According to Plan

Chapter One The Plan, in Shambles

Mal Flowers had not expected their world to end so early on a Monday morning.

“I’m sorry,” they said, clutching tightly to their disposable coffee cup, “what?” Like their voice, Mal’s hands shook. Hot black coffee sloshed out and all over the top of the desk where they sat.

“I truly hate to say it, but Collage is canceled,” Ms. Merritt repeated. “I’m sorry, kiddos.”

The rest of the magazine staffers started to make noise—disappointed oh maaaans and disbelieving whaaaats and at least one well, whatever—and Mal was suddenly thankful their coffee spill gave them something to do.

It was easier to focus on fixing a mistake than on what was happening around them.

Mal went through the motions of cleaning up, mechanically mopping up their mess with a brown paper towel.

Though they looked calm on the outside, Mal felt the inside of their brain rage with the pure chaos of too many audio files playing all at once.

It screamed with so many voices—some from the classroom around them, some their own panicked thoughts, at least one inevitable I told you so that sounded suspiciously like their mom—that they couldn’t fully process a single one.

Here and there, something would break through: Someone was packing up their bag and leaving, Collage was canceled, Ms. Merritt was launching into an explanation about budget cuts that Mal didn’t want to hear, Collage was canceled, their fingers were burning from the hot coffee spill, Collage was canceled.

Mal cleared their throat, trying to dislodge the uncomfortable urge to scream.

“I’m sure you all have questions,” Ms. Merritt said from the front of the classroom. “Anyone? Mal?”

Mal pursed their lips around responses like What the fuck? and How could you? and that silent scream of AAAAAAA. What came out of their mouth—almost ten seconds later—was “I need more coffee, I think.”

If anything could get them through this, it was coffee.

They stood up, carefully sliding their round hips out of their desk.

With stiff, robotic steps, they walked away from the rest of the magazine staffers (or what was left of them, anyway).

As everyone who hadn’t left right after Ms. Merritt’s announcement began launching into questions, Mal marched behind their (now-former) Collage sponsor, through the doorway into her cramped office, and toward the student editor’s desk.

It was purposeless now. Just like Mal.

They had expected to spend the first few weeks of school correcting roll-call pronouns to they/them and reminding teachers it was just Mal, not Mallory.

Instead, the first day of the first week had started with their one and only extracurricular—Holmes High School’s long-running literary magazine, Collage—being canceled.

They hadn’t even had time to settle into their official role as editor in chief, a title they had inherited in this very office at the end of last school year.

Even thinking about this ratcheted up the noise of Mal’s mind another two decibels.

They tried to quiet it with the routine of making a fresh pot of coffee.

They carefully avoided looking at the now-useless editor’s desk, seeking out the ancient coffee maker on the back counter instead.

Beside it were all the accompaniments Mal had carefully laid out this morning before the meeting: compostable cups and lids left over from last year, a lone shaker of cinnamon Ms. Merritt had brought in once, powdered creamer and sugar packets from Dollar City that they themself had splurged on.

But the carafe in the drip machine was empty, so now their hands went through the motions of making a fresh pot.

For a moment, their thoughts were drowned out by the familiar hiss and sputter as the cycle ran.

It was louder than it should have been—or maybe that was just Mal, because everything felt loud right now.

The drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker.

The distant sounds of conversation in the classroom.

Their breath inside their head, rumbling around with the dull roar of their own thinking, like their internal volume was turned up to eleven.

But Mal knew a fresh cup of coffee could make it better—could make them better, with caffeine to sharpen their focus and routine to keep them steady.

Before the cycle finished, they removed the carafe and refilled their cup, holding on to it as if doing so would hold them together.

The heat of the cup against their palms grounded them in their body rather than the conclusions their brain wanted them to leap to.

Still, they couldn’t reconcile the comfort of their cup with the cacophony outside.

How were they supposed to give up this office?

These four taupe walls, and their fading motivational posters, formed the one place in Holmes High where Mal didn’t feel like Too Much.

Tucked away in the dusty, poorly lit corner of Ms. Merritt’s office, they felt safe.

They had been counting on this refuge.

Beneath them, in their secondhand Doc Martens, their feet were sluggish.

But Mal took a deep breath, letting the rich scent of the coffee grounds fill their lungs, and did what they often had to do when they felt close to melting down: They took a sip of coffee and did what they were Supposed To Do.

They walked back into the classroom—and into the bargaining phase.

“But there has to be something we can do.”

Mal knew most of the literary magazine staffers by their writing—the mistakes they made, their particular quirks—more than they knew them by name, but there were some staffers they’d come to know off the page too (mostly those who’d stuck with the magazine as long and as passionately as Mal had).

This plea came from James, who wrote literary fiction and overused semicolons.

Mal always liked his work because it featured fat people as complex main characters instead of as the punch line to a joke.

When they’d first started editing his work, they had been curious about him and had looked for him in the halls.

Like his main characters, James was also fat, as Mal had suspected.

There were details in his short stories that Mal, who was fat too, was sure someone wouldn’t think to mention unless they’d lived in a larger body—like the uncomfortable experience of narrow restaurant booths or taking up just slightly more than one city-bus seat.

“We can… I don’t know.” James threw his hands up in frustration, sweeping his blond hair out of his eyes with a flick of his head. “Have another bake sale or something.”

“I don’t mind baking extra cupcakes,” volunteered a girl named Nylan. “The pistachio-rose ones were a big hit last year.”

Mal returned to their seat and frowned down at their coffee.

The bake sale was their least favorite part of the Collage year.

Although, to be fair, Nylan’s cupcakes (decorated with rosettes piped in baby pink buttercream) were almost as beautiful as her lyrical poetry, which was also often nature-themed.

Last year Mal had spent their assigned lunch hour at a table with Nylan, and while she was easy to chat with (about cosplay and coffee and the chilly weather that meant fall was on its way), having to talk to so many other students back-to-back over baked goods meant the annual bake sale was A Lot.

Mal had been hoping to get out of it this year since they were now the editor in chief.

Guilt twinged in their stomach. They hadn’t wanted to get out of it in a the-magazine-is-over-so-there-is-no-bake-sale kind of way.

“I’m sorry,” Ms. Merritt said, shaking her head. “The bake sale was really just to cover some of the gap in the school funding, and now that it’s cut, I’m afraid that sort of fundraising won’t make much of a difference.”

“But what if we sell more magazines?” asked Parker.

Mal’s frown deepened. Selling Collage to the students of Holmes was already a challenge.

While the students in this room adored it, the general population was fairly indifferent.

Editing Parker’s short story about a Black girl adventuring in space had been fun (if challenging—made-up planet names were hard to spell-check, especially with dyslexia), but Mal doubted that even another epic, interdimensional odyssey like that could bring in enough readers to save Collage.

“That’s how it works, right?” Parker went on, oblivious to Mal’s gloomy thoughts. Her hands waved through the air animatedly while she spoke, making her many pastel plastic bracelets rattle on her wrists. “Sell more copies, make more money?”

“We could raise the cover price too.”

This suggestion came from Stella, one of the few staffers Mal actually knew knew outside of Collage.

Or had known. In freshman year, Mal and Stella had both joined the magazine and become fast friends, but they’d fallen out just as quickly.

There had never been a particular moment that did it; Mal’s rules and social irregularities had just added up over the year as Too Much for Stella to handle.

Since sophomore year, Mal’s interactions with her had mostly been confined to passing snarky comments back and forth on the pages of Stella’s serialized romantasy (which was, as Stella pointed out in the comments every few pages, the most popular feature in every issue).

At the end of last year, Stella had also made it known that she did not approve of Mal’s promotion to editor in chief.

Now, with that same snooty air, she pulled her thick brown French braid over her shoulder, her pale fingers combing through its end.

“Then we’d earn more for every issue we sold. ”