A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 2: One Camera, Two Egos
You would think, after the poll and the trending clip and the entire cafeteria practically taking sides, that Ms. Chen might reconsider the whole co-hosting arrangement. You would be wrong. Ms. Chen apparently possesses the kind of patience usually reserved for kindergarten teachers and bomb disposal technicians, because on Monday morning she handed Ethan and me a shared shot list, a shared calendar invite, and a look that very clearly communicated do better this time, and then walked away before either of us could protest.
Mina found this development delightful in a way I found deeply suspicious. "So let me get this straight," she said at lunch, counting off points on her fingers like she was building a legal case. "You two are trending. There's a poll. You now have a shared calendar invite with his name in it. And you're telling me there's nothing going on."
"It's a co-hosting arrangement, Mina. Ms. Chen assigned it. I did not choose this. This is basically a hostage situation with better lighting."
"Sure," Mina said, in the exact tone of someone filing that statement away for later use against me. "Hostage situations don't usually come with a shared calendar invite titled 'Riley + Ethan — Weekly Sync,' though. I checked. It has a little heart emoji next to it. Blake put it there. He says it's ironic."
I did not have a response to that, which was, in itself, becoming an alarming pattern.
• • •
So we tried again. Three times, to be exact, and I would like it noted for the historical record that all three attempts were, in their own unique and devastating ways, complete disasters.
Attempt one started reasonably enough — a simple introduction, some friendly banter, Ethan tossing a basketball between his hands for visual interest — until I made an offhand comment about Hawthorne's defense being, generously speaking, made of wet cardboard, and Ethan took this as a personal invitation to launch into a twelve-minute breakdown of the entire regional bracket, complete with hand-drawn diagrams on the whiteboard behind him, arrows pointing at other arrows, a small doodle of what I can only assume was meant to be a trophy, none of which had anything remotely to do with the library fundraiser we were supposed to be promoting. By the time I managed to drag him back on topic, we'd burned through half our recording slot, Blake had visibly aged several years behind the camera, and someone's forgotten protein bar had melted onto the equipment cart.
"You do know this is a library fundraiser," I said, gesturing at the whiteboard, which by now bore a closer resemblance to a conspiracy board than a broadcast outline. "Not a coaching clinic."
"I'm building context," Ethan said, entirely unbothered, still holding the marker like a man who fully intended to keep going. "Context matters, Riley."
"The only context anyone needs is that books exist and the roof above them is currently leaking. That's the whole pitch. We had it. It was good. You ruined it with a bracket."
Attempt two ended in under ninety seconds. Ethan, gesturing enthusiastically to make some point about "synergy" — a word I am fairly certain he picked up from a podcast and has since used incorrectly at every possible opportunity, applying it to everything from teamwork to, memorably, a particular brand of sneaker — knocked his entire water bottle directly onto the camera. Not near the camera. Onto it. Straight into the little vents where all the delicate, expensive electronic components apparently live. The equipment made a small, tragic beeping sound, flickered twice like it was reconsidering its life choices, and died a quiet, undramatic death right there on the tripod.
Blake appeared out of the shadows within seconds, cradling it like a fallen family pet, murmuring something that sounded suspiciously like a eulogy, and did not speak to either of us for the rest of the period. He did, however, leave a sticky note on the equipment cart the next morning that simply read: WATER BOTTLES STAY IN BACKPACKS. NO EXCEPTIONS. THIS MEANS YOU, ETHAN.
Attempt three collapsed for an entirely different reason: I'd forgotten to mute my own mic while muttering a running commentary to myself about Ethan's inability to read a teleprompter at a normal human speaking pace, and the backup mic, being significantly more sensitive than advertised, caught every single unflattering word — including, unfortunately, the phrase "reads like a golden retriever sounding out a menu" — and broadcast it directly into Blake's headphones at what he later described as "genuinely dangerous volume, Riley, I nearly lost hearing in one ear."
Ethan did not find this nearly as funny as I did, right up until Blake played the audio back and Ethan's own reaction in the moment — a full-body flinch followed by an offended gasp worthy of a soap opera villain discovering betrayal — became, in its own right, the single funniest thing to happen in the Pulse Lab all semester. Even Ethan, eventually, admitted it was a solid bit, though he insisted on adding, with great dignity, that he reads teleprompters "at a contemplative pace, not a slow one, there's a difference."
By the time we packed up, Ms. Chen had wandered in to check our progress, taken one look at the wrecked camera, Blake's thousand-yard stare, the melted protein bar, and the general aura of defeat radiating off both Ethan and me, and delivered her verdict without so much as a hint of surprise, like a doctor confirming a diagnosis she'd suspected from the hallway.
"Keep the chemistry," she said. "Lose the collateral damage. And for the love of the entire audio department, somebody mute a microphone occasionally."
"Define collateral damage," Ethan said.
"The camera, Ethan. The camera is the collateral damage."
• • •
What none of us said out loud — though I suspect Blake noticed it first, given how much time he spends staring at raw footage nobody else bothers to watch twice — was that our worst, messiest, most catastrophic takes were somehow also our best ones. The bickering wasn't a bug. According to the analytics, it was very much the feature. Every clip where Ethan and I actually argued, actually forgot the cameras were rolling, outperformed every carefully scripted, perfectly lit segment we'd painstakingly planned for. Ms. Chen wanted us to keep that same unfiltered energy, minus the ruined equipment, minus the earlier cat whiskers incident that still, weeks later, occasionally resurfaced in the comments of unrelated posts, and minus, ideally, any further threats to Blake's declining will to live.
This turned out to be significantly harder than it sounds. Being funny by accident is easy. Being funny on command, while also being responsible, while also not drowning a camera, is, I have since learned, a professional skill that some people spend entire careers trying to master and that Ethan and I, evidently, were still very much in the beginner tier of.
• • •
We ended up filming a segment at Moonbean on Wednesday, mostly because Ms. Chen decided our rivalry needed "a human backdrop," her words, not mine, and my mother's coffee shop happened to be the most convenient human backdrop available within walking distance of school. I spent the entire car ride over rehearsing exactly how unbothered I intended to look about Ethan Cole standing inside my actual family business, surrounded by the actual smell of cinnamon and burnt espresso that has followed me my entire life, and somehow still ended up completely unprepared the second he walked through the door and immediately, without asking, knew which pastry case held the good almond croissants.
"How do you know where the croissants are," I asked, deeply suspicious.
"Everyone knows where the croissants are, Riley. It's a small shop."
"Sure. Everyone. That's totally a normal thing to just know."
Filming got delayed almost immediately, because Mrs. Alvarez — a semi-regular customer who has strong, detailed opinions about oat milk foam ratios and has voiced every single one of them to my mother personally, at length, on multiple prior occasions — decided this was the correct moment to complain about her latte again. I watched my mother handle the entire situation with the exact patient, warm, unshakably kind tone she uses on literally everyone, remaking the drink twice without a hint of irritation, laughing genuinely at Mrs. Alvarez's rambling story about her cat's ongoing feud with the neighbor's cat by the end of it, a story that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely no ending in sight.
I glanced over and caught Ethan watching the whole thing too, quiet in a way he almost never is, his usual performance mode entirely switched off, forgotten pastry going slightly stale in his hand.
"Your mom's kind of a legend," he said, when he noticed me noticing him.
"She's dealt with worse than Mrs. Alvarez," I said, which was true, though I didn't elaborate, because elaborating would have meant explaining exactly how much worse, and I was not remotely ready to have that conversation with Ethan Cole over iced coffee and a slightly stale croissant.
Ten minutes later, while I was fixing my hair in the reflection of the espresso machine and pretending not to be doing exactly that, I caught sight of Ethan through the front window, crouched on the sidewalk outside Cole Sports next door, patiently helping some kid — maybe eight years old, missing a front tooth, clearly overjoyed at the attention — reattach a bike chain that had come loose. He wasn't performing for anyone. There was no camera pointed at him, no crowd, no one to impress. He was just quietly good at something, the way you're only quietly good at something when you've completely forgotten anyone might be watching.
It was, objectively, an extremely inconvenient thing to witness, and I stood there for a solid thirty seconds pretending to reorganize sugar packets so I'd have a reason to keep looking.
• • •
Once the cameras were actually rolling, we snapped right back into our usual roles, like actors hitting well-rehearsed marks after a brief and confusing intermission. Ethan teased me about my "aggressive relationship with commas." I informed the internet, on the record, that Ethan Cole had once tried to return a pair of shoes to my mother's coffee shop, believing it was, in fact, a shoe store, a story my mother has never once let him live down and brings up unprompted at least twice a month. It was, all things considered, going smoothly, right up until Ethan leaned in to adjust my slipping mic clip, close enough that I could smell his ridiculous, expensive-smelling cologne, and I heard myself say, completely without authorization from my own brain, in front of a live camera, on the record, forever, unerasably:
"You're actually kind of decent-looking when you're not trying so hard to perform."
There was a beat of silence. Blake, behind the camera, went very, very still, the specific stillness of someone who has just realized they are recording something extremely valuable, followed by the very small, very deliberate motion of someone quietly, carefully making sure the recording light was still on.
Ethan blinked, genuinely thrown, before the grin crept back across his face, slower and somehow more real than his usual camera-ready version. "Was that a compliment, Monroe? From you? On camera?"
"Don't get used to it," I said quickly, already regretting every single word, already calculating exactly how bad this was going to look once it inevitably ended up somewhere it wasn't supposed to.
"Too late," he said. "That's the first nice thing you've ever said to me. I'm framing it. I'm getting it engraved on something. Maybe a plaque. For the trophy case."
"There is no trophy case."
"There will be. I'm building one. Specifically for this."
Naturally, within an hour, someone had clipped exactly those eleven words out of context, cut clean away from the sarcasm and the teasing that surrounded them, and posted them with the caption: riley monroe just said WHAT about ethan cole?? By the time I got home, it had more shares than the original basketball clip that started this whole mess, and at least two accounts had already turned it into a slowed-down, softly lit edit set to music, which felt, frankly, like an overreaction to eleven words.
• • •
That night, while I was lying on my bed pretending to do calculus homework and actually just refreshing the comments section like it was a personality trait, my phone buzzed with an email that had absolutely nothing to do with calculus, homework, or Ethan Cole's cheekbones.
The subject line read: Partnership Opportunity — StreamForge Marketing Division.
I sat up so fast I nearly knocked my laptop off the bed. The email was polite, professional, and entirely too interested in the two of us — congratulating Pulse Live on its "remarkable organic engagement," praising the "authentic rival dynamic" between "Riley Monroe and Ethan Cole," and proposing, in language that sounded friendly enough on the surface, an official sponsored campaign built entirely around our rivalry, complete with a proposed hashtag I refuse to repeat because it involved an unforgivable pun on my last name.
Attached to the email was a draft agreement. I only skimmed the first page before one single line jumped out at me, printed in the same calm, professional font as everything else, as though it weren't about to completely upend my entire semester:
"Talent must not publicly reconcile or de-escalate the rivalry narrative without prior written approval from the sponsor."
I read it twice. Then a third time, just to make sure I hadn't somehow misunderstood, the way you reread a text message hoping it says something different the second time. Somewhere out there, a marketing team had looked at me and Ethan — at an actual friendship, however reluctant, however new, however inconveniently built on stolen glances through a coffee shop window and a bike chain and a compliment I hadn't meant to say out loud — and decided the most valuable version of us was the one that never got to be real.
I sat there for a long time, phone glowing in the dark, half expecting the words on the screen to rearrange themselves into something less alarming. They did not. If anything, staring at them longer only made the sentence feel heavier, like it had been sitting there the whole time waiting for someone to actually read it.