Chapter Twenty-Four A Walk, Divergent #2
I hope this e-mail finds you well. I’m Dr. Jordan Barnett, a professor at Northern Kentucky University and Sam Russel’s Interdisciplinary Studies advisor.
I would like to congratulate you both on the success you have found with your zine, MixxedMedia.
As both a creator who is passionate about the artform and an academic who makes its study her specialty, I find what you have been able to accomplish together with your team inspiring.
I am excited to share that I am not the only one—a collection of colleagues and friends have come together to secure the funding needed to resume your school’s literary magazine in an official capacity. I have been in touch with your staff advisor to coordinate these efforts.
As of the start of next semester, Collage will be refunded in its entirety. An amount sufficient for its continuation for the next five academic years has been set aside in MixxedMedia’s honor.
I hope this brings you both a well-earned sense of achievement and that you both consider NKU for your academic future. With talent and drive like yours, I believe you have much to offer.
Sincerely,
Dr. Jordan Barnett
For a breathless moment, lasting both an eternity and no time at all, Mal just blinked at the message, not quite reading it again and again until all the words swam together, untangling themselves until they were only letters taking up all the space on the page of Mal’s brain.
And then they clicked the delete icon, closed their laptop, and walked out of the Zine Lab.
They didn’t stop walking.
They didn’t stop walking when they left the room, or the café, or the Haus.
They didn’t stop as they turned down 3rd Street and into the historic neighborhood behind it.
They didn’t stop when the houses grew grand and unfamiliar, with landscaped gardens full of brilliant fall blooms, or when they turned south through Eastside and the houses grew once again into a comfortable state of decay, with carved pumpkins rotting on their porches.
They didn’t stop through Helentown, or Austinburg, or Wallace Woods with its wide, oak-lined streets empty of cars, which were instead parked neatly in individual driveways (a rarity in the city).
They didn’t stop through Lassavor Park, or when they passed Holmes High School—though they probably should have, when they saw the red practice jerseys on the soccer field working their complicated plays.
It was Maddie, usually, who Mal went to for help.
But instead they walked faster, turned, and crossed over Madison without waiting for the white walk light—and without really registering the blare of a car horn chasing after them.
They wandered blindly, with their head down and their sleeves rolled up, around West Covington, their cheeks huffing and puffing as they climbed the hills.
They kept going over a bridge they didn’t know, and past the cemetery they did, and past the factory where they made goetta, which stank of oatmeal and spice and meat.
Even though their legs were tired, they walked through Mainstrasse, where the shop lights glowed yellow and the goose girl glared at them from beneath her laurel of fake autumn leaves, and under the 6th Street bridge with its painted-on stripes, and past Mutter Gottes Church with three big steeples and bells that rang thunderously loud.
They kept going until they couldn’t anymore, and then they kept going still, their legs carrying them on like they were someone else’s legs, someone who was stronger and surer and not in sudden crisis, walking with pursed lips and a blank expression and not even a sweater, despite the November chill.
The entire time, Mal’s thoughts raged—screamed, yelled, roared—in their head.
But there were so many, all at once, that they became a solid wall of Nothing Good, none distinct enough to be separated from another.
Mal spiraled and tangled with them. Their heart pounded hard to the beat of their Docs against the Covington sidewalks, which grew nicer as they went, from piles of decaying leaves and cigarette butts to bright, freshly painted murals that read LOVE THE COV.
Mal didn’t stop walking—not as they turned onto Greenup again, or as they sped past the Haus’s yellow-painted door, or as the sidewalk started to slope dramatically down—until, all at once, they did.
The river waited for them, cold steel and Canadian geese honking beneath the Roebling Bridge.
Mal found themself collapsing beside it, coming to rest on the cool concrete steps of the floodwall amphitheater.
The space often hosted summer movie nights or Taco Week food trucks, but this afternoon it hosted only Mal, who slumped on a center row about halfway down, their cheeks red with cold and wet with sweat.
Even by the river, it took a long time for the page of their mind to become anything but overflowing with key smashes and AAAAAAAAAAA and FUCK!
and you knew it you idiot you knew this would happen you can’t have this good thing it’s not an option it’s stupid they’re stupid you’re stupid and AAAAAAAAAAA.
And when it finally did, their thoughts weren’t much nicer than any of those anyway.
It had taken all those blocks to work it out, but when Mal finally settled on a feeling, it was Very Fucking Angry.
They realized how ridiculous it was. Here it was, in one e-mail: everything they had wanted at the start of the school year. Their literary magazine, their editors’ desk, their Plan, all back on track, just like they had wanted—like they had needed—it to be.
But things had been different then. It hadn’t been their future they were planning for. None of it had been for them at all. It had been for their mom, and her options, and her impossible Looks. It had been for Maddie, and her trophies, and her promise to get them out.
But it hadn’t been for Mal—not anymore, not the Mal they had become.
They felt changed now, as the editor in chief of MixxedMedia—not wholly different, but somehow more like themself than they had been back in August, before they knew what they could be like without the rigid lines and rules of The Plan.
They were better when they sat at the editors’—plural—desk, with Emerson at their side, their team behind them, and their work ahead of them.
None of that—the desk, the worktable, all the tools Sam had let them borrow—would fit into the corner of Ms. Merritt’s office. Mal wouldn’t fit.
A flicker of the glow from their conversation with their mom earlier glimmered, yellow and warm, in their chest. It fanned the ember of anger that had been smoldering since their trip to the principal’s office.
They didn’t get to get Mal back.
But, like so many things in Mal’s life, it didn’t seem like they had much of a choice. Ms. Merritt had been cc’d on that e-mail. It was already as good as done: Collage lived again.
Mal had brought it back from the dead, like a ghost from the Haint History Festival.
Their thoughts swirled again, shimmering and blurring like their vision.
As night fell in earnest, inky black and colder than it had been all year, the city lights blinked on around them.
They glittered across the surface of the wide Ohio River in yellows and oranges and reds.
But there was more to their shine too; when they touched their frozen finger to their cheek, Mal realized dimly that they were crying.
And they didn’t stop that, either—not for a long while.