Ms. Merritt stepped forward, reclaiming the attention and saving Mal from whatever words were about to come out ofEmerson’s mouth, which had opened (with a quirk of her eyebrow) for a retort.
“I’m afraid the official, final word is: We’re shuttered, folks,” she said, and to her credit, she looked as distraught about this as Mal felt. “Collagehas been a Holmes High School institution for almost fifty years. I wrote for it when I was a student here, so I wish I had better news for this first meeting of the year.”
Ms. Merritt paused, looking at each of the students in turn. When she met Mal’s eyes, they could feel their own go wide, their chest hammering like they’d been caught by the red flashing hand halfway across a street’s crosswalk. Ms. Merritt had always had a keen editorial eye—but more than that, she had seen Mal’s potential back in sophomore year, when she’d brought Mal onto the editorial side ofCollage. She had seenMal, which was not something they often felt.
But now, under her brief but piercing stare, they felt almost too exposed—as if, should Ms. Merritt look too closely, she would see the truth: Mal Flowers was absolutelynothingwithoutCollage.
It was only after her eyes moved away that Mal was able to catch a breath, quickened by that horrible thought.
Ms. Merritt spoke again, as if things were not, in fact, The Worst. “But I don’t want this meeting to be our last. I think we owe it to the magazine—and ourselves—to sendCollageout in style. How would we feel about a potluck-style farewell party this Friday after school?”
“We’ll be here,” said Nylan, and Parker nodded beside her.
“You know it,” said Emerson, more than a little too loudly.
Mal couldn’t muster anything more than a nod.
“All right, team.” Ms. Merritt nodded too, resolutely. “We’ll see each other Friday.”
Mal wasn’t sure whether this gave them something to look forward to or to dread. But they had more pressing worries than what to bring to the farewell party (though they would worry about that later too). Much more pressing was the truth that withoutCollage, The Plan—and Mal—was ruined.
The Plan was one of Mal’s many proper nouns: a concept they’d carried with them since third grade, when they’d first learned that a proper noun was a specific person, place, thing, or idea. They knew it was meant for terms like Aunt Tina, Roebling Bridge, and Holmes High School, but for Mal, nouns like Too Much Noise, Good Coffee, and A Mental Health Walk had always felt just as important.
The Plan was the most important proper noun of all, because it was Mal’s framework for their future, the structure that kept their neurodivergent brain in line and on time, focusing on an End Goal rather than meandering off on random, late-night hyperfixations or spiraling into a labyrinth of homework avoidance. Before The Plan, Mal had been directionless, simply hopping from one interest (biology, for example) to another (vegetable gardening, via an interest in cozy video games). While Mal felt more fulfilled—or at least less bored—by those sorts of things, the forward motion of The Plan helped them achieve something even more important: what mattered to their parents.
The Plan consisted of a few simple steps, which Mal aspirationally wrote down every year in a secret, taped-in back page of their planner:
Do the best you can at school.
Work at Dollar City to save money.
EditCollagefor Common App activity.
Go to University of Kentucky with Maddie.
With 25 percent of those steps no longer an option, The Plan was in shambles. They needed to get it back together beforetheyfell apart too.
For Mal Flowers, that meant one thing:
They needed Maddie.
“And she dropped it on you just like that, right before school?” Maddie asked, raising an eyebrow at Mal.
Mal gave a curt nod, their lips pressed into a hard line.
It was only now, during lunch, that they were finally able to tell Maddie what had happened withCollagethat morning. Maddie—Mal’s sister—was a year younger than them in age but was in the same graduating class after Mal had been held back in eighth grade. Earlier on, they had often been confused for twins, since they both had identical blond hair and brown eyes—but then Maddie hit her growth spurt, becoming tall and athletic while Mal stayed short and round.
Sometimes, especially in the beginning, Mal had been embarrassed to be in the same grade as their little sister, but their embarrassment was far outweighed by the perk of having a ready-made best friend in all their classes. But in a cruel twist of senior-year fate, the two siblings hadn’t been scheduled for any shared classes until their lunch hour. Allday Mal had carriedCollage’s cancelation around with them like a private rain cloud. Now that they were finally with Maddie, it all came storming out over the round lunch table.
“The whole magazine done, just like that,” they said, flicking their hands outward as if to shoo the words away. “And the money isn’t evengoinganywhere. Just… away.”
Not unlike The Plan. The feeling of Too Much pulled hard at Mal’s edges. They dropped their hands to their lap, fingers drumming on their thighs.
“Well,” started Maddie, teeth snapping into a baby carrot, “it was really shit of Ms. Merritt to drop all that on you right before school started. Especially over coffee.”
“Right?”Mal still felt betrayed. Coffee time was a sacred time—and so was Mal’s space within it. “I could hardly pay attention in AP Bio, and during the get-to-know-you thing Ms. Woodmore did in Econ—the one where you have to think of a word that starts with the same letter as your nameand alsorepeat everyone’s back—I said I had to go to the bathroom when it got close to my turn.”
It was worth the embarrassment, honestly. The cool water of the sink on their wrists had been a welcome distraction from their racing thoughts.
