FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Four: Stranded
The Bayview activity bus died in the school parking lot at six fifteen, twenty minutes after practice ended and roughly four minutes after the sky had opened up into the kind of rain that turned the whole lot into a shallow lake, and Mia Reyes would later insist, to anyone who asked, that this was the single most inconvenient piece of bad luck that had ever happened to her, and also, quietly, one of the best nights of her whole year.
That was in about three hours. First, there was the part where she was furious about it.
Practice itself had run late, which was the first domino in the whole unfortunate chain of events. Coach Whitfield had kept the team an extra thirty minutes running finishing drills after Mia sailed three shots over the crossbar in a row, muttering something about focus that had nothing to do with soccer and everything to do with the fact that Mia had spent the entire session distracted, replaying an unanswered text from Jordan in her head instead of watching the ball. By the time Coach finally blew the whistle to end things, the sky had already gone that strange yellow-green color that meant something was coming, and it arrived exactly as everyone was climbing onto the bus.
"It's not starting," the driver announced, for the third time, like saying it louder might change the outcome. "Something electrical. I've called the district, they're sending someone, could be an hour, could be two."
Most of the team's parents had already been called and were on their way, headlights cutting through the rain one by one, until the parking lot had emptied out to almost nothing, and Mia was standing under the fieldhouse awning with her bag over one shoulder, waiting for her mom to finish her shift and come get her, when a familiar car pulled up anyway, twenty minutes early, because apparently Jordan Cole had been driving past on his way home from a Falcons weight session and had seen the whole sad tableau of stranded Hawks through his windshield.
"Get in," he said, leaning across to push the passenger door open. "I'm not letting you stand in a flood."
"I have a ride coming."
"Your ride is a bus that is currently deceased. Get in the car, Reyes, I promise I won't make you talk about anything you don't want to talk about."
She got in. The rain was loud on the roof, the heater was on, and for the first ten minutes neither of them said much of anything at all, which felt, strangely, like the most comfortable silence Mia had shared with another human being in weeks.
"You didn't have to stop," she said eventually.
"I know. I wanted to." He glanced over at her, then back at the road, windshield wipers going hard against the downpour. "Also I've been trying to find a way to talk to you since the parking lot thing that wasn't through a text message, so honestly, thank the bus."
Her mom called a moment later, and Mia explained the situation as normally as she could manage, considering she was currently sitting in the passenger seat of the enemy captain's car, and her mom, exhausted and grateful not to have to fight traffic in the storm, said only, "Text me his last name in case I need it for the police report," which made Jordan laugh so hard he nearly missed the turn onto the highway.
The district's replacement bus, it turned out, would not be ready for two hours, and the flooding on the main road back into Bayview was bad enough that Jordan's phone lit up with three separate flood warnings before he'd even left the school district, so they ended up parked in the school lot again, engine running for the heat, rain hammering the windshield, going nowhere for a while whether they liked it or not.
"Can I ask you something," Jordan said, "and you can absolutely tell me it's none of my business."
"Depends on the something."
"Why soccer. Not, like, why do you play it. Why does it matter this much. I've seen you play through a stress fracture. I've seen you run extra sprints after a loss when your own coach told you to go home. There's wanting to win, and there's whatever that is."
Mia looked out at the rain for a long moment before she answered, and when she did, her voice was quieter than it usually got on camera, or at practice, or basically anywhere Jordan had heard it before.
"My mom works two jobs. Has since I was seven, since my dad left and didn't really look back. She's a nurse's aide during the day and does home care overnight some weeks, and she's exhausted all the time, and she has never once complained to me about any of it." Mia picked at a loose thread on her bag strap. "A scholarship to State isn't just me wanting to play soccer in college. It's the one thing I can actually do, with my own two feet, that changes her life too. If I get it, she stops working the overnight shifts. That's it. That's the whole reason I run extra sprints."
Jordan didn't say anything right away, which she appreciated more than any response he could have come up with.
"That's not nothing to carry into every single game," he said finally.
"What about you," Mia asked, because it felt only fair, and because some part of her genuinely wanted to know. "Why does the channel matter so much you'd rather be funny about people than be seen as, I don't know, an actual serious goalkeeper."
Jordan exhaled, fogging up a small patch of the windshield he'd have to wipe clear later. "Because I'm good, Reyes. Genuinely good. I've got scouts who've watched my tape and told my coach I've got the reflexes for a college program, maybe better. But nobody remembers a clean sheet the way they remember a joke. Offside Report got me noticed in a way three years of shutouts never did, and once people started laughing at my videos instead of just watching my games, it got easier to believe the channel was the actual talent and the soccer was just what I filmed. I don't love that trombone sound effect version of myself. But it's the version that gets watched."
He's scared of the exact same thing I am, Mia thought, startled by how simple that realization felt once she had it. Being reduced to one thing when he knows there's more of him than that.
"Do you ever think about quitting the channel," Mia asked. "Just playing, no cameras, no comments section."
"Every time somebody posts something nasty in the replies. Then I remember it's also the reason I met the most annoying, most talented striker in this entire region, so." He shrugged, a small smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. "Trade-offs."
"I'm going to pretend you didn't just call me talented."
"I called you annoying first. Pick your battles, Reyes."
"For what it's worth," she said, "I think you're a genuinely good goalkeeper. I've watched enough of your tape complaining about your defense to know that much."
Jordan turned to look at her, something unguarded on his face that she hadn't seen on camera even once, not in three episodes of footage. "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, and you said it by accident while insulting my defense."
"I contain multitudes."
They talked for another hour, about nothing that mattered and everything that did, until the replacement bus finally rolled into the lot and the rain eased into a drizzle, and when Mia climbed out of Jordan's car she stood there a second too long with her hand still on the door before closing it, neither of them quite ready for the conversation to be over.
"Same time next week," Jordan said, "assuming the bus doesn't die again."
"Don't jinx it, Cole."
"Wouldn't dream of it, Reyes." He hesitated a second longer than the joke required, hand still on the wheel, rain sliding down the windshield behind him. "For what it's worth, I'm glad it was me who drove past tonight. Could've been anybody. Glad it was me."
"Me too," Mia admitted, and it cost her something to say it out loud, standing there in the wet parking lot with her bag getting heavier by the second, but it felt true in a way that mattered more than the cost.
She watched his taillights disappear out of the lot before she got on the bus, and for the entire ride home, while her teammates argued about a movie none of them could agree on, Mia sat by the window replaying an hour of parked-car conversation that had told her more about Jordan Cole than eleven months of rival channels ever had.
Her mom was waiting up when she got home, curious in the way parents get when they've clearly already heard part of a story secondhand. "So," she said, leaning in the kitchen doorway. "Jordan Cole drives a very clean car, apparently, according to the group chat of moms I am somehow part of now."
"It's not like that."
"I didn't say it was like anything. I said his car was clean. Very telling detail, according to the group chat."
"Mom."
"I'm only saying, mija, that a boy who stops in a flood to make sure you're not standing in it, and then sits with you for two hours instead of just dropping you at the fieldhouse and leaving, that's not nothing. Doesn't mean you have to do anything about it tonight. Just don't pretend you didn't notice."
Mia didn't have a comeback for that, which her mother took, correctly, as a kind of answer all by itself, and went to bed satisfied, humming something under her breath that Mia was fairly sure was, unforgivably, a love song.
Her phone buzzed once more before she fell asleep. Glad the bus died, honestly. Don't tell anyone I said that.
She smiled at the ceiling in the dark, and did not, in fact, tell anyone.
She almost made it through the whole next morning without a single interrogation, which, given the way this particular school year had been going, should have told her something. Priya cornered her at her locker holding up her phone, on which someone had posted a blurry photo of two cars sitting side by side in an empty, flooded parking lot, captioned Bayview bus drama last night, guess who gave Reyes a ride home.
"It was raining," Mia said. "The bus broke down. It was a completely normal, non-romantic act of basic human decency."
"For two hours."
"The replacement bus took two hours."
"You were in his car for two hours, Mia, in the rain, alone, and you're telling me nothing happened."
Mia thought about the conversation about her mom, about scholarships and overnight shifts and a boy who had told her, unprompted, that he thought about quitting his own channel every time it got ugly. She thought about how none of that would translate into anything Priya could screenshot or caption, and how it mattered more to her than every clip the internet had made of them combined.
"Nothing happened," she said, which was, technically, true, and felt, somehow, like the biggest lie she'd told all year.