Chapter Fourteen Coddled Eggs and Collated Pages
“Two today?” Maddie asked, looking up over a simmering pan when Mal came down to the kitchen.
Mal nodded, still sleepy. They hadn’t gotten home from the Haus last night until well past eleven—late enough that they accepted a ride from Nylan, who lived two neighborhoods away from Mal in Lassavor Park.
They had tried very hard not to feel embarrassed by the sagging gutters as they shut the door of Nylan’s Civic in the dark and were quietly thankful the streetlight in front of their house still hadn’t been fixed. “Two, please.”
It was always two.
Sunday-Morning Eggs had become a tradition for the Flowers siblings.
With their dad usually working at Glen’s and their mom spending most of her morning at church (she had given up trying to drag Maddie and Mal years ago), the two were—as they often were—left to fend for themselves.
Mal had never been much of a cook, so for the first few years, they made Maddie a frozen egg sandwich in the microwave.
But Maddie, inspired by all the food shows they watched together, had eventually taken over breakfast. Lately she had been on a coddled-egg kick—they were like poached eggs but fancy.
Luckily, the MixxedMedia meeting was later in the day, so Mal didn’t have to miss it. After plodding outside to put out a scoop of food for the neighborhood cats, they sat at the rickety kitchen island, freshly brewed coffee in hand as Maddie’s ramekins simmered away.
With her back turned as she chopped green onions, she said, “I missed you yesterday.”
“I was there, you goof,” Mal said, miming the motions again to remind her. “You kicked butt. Congratulations, by the way.”
“Thank you, thank you.” Maddie grinned, turning and scooping the green onions into a bowl. But there was a strange stiffness to her smile Mal didn’t understand. Finally, she added, “You didn’t stay.”
Mal shrugged. “I just had to cut out a little early so I could do zine things.”
“But you missed pizza at LaRosa’s with the team.
” Maddie pursed her lips, fiddling with the bowl of onions until it sat just so on the serving tray, next to a bowl of cheese.
This was part of the tradition, too: Maddie took the time to make things pretty for them, which made Sunday-Morning Eggs feel more special.
She was quiet for some time, moving the saltshaker from one side of the tray to another, twice, before she finally said, “I missed you is all.”
And there was a strange wobble to her voice—something small and vulnerable that cued Mal to listen closer, to look between the words for what Maddie wasn’t saying out loud.
Mal struggled with this sometimes. It wasn’t their style; they just said what they meant, when they meant it.
After a long night with Emerson, who did the same, it took Mal an extra minute to figure it out.
They had hurt Maddie’s feelings by not staying.
“Shit,” said Mal, wringing their hands in their lap. “I’m sorry, Maddie.”
And they were. Hurting Maddie’s feelings was not what Mal did.
But part of Mal’s heart felt still light from last night—from the laughter and the layout and the way Parker had rock-paper-scissored Mal for the last piece of pizza but still split it with them when she won, cutting it in two with an absolutely pathetic plastic butter knife.
Instead of sitting quietly while Maddie and the team recapped the game in the corner booth of LaRosa’s, Mal had had a pizza party of their own. It felt good.
But it felt uncomfortable, too—feeling good at the same time as feeling guilt.
“I mean it,” they reiterated, because they did.
They had promised themself years ago that they would never be the one who made Maddie feel forgotten; their mom and dad did that to her enough.
This was the trade-off they made: Mal showed up for Maddie when their parents couldn’t be around, and when they were, Maddie shielded Mal from them as best she could.
Mal nodded, resolute. They’d do better next time.
“I’ll make sure to stick around for all the rest this season. Pinkie promise.”
Settling the pepper in its proper place, Maddie looked up at Mal. “Pinkie promise?”
“You know I don’t mess around with these,” they said, holding their pinkie out.
Maddie took it, curling her finger tight around Mal’s. She hesitated, holding their gaze. There was something else she wanted to say; Mal could tell. They just couldn’t tell what.
It had never been like this before with Maddie.
Though Maddie’s brain didn’t work exactly like Mal’s, she made more effort to meet Mal where they were than anyone else typically did.
But today felt… different. The grit of salt and the soft slick of cooking oil coated the space between them.
That oily feel rested on them too, leaving Mal with the feeling of needing to wash their hands.
“Okay,” she said at last, and let Mal’s pinkie go. “Help me get these eggs out of their bath.”
Mal did—or rather they stood beside Maddie and watched her do so, easy and effortlessly, with a pair of old kitchen tongs.
As she added them to the serving plate and Mal picked the two Best Spoons, they were sure there was something else they wanted to say too.
But whatever it was, it got tangled up and lost and softened by the time the siblings got to the sofa, tucking themselves under a faded Dollar City throw blanket.
Together, they ate their eggs and caught up on the latest episodes of Baking Show in relative silence.
“Well, beans, we’re out of paper again.”
“Emerson,” Mal hissed, but even their whisper rippled with laughter.
The pair of them had been hunched over Patron Use Print Station Number Two since one p.m., when the Covington library opened—much too late for Mal’s taste, even for a Sunday.
It was the first time Mal had been into the library since they stopped walking Maddie to tween time when she was twelve (at her request, as it was “too babyish”), but it was much the same as they remembered it: absolutely stunning under a bit of grime and misuse, with a big bright skylight over the computer bays.
This was where they were now stationed: at the very end of the row of computers, directly by the printer.
It was Mal’s job to send the correct pages to the printer in batches of one hundred and to jiggle the mouse every five minutes or so to keep the computer from shutting down and wiping everything Emerson was logged into.
“They know me here, so they know I’m a noisy mess,” Emerson insisted, though she did drop her voice at least a few decibels.
Standing in a crouch over the printer, she waved her hand, caught the eyes of the library worker behind the desk, and for the third time made a motion between herself and the small hutch beneath the printer, which held the reams of refill paper.
With a nod from the associate, she bent, took out a fresh ream, and started to reload the printer.
“I mean, I know that too,” Mal conceded, swatting at Emerson’s hip as they whispered. Mal couldn’t remember when these small touches had become natural between them, but they had, and Mal leaned comfortably into the contact. “But this is a library. We have to keep it down; it’s the rules.”
“You and your ru— OH, sorry, I mean—” Emerson continued in a dramatic stage whisper that was just as loud. “You and your rules, Mal Flowers.”
“This one isn’t even mine,” Mal whispered. “It just… is.”
To be fair, Mal felt like most of the rules they followed just were. It was how they functioned.
“Libraries are cool now Mal, haven’t you heard?” Emerson’s not-whisper was punctuated with giggles. “They’re not stuffy old quiet places anymore. If half these people weren’t like, still asleep, it would be bumpin’. Trust me.”
It wasn’t that Mal didn’t trust her; Emerson had detailed, in the short five minutes they waited outside for the doors to open, how often she came here for anime club or crafting programs or to browse the stacks.
She was here just the other day, she insisted, at a button-making program with Parker, and that had been quite the ruckus.
But looking around at the other computer bays, filled mostly with unhoused folks and a few kids Mal recognized from school, the vibe was still very much “quiet.”
Mal shrugged.
“Okay,” said Emerson in her usual speaking voice. “I mean—okay,” she whispered, placating Mal. “That’s it for the fourth page. Run me through a hundred of page five; let’s get this party started.”
“Emerson, there’s like eight pages still to print,” Mal said, sending the job to the printer. “This party is going to take a while.”
“No reason we can’t party now, though, right?
” As Emerson started to collect pages from the machine as they spit out (they had been trying to collate them in groups of ten, for easy assembly later, although Mal was almost certain Emerson’s ten and their own ten were very different things), she started to hum an upbeat tune Mal didn’t recognize.
“Emerson,” Mal hissed again.
Emerson hummed harder. Mal swore they could see her lips vibrate with it. They raised an eyebrow at her.
And then Emerson started to wiggle: her hips, her fingers, her arms, her belly. She hummed harder, shimmying her shoulders.
“We’re going to get in trouble!” Mal said, and now their voice was a little too loud, to compensate for the noise of the humming.
“We’re not,” Emerson hummed, swiping another small pile of pages. “Come on. Have a wiggle. I dare you.”
Emerson hummed harder when Mal shook their head, her knees now joining in and wobbling around so she looked more like a squid than a girl.
“That looks ridiculous,” Mal didn’t quite whisper.
But in truth, it actually looked… really fun.
Mal often found themself seeking movement—a walk when things felt hard, the opening and closing of their fists when things felt too much.
Things felt fine now—despite their fussing about Emerson’s volume—but they still felt their body wanting to mirror Emerson’s motions.
And so, with a furtive glance over their shoulder at the library worker at the desk (who was, to Mal’s astonishment, spectacularly unconcerned about the humming happening at Patron Use Print Station Number Two), Mal wiggled.
They started with their fingers, which felt so good that they wiggled their arms too, and then their thighs, the fat there jiggling pleasantly against the hard plastic of their chair.
“Yes!” piped Emerson, which did draw a look from the associate at the desk, but she gave an apologetic shrug and dropped her voice to a whisper when she went on. “See what I mean?”
“Okay, yeah,” Mal said, wiggling their hips where they sat. “I see what you mean.”
“Now we’re talking—quietly! Quietly!” Emerson raised her hands in surrender, partly to Mal and partly to the associate, who stood up from their chair to give Mal and Emerson the Librarian Look.
But in that moment, Mal didn’t mind at all.
Being wiggly with Emerson felt nice. They were content to wiggle for the next hundred or so pages worth of print jobs.
When the printing was finished, Emerson commandeered a couple paper boxes from the recycling pile and Mal carefully loaded the collated zine pages in.
Together, they carried them to the front desk to pay.
The good vibes evaporated; Mal had been dreading this part.
“I can pay for half,” they insisted as they waited for the library worker to figure out how much to charge for the literal crate of paper they’d printed.
“Nope,” Emerson insisted just as firmly. “We talked about this, Mal.”
They had, but that didn’t make it sit any more comfortably in Mal’s gut.
Having Emerson pay for the print run made things feel unequal, even if they did earn it right back by selling copies, like she’d promised.
It reminded Mal of their first eighth grade, when they would meet friends for sweets at Golden Gelato and couldn’t afford to pay.
Their friends always covered them and promised it wasn’t a problem, but it was part of the reason Mal had stopped going to those sorts of things.
It felt like they cost too much, like they couldn’t contribute.
“But half would only be—” Mal peeked over Emerson’s shoulder at the number on the old card reader the library worker had turned to them.
Half would be a whole Wednesday-night shift at Dollar City. Mal’s insides felt cold with embarrassment.
“Listen, let me take advantage of my moms in peace, Mal,” Emerson joked, shaking a bank card that read ROSE PIKE and then tapping it to the machine. “We’ll earn it back in no time. I promise.”
Mal sighed but relented; they didn’t have a shift’s worth of extra funds to pay with right now anyway.
They resolved that they would earn it back, even if the how part was still to be determined.
Part of what they loved about Emerson was that she felt like Mal’s equal in every way.
Being reminded that they stood on uneven ground in this one very large, very embarrassing way made them uncomfortable.
Mal shifted from foot to foot at the desk, waiting.