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 practicejerseys 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 readLOVE 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 andAAAAAAAAAAAandFUCK!andyou 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 stupidandAAAAAAAAAAA. 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 hadneeded—it to be.
But things had been different then. It hadn’t beentheirfuture they were planning for. None of it had been forthemat 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 ofMixxedMedia—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 werebetterwhen 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.Malwouldn’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:Collagelived 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.
COLLAGE
VOL. 44
The Fall Child
By Mal Flowers
Sophomore
In fall, everything became better. Or at least, it did for the fall child.
As they walked down the autumn-scattered sidewalks, they reflected.
