FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Six: Ship Wars
By episode six, someone had made merchandise. Actual, physical merchandise, a set of stickers featuring a cartoon Mia and a cartoon Jordan standing back to back with soccer balls and tiny hearts floating between them, sold out within a day on some fan's online shop, and Mia found out about it because Priya sent her a photo of her own binder with one stuck proudly to the front cover.
"You bought this," Mia said, flat.
"I bought four. One's for you."
That was in about five hours. First, there was the part where Ms. Alvarez called an actual meeting about it.
"The fandom has a name for you two," Ms. Alvarez announced, spinning her laptop around at the start of Thursday's shoot so both of them could see the screen, which displayed, in large stylized letters, the word ReysCole, alongside a fan-made banner featuring both their faces and, for reasons neither of them could explain, a small cartoon soccer ball wearing a crown. "RYSN's social team is thrilled. Engagement is up four hundred percent since episode five. We would like today's episode to lean into it."
"Lean into it how," Jordan asked, with the caution of someone who had learned, over six weeks of this documentary, that Ms. Alvarez's ideas of leaning into things tended to be significantly more elaborate than expected.
"A friendly, on-camera Q&A. Fan questions, submitted online, both of you answer live. Corporate loves the ship name. Corporate wants content that either confirms or denies it in a fun, brand-safe way."
Mia looked at Jordan. Jordan looked at Mia. Neither of them said the thing they were both thinking, which was that confirming or denying anything on camera required first admitting to themselves what the honest answer actually was, and neither of them had quite worked that out yet, not out loud, not to each other.
"Sure," Jordan said finally. "Fire away."
The first question, read off a card by Ms. Alvarez in the voice of someone enjoying her job a great deal, was simple enough. "'Is there really nothing going on between you two, or are we all losing our minds.' That's from a fan account with eleven thousand followers, so, no pressure."
"There is a very well-documented, ongoing sports rivalry between our two schools," Mia said, aiming for breezy and landing somewhere closer to rehearsed. "That's what's going on."
"What she said," Jordan added, and if his voice came out slightly less convincing than hers, the crew was polite enough not to mention it.
The second question hit harder. "'Jordan, be honest, would you ever date a Bayview Hawk.'"
Jordan opened his mouth, closed it, and took a beat longer to answer than the question strictly required. "I'd have to know the specific Hawk in question. Can't answer hypotheticals about an entire roster."
"That's not a no," Ms. Alvarez said, delighted, scribbling something on her clipboard.
"Next question," Jordan said quickly, before anyone could dwell on it, and Ms. Alvarez, mercifully, moved on to a slightly safer card.
"'Mia, what's the most annoying thing about Jordan.'"
"His entire personality," Mia said, which got a laugh from the crew, "specifically the part where he thinks fist pumps are a personality trait."
"They are a personality trait. A great one. Studies show it."
"What studies."
"The study of me, personally, being extremely likable when I fist pump."
"That's not a study, that's a delusion."
"'Jordan, what's the most annoying thing about Mia,'" Ms. Alvarez read next, grinning behind the monitor.
Jordan considered this with the exaggerated seriousness of a man solving a difficult equation. "She has this thing where she scores a goal and does this little shrug, like, oh, that old thing, no big deal, when she has clearly been picturing that exact goal in her head all week. It's infuriating. It's also, unfortunately, very charming, which I did not put in my notes for this segment and would like stricken from the record."
"Noted and absolutely not stricken," Ms. Alvarez said. "Last question, and then we can wrap. 'Is there a nickname for this pairing you two would actually pick, if not ReysCole.'"
"Reyes and Cole," Mia offered. "Simple. Efficient. Alphabetical."
"Boring," Jordan said. "I vote we let the internet keep ReysCole. It's got a nice ring to it. Little bit of a soccer pun buried in there if you squint."
"There is no pun buried in there."
"There's absolutely a pun. Reyes, cole, like, like a coleslaw situation, it's very layered, you're just not looking hard enough."
"That is the worst pun I've ever heard in my life."
"And yet you're smiling," Jordan said, and the camera, predictably, caught that too.
"It's not a yes either," Jordan said, but he was looking at Mia when he said it, and the camera caught every second of that look, and somewhere in a comments section that would explode within the hour, four hundred fans would insist, correctly, that they had just watched something real happen in real time.
Derek cornered Jordan after the shoot wrapped, arms crossed in the exact posture Jordan had come to associate with an incoming lecture. "You looked at her for way too long on that last one."
"It was a two second pause."
"It was a whole moment, man, everyone in the crew noticed, the sound guy noticed, I noticed, and I wasn't even trying to notice." Derek lowered his voice. "Look, I'm not going to keep having this conversation every week. I said my piece about Regionals. But if you're going to do this thing, actually do it, don't half do it on camera for four hundred thousand strangers and then go back to pretending at practice. That's not fair to her, and honestly, it's not fair to you either."
Jordan didn't have an answer for that on the spot, which was becoming an uncomfortable pattern whenever Derek said something inconveniently reasonable.
"I'm working on it," he said finally.
"Work faster. Regionals is six weeks out, the whole league's watching this documentary, and if you're going to spend the next six weeks half in your own head about a girl, I'd rather you just be all the way in it and get it sorted, one way or the other. Indecision's worse for your game than a crush is."
"Since when do you give relationship advice."
"Since you started missing easy claims on crosses because you were staring at the Bayview bench," Derek said, which was, Jordan had to admit, an extremely fair and extremely embarrassing point.
Mia's version of that same conversation happened in the equipment shed with Priya, who had watched the entire segment twice already by the time Mia found her.
"'I'd have to know the specific Hawk in question,'" Priya quoted, in a passable Jordan Cole impression. "Mia. That's not a no."
"I heard him say it the first time."
"Are you going to do anything about it, or are we doing the thing where you pretend this is only a documentary about soccer for another four episodes?"
Mia sat down on an overturned bucket, suddenly more tired than ninety minutes of practice had made her. "I don't know how to do anything about it, Priya. Every version of this that isn't pretending is a version where the whole internet is watching, and my mom is watching, and Coach is watching, and if it goes badly, it's not just my heart that gets embarrassed, it's the whole documentary, the whole sponsorship, maybe the whole team's reputation with RYSN."
"Or," Priya said, sitting down next to her, "it's a version where it goes well, and you get exactly what four hundred thousand strangers have apparently already figured out you want."
I'm scared, Mia thought, and let herself think it plainly, for the first time, instead of dressing it up as strategy or focus or scholarship math. Not of losing to Northgate. Of losing this, whatever this is, before I've even let myself call it something.
"What's the actual worst case," Priya asked, more gently now. "Say it out loud. Let's look at it directly instead of letting it live in the back of your head."
"Worst case, it doesn't work out, and I have to see him across a soccer field for the rest of the season, and every highlight of that awkwardness lives on the internet forever, and RYSN quietly stops sponsoring Bayview because their cute rivalry storyline imploded into something messy."
"Okay. And best case?"
Mia hadn't let herself get that far before. "Best case, I get to keep talking to him like I did in that car during the storm. For as long as I want. Without an internet audience deciding what it means before I do."
"That sounds like a pretty good best case."
"It sounds like a best case with a lot riding on it."
"Most good things do," Priya said, bumping her shoulder against Mia's. "You've never once in your life let being scared of something stop you from going for it on a soccer field. I don't know why this is any different."
"This is fitness me showing up. Soccer trains you for one specific type of fear. Nobody trains you for the other kind."
"Sure they do," Priya said. "You just did it. You said the worst case out loud and you're still sitting here. That's basically the whole training."
"I'll think about it," Mia said out loud, which was, for Mia Reyes, roughly equivalent to a declaration of war.
That night, a fan edit hit two million views, ninety seconds of every look, every near-miss, every unfinished sentence from six weeks of Road to Regionals cut together with music that made the whole thing feel, uncomfortably, like the trailer for a movie about two people who were the only ones in the story who hadn't figured out the ending yet. Someone in the comments had pinned a single line that got repeated in a hundred different reposts by morning.
They're going to end up together and they don't even know it.
Mia watched it four times before she made herself stop, phone light the only thing on in her dark room, and when Jordan's text came through at midnight, she was, for once, already holding her phone, waiting.
Did you see the edit, he wrote.
I saw it.
They think we don't know it yet, he wrote back. What if we do know it. What happens then.
Mia stared at the message for a long time, thumb hovering, the ship name and the stickers and Derek's warning and her mother's tired, knowing smile all crowding into her head at once, and she still hadn't typed a single word back when her phone buzzed again.
We don't have to answer that tonight, Jordan wrote, before she could. But I needed you to know I'm not pretending anymore. Whenever you're ready, Reyes. I'm not going anywhere.
Mia set her phone face down on her chest and stared at the ceiling for a long time, the fan edit's music still looping faintly in her head, Priya's voice and her mother's voice and now Jordan's, all saying some version of the same thing in the same patient, unhurried tone. Nobody was rushing her. That, somehow, made it harder to keep pretending she needed time at all.
She picked the phone back up before she could talk herself out of it.
Ask me again after Regionals, she typed, and then, before she could send only that, added one more line. Not because I need six more weeks. Because I want to win this thing with you still looking at me like that, and I don't want either of us distracted before we get there.
The reply came back almost instantly. Deal. Six weeks. Then I'm asking you properly, not over text, and you're going to give me a real answer.
Counting on it, Cole, she wrote back, and for the first time in six weeks of cameras and comments sections and fan edits with music over them, the thing between them felt less like something the internet had invented and entirely like something that belonged, finally, to the two of them.