FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Three: Old Footage
The clip had been posted eleven months ago, back when Mia Reyes was, to Jordan Cole, nothing more than a name on a scoreboard and a highlight reel he liked picking apart for laughs, and it resurfaced on a Tuesday morning with the caption everyone already knew Reyes before the documentary. Some things don't change. She watched it four times before first period, and by the fourth time her hands were shaking hard enough that she had to set her phone down on the cafeteria table.
That was in about nine hours. First, there was the part where she still had to get through an entire school day pretending she was fine.
The clip was old Offside Report footage, from back before either of them had a rivalry anyone outside their two schools cared about. In it, Jordan sat in front of his old bedroom setup, seventeen years old and considerably more obnoxious than he currently liked to think of himself, breaking down a Bayview loss from Mia's freshman year with the specific cruelty available only to someone who has never once considered that the person on screen might see the video. Reyes has heart, he'd said, grinning at the camera, but heart doesn't win you a Regional Cup, technique does, and judging by this footage, somebody forgot to teach her any. He'd played the clip of her missing an open net in slow motion, three separate times, with a sad trombone sound effect over the top.
It had gotten forty thousand views back then. It was closing in on two million now, because somebody, for reasons Mia would probably never know, had decided this was the perfect week to remind the entire internet that Jordan Cole used to think she was a joke.
"He said that a year ago," Priya said carefully, at the lunch table, watching Mia's face with the wariness of someone defusing something. "Before he knew you. People say dumb things about strangers on the internet, that's basically the whole internet."
"He put a trombone sound effect over me missing a shot in a game we lost by one goal. In front of my whole team."
"I'm not saying it was kind."
"I'm not asking if it was kind, Priya, I'm asking why I let myself forget, for exactly two weeks, that this is who he actually is under the parking lot conversations and the bracelet from his brother and the stupid, stupid grin."
Priya didn't have an answer for that, and for once, she didn't try to make one up.
Across the cafeteria, at the table where the rest of the Hawks usually sat, someone had already pulled the clip up on a phone, and Mia could hear the trombone sound effect playing, tinny and small, three tables away, and the sound of a couple of freshmen laughing at something that had happened to her four years ago as if it were happening right now. She put her head down on her arms for a second, just to block it out, and Priya put a hand flat on her back without saying anything, which helped more than any of the things Priya had actually said out loud.
"I keep thinking about how he looked at me in the parking lot two weeks ago," Mia said, muffled, into her own arms. "Like I was the only interesting thing in a hundred-mile radius. And this whole time there was a version of him sitting in his bedroom cutting me into a punchline."
"People change, Mia."
"People also don't, sometimes. That's the whole problem with liking someone you used to hate. You can't tell which one you're getting."
By the end of the school day, the clip had made its way to Coach Whitfield's inbox as well, forwarded by a concerned parent with the subject line is this appropriate for our sponsorship partner, and Coach Whitfield had spent twenty minutes of practice time on the phone with someone from RYSN instead of running drills, which meant the whole team knew something was wrong before Mia had said a single word about it herself.
Jordan found out about the resurfaced clip forty minutes after Mia did, from three separate group chats and a screenshot Derek sent with no caption at all, which from Derek was somehow worse than any words could have been. He watched his own old video with the specific horror of a person confronted with an earlier, worse version of himself, and the trombone sound effect landed like something physical in his stomach.
He had forgotten he'd ever said it. That was the truly awful part. He had forgotten entirely, the way you forget most of the hundred small cruelties you commit before you're old enough to know better, and somewhere out there Mia Reyes had apparently not forgotten at all.
Derek found him in the locker room afterward, and for once he didn't say anything about focus or Regionals or rom-coms. He just leaned against the next locker over and said, "That's a rough one to have dug up," which, from Derek, was practically a hug.
"I don't even remember making it feel like that," Jordan said. "I remember making it feel like a joke. A good one. I got so many comments that week telling me how funny I was."
"You were seventeen and running a channel that paid you based on how many people watched it. That doesn't make it okay. It just means you're not the only guy in this league who's said something he'd take back if he could." Derek shrugged, which for him passed as sympathy. "Fix it if you can fix it. Just don't let it wreck your head before the group stage."
Jordan appreciated the second half of that sentence a great deal less than the first, but he nodded anyway, and went home, and texted her three times. She did not answer any of them.
He tried a fourth. I know I can't take it back. I know an apology on the internet doesn't undo two million views. But can I say it to your actual face, not a camera, not a screenshot, just you.
Nothing. He set his phone down, picked it back up, set it down again, and finally did the only thing he could think of, which was drive to the Bayview fieldhouse after Falcons practice ended, in his own car, on his own time, with no crew and no cameras and no Ms. Alvarez to make it feel like content instead of an actual apology.
Mia was locking up the equipment shed when he found her, and the look on her face when she saw him standing in the parking lot without a single microphone in sight told him exactly how badly this could go.
"I'm not filming anything," he said quickly, hands up. "There's no crew. I just needed you to hear this from me instead of reading it from a comments section."
"You already said it, Cole. A year ago, apparently, to two million people."
"I said it when I didn't know you. When you were a name on a scoreboard I was trying to be funny about, because being funny about the scoreboard was the whole job, and I was seventeen and I didn't think about who was on the other side of it." He made himself keep going, even though every part of him wanted to stop and let the silence cover the rest. "That's not an excuse. It was a lousy thing to say about anyone, and it was an especially lousy thing to say about someone who was fifteen and trying her best in a game her team lost by one goal. I don't get to undo it. I just needed you to know that the guy who said that isn't trying to be funny about you anymore. Hasn't been, for a while now."
Mia crossed her arms, keys still in one hand, and studied him for a long moment in the fading light. "You still put trombone sounds over people's mistakes. I watched last week's video. You did it to a Fairhaven midfielder."
"I did," Jordan admitted. "It's still not great. I'm working on it. I've been working on it since about the day I met you in person and realized the person behind the highlight reel had actual feelings I hadn't bothered to think about."
Don't forgive him yet, Mia told herself, even as some traitorous part of her chest was already softening at the sight of him standing there without a camera, without an audience, just apologizing because it mattered to him that she believed it. He hurt you in front of your whole team. That doesn't go away because he found you in a parking lot with a sad face.
"I'm not saying it's fine," she said out loud. "It's not fine. It's going to take longer than one apology in a parking lot."
"I know."
"But I believe you meant it. That's different from it being fine."
Jordan let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since he'd shown up. "That's more than I was expecting to get today."
"Don't get used to it," Mia said, but there was something less sharp in her voice than there had been a minute ago, and when she turned to walk to her car, she did not tell him to stop following her, even though he did, all the way to the driver's side door, neither of them saying much of anything else, both of them apparently fine with that.
Ms. Alvarez's message came through that night, cheerful as always, entirely unaware of the day either of them had actually had. Great buzz around episode three, champs. The internet loves a redemption arc almost as much as it loves a rivalry. Keep leaning into the story, whatever it is. See you Thursday.
Mia read the message twice, then looked at the last text still sitting unanswered in her phone from Jordan, sent an hour after he'd left the parking lot. For what it's worth, Reyes, the guy in that old clip has no idea how much better his year is about to get.
She didn't reply. She also didn't delete it, and when she finally fell asleep, the phone was still on the nightstand, screen dark, his name the last thing she'd looked at before closing her eyes.
Her mom got home from her second shift a little after midnight, the way she did most nights, and found Mia still awake at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal she hadn't touched. "Rough day?" her mom asked, dropping her bag by the door.
"Somebody dug up an old video of Jordan Cole making fun of me. A year ago. Before any of this started."
Her mom sat down across from her, tired in the particular way that came from being on her feet for ten hours, and considered this for a moment. "Did he apologize?"
"He drove to the fieldhouse. No cameras. Said it to my face."
"That's not nothing, mija." Her mom reached over and stole a spoonful of the abandoned cereal. "People are allowed to become better than the worst thing they ever said. Doesn't mean you have to forgive him on his schedule instead of yours. Just means it's worth watching what he does next, not just what he did once."
Mia thought about that long after her mom had gone to bed, about the parking lot and the apology and the two million strangers who thought they understood exactly who Jordan Cole was based on forty seconds of old footage, when Mia herself was still working out the answer one week at a time.