“Uh…,” they said, trailing off.
“Don’t worry about sounding perfect,” Sam said encouragingly. “I’ll make sure you sound good when I write it.”
“I just—” Mal shook their head. “I don’t do really great answering on the spot like this?” They felt a little embarrassed, but it was true; in the pressure of the moment, the words they needed skittered away (like Mal wishedtheycould). It gave them flashbacks to reading out loud in third grade, to Joseph Green and how he still sometimes laughed remembering howtheir dyslexia made them pronouncecombaschomb. “I’m sorry.”
“What? No, literally don’t worry.” Sam shook their head, pressed the red button so it turned back to gray and slid their phone back into their pocket. “I should have asked first. I’m sorry. Is there an accommodation that would make it easier for you?”
Mal squinted up their face at the word—it was one their mom always insisted they didn’t need, because they were “high-functioning.” But the sweat beading on the back of their neck begged to differ.
“Is there a way I could get the questions in a doc and answer them for you there?” Mal floated. “I’m… better edited, I guess.”
“Oh, of course.” Sam said, like it wasn’t a problem—and maybe, Mal considered, it didn’t have to be. “I can get them typed up and e-mail them over by tonight. I’m on a tight turnaround, though—do you think you could get them back to me quickly?”
“Let me—” Mal swung their backpack over their shoulder, fished out their planner, and looked at the rest of the week. Between the Haint History Festival tomorrow,MixxedMediagoing on sale the day after, a Saturday shift at Dollar City to finish the Christmas reset, and the mountain of homework waiting for them on Sunday, there wasn’t much space left.
But this felt like too important an opportunity to pass up. Repurposing one of the lurid green Post-it notes Emerson had slapped into their planner with nothing but a drawing of a smiley heart, Mal wrote inSAM—QUESTIONS—PRIORITYand made space for it on the grid for tomorrow morning, before school. It would mean waking up early—but that was what coffee was for.
“Yep,” they said, trying to sound sure. “I got you.”
“Cool,” Sam said. “I may submit it to my school’s paper too—would that be cool with you?”
Despite the flutter of anxiety in their stomach, Mal grinned. “Do you think they’d really run a story about our little zine?”
“Um, by the looks of it,” Sam said, grinning and nodding their head in the direction of the worktable over Mal’s shoulder, “there’s nothinglittleabout your zine, Mal. I absolutely do.”
Mal doubted that, but they nodded anyway. “Yeah, sure, of course.”
“Cool, cool, cool,” said Sam. They pointed to Mal’s coffee. “Want me to freshen that up?”
Mal looked down. “Oh. Uh, no, it’s fine. I probably shouldn’t have any more. It’s almost ten o’clock.”
Sam chuckled. “Let me know if you change your mind! And give me your e-mail on the way out, okay?”
“I’ll follow you out now, actually,” they said, looking back at the neat rows of zines one last time. “It looks like the team took care of everything here.”
One bus ride and about thirty minutes later, Mal spread out on the floor of their bedroom, all the clothes that had previously been strewn across it now shoved neatly into a pile in one corner. Spread out instead was Mal’s mini zine, stacked in different phases like a punk-rock version of the life cycle ofa butterfly: caterpillar copies still in need of their center cut; pupa copies that were cut but not folded; butterfly copies in their final forms, little pocket-size pamphlets containing a piece of the way Mal’s mind worked.
Mal frowned down at them all. Even as they pulled another unfolded paper to them, they still weren’t sure if they wanted the mini zines to fly free of this room. The idea of anyone actuallyseeingthem still felt frightening.
There was a sudden knock at the door, and Mal startled. They did quick math in their head about who might be on the other side before finally saying, “You can open it.”
Like they’d calculated, Maddie peeked her head in. She said, “Hey.”
Mal said “Hey” back.
A quick beat passed, Maddie’s eyes dipping down to Mal’s work and Mal using their hands to cover the legible top sheet, before Maddie asked, “Do you want to come flop on my bed and playAnimal Crossingwith me?”
It didn’t sound bad, Mal had to admit. They had been going since earlier than they should have been, with the promise of another late night and another early morning ahead of them. But finishing their work felt Important. If not for the Mini Zine Festival, then at least for themself.
“I can’t,” they said. “I have to finish this project.” But it was easier, sometimes, to work with Maddie around—with the familiar sound of her existing close by. “If you want you can come flop on mine, though, and gossip with me about your neighbors.”
Maddie was very invested in the goings-on of Scary Town.
“Yeah, okay,” she agreed.
For a while, though, she just hovered in the doorway instead of going back to her room to get her Switch. Enough quiet stretched between them that Mal, finishing a fold with a borrowed bone folder, finally looked up.
“Do you likeAnimal Crossing, Mal?” Maddie asked.
