfriend had yet to be heard from either side. Maybe for this, she had started finding it harder not to blur the lines between her son and his secret uncle. She had shared this notion with Lucas, and he had admitted that he'd started seeing it, too. It made them smile.

When she heard her name, Maya was startled, only to breathe out as she looked over to find that Gracie had woken up. They'd been settled on the couch, the two of them, but her little sister had been resting while she went through the diaries. She'd had a very bad night's rest, and Maya was determined to see to it she made up for that. Nellie was out with Bobby for a check-up and they'd taken the boys with them, because they wanted to spend more time with them, so the quiet had finally worked its wonders. Now, her eyes were open, and Maya reached over to brush at her forehead, inciting her to go on sleeping.

"Are you in the other box yet?" Gracie mumbled, already drifting off under the power of the big sister magic.

"You can look at Haley's diary later. Sleep now, Mouse Mouse," Maya whispered.

"Mkay…" Gracie told her. She was asleep again in no time, and Maya smiled. Yes, she was 'in the other box' now, or she was about to begin, and she chuckled at the thought that Gracie had known in her sleep and woken up for it.

She would often be so taken with the skill in Quinn Monterey's work that it would take her longer before she was able to stop and look beyond the surface level. He had been raised already with an excellent art teacher in his own home, in the form of his father. He had watched him and he had learned from him. Now he was in her class, and it would make her smile whenever she'd recognize that he'd done something he had for sure learned from her. He was one of those she knew would pick up something from her class and very quickly turn to apply it to his art, and it thrilled her.

Once she looked past all that, there was still plenty of intent to find, whatever was on his mind at the time. And there had for sure been something, though it had taken her a while to identify it. It would be as though watching a movie, six deep in a franchise, without any of the context, but then eventually… It was his mother. He was thinking about his mother. Maya knew that Mrs. Monterey had walked away from her husband and son, and she could sympathize with how it would make Quinn feel as much as she could understand the way that absent parent could be all you thought about sometimes.

Going from Quinn's diary to Martin McNeil's, the shift in the art style was unavoidable. Quinn was an artist, Martin was an appreciator of art who gave it his best. Maya knew the type, recognized it in the clear signs of his attempts to fix one part or another of his drawings, to get it just as he wanted it to look. She would do her best to note what he would want to do and give him pointers if she could, and he would try those, sometimes going back on pages of those past weeks until she'd gone and asked him to find a way and let her know when he did so, allowing her to see what he'd done differently. Would he be some world renowned artist someday? Not likely. But he loved what he did, and that was all that mattered to him, to her… She would never stop encouraging that in any of the students that passed through her classroom.

When she spotted their sister's name on the next spine, Maya was tempted to wake Gracie, but she decided to go ahead and let her be. She could see it later, and she could have a smile, too, picking up on all those small details that Haley would hide in her work, by the specific awareness that the book would be in her sister's house, and that her siblings would go and want to look at it, her nieces and nephew, too… If there was one diary that was absolutely not marked for Maya's eyes only, it was this one. This made her very happy, yes, but sometimes it would fill her with a bit of regret.

The diaries were always there for her students to be able to express themselves, to put on those pages something that they would trust her with, whether they realized it or not. But in Haley's case, Maya had to wonder if maybe she was depriving her little sister of that opportunity. She might not want to put things in there that could become known to the entire family. Some pages felt genuinely guarded to her, and maybe she was reading too much into it, but maybe she was reading it correctly.

With someone like Reese Quinland, it truly felt like a battle of the wills, or like trying to get an injured but fearful animal to let you close enough to help them. When the year had started, there was none of that trust happening, or at least not enough that they would get anywhere. She had been his teacher in the past, but there hadn't been much there, and then his trouble had happened, juvie had happened. He'd come back, and it was clear to her before long that he genuinely wanted to make a change for himself, but it didn't mean that he was going to let her in right away, nor did she expect him to. It had taken days, weeks, months, but she had watched the tension relax, watched him start to look at her, to meet her gaze and hold it. She'd seen the change in the pages of his diary. She got to watch his smile start to come back, cautious though it was, selective… It came out around her, around some of his classmates, but not so with some others, where it would hide itself all over again.

When Gracie woke up again, she was hungry, and Maya was ready for her with her latest batch of GiGi cookies. She knew the recipe, entrusted to her by Zay's late great grandmother, by heart after all the times it had come in handy, but she didn't know that she had ever made them so often as of late, between Nellie who claimed them as a pregnancy craving and Gracie who assured her that they were better than any pain medication she'd ever been prescribed. Maya suspected that she could smell them in her sleep.

"Did you finish them all?" she asked, chewing on her second cookie after she'd wordlessly consumed the first one in its entirety. She was nodding to the diary boxes, and Maya resisted the urge to tease her under the assumption that she was asking after the cookie supply.

"Yes, but I left the one you wanted on top," Maya nodded to their sister's book. Gracie hummed. She would not touch it until she'd had her cookies and cleaned her hands. "Feel better?"

"Better," Gracie agreed. "If I can just sleep well tonight, I'll be even better." Her silence suggested she did not have high hopes of that, so Maya passed her another cookie. It made her smile.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners