like baby-size
its glorious
Perfect. I love little spoons.
perfect
i am a little spoon
CHAPTERSEVENTEENSUPPLY AND DEMAND, BAYBEE
Mal hadn’t been wrong in feeling a catastrophic failure coming. They had just been wrong about what it was.
Math. It wasalwaysmath.
With Mal’s dad working even longer hours as Christmas grew ever closer, their mom was around more and more. Or maybe it justfeltlike she was, without their dad to balance her out. With the sudden increase of complaints she brought home from work, Mal guessed she was also nearing Quitting Time for this job—the part of the cycle that always made her especially grouchy.
She was always half a step behind Mal lately, reminding them to take their dishes to the sink or not leave their shoes by the door. And Maddie was always a half step behindher, trying to distract her or move the shoes herself. The three of them followed each other around the house like that, a little cycle all their own. It made Mal tired, trying to keep up with being kept up with so much.
But the catastrophe came when Mal’s mom, after coming home from a particularly Bad Workday and looking for something to be upset about, checked Mal’s grades online and sawexactly how many Algebra II assignments they had missed. Their grade sat at a cool 62—and despite Maddie’s best efforts to convince her otherwise, their mom wasn’t buying that all the missing homework grades just hadn’t been added in yet.
“Look at this,” their mom said, calling Mal over to the desktop in their dad’s office (a corner of the kitchen with a small desk and a stack of bills). “Eighty-two, zero, zero, ninety-three, zero, eighty-four, zero. Do I need to go on?”
“No.” Mal really hoped she wouldn’t.
“But the grades thatarein are really good,” Maddie hedged, inserting herself into the space between Mal and their mom.
“They’re fine,” their mom admitted with a huff. “Not good but fine. Mal, I don’t understand why you can’t just do the work.”
Mal had tried to explain how hard it was for them many times: howtheydidn’t understand why they had to do twenty-five basically identical problems when they could show they understood the formulas in ten, how much it felt like pulling teeth trying to pull the answers out of their brain after they got bored with the problems. But those reasons were not ones their mom was interested in hearing. She would answer with her usual refrain: that no one liked doing work, and yet they still did it. If Malcoulddo it, she justified, theyshould.
“I’ve just been busy,” they said instead. “With work and… things.”
“Well, I have a hard truth for you, Mal,” their mom snapped. “Your job isn’t really Dollar City, or that magazine club of yours. It’s school. And you need to dothatbefore you can do the others.”
“It’ll be fine, Mal,” Maddie insisted quietly, just to them. “I can help.”
“But you can’t ride on your sister’s coattails forever, Mal.” Their mom spoke over their sister, leaning around to look at them. “You need to catch up, or else.”
Mal didn’t care to find outor elsewhat.
And so between Mal’s supposedrealjob of school, their actual job working at Dollar City, and their Mom-imposed job of catching up on missing math work, Mal found it harder and harder to make time forMixxedMedia.
But they still did it, in stolen hours here and there. In e-mail chains, in text messages to Emerson (who rain-checked them for gelato, much to their mutual chagrin) and Nylan and Parker in a group chat they’d set up, in quick trips to the Haus to check in and (at Emerson’s insistence) grab a bite of Pop-Tart before heading home to do “real” work.
It wasn’t until the Friday after the release of the Carving Our Place issue that Mal could carve out some time toactuallygo to the back room. (Their dad was working late, their mom was out for a girl’s night at Color Me Mine, and Maddie had promised that she didn’t mind, really, they wouldn’t be missed.)
Mal walked there faster than usual, chill beats in their ears and their comfort boots warm on their feet. With night falling earlier and earlier, the orange and purple and green Halloween lights that now decorated many of the houses on Greenup twinkled on halfway through their walk. One of the particularly large houses even had spooky black lights that illuminated a whole scene of skeletons climbing up to the balcony, their white bones glowing eerily in the near-darkness.
When Mal finally walked into the back room, it turned out they weren’t the only one.
Spread out along the table were all the usual suspects: Emerson, of course, and Nylan and Parker bent over Nintendo Switches, and James, who appeared to be becoming a back-room regular too. Sitting beside him, working on a laptop, was a person Mal did not recognize.
“Oh, hey, Mal,” the newcomer said, turning to see them staring impolitely at them. “Glad you made it!”
“… Hey?” Mal said, like it was a question.
“I’m Alex, he/him pronouns,” said Alex, standing. He was tall (much taller than Mal), white, and very strong-looking, with muscly arms that flexed beneath a long-sleeved, seasonally appropriate black-and-orange-striped shirt. “I read your zine and I think it’s really cool. James let me know you meet here, and I was wondering if you’re accepting new writers?”
