Chapter Four The Haus on 3rd Street #3
“I…,” Mal started, then trailed off. Suddenly, they were embarrassed by what was on the page: a line with the date, time, and place of their meeting, gone over in black pen several times so it looked almost like a bolded font, with several bullet-pointed notes below forming an agenda of things they wanted to discuss so they wouldn’t forget.
Pulling out their planner felt a little bit like showing Emerson part of their brain—the tidier parts, at least, the ones they’d cleaned up for a houseguest—which was a level of familiarity Emerson hadn’t yet earned.
Mal’s mom always teased them about their Little Planner, as she called it.
This felt particularly unfair, since Mal used it at least in part to keep her from teasing them about other things (time management, getting behind, forgetting).
Here, on Emerson’s home turf, they felt sure that she would tease them too.
Mal gulped. “I made some notes,” they said. “About what I think we should talk about.”
“Perfect,” said Emerson, nodding enthusiastically as she pushed off from the desk with her feet.
Her chair was an actual desk chair, and this motion sent her wheeling toward the other corner of the desk.
Bending, she collected a notebook from her own backpack, along with a fuzzy purple pencil pouch from which she started unpacking various-colored pens.
“Is it cool if I take notes while we chat? Writing stuff down always helps me remember.”
Mal blinked. Emerson hadn’t made fun of their notes at all.
In fact, she just smiled at them and opened her own notebook to a mostly fresh page.
The back of the one beside it was covered in bright Post-it colors: hot pink, neon teal, and the same bright, cartoony yellow of Emerson’s sweatshirt.
From the pencil pouch, Emerson took out pads of Post-its in the same colors.
“Sure,” said Mal. “That sounds…” It sounded, honestly, like what Mal did too.
“Cool,” said Emerson, wiggling her purple gel pen. “So lay it on me, Mal. What have we got?”
And they started, just that easy.
“Well,” Mal said. “I think we should talk about this first.” They tapped the first line of their planner, which read WHAT ARE WE DOING? Emerson leaned in, looked down at the planner, and was already nodding when she looked back up.
“Smart,” she said, and then very soon after: “A zine.”
“So, the thing is,” said Mal, sitting very still compared to Emerson, who wiggled, “I’m not… actually super sure what a zine is.”
Now that they’d said this out loud, they felt stupid. Like they should have figured that out first, before they agreed to do this. They sighed.
“Oh, hey, that’s cool,” Emerson said. “You came to the right place, because they’re kind of my capital-T Thing.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Mal’s lips.
And then Emerson was off, her hands working through the air as she talked, illustrating what she said like it was a shadow-puppet play.
“So, zines are like magazines, if magazines were punk rock,” she said.
“Same idea, but where magazines are formal and fancy and official, zines are… whatever the fuck you want them to be, really. Wait, uh—is it cool to swear?” When Mal nodded, Emerson went on.
“So some of them are more elaborate, with real bindings and color pages, but they can be as simple as one page folded up cleverly, and they can be about literally anything. Some are about important stuff—like practical protesting-safety tips or protecting your trans neighbors or, like, once I did one about period poverty and left it with pads in public bathrooms, and that felt pretty badass. Or they can be silly, like… I don’t know.
Things to Teach Your Dog About Cyberbullying.
Or A Rating of the Roebling Bridge Geese Population.
And, like, anything in between. With me so far? ”
Yes, Mal was with Emerson. Their mind ran over all the options she laid out: the punk rock and the practical solutions and how wildly rebellious (and, Mal had to admit, cool) the idea of leaving pads and pamphlets in public places felt.
It all sounded like the exact opposite of what Mal wanted to do.
“But our zine could be serious, too,” Mal suggested, trying to keep their voice even as their throat tightened with worry. They didn’t see a clear line between what Emerson outlined and the serious business of the school’s lit mag.
“Sure,” Emerson said, “if that’s what people want.”
“That’s what I want,” Mal said.
“I mean, by default, it would be different,” Emerson said, cocking her head to the side. “But it would be something—which, no offense, is better than the nothing it is now.”
That stung, but it was true. “I just…” Mal swallowed helplessly. “I want to make sure whatever we do is… important.”
They hadn’t realized this until that exact moment, as the words left their mouth. For the second time, they felt like Emerson was seeing a part of them she hadn’t earned yet. They couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“Sure,” Emerson repeated. Drawing a sharp line across her page to divide it from the section above, she took scratchy notes. “We have important things to say. However we do it, we have to do it right.”
There was a surety in her voice, as if she was determined to hold the weight of those words, of Collage and its legacy. Mal raised an eyebrow. When Emerson said things like that, they felt like maybe she did understand what they wanted to do after all.
The other details… Well, Mal was used to duking it out with Emerson in the margins over commas. The finer points could be hashed out later. With their black pen, they crossed out their next two notes: stress need for seriousness and seriousness is a requirement for proceeding with project.
“Next item on the agenda, then.” Mal tapped the second item with the tip of their pen, leaving three little black spots beside it. “ ‘How Will We Do It?’ I’m afraid, uh. I won’t be a lot of help with this part.”
“Nonsense.” Emerson waved her hand. “You were editor in chief!” She underlined something Mal couldn’t quite see three times on her shockingly yellow Post-it pad, then ripped the sheet off the top and patted it firmly onto her notebook page. “You’re, like, the editing expert.”
“The editing part, yeah, I’ve got that, but…” They trailed off. “Ms. Merritt did all the rest.”
Mal didn’t have any idea, they suddenly realized, what it took to actually make a lit mag.
Sure, Mal did the bulk of the student editing, but Ms. Merritt (and the student writers) had the final say on what got changed.
And there had to be other considerations, too—printing and design and lots of other decisions.
Their eyes went wide, their pulse quickening. What had they signed themself up for?
“Hey, don’t go away on me, Mal.” Emerson leaned in and patted Mal’s knee three times, as if she could sense the spiral-shaped turn Mal’s thoughts were taking.
“I got you. So, from a production side, I think we can do this simple and easy, hear me? I’m thinking like…
” Emerson flipped a page and started making lines and squiggles on its surface: a layout.
“We can do a pretty traditional half-fold zine, like”—she mimed folding a paper in half—“this. So we’ll get four pages to each piece of paper we print, and we can do an easy-peasy sewn binding. Following me?”
In one sense, yes—Mal was following Emerson’s words. But they were having trouble turning Emerson’s frantic drawings, the things she was saying, and the waving of her hands into something solid in their head. It felt a bit like being in class—like trying, and failing, to keep up.
Mal shrugged an apology, wrinkling their nose. “I do better with… hands-on stuff.”
“Oh, cool, no problem!”
And before Mal could tell her not to, Emerson was ripping a handful of pages from the back of her notebook, then fishing around again in her backpack.
“Okay, so—basically. We fold the pages in half like this.” She folded the pages together in what Mal always thought of as hamburger style.
“And then we’ll poke a series of holes in the spine of the signature—that’s what a little bunch of paper like this is called.
” With her pen, Emerson stabbed several holes down the center creases in the pages.
“And then—okay, it’s about to get really rudimentary in here, but use your imagination.
” Waggling her bushy eyebrows and grinning playfully, she grabbed the other item she’d collected—a spool of floss, like for teeth—and rolled out a long piece, then started weaving it through the holes.
Her tongue peeked out between her lips as she worked.
After a few quiet moments, she held it out to Mal.
“Like that. But, like, imagine it with cool stories inside and not dental floss as the binding.”
Mal eyed the little pamphlet. Rough was a kind word for it, but it did remind them vaguely of the pamphlets they’d seen on sale in the front room of the Haus.
“Okay,” they admitted, their mind transposing carefully edited stories onto the pages and colorful embroidery floss into the binding. “That’s actually really cool.”
“Yes!” Emerson shouted. “So, we can do the actual editing the same way as before, and the layout—I think between your Word know-how and my Illustrator wizardry, we can figure that out too. And for any photos and art”—Emerson redirected quickly when Mal frowned at her—“or whatever else, we can scan them in. Or actually—ooh!—what if we print out a master proof, do all the layout tweaking on that, and then scan it back in for printing?”
Mal did always like to edit on a printed copy first (to keep both their dyslexia in check and their often-wandering mind away from the temptation of opening other tabs), then translate it into Word after they were done.
They nodded. But their mind still swirled with worry. “It sounds like… a lot.”
A lot of paper. A lot of space. A lot of time. None of which Mal had a surplus of.