April 16th 2024

Chapter 107
The Turn of the Graduates

It gave her the same feeling to receive the diary boxes that day as it had done the first time she got them after starting off her maternity leave. It was the feeling of having been apart from 'her other kids,' and now she had this link back to them. This time, this came with an array of sticky notes peeking out the top of the row of sketchbooks when she opened the top of her first box. It made her smile more than she thought it would to see that Dakota was maintaining her color code for each of the groups with his choice of sticky notes. It was silly, because of course he would, but there was the giddiness….

First off the top of the two stacks of boxes were her seniors, and as she went to pick out the first stack she needed to take a moment, a breath, as it hit her, the way it would have done if she'd been in that classroom the night before. The final parent night was always one of her big milestones, and she hated that she had to miss it, but then Dakota had her covered. This box and the advanced seniors' notes were written by him here and there, but an overwhelming majority were penned by the various parents who had been coming through to visit with her over the past four years, with Dakota adding his own notes underneath. When she started to see these, she became captivated with each one, only breaking when Colby would need her intervention.

It was funny to see those notes from the parents she knew outside school, and she could just imagine them with a knowing smirk as they wrote to her, about Amy, and Jake, and Rafa… It wasn't as though she wouldn't get to see them anymore once they were handed their diplomas, far from that, but she was going to miss this time, truly. She had gotten to know the three of them in a way she could never have hoped to know them outside the confines of her classroom and the school as a whole. Was there just a part of her that looked forward to teasing them a bit as they grew, calling up memories from their high school days? Triumphs, embarrassments, the whole lot… Maybe… More than anything, right now, she would continue to lament the fact she would miss these final days with them, connection or not.

Amy had done so much to find who she was on her own, which had started off with her changing how she dressed at school and not at home, and brought her to where she was now, having grown into a young woman who wholeheartedly knew herself, but maybe just as importantly, a young woman who never felt she had to keep herself hidden from those closest to her. She and her parents had never been so close as they were now, something her father mentioned in the note he'd written to Maya.

Jake Bennett was one of those she was most sorry to have missed on his way out. They still got to have a pretty meaningful interaction through the diaries, where he was able to express his feelings toward the injury that had taken him off the basketball court for the remainder of his high school days and beyond. Sometimes it really felt to her that he was unsure which part hurt the most for him. Of course, the 'after' part was a big thing, it was a dream for him to get to become a name that other players looked up to, as he'd done to his own favorite players and inspirations. But this part here, the past four years, they had been his favorite years so far because of his time on the team. And now, all at once, it was taken away from him. Maya could feel his mother's concerns in her note, as she'd gotten to hear it in her own words, ever since the incident.

When she made it into the second box, for her advanced seniors, Maya couldn't stop thinking about the kids those diaries belonged to. For as long as she could remember, she had gotten caught up in thoughts of 'what ifs,' of 'what never got to be' maybe more than the rest. What if the basketball team hadn't been disbanded during her own high school days… what would those years have been like for her and Lucas and their friends? What if Sandra Davenport had never come to their high school… what would her classes have looked like if all those kids hadn't been prevented from being a part of it? In this box, the question turned to what it might have been like to give this group of kids an advanced art class for four years instead of just the one.

For sure, she would have gotten pretty close to that with those she'd had with her all along. She had gotten very far with the likes of Max and Max, hadn't she? Those two had been a package deal since before they'd been her students, since 'boy Max' had been 'Kelsey Farrell's little brother.' Maya had vague memories of seeing him as a kid, hanging out with his best friend. Those two kids could never have guessed what they would go through together, from his mother's illness and eventual recovery to her being left to navigate a teenage pregnancy and the arrival of those twin babes of hers.

Now they were both looking into taking the next step in their lives as they had taken so many before, together. College was on the horizon, for better or worse, the two best friends already plotting to find a place together, Max and Max and Daisy and Callum… People were not coy about suggesting that this would turn into some 'friends to lovers' story, but they both insisted that would never happen, and for her part Maya felt that they had it right. They were and would forever be soulmates in friendship and nothing else.

The ones that struck her the most were exactly those who had not landed in her classroom until their senior year. After that year was nearly ended, it just felt as though they were barely scratching the surface. She had made it clear to them all that they could reach out to her beyond graduation, whether it was by sending her letters as so many others had been doing for years, or consulting her about their art… If they wanted to continue doing diaries, they would find a way to make it happen, and she had a good feeling that some of them were already looking forward to having that outlet carry on.

She knew Claudia Carter had been one to embrace the diary as an outlet, and if she didn't ask to keep it going, Maya might go so far as to suggest it to her. She would have seen Claudia as unmovable, unshakeable, at the start of the year, with everything her classmates had thrown at her, all the rumors, the lies, taking what may or may not have happened and stretching it far enough that there was no telling anymore if any of it was or had ever been true. Maya hated to know that so many people didn't care anymore. They had decided that Claudia Carter was Bad News, and they would go out of their way to let her know.

It wasn't everyone, no, and all those people who had gone and supported her through the year had probably done much of the work to see to it that Claudia was able to carry on as she had. But all the talk had started to take its toll on her. It had made her push back, which had gotten her into a new bit of trouble, the kind that came very close to knocking her off the graduation path. It had made her start to shut down as far as anyone saw her, but on the pages of her diary it had been the opposite. On those pages, she could have been screaming, shouting all her emotions at the top of her lungs, and Maya, in her responses to her, had done all she could to be the reassuring arms that she needed.

"Did you do all of them?"

Maya looked up to find Marianne, Mackenzie, and Kacey, all three standing in the doorway to her room, staring at the piles of diaries, and papers… They looked up to her, eyes wide, and she had to laugh. They were stunned and, if she had done them all, then they were bummed out, too.

"No, no, only the senior class," she told them. Well, that wasn't as bad as they'd first thought, but still… They moved up to her where she sat, to say hello as they'd just come back from school, absolutely, but they might have had an added interest in seeing how their baby brother was doing, too.

Hearing a bit of what their day had been like, and being asked again about how it had gone when she'd met with all their teachers, she was reminded about the other thing that had come up the night before. This idea of the high school needing a new name to better reflect what it had become and what it was still looking to become… She saw where the thought came from, and she wasn't against it, far from.

Truth be told, there had been a fleeting thought along that same line back when they had kicked off the process of shifting the school into an artistic concentration. It just made sense, didn't it? They weren't going to be the same school as before, not entirely, and a new name would show the turn of that page. But then there had just been so much to do to ensure that they were ready to go back in September that the question of a name change had been set aside until it was practically forgotten. And then the school year had started, and they had never come around to it again, had just been swept up in helping their project get off the ground in earnest.

Now they were almost through their first year. Maybe it would be the perfect time to start thinking about it again, to put it out there that they were looking to change the name of the school… She knew that every time she thought about this she would be reminded of the very unfortunate truth that they were going to get push back the moment they made this public, but they wouldn't have gotten anywhere if they had let themselves be trampled underfoot. Sandra Davenport would still be the principal, there'd be no art, and Maya herself would either have been fired or she would have quit on principle.

Of course, now that the thought was in her head, it would not be so easily removed. It would want to settle in there, expand and take root. It had already started doing so, if she was honest. They didn't have this potential new name just yet, but she could picture it, new letters up on the front of the building, a new crest… Shirts here, mugs there… More than just merch, she saw this new name for their new era as a new rallying cry.

One thing was for sure, and it was that she couldn't mention any of this near the girls until it was really happening. She would love their input if they had any to give - which they most certainly would - to know that they would play a part in this project. This place would be part of them someday, beyond being 'Mom's school,' and they had been part of the vision for that school since before it had its grand reopening last fall. Her eagerness to share it all with them was all she needed to know about how invested she already was.

TO BE CONTINUED

See you tomorrow! - mooners