FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Two: Extra Time
By the time Jordan Cole texted her at eleven at night, Mia had already decided she was never speaking to him again, so it was extremely inconvenient that her phone lit up with his name and her thumb moved to open it before her brain had a say in the matter.
Derek says I looked "compromised" in the raw footage, the text said. What does compromised mean. Should I be worried.
That was in about six days. First, there was the part where nobody was supposed to notice anything at all.
The second episode of Road to Regionals dropped on a Wednesday, and by Wednesday afternoon it had more comments than either of their channels had ever gotten on anything, which normally would have thrilled Mia completely, except that roughly a third of the comments were not about soccer.
"Did anyone else catch the way she looked at him at 3:42," Priya read aloud from her phone, sprawled across the Reyes family couch with the specific delight of someone who had found a new favorite hobby. "Screenshot attached. Reyes is not okay you guys."
"I was looking at the camera."
"You were looking at Jordan Cole's face, which was, unfortunately for your case, directly behind the camera."
Mia grabbed a couch cushion and put it over her own face instead, which did not make the problem go away, but did at least buy her a few seconds of darkness to regroup. The second shoot had gone almost exactly like the first one. Ms. Alvarez had set up a segment where the two captains ran a short passing drill together for the cameras, ostensibly to demonstrate "friendly competition," and it had taken four takes because every time Jordan won a race to the ball he did an incredibly smug little fist pump that made Mia laugh loudly enough to ruin the audio, and every time she scored on him in the small-sided drill she did a victory lap that made him laugh loudly enough to ruin the audio, and somewhere in take three Ms. Alvarez had stopped even pretending to direct them and had just let the camera roll.
The drill itself had started simple enough. Ms. Alvarez wanted ten minutes of "friendly skill work" between the two captains, footage she said would play well against the rivalry narrative from episode one, and for the first few minutes it had gone exactly according to plan. Jordan stood in goal, gloves on, calling out taunts between saves. Mia took shots from the top of the box, calling out taunts of her own between attempts. It was, on paper, precisely the kind of segment RYSN's marketing department had ordered: two captains competing, cameras rolling, brand-safe and full of highlight-reel action.
What the marketing department had apparently not planned for was Jordan diving to tip a shot over the crossbar and coming up laughing so hard he could barely breathe, or Mia sitting down in the grass afterward because she'd laughed too hard at his sound effects to keep running, or the two of them ending up several feet apart just looking at each other while the crew reset the cameras, neither one saying anything, both of them smiling like idiots for reasons that had nothing to do with the drill.
None of that was the part that worried Mia.
The part that worried her was afterward, when the crew had wrapped and Jordan had walked her partway to the parking lot because it was, quote, on his way, unquote, even though Northgate's lot was in the opposite direction, and they had ended up standing by her car for eleven minutes talking about nothing important at all, and it had felt like the easiest eleven minutes of her entire week.
You are supposed to want to beat this boy in a soccer game, she reminded herself. Not stand in a parking lot enjoying his personality.
She had not told Priya about the parking lot. She was beginning to suspect Priya did not need to be told things anymore; Priya had a talent for simply knowing.
"I'm just saying," Priya said now, setting her phone down, "for someone who spent eleven months making videos about how insufferable Jordan Cole is, you've had a lot to say about how good he smells lately."
"I said that one time. About his detergent. It was a factual observation."
"You've said it three times. I counted."
"You did not count."
"I absolutely counted, and it's currently three, and if it hits five I'm telling Coach Whitfield we have a problem."
"There is no problem. Jordan Cole and I have a professional rivalry that is currently being filmed for a sports network. That is the entire relationship."
"Sure," Priya said, scrolling back up through the comments like she was reading tea leaves. "That's why forty people in the replies think you two should just date already, and also why you've reorganized your whole cleats collection twice this week for no reason, and also why you keep 'accidentally' checking his channel before yours."
"I check his channel because I'm his rival. It's called scouting."
"It's called a crush, Mia. It's been called a crush by literally everyone except you."
Mia threw the couch cushion at her, and Priya caught it without even looking up from her phone, which felt, somehow, like the most annoying part of the entire conversation.
Derek Osei found Jordan at his locker before Thursday practice, arms crossed, wearing the particular expression Jordan had learned to recognize as Derek preparing to say something he thought was helpful and Jordan was about to find extremely not helpful.
"You looked compromised in the footage," Derek said, by way of greeting.
"Compromised how."
"Soft. You looked soft, man. At the parking lot thing. Somebody's little sister posted a screenshot of you two by her car and it's got forty thousand likes and half of them are calling it, and I'm not trying to be dramatic, but we have Regionals in eight weeks and I need my captain's head in the game, not in Bayview's parking lot."
"I was being polite. It's called manners, Derek, you should look into them."
"You've never once been polite to anyone in the history of your life. You made a whole video calling their goalkeeper's throw-ins, quote, a public health hazard."
Jordan closed his locker a little harder than necessary. He did not have a good answer for that, mostly because Derek was, infuriatingly, correct, and Jordan had spent the better part of the last week trying to work out exactly when it had stopped being fun to be mean to Mia Reyes on the internet and started being fun to talk to her in a parking lot instead. He had known Derek since they were nine years old. Derek was not wrong about very much, ever, which was the single most annoying thing about him.
"I hear you," Jordan said, which was true, and also not a promise to do anything about it.
"Regionals," Derek said again, like repetition would help. "This is our year. Don't let a camera crew and a Bayview striker turn it into a rom-com."
"Nothing is turning into a rom-com. I stood by her car. People stand by cars. It's a very normal place for two humans to stand."
"For eleven minutes."
"How do you even know it was eleven minutes."
"Because the clip is eleven minutes and forty seconds long, Jordan, someone filmed the whole thing from the gym windows, it's already got a fan edit with a song over it." Derek held up his phone as evidence, and Jordan had the deeply unpleasant experience of watching a slowed-down, soft-focus video of himself laughing at something Mia Reyes had said, set to music he did not recognize and would now never be able to unhear.
"Delete that."
"I didn't make it. I can't delete the entire internet, man. I can, however, tell you that if you show up to the group-stage match against Bayview looking one percent as soft as you look in that video, our whole back line is going to lose their minds, because right now you're the only thing standing between Reyes and about four more goals this season."
Jordan didn't have a comeback for that either. He liked being unbeatable. He liked being the guy whose highlight reel made other keepers nervous. He did not love the idea that liking a girl who happened to play forward for the other team might be the thing that finally cracked that reputation, and for the first time since RYSN had announced this whole ridiculous documentary, a small, cold seed of worry planted itself somewhere behind his ribs, right next to the warm feeling he still hadn't figured out what to do with.
That, Jordan reflected later, was probably the worst possible thing Derek could have said, because now the word rom-com was stuck in Jordan's head at eleven o'clock at night, which was roughly the moment he decided the only reasonable course of action was to text Mia and ask her, very casually, whether she thought he had looked compromised.
Her reply came back faster than he expected.
Compromised is a word people use when they don't have the guts to say "you like her." Ask me how I know.
Jordan stared at his phone for a full thirty seconds before he trusted himself to type anything back.
Do you like me, Reyes.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. He watched them with the kind of focus he usually reserved for a penalty kick in the final minute.
I like your bracelet, she wrote finally. The jury's still out on the rest of you.
He laughed out loud in his empty room, loud enough that his little brother yelled through the wall for him to shut up, and Jordan Cole, captain of the Northgate Falcons, undefeated smart mouth of the entire regional soccer league, sat there grinning at his phone like it had personally handed him the Regional Cup already.
Three more days, said a text from Ms. Alvarez, forwarded to both of them the next morning. Episode three shoot moved up. Corporate wants a "training montage" segment. Bring your competitive spirit, champs, and maybe leave the parking lot chemistry off camera this time. The internet already has enough theories.
Mia read the message twice. Somewhere out there, on servers she would never see, a clip of her laughing at something Jordan Cole said was currently being watched, rewatched, and dissected by strangers who thought they understood exactly what was happening between the two of them.
The trouble was, Mia was starting to wonder if the internet understood it better than she did.
She thought about texting Priya. She thought about texting her mom, who would probably just laugh and say something about how Mia had never once in her life liked anything by half measures, not soccer, not grades, and apparently not this either. In the end she did neither. She lay back on her bed, phone screen still glowing with Jordan's last message, and let herself replay the parking lot for the fourth time that night, the eleven easy minutes, the way he'd said her name like it wasn't a punchline for once.
Episode three was in three days. Eight weeks until Regionals. A training montage, corporate had called it, as if a camera could tell the difference between two athletes working hard and two people who were quietly, catastrophically starting to fall for each other in front of four hundred thousand strangers.
Mia set her phone face down on the nightstand and told herself, very firmly, that she would think about none of this again until morning. She was still thinking about it when her alarm went off at five.