Chapter Seventeen Supply and Demand, Baybee
Mal hadn’t been wrong in feeling a catastrophic failure coming. They had just been wrong about what it was.
Math. It was always math.
With Mal’s dad working even longer hours as Christmas grew ever closer, their mom was around more and more.
Or maybe it just felt like she was, without their dad to balance her out.
With the sudden increase of complaints she brought home from work, Mal guessed she was also nearing Quitting Time for this job—the part of the cycle that always made her especially grouchy.
She was always half a step behind Mal lately, reminding them to take their dishes to the sink or not leave their shoes by the door.
And Maddie was always a half step behind her, trying to distract her or move the shoes herself.
The three of them followed each other around the house like that, a little cycle all their own.
It made Mal tired, trying to keep up with being kept up with so much.
But the catastrophe came when Mal’s mom, after coming home from a particularly Bad Workday and looking for something to be upset about, checked Mal’s grades online and saw exactly how many Algebra II assignments they had missed.
Their grade sat at a cool 62—and despite Maddie’s best efforts to convince her otherwise, their mom wasn’t buying that all the missing homework grades just hadn’t been added in yet.
“Look at this,” their mom said, calling Mal over to the desktop in their dad’s office (a corner of the kitchen with a small desk and a stack of bills). “Eighty-two, zero, zero, ninety-three, zero, eighty-four, zero. Do I need to go on?”
“No.” Mal really hoped she wouldn’t.
“But the grades that are in are really good,” Maddie hedged, inserting herself into the space between Mal and their mom.
“They’re fine,” their mom admitted with a huff. “Not good but fine. Mal, I don’t understand why you can’t just do the work.”
Mal had tried to explain how hard it was for them many times: how they didn’t understand why they had to do twenty-five basically identical problems when they could show they understood the formulas in ten, how much it felt like pulling teeth trying to pull the answers out of their brain after they got bored with the problems. But those reasons were not ones their mom was interested in hearing.
She would answer with her usual refrain: that no one liked doing work, and yet they still did it.
If Mal could do it, she justified, they should.
“I’ve just been busy,” they said instead. “With work and… things.”
“Well, I have a hard truth for you, Mal,” their mom snapped. “Your job isn’t really Dollar City, or that magazine club of yours. It’s school. And you need to do that before you can do the others.”
“It’ll be fine, Mal,” Maddie insisted quietly, just to them. “I can help.”
“But you can’t ride on your sister’s coattails forever, Mal.” Their mom spoke over their sister, leaning around to look at them. “You need to catch up, or else.”
Mal didn’t care to find out or else what.
And so between Mal’s supposed real job of school, their actual job working at Dollar City, and their Mom-imposed job of catching up on missing math work, Mal found it harder and harder to make time for MixxedMedia.
But they still did it, in stolen hours here and there.
In e-mail chains, in text messages to Emerson (who rain-checked them for gelato, much to their mutual chagrin) and Nylan and Parker in a group chat they’d set up, in quick trips to the Haus to check in and (at Emerson’s insistence) grab a bite of Pop-Tart before heading home to do “real” work.
It wasn’t until the Friday after the release of the Carving Our Place issue that Mal could carve out some time to actually go to the back room.
(Their dad was working late, their mom was out for a girl’s night at Color Me Mine, and Maddie had promised that she didn’t mind, really, they wouldn’t be missed.)
Mal walked there faster than usual, chill beats in their ears and their comfort boots warm on their feet.
With night falling earlier and earlier, the orange and purple and green Halloween lights that now decorated many of the houses on Greenup twinkled on halfway through their walk.
One of the particularly large houses even had spooky black lights that illuminated a whole scene of skeletons climbing up to the balcony, their white bones glowing eerily in the near-darkness.
When Mal finally walked into the back room, it turned out they weren’t the only one.
Spread out along the table were all the usual suspects: Emerson, of course, and Nylan and Parker bent over Nintendo Switches, and James, who appeared to be becoming a back-room regular too. Sitting beside him, working on a laptop, was a person Mal did not recognize.
“Oh, hey, Mal,” the newcomer said, turning to see them staring impolitely at them. “Glad you made it!”
“… Hey?” Mal said, like it was a question.
“I’m Alex, he/him pronouns,” said Alex, standing.
He was tall (much taller than Mal), white, and very strong-looking, with muscly arms that flexed beneath a long-sleeved, seasonally appropriate black-and-orange-striped shirt.
“I read your zine and I think it’s really cool.
James let me know you meet here, and I was wondering if you’re accepting new writers? ”
Mal blinked up at Alex.
Were they accepting new writers?
It was something Mal hadn’t considered; the old Collage team had abandoned ship so quickly when the magazine lost funding that Mal hadn’t prepared for any new interest.
They looked toward Emerson, sitting in her spot on the right side of the editors’ desk (the way Mal yearned to scoot in beside her on her left), but she was bent over her work, cramming nickels into brown paper change rolls and swearing under her breath.
“Yeah, sure,” Mal said, before they were even sure whether that was the right answer. “What do you write?”
“Personal essays, but, like, with a very fiction-y voice,” Alex said, looking excited. “Mostly about being a trans guy, because I can never find stuff to read about us. And I’m really stoked about what y’all are doing here for the community.”
“Yeah, cool,” said Mal, confused but trying to not show it. “Welcome to the team.”
“More like welcome to HELL,” Emerson said, collapsing dramatically on the editors’ desk. “If I have to roll any more nickels ever, I’m going to die.”
Mal shook their head but smiled, taking their place to her left. “Here, let me help.”
And for a while, Mal became lost in the task at hand, until all the change had been accounted for. Collecting all the various Post-its on which Emerson had recorded figures and doodles of cats, they tallied up the totals from the first issue’s sales.
A strange wave of discomfort rolled through Mal’s body as they did this work.
Money had never been their strong suit. But that wasn’t right—they were okay, really, with their budget.
They always made sure they had enough to cover their cell phone bill, their coffees (and sometimes Emerson’s) at the Haus, special snacks for themself and Maddie, and contributions to a small but growing savings account, all from their small Dollar City wages.
It was more that money made them uncomfortable, or that they thought it should.
More than once, they had overheard their parents fighting about it, and it seemed like they never had enough of it.
And now here was a small treasure of it, earned by doing something much nicer than stocking shelves at the dollar store, by working with people they liked much more than Brenda, the head cashier who refused to use Mal’s correct pronouns.
Mal counted the crumpled dollars and small army of rolled change again, trying to reconcile the total and the unsettling, hopeful feeling in their chest.
In the end, they’d figured out enough to at least start a new spreadsheet titled (by Emerson) MIXXEDMEDIA FUNDS!!!!! “Team meeting?” they asked, looking across at her.
“Team! Meeting!” Emerson agreed, but at such volume that it was an announcement, too.
When everyone had gathered around the old green worktable, Mal and Emerson sitting side by side at its head, Mal consulted their old laptop.
“Okay,” they said, “we’ve finally added up everything, including the consignments from the Haus café—which sold out, too, over this week—and it looks like we made a total profit of one hundred and thirty-five dollars.”
“We only made a hundred thirty-five bucks?” James asked, incredulous. “For all that?”
“Well, no,” said Mal. “We made back what we invested—”
“What my mom’s credit card invested,” Emerson interjected.
“Well, we made that back, and then an extra one hundred and thirty-five dollars on top of it.” It had seemed like a lot to Mal. A surge of shame flushed their cheeks.
“That’s cool,” said Nylan, grinning. “That means our next print run is fully funded!”
“I mean, I guess,” said James, shifting in his seat. “But was that print run large enough?”
“True,” Alex chimed in. “I feel like I barely got my hands on a copy. It sold out lightning-fast.”
“Collage could never,” agreed Parker. “Do we need to up the numbers?”
Mal shrugged. “I think we can stay solid where we are, and in a couple of issues, we’ll have earned enough to think about it.”
“But think of all the extra funds we could be earning now,” James said. “We could be saving up for a printer of our own so you two don’t have to use the janky ones at the library.”
“The library printers are superb,” Emerson protested, crossing her arms.
“But I get what you mean,” Parker said. “Like, we could be investing more in what we’re doing. Make MixxedMedia bigger. Better.”
“It’s already great,” Mal said defensively.
“No, yeah,” said Nylan, “it is. But think what we could do if we had resources like we did at school. A printer for when we need it, a computer we could all use, right here.”
Those were big-ticket items. Those weren’t in the budget. They didn’t even have a budget.