FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Eight: Full Time
Derek's post was already at six hundred replies by the time Mia got the thread open, a full screenshot of his real conversation with Jordan, timestamps intact, context included, the whole ugly, honest exchange laid out for anyone willing to read past the headline. I said something dumb trying to get my friend to focus before a big match, Derek had written underneath it. It got taken out of context and cropped to look like something it wasn't. That's on me, not him. Sorry, Mia. You didn't deserve to spend a day thinking that.
That was in about twenty minutes. First, there was the part where she had to figure out how to say she was sorry.
She read the real thread three times, start to finish, watching the actual conversation unfold in order the way it was supposed to, Derek needling Jordan about focus, Jordan pushing back, never once agreeing that Mia was just good for numbers, arguing the opposite, actually, in language Mia had to read twice to be sure she wasn't imagining it. She's not a storyline, man. I don't care what it does for the channel. If it doesn't work out with her it's not because I stopped caring, it's because I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to tell a girl he likes her without turning it into a joke first.
Mia sat with that sentence for a long time.
She scrolled further down the thread, past Derek's apology, into the replies, where half the school had shown up to weigh in. Some of it was the usual noise, jokes about the ship name, a few people arguing about whether Regionals mattered more than the drama, but underneath all of that, buried in the replies, was a message from an account she recognized as one of Jordan's Falcons teammates. Bro really posted his own dumb texts to protect his captain's relationship. Respect. Also Jordan you good, you've looked miserable all day.
Another reply, from a Bayview account she didn't recognize at all, read simply: Reyes deserves better than finding out the truth from a group chat instead of from him directly, but at least the truth got out before Regionals.
That last one stung, because it was true, and because Mia knew exactly whose fault that particular failure was, and it wasn't only Derek's account she was thinking about when she read it.
Priya knocked once and let herself in without waiting for an answer, phone already in hand. "You saw it."
"I saw it."
"You believed a screenshot from a burner account with zero followers over seven weeks of him showing up for you. In the rain. After the old clip. During the world's most public documentary breakup arc." Priya sat down on the edge of the bed, more gently than the words suggested. "I'm not saying that to make you feel worse. I'm saying it because you need to go fix this tonight, not tomorrow, not after you've had time to feel appropriately guilty about it. Tonight."
"What if he doesn't want to hear from me."
"Then you'll know that for certain, instead of guessing at it from your bedroom floor. But Mia, I watched that boy's face for seven weeks. He wants to hear from you. He's just probably sitting somewhere right now assuming you still think the worst, because you didn't give him a single reason today to think otherwise."
Mia looked at her phone, Jordan's last message still sitting unanswered from that morning, and for the first time all day, the fear of being wrong felt smaller than the fear of losing something real because she'd been too proud to say so.
"What if I say the wrong thing," she asked Priya. "What if sorry isn't enough after today."
"Then you'll say the next thing, and the thing after that, until it is enough. That's kind of how apologies work, Mia. You don't get to skip to the part where it's already fixed." Priya nudged her toward the door. "Also, for what it's worth, I don't think you need the perfect speech. I think you just need to actually show up, which is more than either of you managed to do for each other today over text."
Her mom caught her on the way out, keys already in hand. "Where are you going at eight at night on a school night."
"To fix something. I promise I'll be back before curfew."
Her mom studied her for a second, something knowing in her tired eyes. "Go fix it, mija. Some things are worth breaking curfew a little for. Text me when you get there."
*
She found him at the Northgate fieldhouse, not his house, because Priya had mentioned he sometimes went there after a bad day to shoot free kicks alone until his legs gave out, and sure enough, the floodlights were on over the empty practice pitch, and Jordan was working through a bucket of balls by himself, no crew, no Derek, no audience at all.
He saw her coming and stopped mid-motion, ball rolling off to the side, unstruck.
"I read the real thread," Mia said, before he could say anything, before her nerve failed her. "All of it. What you actually said."
"Okay."
"I should have believed you this morning. I had a whole day to ask you directly instead of deciding you were guilty because of one blurry screenshot from an account that didn't exist a week ago, and I chose the version that let me be angry instead of the version that required me to trust you." She made herself keep going, even though every instinct told her to stop and let it be enough. "I'm sorry. Not the kind of sorry where I explain why I was scared and expect that to fix it. Just, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that today."
Jordan was quiet for a moment, studying her under the floodlights, and when he spoke, his voice had lost the sharp edge from the parking lot the day before. "I get why you believed it. Not because it was true. Because of what you told me in the car, during the storm. Your dad left and didn't look back, and here's a screenshot telling you the next guy was lying too, in a different way, but lying all the same. That's not a small thing to get scared of. I just wish you'd asked me instead of deciding it for both of us."
"I know. I'm working on that part."
"So am I," Jordan said, and something in the way he said it made clear he wasn't only talking about the fight.
"Can I ask you something," Mia said. "That message. The one from the real thread. About not knowing how to tell a girl you like her without turning it into a joke first."
Jordan's ears went faintly red, visible even under the harsh floodlights. "I was hoping you'd skip past that part."
"I read it three times."
"Then you already know the answer, Reyes, I don't have to say it standing here looking like an idiot with a bucket of soccer balls."
"I'd still like to hear it. Out loud. Not over text, not on camera, not from a screenshot somebody else leaked. From you."
Jordan set the ball down at his feet, considering her for a long moment, floodlights buzzing faintly overhead, the whole empty pitch holding its breath around the two of them. "I like you. Not the version of you the internet made a ship name for. You, specifically, the one who runs extra sprints for her mom and gets embarrassed when she's called talented and once told me my defense of a bad pun made no sense while also, somehow, still laughing at it. I've liked you since about the parking lot, if I'm honest, and every single week since has just made it worse. Or better. I haven't decided which word fits."
"Better," Mia said, before she could second-guess it. "Definitely better."
"For what it's worth, Derek feels terrible. He's been apologizing to me for an hour like he personally invented the internet."
"He should feel terrible. But he also fixed it, publicly, in front of his whole school, which is more than a lot of people would do to protect a friend's reputation." Mia stepped closer, close enough that the floodlights caught both their faces at once. "Tell him thank you from me. Eventually. Once I'm done being annoyed that any of this happened at all."
"I'll pass along the eventual thank you." A small, real smile finally broke through, the first one she'd seen from him in a day and a half that had felt considerably longer, and Mia found herself smiling back before she'd consciously decided to. "So. Are we okay?"
"We're okay," Mia said, and meant it, feeling something loosen in her chest that had been wound tight since 7:14 that morning. "I don't want to fight like that again. I don't want to be the kind of person who believes the worst about you just because believing the worst feels safer than believing the best and being wrong."
"Then let's make a deal. Next time something looks bad, we ask each other before we decide anything. Out loud. No screenshots, no burner accounts, no group chats deciding it for us."
"Deal." Mia held out her hand, the same small formality they'd started with in the edit room eight weeks earlier, and Jordan shook it, slower this time, like neither of them was in a hurry to let go.
He picked the stray ball back up, turning it over in his hands, and for a second the old rivalry banter crept back into his expression, familiar and welcome after a day that had otherwise felt like it might never end. "You want to take a few shots at me? I could use the practice before Regionals, and you clearly have some feelings to work out."
"You have no idea," Mia said, already toeing off her school shoes to switch into the cleats she happened to still have in her bag, and for the next half hour, under the floodlights of an empty Northgate practice pitch, two rival captains ran drills together with nobody filming, nobody watching, no ship name trending, just the two of them, laughing between shots, exactly the way it had felt the very first day in that parking lot, before either of them had let themselves admit what it actually was.
She scored on him twice. He saved the third. Neither of them kept score after that, which, for two people who had spent eleven months building an entire rivalry out of exactly that, felt like its own small, quiet miracle.
By the time she finally checked her phone again, there was a text from her mom asking if she'd made it, and Mia typed back one word, fixed, and meant it more completely than she'd meant almost anything else she'd written that day. Priya's response came a minute later, a single row of exclamation points and a demand for details Mia had no intention of providing over text.
Regionals were four weeks away. Whatever this thing between them had survived today, Mia had a feeling it was going to survive a great deal more than one bad screenshot.