Chapter Twenty-Four A Walk, Divergent
“You showed up in the Austinburg Facebook group.”
Mal froze coming down the stairs, their mom’s voice pinning them in place.
They took two breaths, trying to do the math: She wasn’t supposed to be home this early in the afternoon (maybe her Quitting Time had come?), and they weren’t supposed to be here.
The project they needed to take to the Haus tonight was too big to carry around with them all day at school, even tucked into its oversized Dollar City bag, and so they had doubled back home after school.
The bag rested, flat and too tall, against their side.
Taking a deep breath, Mal followed the voice to the kitchen. “Huh?”
“You showed up in the neighborhood Facebook group,” their mom repeated, like that clarified anything.
Mal’s mind ran through all the possible reasons, but they came up with nothing. “I don’t think I’ve done anything?”
“For your magazine project.” Mal’s mom turned from where she’d been facing the counter. It looked like she was smiling. “Someone posted a link to the article.”
“Oh?” Mal was cautious, skirting around the table and toward the kitchen door. They floated the question carefully. “What did you think of it?”
“It was a good read,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “It looks like your little group is working hard.”
She must have just skimmed it, then; Mal felt certain that if she had really read it, she would be grounding them for selling copies against the school’s rules. Their face flushed—with worry, but also something else: pride. “Yeah. We are.”
“It’s an impressive article,” their mom said.
For a moment, Mal waited for something else—for her to say that they were impressive too, or at least that their work was—but it didn’t come. After a quiet moment, Mal said, “Thanks, Mom,” and turned to go.
Holding their project tight to one side so their mom couldn’t see it, their free hand reached for the door handle. It had almost closed around the knob when their mom’s voice reached out again.
“Can I say something honest, Mal?”
No, they wanted to say. Or maybe Don’t you always, regardless of what I want? But like the compliment they ached for, they knew those words would never come either. They turned back to her and said, “Sure, Mom. Go ahead.”
“I wish you’d give that kind of attention to something that mattered,” their mom said tiredly.
She pulled her hands through the air on the last word, like it was something to hold on to, a stick to wave.
“School, or a sport, or something. A hobby is great, and it seems like you’ve found one you like, but I mean something that matters to colleges. ”
“This mattered to NKU,” Mal said, before they could stop themself. “Enough to run the article, at least.”
Mal’s mom waved her hand. “A silly little article by a student won’t count for anything on an application. I just—”
To their mom’s credit, she stopped, letting her eyes slide halfway closed.
She clasped her hands together, and Mal thought they recognized the same flex of the muscles there that they sometimes made when they balled their own hands at their side during stressful moments.
After a minute spent in silence, she finally continued.
“I see so much of myself in you sometimes, Mal,” she said, fixing them with a particular Look—one that Mal, who got all their mother’s Looks, was not familiar with.
“I struggled too, when I was your age.” She said the words like she was confessing to something unthinkable.
“With the homework, and the social situations, and—” Stopping short, she shook herself, redirecting.
“But I knuckled down and I got it done, and sometimes I wish you could just do the same. I know it seems harsh, but there weren’t as many opportunities for me back then as there could be for you now if you could just perform normally.
I could do it, so I know you can too, even if it takes a little push. I just want you to have options.”
By the door, Mal stilled. They remembered their mom’s late nights at night school, how they would sometimes come downstairs for a glass of water to find their dad sitting up very late at the kitchen table with her, chatting while she did her coursework.
They remembered, too, how her first medical coding job had lasted only a handful of weeks before she’d declared it too tedious and gone back to reception.
If that was the sort of option their mom wanted for them, they weren’t interested.
There was another option, though, that they found themself wanting in the quietest hours of the night—and now, in the loudness of their sudden, raging thoughts:
“But what if this is the option for me?”
“Oh, Mal.” Their mom shook her head. “This isn’t an option.”
And Mal wanted to say I think you might be wrong, actually. That if Sam had this option, if Emerson had this option, then maybe they could too.
But something stopped the words in their throat.
It took Mal a moment to realize what it was: the realization that they didn’t care, really, whether their mom thought this was an option.
Because either way, they did. Their chest felt warm with this sudden knowledge, glowing with it like a little rebellious secret.
“There’s still plenty of time to find something else,” their mom assured them, mistaking their silence for agreement.
“Sure,” they said, and smiled: another secret thing, just for themself. “I’m… going to go.”
“Do you need a ride, honey?” she asked, still giving Mal that Look. She nodded at the large, flat bag Mal still held to their side. “Your project there looks cumbersome.”
Mal snorted a strange laugh. “It’s plenty light, actually. I’m fine.”
The door swung shut behind them.
“Yeesh, keep it down over there, would you?”
Though Kodi’s words were harsh, her deep voice was teasing. Mal looked over to catch her expression; she wore a smile, and before she bent back to her laptop to work on her December essay, she laughed.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mal said, but they weren’t.
They also weren’t entirely sure they were allowed to do what they were currently doing: hammering a nail into the wall beside the editors’ desk, to the left of the editor in chief side window, so that any time Mal looked away to try and find a word or recall a tricky punctuation rule, they would see it: a framed copy of the article Sam had written about MixxedMedia.
Mal had been right: the walk to the Haus with it tucked under their arm had not been cumbersome at all. It felt like a secret victory against their mom’s insistence that Mal needed options.
And the piece had continued to go Cincinnati viral, getting shared by CityBeat and reposted by Buffy Muller, a prominent local queer activist who put a lovely spin on it in her caption about the “unbeatable audacity of queer kids” that had been liked by both the Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati Pride accounts.
It was getting some truly wonderful comments. And some really horrible ones. Mal had stopped reading them, designating Maddie their Share The Good Things person: the one who brought back the tidbits of good so Mal could be spared the few absolutely atrocious things.
Before they had had time to figure out how they felt about any of it—good, mostly, and also a little weird, like most things Mal felt lately—they had printed out a copy of the article at the library, where Emerson was helping Nylan and Parker set up for a Secrets & Sorcery open play session they were starting together.
With Emerson’s assistance (and assurance it was a good idea), Mal carefully arranged them in a grid of four pages so they fit neatly into the frame they’d bought for them.
It was a little gaudy (made of gold plastic), and a little expensive (one of Dollar City’s rare ten-dollar items, worth almost an hour and a half of the shift Mal worked last night), but it fit.
Mal had never been one to win the sort of medals or trophies that lined Maddie’s walls, so they thought that this once, they could be afforded a little sparkle.
Mal was sure they should feel guilty about it—that if their mom had spotted their framing project through the Dollar City bag in the kitchen, she would have had something to say about it, too.
But even as her strange confession that Mal reminded her of herself still echoed in their mind, Mal felt…
good. The article made them feel good—so much so that, when they were up late last night trying and failing to start their History essay, they read it over again instead of their assigned chapters.
Seeing it here on the wall in the back room felt Correct, because the Zine Lab made Mal feel good too. Their chest swelled when they’d walked in to find Kodi, Alex, and Stella already working on layout ideas for the upcoming issue.
Giving the framed article one last look of appreciation, Mal turned to the worktable and asked, “How’s it going over there?”
They braced themself for Stella’s trademark sass, but instead she said, “Perfect. This theme’s exactly what we needed.”
And while Mal couldn’t tell whether her tone was serious or sarcastic, Alex’s insistence that they give him a high five was pretty clear. Once they made sure everyone had what they needed, Mal turned to their old laptop to check e-mails for new submissions.
A different e-mail waited.
Subject: Funding
Thursday, November 7 | 1:38 PM
From: Dr. Jordan Barnett
To: The MixxedMedia Editors
CC: Russel, Sam , Donna Merritt
Hi Mal and Emerson,