FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Five: Match Day
Mia Reyes and Jordan Cole stood ten feet apart in the center circle, captains' armbands on, referee between them with a coin in hand, and the entire Bayview student section went so quiet in that one second that Mia could hear the coin flip land on the referee's palm from ten feet away. Jordan looked at her, and instead of the smirk she'd spent eleven months learning to hate, he mouthed two words that only she could see. Good luck.
That was in about ninety minutes. First, there was the part where she still had to walk out of the tunnel and be his rival in front of six hundred people.
The group-stage match between Bayview and Northgate had been circled on every calendar in both schools since the bracket was announced, but this year it carried an extra layer nobody had accounted for back in September, because half of both student sections had spent the last month watching Road to Regionals, and the atmosphere in the stands felt less like two schools who despised each other and more like an audience who had shown up for the finale of something they'd been following for weeks.
"Don't look at the Northgate section," Priya muttered, jogging past Mia during warmups. "There's a sign."
Mia looked at the Northgate section. There was, in fact, a sign, hand painted, held up by a cluster of Falcons fans who had clearly put more effort into it than any of their actual homework that week. It read REYES AND COLE 4EVER in enormous red letters, with a crude drawing of a soccer ball wearing a tiny crown, and Mia had to turn around and pretend to stretch her hamstring for a solid ten seconds just to get her face back under control.
Across the field, Derek was giving Jordan a similar problem. "Bayview section's got a sign too," he reported, deadpan. "It says something about your bracelet. I'm not going to read it out loud before a match, you don't need that in your head right now."
"Now I have to know."
"You do not have to know. Get your head in the game, Cole, we've got Reyes to shut down for ninety minutes, sign or no sign."
The whistle blew, and for the first fifteen minutes of the match, it was, blessedly, just soccer. Mia found gaps in the Northgate back line the way she always did, quick and precise, and Jordan met her twice in the box with saves that made the whole Northgate section erupt, diving low to his right on a shot that had, by any reasonable measure, beaten him. She scored past him once anyway in the eighteenth minute, a curling shot into the top corner that even Jordan applauded from his own goal line, clapping twice before catching himself and turning it into an exaggerated shake of his head at his own defense, and the crowd, predictably, lost their minds at the two of them appearing to have a moment in the middle of a one-nil game.
This is the actual sport, Mia told herself, jogging back to her own half, adrenaline high, grin harder to suppress than she would have liked. This is the part that matters. Not the sign. Not the applause. The goal.
It was, she suspected, becoming increasingly difficult to keep those two things separate in her head.
At halftime, the two teams retreated to opposite ends of the field, and Coach Whitfield gathered the Hawks into a tight circle, tactical board in hand, voice sharp with the specific urgency of a coach who smelled a winnable game slipping. "Their left back is tired. Every time we send Mia at him, he's a half step slow recovering. I want more of that in the second half, not less."
"Copy that," Mia said, chugging water, trying to ignore the way her eyes kept drifting toward the Northgate huddle across the pitch, where Jordan stood with his own hands braced on his knees, listening to his own coach with the same total focus she was supposed to be giving hers.
Priya elbowed her. "Eyes on the board, Reyes."
"I'm listening."
"You're looking at Jordan Cole's left back situation from a very personal angle."
"I'm scouting. It's my job."
"Sure it is," Priya said, and went back to her own water bottle, entirely unconvinced, which was, Mia reflected, becoming Priya's default expression around her lately.
The second half opened with Bayview pressing hard, exactly as Coach Whitfield had drawn up, Mia driving at that tired left back twice in the first five minutes alone, drawing a foul the second time that nearly turned into a yellow card for the defender in question. Jordan barked instructions from his goal line the whole time, marshaling his backline with the same restless energy he brought to breaking down other teams' footage, and more than once Mia caught herself grudgingly impressed by how much smarter he was about the game than his own highlight reel of trash talk ever let on.
Northgate equalized in the fifty-third minute, a set piece Jordan had clearly drilled his team on relentlessly, Derek rising above Bayview's back line to head it home, and the Falcons bench erupted with the kind of joy that made Mia's stomach twist with old, familiar competitiveness, the kind that had nothing to do with cameras or parking lots or rain-soaked conversations about scholarships. She wanted to win. She wanted to win so badly it ached, and for the rest of the second half, whatever softness had crept into her feelings about Jordan Cole got shoved firmly into a back pocket where it belonged during ninety minutes of live competition.
The final fifteen minutes belonged almost entirely to Jordan. Bayview threw everything they had at the Northgate goal, three corners in a row, a header off the crossbar that had the entire Hawks bench on its feet, and every single time, Jordan Cole was somehow exactly where the ball ended up, gloves absorbing shot after shot with the kind of composure that made Mia want to simultaneously applaud him and throw her shin guards at his head. When the final whistle blew, both teams collapsed to the grass in roughly equal measure, exhausted, one-one, nothing decided, everything still to play for in the final.
"You cost me at least two goals today," Mia told him as they walked off together, only half joking.
"I'm aware. I plan on doing it again in the final, for what it's worth."
"We'll see about that."
The match ended one-one, a hard-fought draw that satisfied nobody completely, and in the tunnel afterward, sweaty and spent, both captains found themselves face to face for the post-match handshake with Ms. Alvarez's camera crew hovering a respectful distance away, capturing the moment for episode five.
"Good game, Reyes," Jordan said, hand extended, breathing hard, grass stain across one knee.
"Good game, Cole." She shook it. His hand was warm, same as it had been over the microphone weeks ago, and neither of them let go quite as fast as a normal handshake required. "That save in the eighteenth was filthy."
"That shot in the eighteenth was filthier. I'm still annoyed about it."
"Get used to that feeling. I plan on doing it again in the final."
"Confident."
"Realistic," she said, and the corner of her mouth curved despite herself, despite the camera, despite everything.
The clip that went viral by that evening was not, as everyone expected, the goal, or the save, or even the handshake. It was six seconds of footage, caught by a fan in the stands and uploaded within minutes, showing Jordan clapping for Mia's goal before catching himself, and Mia catching him do it, both of them briefly, helplessly grinning at each other across a soccer field while their entire two schools watched.
Real ones know these two are the whole plot this season, read the top comment, with forty thousand likes by midnight.
Ms. Alvarez forwarded the clip to both of them with a single line of her own. This is the best organic content this campaign has produced all season, champs. Whatever's happening between you two, the audience is obsessed, and honestly, so am I. See you Thursday for episode six.
Mia stared at the message for a long time before setting her phone down, unsettled by a feeling she couldn't quite name, some mix of pride at the goal, ache from the draw, and something warmer and more complicated stirring underneath both of those, tied directly to a boy she was still, officially, supposed to be trying to beat.
Priya flopped onto Mia's bed uninvited later that evening, still in her post-match hoodie, scrolling the same clip on her own phone. "So. That was a moment."
"It was a handshake."
"It was six seconds of you and Jordan Cole looking at each other like the rest of the stadium had evaporated. I've known you nine years, Mia. I've never seen you look at a boy like that. I've barely seen you look at a trophy like that."
"I look at trophies exactly like that."
"You don't, actually. You look at trophies like you're calculating what they mean for your recruiting profile. You looked at Jordan like he was the whole plot." Priya set her phone down and studied her friend for a long moment, gentler than her usual teasing. "I'm not trying to make fun of you. I just want to know if you're okay. This is a lot, the games, the cameras, the scholarship stuff, and now apparently a boy who used to make videos calling you names."
Mia was quiet for a second, turning her armband over in her hands, still creased from the match. "I don't know what I'm doing, Priya. I know I'm supposed to hate him. I know the internet has decided we're a couple based on a handshake and a six-second clip. I know Regionals is six weeks away and my whole scholarship might come down to it. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, he's just, I don't know. Easy. Being around him is easy, even when we're actively trying to beat each other."
"That doesn't sound like a problem to me."
"It sounds like exactly the kind of thing that could go very wrong very publicly."
"Or," Priya said, flopping back against the pillows, "it sounds like the kind of thing that could go very right, also very publicly, and you're just scared of the first option enough to forget the second one's on the table."
Mia didn't have an answer for that. She thought about it long after Priya had gone home, long after she'd iced her knee and eaten dinner and told her mom the score in careful, measured detail that left out the six-second clip entirely, and she was still thinking about it when Jordan's message finally came through.
Jordan, three miles away in his own room, watched the same six-second clip for the eleventh time and did not feel unsettled at all. He felt, if anything, like a boy who had just been handed proof, publicly, undeniably, on video, that whatever was happening between him and Mia Reyes was no longer a secret either of them could pretend away, not from the internet, not from their own teammates, and increasingly, not from themselves. He typed out a message, deleted it, typed it again, and finally sent it before he could talk himself out of it a third time.
That draw is going to bother me all week. Not the score. The other thing. You felt it too, right? Tell me I'm not the only one who felt it.
Mia read it twice, thumb hovering over the reply, Priya's words still sitting in her chest like something she hadn't decided what to do with yet.