Chapter Nine Move in with Me
On Monday, in the short hour they had crammed into their schedule for time at the Haus, Mal arrived Mal Late, which meant only five minutes early.
It was a cool day, overcast and gray, and Mal lingered on their walk in, taking time to appreciate the ginkgo trees that lined the upper part of Greenup Street, closer to the river.
They were changing color at last and were currently Mal’s favorite shade of green-just-starting-to-turn-yellow.
Mal ran their fingers over the ombre line where waxy green faded to waxy yellow, wondering when they would fall.
Soon, they hoped. It was always an incredible sight, the way the ginkgos all decided to shed their leaves at once. And if the slight chill to the breeze was any indication, they might be right.
But lingering meant that when they walked through the front door of the Haus, they weren’t as on time as they liked to be—but they were still more on time than Emerson tended to be, so they waited at the front coffee bar, trying not to be obvious about keeping an eye on the door while they watched for her bright hair to come through it.
The minutes crept by, Mal checking the time regularly on their phone lock screen.
At 4:03—practically late enough that they’d considered packing it up and going home—Sam, clad today in a red beanie and an orange flannel, noticed them.
“Oh, hey,” they said, nodding at Mal from behind the bar. “Emerson’s here already.”
“What?” Mal said, their voice bordering on indignant, before they could stop themself.
“I know,” Sam said, and laughed. “I’m as surprised as you. But she’s in the back already.”
“Oh.” She could have texted, at least. Mal frowned. Now they were late. “Well, can I get a coffee, please?”
“She’s got you covered already—took one back for you.” Catching the look Mal must have worn plain on their face, Sam added with a grin, “Sweet, right? If you need a refresh, let me know. I can warm it up for you.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“No problem, Mal.”
And then Mal was off, headed to the back room.
“Finally,” Emerson exclaimed as soon as Mal walked in, turning to face them with one hand on her hip in mock exasperation. “I’ve been waiting forever.”
Guilt surged through Mal. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Chill, Mal.” Emerson’s shoulders rolled with laughter as she beckoned them over. “Literally it’s been like ten minutes, tops. Also, I got you coffee! It should be perfect guzzling temperature now.”
Mal grinned despite themself. “Some of us like to enjoy our coffee, Emerson.”
“Well, it could never be me,” she said, twirling once in her rolling chair. “But come on in anyway, I guess.”
And so Mal did, and as soon as they came closer—as soon as they were able to take their eyes off Emerson, who today wore a bright green swing dress that did nice things to her curves—they noticed a shift.
“You… decorated,” they said, blinking at the new scenery.
“Yep!” chirped Emerson. “I’m moving in!”
Emerson had indeed started to move in. On the wall over the desk, she had hung three bright, rainbow-colored paper pennant garlands, artfully pinned so they stretched across the two windows.
There were also posters of some adventure game hung on the adjacent wall, with people in armor and flowing robes swinging swords or battle-axes.
The surface of the desk, once bare except for a few tile coasters, now sported a trio of mugs full of writing implements: a couple mismatched pencils in one, a handful of Bic pens that looked like they may have been borrowed from the stock room in another, a collection of colorful fine-line markers in another still.
There was also a very gaudy frame, about A4 size, in one corner, set into which was a photo of a very fat, very orange, very grouchy-looking cat wearing a party hat.
“Who’s that?” Mal asked, before they could really absorb the rest.
“My cat, Prince Pringles,” Emerson answered, grabbing the photo and handing it to Mal so they could get a closer look. “He’s kind of the worst, and honestly I don’t think he likes me very much, but I love him enough to make up for it. That’s his birthday party this past June. He turned five.”
“The hat’s a nice touch,” Mal said, smiling down at the glittery 5 at the hat’s center.
“Pringy didn’t think so, but what can you do?” Emerson shrugged. She took back the photo and tenderly arranged the frame in its spot of honor on the right corner of the desk—which Mal realized then had become her side. “Do you have any cats?”
“Not…,” Mal considered, then finally finished, “… really.”
Emerson giggled at their obvious hesitation. The sound was so nice that Mal wanted to make her do it again, so they went on.
“I have a bunch of neighborhood cats. They’re not mine, just strays, but I feed them”—they always dedicated a small portion of their budget to cat food from Dollar City—“so they’re kind of mine, even if they don’t know it.”
“Sometimes our children are so ungrateful.” Emerson smiled at Mal, then fingered the gilded edge of the frame lovingly.
“But hey—can we do this?” Mal asked.
“Talk about cats?” Emerson shrugged. “I mean, yeah, sure, I don’t mind pushing editor duties off for another day.”
“One, no,” said Mal, shaking their head. “We have to dig into the inbox today. James said he sent a first draft of his story he wants eyes on. But two, no, I mean—can we even decorate like this?”
“You don’t like my style, Mal?” Emerson batted her eyelashes at Mal playfully.
“I mean—” Mal stammered, thrown off by the gesture. This made Emerson giggle again, which transformed Mal’s flustered feeling into something more pressing. “It’s really colorful, and Prince Pringles’s frame is top-notch, honestly, but I mean—are we Allowed to decorate in here?”
Mal said it carefully so it sounded out loud like it did in Mal’s head: Allowed, capital A, proper noun.
“I mean…” Emerson shrugged again. “I don’t know? Probably? No? And really—who cares?”
“I mean, me,” said Mal before they could stop themself. And then, to soften it the same way they might have for Maddie: “I just like working here together, and I don’t want to piss the owners off by doing something we shouldn’t.”
“Aw, shucks. I like working with you too, Mal.”
Mal sighed but smiled. It was nice to hear. “You know what I mean, Emerson.”
“I do,” she said, “but I mean—the answer is still the same. I don’t know if we’re Allowed, but I think we should do it anyway.
Trevor is mostly never here, he just keeps the books, really, and Sai’s a big softie, plus no one ever uses this room, so why not decorate it?
Make it comfy. We’re about to be spending a bunch of time in here, right? Might as well do it in style.”
Mal blinked, willing their brain to catch up to Emerson’s words.
“You… can’t just make your own rules like that, Emerson,” they said once it finally did.
Emerson snorted a laugh. “Come on, Mal. All rules are made up. Why not made up by us? Plus, that’s not very punk rock of you.”
Mal shook their hands in exasperation. They weren’t very punk rock. That sort of rebellion belonged to Emerson. “But—”
“But nothing,” Emerson said, grinning broadly, daringly. “Look, sometimes it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask permission. And I already did the thing, so there. You should move in with me, Mal. Let’s make this space our own. No one else is going to do it for us.”
Mal pressed their lips into a line. They didn’t know about all that. Moving a flower-shaped pillow Emerson had put on their chair, they sat down at the left side of the desk—the side that had become their side—and pulled their laptop out of their bag. The answer they gave was “Maybe.”
But also, they thought to themself, Maybe not.
“That’s the spirit,” Emerson said, snatching up the pillow and putting it in her lap.
“Okay.” Mal nodded intently to get themself back on track. “Let’s get to work.”
In the middle of Algebra II, Mal was going through it.
It was more than their usual math class near-meltdown—more than the frustration of keeping all the numbers and letters and equations in strict, neat lines so their eyes could follow them rather than watch them all swim into the worst alphanumerical soup imaginable, more than the fact that it was always a losing battle.
As they sat neatly folding their paper in half lengthwise to form a careful column that would organize their practice problems, they had a different problem screaming in their mind instead.
The problem was Emerson-shaped—or rather, rule-shaped, or maybe broken-rule-shaped.
But that wasn’t right, exactly. Replaying their conversation in their mind, Mal remembered there weren’t any rules for Emerson to have broken.
The Haus had no policy against decorating the space they used as their MixxedMedia headquarters.
And with the way the Haus had come to be in the first place, created for the community by the community, it did seem like the kind of place where people decorated each room how they pleased.
In the absence of any rule against it, other people had done what Emerson suggested: just moved in, making the space what they needed it to be.
But in the absence of rules, Mal defaulted to believing that whatever they wanted or needed to do was probably against them.
There hadn’t been an explicit rule about not singing at the lunch table in kindergarten until Mal did it too much—and then, suddenly, there was.
Taking some quiet time to decompress was totally within the rules until Mal spent most of Stella’s freshman-year birthday party hiding in the bathroom.
And there still wasn’t an actual Flowers family rule about how long laundry could sit unfolded in a basket, but somehow Mal always managed to leave it (according to their mom, at least) Too Long.
Decorating their side of the desk—especially in the way they liked, not in a predetermined style and color palette—felt in their gut like it would be very much Against The Rules.