One Day At A Time - Revised Edition

The last warm day of September goes away and October settles in.

Without a doubt, between the four of them, October is everyone's favorite month.

Rose loves the pumpkin spiced everything that is sold in every store in town.
Lucas loves getting to pull his well-worn hoodies out of his closet and wear them until March.

Lilly loves the outings they go on. Most notably, their adventures through the large local corn mazes.
Ava loves the rain and the colorful leaves, stepping on them on her walk to the bus stop, hearing the satisfying crunch, crunch, crunch under her sneakers.

But most of all, they love Halloween.

Dressing up as whatever they want and getting candy for it is the best way to end off the month.

Lucas and Ava both love the almost theatrical aspect of dressing up.
Getting into the characters of their costumes every year is undoubtedly their favorite part and it's a blast for everyone around them to witness.

With a love for theatrics comes Lucas' no-brainer excitement for the upcoming Fall play, which he takes pride in as he's on this year's stage-craft team.

So, he sits down at their group's lunch table with an excited shine in his eye.
"What are you so excited about?" Rose asks him.
"Guess what play they're doing this year." He asks, answering their question with another question.
"Romeo and Juliet?"
"Romeo and- how the fuck did you know?"

Rose answers casually, nonchalantly.
"One of your stage-craft buddies told me about it and threw it out there that I should audition, maybe shoot high for a lead role."

Lucas looks at them with pure confusion in his eyes.
"Why would they want you to play Juliet? That's not something you mess around with."
"They're really good looking, they'd look the part for sure. That might be why." Ava chimes in with ease.
"Thank you." Rose smiles at her, then looks back at Lucas. "See? There's one good reason."

Lilly looks at Ava curiously, her mind reeling.
She wants to ask her why she thinks Rose is good looking.

Objectively, Rose is a good looking person, there's no doubt about that, but she wants to know specifically what is good looking about her to Ava. (Above all things, Ava is a logical person, and Lilly knows this. But despite knowing, she is still dumbly curious and reaching for conclusions in her mind.)

But before she can ask directly, Lucas has one his one good reason set and goes on about the logistics of auditions, and that he'd put a good word in for Rose with the theatre teacher.

The bell for next period rings and Lilly is snapped out of her reeling thoughts and with the reality of what comes next; she sighs, dramatically enough.
"What's wrong?" Ava asks her.
"Lucas and I have a science presentation next period."
"We do?" Lucas asks, his eyes widening for a split second.

But then, he seems to calm himself down.
He does what he does every time he has a presentation that he's not prepared for in the slightest.

He goes into his backpack, pulls out a ziplock bag filled with a few gummy bears, and looks around for the eye's of teachers.
When he doesn't see any, he passes a gummy bear over to Lilly.

"You guys are seriously still getting high before projects? You don't have any other coping mechanisms?" Rose asks bluntly, slinging their backpack over their shoulder.

Lucas pops the gummy bear into his mouth and puts on his backpack.
"Yep."
Lilly looks at Rose and nods with a smile.

"I bet your parents are proud." Ava quips; she doesn't quite know where she stands on the ethics of floating through difficult class projects.
"What they don't know won't kill them." is all Lucas says. Overconfident, proudly so.

With that, they're all off, going (and floating) their own ways.