Chapter Twenty-Six Different Ways to Win
Emerson was right: Mal needed rest. They could feel the want of it piling up in their bones, achy and stiff and hyperaware of the weight of their coat on their shoulders. This happened sometimes. When things got to be too much, Mal’s body responded by needing extra sleep.
Which they didn’t get, of course. Their mind was much too full of guilt and what-ifs and the memory of that look on Emerson’s face.
But over the weekend, Mal did get to retreat into the comfortable cave of how things used to be, before Emerson Pike and MixxedMedia mixed up their life.
On Saturday, after texting Emerson, Mal went downstairs and ate cereal on the sofa and filled in their planner pages for the weekend (without colorful Post-its, which made the page look boring but clear) to the tune of their dad’s morning news.
They took extra time with the neighborhood cats, making sure to serve an additional scoop to a tuxedo that had just showed up on the street, looking skinny and scrappy.
They walked to work, belly full of sugar and milk and undefined butterflies, and worked their shift, all scanner beeps and robotic have a nice days, before walking back home again.
Maddie was there, and although no news about the rumored scout had materialized, she eagerly rehashed her best plays in yesterday’s game as Mal did their best to nod and smile at all the right parts.
Mal wanted nothing more than to flop into bed with their headphones in and some lo-fi, to think about the e-mail they hadn’t told Emerson about, to figure out what was supposed to come next and how—if—they would fit into it. It felt like they had been so close to solving the equation.
But math had never been their strong suit, so all they could fit into their schedule were the tasks they’d outlined in their planner that morning:
Math (5 lessons)
History short answer
English reading (25 pgs at LEAST)
CATCH. UP.
Finals crept up like the frost on the windows, reaching out with tendrils of cold truth, and Mal could no longer deny that they had work to do.
While they had managed to keep good grades in the classes that mattered to them (English, Science), they had fallen lower than they had since middle school in the ones that didn’t.
With their mom’s focus on their math grade, they were managing a low B, but somehow, in the shuffle of everything else, Mal had gotten at least a hundred years behind in History.
No amount of copying Maddie’s assignments would catch them up on all that reading before the looming end-of-semester exams next month.
So on Sunday morning, instead of watching their show, Maddie dutifully gave Mal the abbreviated version of the chapters they needed to read, which Mal was sure contained some colorful and creative embellishments.
With her lecture, they were able to fall into the monotony of end-of-chapter questions for the second half of the day.
As they spread out at the living room coffee table, their papers in neat stacks to take up as little space as possible, part of Mal felt comfortable.
This—doing what they had always done, what they were supposed to do—was familiar.
It didn’t require much thought—not the kind that mattered, at least. It only took the effort of word choice and careful commas and knowing how to paraphrase from the assignments Maddie lent them.
But in the back of Mal’s mind, a thought needled them: this was Incorrect.
Returning to The Plan felt wrong, rough against Mal’s skin.
As they went into their fifth hour of homework catch-up efforts, they thought about just how much effort it took to maintain this.
Of how much of themself they had to turn off just to keep up.
Of how, if they stepped outside of the bounds of The Plan even for a little while, it seemed to all fall apart around them, no matter how brief their departure from it.
It contrasted so sharply with Mal’s life with MixxedMedia.
Mal had absolutely no worry about how the zine would run without them there.
It was a system Mal had helped create, one that worked for the people who worked it.
It wasn’t always easy—sometimes it was a little messy—and still Mal had no concerns that it would stay on track for two days without them.
Unlike The Plan, which pushed them out the moment they diverged from it, Mal had no worries about how they would fit back into MixxedMedia on Monday.
They knew they would fall back in effortlessly, like a strawberry Pop-Tart into a toaster.
They were a community, and Mal was an integral part of it.
But realizing this made them worry about the question of What Next, so instead they pushed the thought from their mind and filled it instead with facts about the Gilded Age.
When Mal finally got into bed that night, near midnight, it was with the good news that they were caught up enough that they’d at least stave off failure (and their mom’s ire) for another week.
The bad news was that the processing they’d told Emerson they would do hadn’t happened in the slightest.
In the morning, after a fitful night of not-quite-sleep, Mal packed that bad news in their backpack along with their catch-up work and carefully avoided Emerson throughout the day—aside from a Hey, I’m okay and I’ll see you at the Haus text sent at lunch, which was met with an enthusiastic, all-caps CAN’T WAIT and enough exclamation points that they filled up more than half of Mal’s phone screen.
But when the time finally came for them to head to the Haus, Mal found themself dallying, hanging back at school after the final bell and then taking the long way for no reason at all.
They stopped in at the library too, spending extra time running off some mini zine pages so Kodi could show Theodora how they came together.
They were still sluggish as they walked the last few blocks from the library to the Haus, the hour between their usual arrival and the start of Emerson’s shift squandered.
Mal frowned, realizing they had probably done this on purpose.
Still, Emerson bloomed to life behind the café counter as soon as Mal walked through the door.
“Mal,” she said sweetly. “It’s so good to see your actual, human face.”
Despite themself, Mal smiled. “It’s good to see yours too,” they said, and they meant it; they hadn’t realized until that exact moment how much they had missed her.
They wanted to kiss her, once at the temple for her brain, and once on her cheek for her smile, and once on the lips just because.
But Emerson was working, so Mal just stepped up to the counter, their hands in their pockets.
Emerson pulled Mal’s mug from the wall. “The usual?” she asked.
Mal nodded, reached toward their backpack for their wallet.
“Please, no,” Emerson said, waving them off with a grin. “It’s my treat today—for your triumphant return.”
Mal’s lips pressed into a line. They could cover it. But they said, “Sure. Thanks.”
Emerson poured, then pressed the warm mug into Mal’s hand. Mal could tell she let her fingers linger on theirs on purpose. “I’ll see you in”—she checked her watch—“exactly three hours and fifty-two minutes.”
“Yeah,” said Mal. “Okay.”
But it wasn’t, not really. As Mal made their way to the back room, careful not to slosh their coffee over the sides of their cup, they wanted more time than three hours and probably now fifty-one minutes.
There was still so much to figure out—plans to be made, conversations to be rehearsed in their head.
Blessedly, the back room was quiet today—just Stella at the head of the worktable, typing quietly on her laptop, and Alex and James working together on flash cards, though Mal wasn’t sure for what. They went straight for their chair at the editors’ desk, careful to avoid all eye contact, and sat.
The desk was just as they’d left it: barely managed mess on Emerson’s side, spotlessly tidy on Mal’s, a stack of multicolored Post-its in the center.
The top read, in Emerson’s handwriting: every time i wanted to kiss you i drew a heart.
The stack was at least fifty mismatched Post-its deep, each one bearing a brightly colored heart doodle in her familiar style.
Mal’s lips tugged into a smile.
They opened their backpack, pulling out their laptop and getting ready to work.
On what, they weren’t sure—but whatever it was they needed to do to manage the situation with Collage, they knew they needed to do it here, in their comfy armless chair, with the haphazard stack of coasters on Emerson’s side of the desk making them want to straighten them.
Even with an unspeakably difficult afternoon ahead of them, it felt much more comfortable than working at home ever did.
It was the Correct place for Mal Flowers.
Before they could get settled, though, into the room floated the sound of Parker’s voice.
“Okay, so here it is, in all its glory!”
“Ooooooooh,” squealed an unfamiliar voice in reply.
Mal turned. Standing between Parker and Nylan was a new person. They were short, very thin, and mostly angles, covered in a fuzzy, lurid green sweater with sparkly pink elbow patches. On their face was a grin so broad it bordered on disconcerting.
“So this is the Zine Lab,” said Parker, walking the three of them in.
“This is the worktable, where we do our thing. That’s Stella, she writes Through the Garden of Gems and Dahlias, and this is Alex and James.
” As if cued, Alex and James waved. “Theodora was around here somewhere, I think, but I don’t know where she is now, maybe looking for Kodi?
And this is our fearless leader, Mal. They’re—”
“The one who wrote the ADHD map book!” the newcomer finished. They nodded, like this itself was conclusive evidence, then snapped their fingers in little finger guns. “Cool to meet you, Mal. I’m Fran!”
Mal cocked their head to the side. “Hi, Fran.”
“She’s in our S&S game at the library,” Parker said, chuckling. “We headed here from there, and she wanted to come see what we do.”
“It’s bitchin’,” Fran said. “I haven’t read your, like, big zines, but Parker’s let me read your mini ones. I really liked yours!”
“Really?” Mal asked.
“Uh, yeah,” said Fran. “I’m ADHD too, and going for walks helps me a lot too—but when it’s cold like this, I mostly do my walking in S&S, in character.”
Nylan giggled. “Oh, is that why your rogue is always strutting around?”
“Um, excuse me,” Fran said, “Petty Sharppaws struts around because they’re a super cool cat person with a magical, sparkly cape. You’d strut too!”
“Yeah, okay. Fair,” laughed Nylan.
“I just think it’s neat that someone else who has ADHD is doing ADHD, like, things,” Fran said.
Her hands punctuated the air with the word, like maybe Fran’s things had a capital T, too.
She raised an eyebrow at Mal. “Like, that you’re doing stuff about ADHD.
I feel like I don’t see that a lot? Or if I do, it’s by people who obviously don’t have ADHD because they don’t actually get it. Does that make sense?”
A familiar feeling fell over Mal. It reminded them of when they first started talking with Emerson. “Yeah. I get it. You don’t have to explain it to me.”
“I knew you’d get it.” Fran snapped her fingers again. “Anyway, I liked it, and I didn’t really ever think about it before, but now I’m like—maybe I could make stuff about ADHD, too.”
Mal smiled, a warm feeling flooding their cheeks. “Maybe I can show you sometime? The cool thing about zines like that one is they aren’t super hard or expensive to make.”
“Yeah,” said Parker. They mimed folds with their hands. “It’s a bit of tricky folding, but Mal’s really good at explaining it.”
“That would be cool!” Fran said. “I didn’t know you guys took people from not your school.”
Mal shrugged. They didn’t either. But being here for people like Fran felt important. “Things are a little… in flux right now. But you’re welcome to stop by anytime.”
“Bitchin’,” Fran said again. (Mal was sure they caught her eyes flash to the side, like part of her was waiting for the word to be chided.) “Until then, I’ll just have to do ADHD stuff in-game. Maybe Petty has ADHD, too.”
“Oh, Petty for sure has ADHD,” Parker said, laughing. “I know rogues like shiny things, but have you seen the way she goes after loot?”
“Uh, that’s not ADHD,” Fran huffed playfully. “That’s called winning Secrets & Sorcery, Parker!”
“You can’t win S&S, Fran!” Nylan said.
“Winning looks different for everyone, Nylan!” Fran retorted dramatically.
The three of them dissolved into chatter about their roleplaying game, grabbed a couple of snacks from the station on the far wall, and left.
But even after the noise of them faded—Fran was very noisy, giving even Emerson a run for her money—their words stayed behind, neatly typed in the center of Mal’s brain page.
Instead of working to come up with some plan to fix everything, they worked the words over in their mind, changing the font and the formatting to make them their own.
Winning looks different for everyone.
And as the clock crept closer and closer to nine p.m.—the end of Emerson’s shift—Mal got to work.