Chapter Six ‘Collage’ Is Dead #2
“Okay.” Emerson considered. “What about, like—” She pushed off hard from the circle, her chair rolling back to the editor’s desk.
Half a breath later, she rolled back with a pink pad of Post-its and an orange pen.
She scribbled something on the top page, then showed it to the group.
“Mixxed, with two X’s, Media. It adds a little edge without too much edge.
Plus, it’ll make the logo cool to design. ”
“Ooh, do you need help with that?” asked Kodi, leaning in to look at Emerson’s lettering.
“Probably!” said Emerson. “I’ve never designed a logo before.”
“The queer audacity of it,” Kodi said, but she was grinning at Emerson.
“Y’all, I still don’t like it,” said Mal. “This is a meeting about revamping Collage, not—MixxedMedia, or whatever.”
“Well, we can’t rename it The Mal Party or Sad Sack Failed Lit Mag Straggler’s Monthly,” Stella said. “And I don’t super love MixxedMedia, either—look, I’m not going to lie to you, Emerson—but it’s better than Collage.”
“I actually think it’s really cool,” said Parker.
“Yeah.” Nylan looked from Parker to the group. “It’s got promise.”
“Okay, it’s growing on me,” conceded James, leaning toward the Post-it Kodi now held.
Mal’s insides started to itch and squirm.
The meeting had gone from Good Enough to spiraling out of their control in an instant.
Mal looked to Emerson, who was bopping along with it all, bouncing happily in her seat.
When she caught Mal’s eye, she smiled, but the meltdown Mal was barely staving off must have been sharp on their face.
Emerson quickly fixed her expression into a serious one.
“Oop! We’re running out of time. We’ll talk specifics about everything else later,” she said decisively. “But for now, let’s take a vote on the name. All in favor of MixxedMedia?”
Parker and Emerson’s hands shot up together. Nylan and Kodi followed, with James slowly joining them. With a long-suffering sigh, even Stella raised her hand.
They waited almost a full minute before Emerson asked, “All opposed?”
Mal didn’t raise their hand then either.
Deciding on things together was a terrible idea.
“And the measure passes with six yeses and one impartial editor in chief abstaining.”
And just like that, Collage was dead.
When Mal got home an hour later, they still felt spiky all over, like too many staples in the bindings of a zine.
Not even the long walk home would smooth out their edges.
They had taken what they called the Scenic Route—a longer loop than usual, which took them up through the upscale, historic neighborhood of Seminary Square, where cats peeked out of windows instead of from around street corners like they did in Mal’s neighborhood, and then across to Linden Grove Cemetery, the closest thing Mal had to real green space in the city.
Mal had hoped they could lose some of those sharp feelings in the autumn twilight, with the sun setting earlier but not quite early enough that it was dark dark yet.
But even with a cooling, cleansing breeze blowing through the yellow trees in the cemetery’s arboretum, all the Too Muchness of the meeting still followed them home like a street cat.
Luckily, Mal had nothing else to do with their Friday night, unlike some of the others involved in Col—MixxedMedia, who had rushed from the meeting to other exciting, hopefully less-ruinous things.
That left Mal with the space—and quiet—they needed to right themself.
After all that coffee and no snacks since their cafeteria lunch, they felt a little woozy, underfed, and overcaffeinated.
Rifling through the fridge, they gathered Odds And Ends for themself: cheese, grapes, and bologna they cut into triangle-shaped fourths. They had just opened a fresh pack of saltine crackers when their mom came into the kitchen from the living room.
“Hey there, Mal,” she said, reaching into the fridge for a bottle of wine. “What’cha cooking?”
“Nothing,” they said, then shook their head. That wasn’t right. “I’m making snacks.”
“Oh, nice, nice.”
She wasn’t really listening. Mal stewed silently for a moment, annoyed. It must have been palpable, because their mom looked over as she refilled her glass, really seeing them for the first time all day. “Is it a spiky day, hon?”
Mal was instantly suspicious. Their mom didn’t typically check in like this. But Mal referred to days like these enough that Spiky Days were as good as a proper noun for the other Flowerses, too. They nodded.
“My meeting didn’t go…” It hadn’t gone badly. By most accounts, it was a rollicking success. It just hadn’t gone in the direction they wanted. They corrected course. “How I thought it would go.”
“I’m sorry,” their mom said. “What happened?”
Mal placed a handful of crackers on their plate so hard the bottom two split in half. “Just—stupid stuff. People had some very wrong opinions, which happened to be the popular ones, so.” They shrugged. “I guess we’re going to do things the wrong way.”
“Oh, Mal,” their mom tutted. “Remember what Dr. Benson said—don’t get stuck in black-and-white thought patterns.”
A groan rolled out of Mal’s chest without their permission.
Dr. Benson was their middle school psychiatrist—the one who had diagnosed them with ADHD after their first eighth-grade year.
They had only seen him a handful of times, when their dad’s insurance still covered it, to help with Mal’s ADHD Problem (another proper noun in the Flowers household).
What Mal remembered most about those sessions was the going and the waiting, and also their mom doing most of the talking during the actual appointments.
While they hadn’t found those sessions helpful at all—to them, his advice had amounted basically to “just don’t have ADHD”—their mom had latched onto a few of the phrases he gave them as coping mechanisms.
This, black-and-white thought patterns, was one of them.
Most often, she deployed it when she thought Mal was being particularly stubborn.
If Mal was being honest, most of the borrowed phrases their mom criticized them with—use your time-management skills, find your motivation—were things she struggled with as much as Mal.
But the one time Mal had been honest and pointed this out, their mom had had a Mal-size meltdown of her own.
And then when Dr. Benson had casually mentioned that ADHD is often inherited from a parent, she had had another, and suddenly it was Mal’s dad taking them to appointments, and then not taking them at all.
“I’m not,” Mal huffed, finishing their snack plate with a fun-size box of Nerds. “I’m just a little overwhelmed right now is all.”
“Mal, honey, if it’s too much, you know you don’t have to do this,” their mom said. “I don’t want you to get behind.”
And there it was again: Do less. The words crashed into them, taking their appetite away.
“Thanks,” they said. “Noted.” And they left the kitchen with nothing but a store-brand sparkling water, leaving their Odds And Ends abandoned on the counter.
After a stomp up the stairs, they turned not left toward their bedroom door but right, toward Maddie’s. Later, Mal knew she would be going to a bonfire with the soccer team, but now she was just getting ready, holding two flannel shirts at arm’s length.
“Red or purple?” she asked when Mal stomped in.
“Purple,” Mal answered, their voice stiff. At their side, they opened and closed their fists to the beat of the Charlie XCX song that played over Maddie’s phone.
Maddie took a real look at Mal and nodded. “Do you want to talk about it or just be here?”
Mal scrunched their nose. “Just be here?”
“Of course.”
And so Mal flopped onto Maddie’s twin-size bed, shooing away the discarded red flannel and feeling more than a little childish.
They got so frustrated with themself sometimes when they got Like This—when the page of their brain started to overflow.
They hadn’t even started with a particularly full page today; this morning, and even when the meeting had started, they had been able to keep up with the mess of their mind, editing away the excess.
But the zine’s name change and everything that came with it had ruined all that careful work, shifted them into caps lock mode, to alternating text sizes and illegible fonts.
No amount of careful self-editing could contain the absolute overwhelm they felt now as they lay with their back against the mattress, staring at the ceiling.
Maybe their mom had been right about them doing too much.
But… Mal didn’t want her to be right. It was a small, rebellious thought, a spark they felt just desperate enough to foster.
And they knew the only way to move forward was to edit their brain page back down, to shift things, to keep themself within the correct margins.
So, that’s what they did: They drank their sparkling water and wallowed in the Too Muchness of the day, letting it wash over them like the noise of Maddie moving around the room getting ready.
The spicy feel of fizzy bubbles in their nose helped bring them back from their spiraling thoughts and into their body.
Slowly, they untangled the conflicting streams of words in their brain, changing Wingdings to Comic Sans to Times New Roman.
“Mom thinks I am going to fail at Collage,” Mal finally said, and then amended, “I mean. MixxedMedia.”
“You changed the name, huh? Well, Mom thinks a lot of things that are wrong.” Maddie watched Mal through the mirror as she finished curling her hair. “Do you think you’re going to fail?”
“No.” This was Mal’s immediate reaction, tumbling out before they had a chance to edit it. Right away, they felt like they had to amend it. “I mean, maybe? Probably, even. I mean,” they said, echoing their parents’ words, “you know how I can get.”
“If you mean awesome, then yeah, I do. Can you throw me that scrunchie from—?” Maddie pointed over Mal’s shoulder. Mal grabbed the black satin hair tie from the bedside table and tossed it to her. “What do you want to happen?”
Mal shrugged, sipped their sparkling water, and considered, trying to pin down an answer.
They still had concerns about the whole thing—the change, the responsibility of a roomful of staffers looking to them, not Ms. Merritt, for answers.
But strangely, those weren’t the thoughts that bubbled to the surface.
“I think I want to be good at it?”
“Hey, that sounds doable to me.” Maddie gathered her curls into a half-up bun. “Don’t let Mom get in your head. Or if she’s in there, let me get in there too, and I’ll say you can do this, Mal over and over until you can’t even hear her.”
Mal scrunched their nose. “It gets weird in there sometimes, Maddie.”
“Well, luckily for you, I don’t mind weird,” Maddie said. “Okay, I have to do my mascara, and I can’t do that without doing the open-mouth thing.”
Mal nodded and went quiet, imagining Maddie in their head chanting you can do this, Mal—quietly, so it didn’t feel like Too Much.
Maybe they could be good at MixxedMedia.
It meant they still got to do their Thing, even if it was going to change in ways they thought were wrong.
And it meant an opportunity to get back on track for The Plan.
But that wasn’t even the full picture. Putting their empty can on Maddie’s bedside table (“Don’t leave it there, I don’t collect them like you do,” she joked between applications), Mal rolled onto their stomach and reflected.
The part they were most excited about was working with Emerson.
Emerson, who liked colors that were too bright but who used them to such great effect Mal could see themself learning to like them too. Emerson, with her excited text messages and comfortable phone calls and messy Google Docs and a big, bold, underlined need for someone like Mal to organize it all.
Emerson was not like anyone else Mal had ever known.
And although they still didn’t really know her—two weeks was hardly enough time to know someone—they already felt like they did.
Mal slotted into place with Emerson like a perfectly placed semicolon linking two independent but closely related clauses.
Mal wasn’t sure about the zine, but they wanted to be sure about her.
Smiling, Mal leaned onto one hip and slid their hand into their pocket, grabbing their phone.
Hey.
Their text chain with Emerson shone bright on their screen.
We should make a form for people to pitch stories for the first issue.
If we’re going to publish by the end of the month, we need to get the ball rolling.
A few moments passed, and Mal reread their messages. Did they sound too bossy? Too demanding? Too—
you got it, boss!!!!
i’m out at a show right now but i’ll get on it in the morning.
expected turn-around: by the time you get off work????
The text on Mal’s evening brain page highlighted and shifted to eleven-point Georgia: inarguably the best font.
“You’re smiley,” Maddie said, sitting on the bed and pushing against Mal with her hips so they had to scoot back and make room.
“Yeah,” Mal said shortly. “Mag—uh, zine things.”
Maddie did a little hum Mal couldn’t interpret, then looked down at them. “Are you sure you don’t want to come out tonight?” She waggled an eyebrow. “You can invite whoever it is you’re texting.”
Mal shoved Maddie gently with their knee. “It’s not like that.” Despite the thrill in Mal’s chest at the suggestion. “Plus, I have to be up early for work, so. No. Thank you.”
“Okay. Walk me down so Mom lets me out the door without grilling me?”
“Okay,” said Mal.
As Maddie grabbed her things, Mal texted Emerson back quickly.
Sounds great.
Thanks, Emerson.
Then they added:
Best Managing Editor Ever.