A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 3: The Fake Date Algorithm
By Thursday, the rumor had evolved from a single out-of-context clip into what Mina cheerfully referred to as "a whole cinematic universe." Someone had cross-referenced the Moonbean footage with an old photo of me and Ethan standing slightly too close during a fire drill in October, added a moody piano track, and produced a two-minute montage titled riley + ethan: the whole timeline, complete with chapter markers. It had ninety thousand views by the time I saw it. I had not consented to being the star of a documentary.
I denied everything, loudly, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen, which in retrospect may have been my first mistake, because nothing convinces the internet that two people are secretly dating faster than one of them insisting, with visible panic in her eyes, that they are absolutely, definitely, one hundred percent not.
"You're doing the thing again," Mina informed me at lunch, watching me deny the rumor to a junior I had never spoken to in my life. "The over-explaining thing. It's very 'I did not kill him' energy."
"I am calmly clarifying a factual inaccuracy."
"You just used four sentences to say 'no.' Nobody who's actually fine says no in four sentences."
I did not have a rebuttal for that either, which, again, was becoming an alarming pattern where Mina was concerned.
• • •
The StreamForge marketing team, it turned out, noticed the exact same spike in engagement I'd been trying so hard to deny fueling, and reached out with a proposal so absurd I genuinely thought Ms. Chen was going to laugh them out of the building. Instead, she sat through the entire pitch with the calm, unreadable expression of a woman doing complicated math in her head.
The pitch, delivered by a StreamForge representative named Priya who wore a blazer clearly more expensive than my entire wardrobe and spoke exclusively in phrases like "narrative momentum" and "authentic engagement architecture," was this: since the rumor was already driving unprecedented traffic, why not stage one deliberate, sponsored, camera-ready fake date, framed as a charity promotion for the library fundraiser, and let the internet do the rest?
"Absolutely not," I said, at the exact same moment Ethan said, "Depends on the budget," which earned him a look from me so sharp I'm fairly sure it left a mark.
What ultimately changed my mind was not, in fact, Ethan, or Priya's very persuasive PowerPoint, but a single number on the very last slide: the amount the sponsorship would funnel directly into fixing the library's water-damaged reading room, the same reading room where I'd spent approximately half of middle school hiding from my own social anxiety behind a returns cart. I sat there doing the math on how many actual books that number could buy, sighed the sigh of someone about to make a deeply questionable decision, and said, "Fine. One date. Fully scripted. Zero authenticity required."
"Copy that," Priya said, already typing something into her tablet with the terrifying efficiency of someone who had clearly gotten yeses out of far more reluctant teenagers than me.
• • •
The date, if you could call it that, began at Chapters & Verse, the only bookstore within walking distance of school that hadn't yet been replaced by a smoothie chain. Ethan showed up wearing an actual collared shirt, which threw me so completely off guard that I spent the first two minutes of filming forgetting my own scripted opening line.
"You look like you're about to give a TED talk," I said, once my brain rebooted.
"You look like you're about to review one negatively," he said, which, fair.
Ethan had apparently decided, entirely on his own initiative, that a romantic bookstore date required a romantic destination within the bookstore, and led me — with visible confidence, like he'd rehearsed this — directly to the computer repair and networking manuals section. I stood there in front of a shelf titled Home Networking for Beginners for a solid ten seconds before I could form words.
"This is where you're taking me. On our fake date. The router aisle."
"It's romantic in its own way," he said, entirely unbothered, already flipping through a book on troubleshooting Wi-Fi signals like it was a bouquet of roses. "Connection. Bandwidth. It's basically a metaphor."
"It is not, in any universe, a metaphor."
Not to be outdone, and driven by a petty streak I am not proud of but will not apologize for, I marched him three aisles over to the self-help section and handed him, with great ceremony, a book titled How to Talk to Literally Anyone, which he accepted with the deeply wounded dignity of a man who has just been publicly, if gently, roasted in front of a rolling camera. We ended up, somehow, twenty minutes later, sitting cross-legged on the floor between the shelves, actually reading — him the networking book, unironically fascinated, me a battered paperback I'd pulled at random — while Blake filmed from a respectful distance and Priya, off camera, mouthed the word content at us like we were a particularly good stock photo come to life.
Afterward, we ducked into a tiny sandwich place two doors down that Ethan swore made the best grilled cheese in the neighborhood, a claim I intended to dispute right up until I actually tasted it and immediately, silently, revised my entire opinion of the establishment. We sat by the window, cameras finally off, and for a few minutes it stopped feeling like content and started feeling, alarmingly, like an actual afternoon.
That was, of course, exactly when my phone buzzed with an email from the scholarship office, subject line: Regarding Your Media Scholarship Status — Action Required. I read the first line, felt my stomach drop somewhere around my shoes, and set the phone face-down on the table so hard the silverware jumped.
"What was that," Ethan asked, immediately catching the shift, because apparently the one thing Ethan Cole is genuinely, annoyingly good at is noticing when I'm not okay.
"Nothing," I said, in the specific tone of someone for whom it was, in fact, extremely something.
He didn't push, which somehow made it worse, because I could tell he was filing the moment away rather than letting it go.
• • •
We were three bites from finishing our sandwiches, and I had almost, almost managed to convince myself the afternoon was salvageable, when Harper Lane appeared at the door, spotted Ethan, and crossed the entire sandwich shop in roughly four strides to wrap him in a hug that lasted, in my extremely accurate and not-at-all-biased estimation, several years too long.
"I haven't seen you in forever," she said, beaming, completely oblivious to the fact that she had just interrupted what the internet believed to be a romantic date, or possibly extremely aware of it and choosing not to care, I genuinely could not tell which.
I sat there, sandwich halfway to my mouth, watching Ethan laugh at something Harper said, watching the easy, familiar way they leaned into each other's space, and felt something ugly and unfamiliar twist in my chest that I refused, on principle, to name jealousy, because naming it jealousy would have meant admitting there was something to be jealous about.
"Old friend?" I asked, once Harper had finally, mercifully, moved on toward the counter, in a voice I hoped sounded casual and almost certainly did not.
"Something like that," Ethan said, which was, somehow, the single least reassuring possible answer he could have given, and he seemed to realize it the second it left his mouth, because he opened his to say something else and then, very deliberately, closed it again.
I didn't ask any follow-up questions. I have my pride. I did, however, spend the rest of the sandwich in a state of quiet, dignified sulking that I would have denied to my grave, had events not overtaken me almost immediately.
• • •
It was while Ethan went up to pay — refusing, with great chivalry and zero self-awareness about how this would look to the internet, to let me contribute a single dollar to our fake date — that I caught sight of his phone, left face-up on the table, lighting up with a new message from a name I didn't recognize.
I want to be very clear that I was not snooping. I was sitting exactly where I had been sitting the entire meal. The phone simply chose that moment to display its contents directly in my line of sight, which I maintain is an entirely different thing from snooping.
The message read: Don't let Riley find out about this.
I stared at it for exactly as long as it takes a stomach to fully, completely drop through a restaurant floor. Then Ethan came back, slid into his seat, caught the look on my face, and glanced down at his own phone just in time to see exactly what I'd seen.
"Riley, that's not—" he started.
"It's fine," I said, in the bright, brittle voice of someone for whom absolutely nothing was fine, already gathering my things, already halfway to the door, already, somewhere deep down, furious at myself for how much this shouldn't have mattered and somehow, infuriatingly, did.
I walked the entire way home asking myself the same unhelpful question on a loop, over and over, in time with my footsteps: if Ethan didn't care about me at all, why would he need to hide something from me in the first place?