Chapter Five Too Much
On Wednesday night, after a blessedly boring shift at Dollar City, Mal sat curled up on the sofa in the family room, the rapidly filling page in front of them lit by the blue glow of the TV.
They had started this week by checking several names off the Post-it list Emerson had given them on Sunday.
Parker Washington had been an early and easy win; she was on board as soon as Mal opened their mouth, and she gave them a high five for being a “badass punk bitch” (her words, not Mal’s).
A girl named Taylor Bagby had been an equally easy pass; as soon as Mal had gathered the courage to approach her in the hall on Tuesday, Taylor had said no thanks.
While crossing her name off felt a bit like a loss, Mal wouldn’t particularly miss the cat mysteries she turned in at the last minute.
But while some of the names on their list were easy, one stood stubbornly at the very bottom, glaring at them whenever they opened their planner:
Stella Willen.
For most of Monday, Mal had tried to rationalize forgetting to ask her. With so many folks saying no, Emerson might assume Stella was another casualty, if she even assumed anything at all.
But by Tuesday, as Mal’s list started to dwindle—and with it, their pool of writers—they had to face a hard truth: They needed Stella.
And not just as a warm body to send them words.
Though they would never admit this to her, they needed Through the Garden of Gems and Dahlias to keep readers coming back to the zine.
The story of Talia and Xarrett was as popular as any Wattpad ship among the fic traders of Holmes.
But Mal would have to propose it to Stella carefully.
They not only had to make the new and improved Collage sound good (something Mal was still trying to convince themself of), but they also had to make it clear that Mal—and now Emerson—was in charge.
They would be walking a fine line. One with too many variables for Mal’s liking.
And so, like they sometimes did when conversations felt especially out of their control, they made notes tracking possible answers for all the ways the conversation might go.
Obviously, they wouldn’t use these notes in the actual conversation, but mapping them out ahead of time helped Mal hold on to their thoughts in the moment.
Squinting down at the page, they added another few bullet points: THINK OF YOUR READERSHIP, followed by THINK OF YOUR LEGACY.
They started to draw a line from the latter to another thought, but it slipped away as the kitchen door swung open. A gust of chilly air swept in the woody scent of changing leaves—and their dad, with a briefcase in his hand and the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Mal’s eyes flicked to their phone’s lock screen. “This is later than usual,” they said.
“Tell me about it,” their dad said with a little laugh. “We got a shipment of trees in today, and the warehouse is still full from last week’s.”
Mal’s dad was manager at Glen’s, a chain craft store.
While most of the time they liked that he worked at a craft store—it meant they got a lot of fun trinkets, like stickers and cool pens, when they went on final clearance for cheap—during this time of year, they hated it.
From fall through the New Year, their dad’s life consisted of only Christmas: setting Christmas, stocking Christmas, selling Christmas, clearance Christmas.
It left very little time for actual Christmas—and it also meant Mal was left mostly at the mercy of their mom.
Now, in early September, they always tried to get in as much time with their dad as they could, filling up on him before he went into Work Hibernation for the cold months.
There was never really enough of him to tide them over until spring.
After setting his briefcase by the door and kicking off his Professional But Sensible Dad Loafers, he moved to the fridge. He swung the door open, adding to the strange light of the room. “What’s got you out of bed so late?” he asked. “Homework?”
Mal frowned. It was still early enough in the year that teachers weren’t assigning Heavy Stuff often, just little things they could finish in the morning before the bell or (as was the case for History) copy from Maddie. But they couldn’t tell their dad that, so instead they said, “Kind of?”
Coming in from the kitchen with a plate of Odds And Ends—what Mal thought of as snacks that didn’t really match; tonight, for their dad, a little chocolate bar, half a PB there was no use denying it.
“But I don’t really have another choice.
” Their extracurricular investigations had made that much clear.
If this didn’t work… Well, there wasn’t space on Mal’s brain page to worry about that now.
But their dad reached out, gripped their knee, gave it a squeeze that was a little too hard. “I just don’t want you to bite off more than you can chew, Mal. I know how you can get.”
How You Can Get was code for Too Much: times when Mal melted down and couldn’t make themself solid again.
When they became inconsolable, quick to lash out and slow to calm down.
When they felt like they either needed to be alone in complete darkness with no sound or sensation, or else walking at top speed around Covington with both earbuds in and the volume all the way up.
Nothing in between would do. Mal often wondered, trapped in the middle of those extremes, whether there was something off about them, something wrong.
They already had dyslexia and ADHD. What if there was even more?
In those moments, Mal was even too much for themself, which only ever made the meltdowns worse.
The brunt of these meltdowns usually fell on their dad.
Normally, Maddie had already tried to intervene, and Mal’s mom, prone to melting down herself, only ever made them worse.
It was down to their dad, and to late-night talks over Odds And Ends, to put them back together.
This happened less now—that was the beauty and importance of The Plan—but before, it had happened much more frequently.
Sometimes Mal had lost whole days, whole weeks, to How They Could Get.
This was why slotting something into Collage’s place in The Plan was so important. The Plan was how they forced themself into Normal Parameters, how they kept themself acceptably solid. Even if it was uncomfortable, it was what worked.
But How You Can Get was also, Mal worried, code for I Don’t Want You To Get Like That. With Christmas at Glen’s creeping closer and closer, Mal was pretty sure their dad’s concern came from a place of not having time or energy to handle them when they got Like That.
They shouldn’t have brought this up with him after all. Mal gripped their planner even harder.
“I know,” they said; again, this was not worth pushing back on.
Sometimes it felt like the whole Flowers family operated at least in part because of How Mal Could Get—to keep them from it.
Their insides churned uncomfortably with guilt.
“But I’m not alone. Emerson will help. And Stella too”—Ugh—“if these notes go to plan.”
“Just be gentle with yourself, okay, Mal?” He fixed them with a Look, soft and concerned, that made Mal look away. “I don’t want you to do too many things.”