Mal blinked. Emerson hadn’t made fun of their notes at all. In fact, she just smiled at them and opened her own notebook to a mostly fresh page. The back of the one beside it was covered in bright Post-it colors: hot pink, neon teal, and the samebright, cartoony yellow of Emerson’s sweatshirt. From the pencil pouch, Emerson took out pads of Post-its in the same colors.
“Sure,” said Mal. “That sounds…” It sounded, honestly, like what Mal did too.
“Cool,” said Emerson, wiggling her purple gel pen. “So lay it on me, Mal. What have we got?”
And they started, just that easy.
“Well,” Mal said. “I think we should talk about this first.” They tapped the first line of their planner, which readWHAT ARE WE DOING?Emerson leaned in, looked down at the planner, and was already nodding when she looked back up.
“Smart,” she said, and then very soon after: “A zine.”
“So, the thing is,” said Mal, sitting very still compared to Emerson, who wiggled, “I’m not… actually super sure what a zine is.”
Now that they’d said this out loud, they felt stupid. Like they should have figured that out first, before they agreed to do this. They sighed.
“Oh, hey, that’s cool,” Emerson said. “You came to the right place, because they’re kind of my capital-TThing.”
A smile tugged at the corner of Mal’s lips.
And then Emerson was off, her hands working through the air as she talked, illustrating what she said like it was a shadow-puppet play.
“So, zines are like magazines, if magazines were punk rock,” she said. “Same idea, but where magazines are formal and fancy and official, zines are… whatever the fuck you want them to be, really. Wait, uh—is it cool to swear?” When Mal nodded,Emerson went on. “So some of them are more elaborate, with real bindings and color pages, but they can be as simple as one page folded up cleverly, and they can be about literally anything. Some are about important stuff—like practical protesting-safety tips or protecting your trans neighbors or, like, once I did one about period poverty and left it with pads in public bathrooms, and that felt pretty badass. Or they can be silly, like… I don’t know.Things to Teach Your Dog About Cyberbullying.OrA Rating of the Roebling Bridge Geese Population. And, like, anything in between. With me so far?”
Yes, Mal was with Emerson. Their mind ran over all the options she laid out: the punk rock and the practical solutions and how wildly rebellious (and, Mal had to admit,cool) the idea of leaving pads and pamphlets in public places felt.
It all sounded like the exact opposite of what Mal wanted to do.
“But our zine could be serious, too,” Mal suggested, trying to keep their voice even as their throat tightened with worry. They didn’t see a clear line between what Emerson outlined and the serious business of the school’s lit mag.
“Sure,” Emerson said, “if that’s what people want.”
“That’s whatIwant,” Mal said.
“I mean, by default, it would be different,” Emerson said, cocking her head to the side. “But it would besomething—which, no offense, is better than the nothing it is now.”
That stung, but it was true. “I just…” Mal swallowed helplessly. “I want to make sure whatever we do is… important.”
They hadn’t realized this until that exact moment, as the words left their mouth. For the second time, they felt likeEmerson was seeing a part of them she hadn’t earned yet. They couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“Sure,” Emerson repeated. Drawing a sharp line across her page to divide it from the section above, she took scratchy notes. “We have important things to say. However we do it, we have to do itright.”
There was a surety in her voice, as if she was determined to hold the weight of those words, ofCollageand its legacy. Mal raised an eyebrow. When Emerson said things likethat, they felt like maybe she did understand what they wanted to do after all.
The other details… Well, Mal was used to duking it out with Emerson in the margins over commas. The finer points could be hashed out later. With their black pen, they crossed out their next two notes:stress need for seriousnessandseriousness is a requirement for proceeding with project.
“Next item on the agenda, then.” Mal tapped the second item with the tip of their pen, leaving three little black spots beside it. “?‘How Will We Do It?’ I’m afraid, uh. I won’t be a lot of help with this part.”
“Nonsense.” Emerson waved her hand. “You were editor in chief!” She underlined something Mal couldn’t quite see three times on her shockingly yellow Post-it pad, then ripped the sheet off the top and patted it firmly onto her notebook page. “You’re, like,theediting expert.”
“The editing part, yeah, I’ve got that, but…” They trailed off. “Ms. Merritt did all the rest.”
Mal didn’t have any idea, they suddenly realized, what it took to actuallymakea lit mag. Sure, Mal did the bulk of the student editing, but Ms. Merritt (and the student writers) hadthe final say on what got changed. And there had to be other considerations, too—printing and design and lots of other decisions. Their eyes went wide, their pulse quickening. What had they signed themself up for?
“Hey, don’t go away on me, Mal.” Emerson leaned in and patted Mal’s knee three times, as if she could sense the spiral-shaped turn Mal’s thoughts were taking. “I got you. So, from a production side, I think we can do this simple and easy, hear me? I’m thinking like…” Emerson flipped a page and started making lines and squiggles on its surface: a layout. “We can do a pretty traditional half-fold zine, like”—she mimed folding a paper in half—“this. So we’ll get four pages to each piece of paper we print, and we can do an easy-peasy sewn binding. Following me?”
In one sense, yes—Mal was following Emerson’s words. But they were having trouble turning Emerson’s frantic drawings, the things she was saying, and the waving of her hands into something solid in their head. It felt a bit like being in class—like trying, and failing, to keep up.
Mal shrugged an apology, wrinkling their nose. “I do better with… hands-on stuff.”
