“Uh,” said Mal.
“Should I go?” asked Nylan, pointing toward the hallway door.
“No, stay,” Parker rushed. “You’re kind of my person, Nylan, I want you here too.” She looked between Mal and Nylan and drew another card. “I guess I’ve just been having some, like. Gender feels. And I was wondering if I could ask you about them, Mal.”
“Yeah, sure.” Mal blinked. No one had ever asked them about this—even when they’d first figured it out themself. “I guess I just always knew?” they floated. “It was a feeling I had, in my gut, that I was beyond the boundaries of thegirlI was supposed to be. Something different. And then when I found the word ‘nonbinary,’ it all kind of suddenly made sense. Like, ‘Oh, duh. I’ve always been this.’ And then there was the word for it.”
“Hmm,” hummed Parker.
“Does that… help?” asked Mal.
“Yeah, sort of.” Parker chewed her lip as Nylan played half a crocus’s worth of cards. She watched Nylan carefully. “I still feelkind oflike a girl. And also… like something else too. Something bigger than that word.”
Nylan nodded encouragingly. Parker flicked the corner of her cards.
“You can be both,” Mal said. “Nonbinary girls are a thing.”
“Isn’t that, like, cheating?” Parker asked.
“You can’t cheat with gender,” Mal replied, smiling. “It’s kind of—” In a way that felt very like something Emerson might do, Mal wiggled their fingers and waved their hands around, as if to saya big wiggly soup we’re all floating around in.
“Fluid?” Nylan suggested.
“Sure,” said Mal.
“I guess I’ve just…” Parker flicked the corners of her cards faster. “I’ve been thinking about trying out she/they pronouns? But it feels like ahugestep, and I worry I don’t looktheyenough. Just—”
She waved down at her outfit: a ruffly yellow skirt and an oversize sweater in bright pink and vivid blue, with a stark-white Peter Pan collar sticking out from its neckline. Her space buns glittered with a handful of sparkly hair clips shaped like cute animals.
“Okay, Ireallyunderstand that feeling,” Mal said. “I had a full-on crisis freshman year when I was figuring everything out because I didn’t look like the nonbinary people I followed on Instagram. I’m fat, and I don’t dress super androgynously, and I have, like,reallybig boobs.” Parker snorted, and Mal smiled. “But nonbinary doesn’tlooklike any one thing. Or maybe it looks like everything, because we’re all different.”
“Are you sure?” Parker still seemed skeptical.
“I mean—no,” Mal admitted. They laughed, but it was gentle. “But also yeah. We’re all just figuring it out, I think.”
“And I think you don’t have to change pronouns everywhere all at once, if that doesn’t feel comfy?” Nylan gave Mala tentative look. Mal nodded. “We could try them here, in the Zine Lab, if you want?”
Parked nodded. “Yeah. That sounds good.” They played two cards, then placed a wooden token on the flower it created. “Thank you for listening, friends.”
“Literally my favorite thing to do,” said Nylan, putting down the last cards in her hand. “That, and beating you at Lotus.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Parker hummed. “You seem to love beating me at Wingspan just as much.”
“AndMario Kart!” Nylan beamed.
“And if you ever want to talk to me more about gender stuff, Parker,” Mal added, suddenly feeling a bit liketheywere the one who should be asking whether they should leave. “Please do?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Parker.
And Mal felt good knowing they would.
But the thing about mixed bags was that there were always the duds: the Dots, the yellow Starbursts, the suspicious, halfway-unwrapped Twix at the bottom of the bag. And in the first weeks of October, Mal hadplentyof Bad Candy, too.
Report cards had gone out at some point—something Mal would usually track in their planner, but there was so much other stuff, so many of Emerson’s stuck-in Post-it notes and all-caps reminders about Maddie’s soccer schedule, that they had forgotten to add it in—and exposed Mal’s less-than-stellar-math rebound. Despite protesting to their mom than they weren’tfailinganymore, that there was enough in-class work that they could probably pull a low B by the end of thesemester, they had still been told in no uncertain terms that all non-school activities (minus Maddie’s soccer games) were off-limits until Mal’s teacher confirmed they were caught up on their homework.
Mal struck a tearful bargain with Mrs. Grimes after school on Friday: They’d get it all done this weekend if she would allow them to do only the odd-numbered problems. When she’d agreed, Mal had sent Emerson a photo of their math textbook, their middle finger extended in front of it. While Emerson sent back a punk-rocker emoji, a middle-finger emoji, and a crying emoji, Mal turned to walk not toward the Haus but home with Maddie, who chatted gleefully about the revenge the soccer team planned to take later that month for having to play a game on Halloween: dressing up like zombies before they took the field.
Much to their manager’s upset, Mal called out of work (something they never did without a plan) and spent all of Saturday bent over the kitchen table, absolutely miserable among all the makeup math problems that swam before their eyes. In their planner, they made a chart to keep track of each chapter they worked through. Once, checking off those numbers might have felt satisfying, but every time Mal ticked off another, it felt hollow. Instead of working on logarithms for a second chapter straight—something that mattered only to Mrs. Grimes and their mom—theywantedto be working through edits with Emerson, with the whole staff and all the Haus a little too loud in the background.
