A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 4: Locked in the Mascot Room
Neither of us mentioned the text message again, which was, in its own way, exactly the problem. We just quietly, mutually agreed to redirect all that unresolved tension into something more productive: finding out who, exactly, had been feeding our every private moment to an anonymous account with an unsettling talent for perfect timing.
"It has to be someone with access to the equipment," Ethan said, spreading three screenshots across the editing desk like a detective in a show that definitely had a bigger budget than our actual investigation. "Look — this angle. That's not a phone. That's mounted on something."
"Or someone with access to us," I said, which was a significantly less comfortable theory and also, unfortunately, the one that kept me up at night.
Mina, when consulted, took the entire mystery far more seriously than either of us, arriving at lunch with an actual printed map of the school she'd apparently drawn herself, complete with little red circles marking every location the anonymous photos had been taken from. "I've been thinking about this nonstop," she announced, unrolling it across the table like a general briefing troops. "Whoever this is has line of sight into at least four separate rooms. That's not a coincidence. That's infrastructure."
"Please tell me you didn't stay up until two a.m. making this," I said.
"Two thirty," Mina said, entirely unbothered. "I also color-coded it. Yellow for confirmed sightings, red for suspected. You're welcome."
Our only real lead was the gym. Every photo we'd been sent so far had been taken during, or immediately around, our practice sessions, which meant that whoever was watching us had either extremely convenient timing or an actual camera stashed somewhere in the building. So on Thursday, after Media Club, we let ourselves into the gym's storage area, technically with Ms. Chen's blessing, though her exact words had been "don't break anything and don't tell me the details," which I chose to interpret as enthusiastic permission.
• • •
We found the mounting bracket almost immediately, wedged behind a stack of old scoreboard equipment, definitely not standard gym inventory, definitely angled directly at the practice court. Ethan actually let out a small, triumphant "ha!" upon spotting it, the exact sound of a man who has clearly always wanted to say that in a real investigation, and I was one photograph away from actually documenting the discovery properly when the entire building lost power with an abrupt, decisive thunk, plunging the equipment room into total darkness and, several seconds later, triggering the fail-safe that locked the storage door shut from the outside, because apparently Northbridge Academy's security system was designed by someone who had never once considered the possibility of two students accidentally trapping themselves inside a prop closet.
"Okay," Ethan said, somewhere to my left, in the tone of a man determined to sound calm. "That's fine. That's totally fine. I'll just use my phone flashlight."
There was a beat of fumbling, a small metallic clatter, and then his flashlight went sailing directly out of his hand and skittered somewhere into the dark, landing with a distant, unhelpful thud.
"You dropped your phone."
"I did not drop it, I repositioned it—"
"Into the void, apparently."
I decided the mature, responsible thing to do was climb over the nearest storage bin to retrieve it myself, a plan that would have gone smoothly if I hadn't misjudged the distance entirely and planted my full weight directly onto Ethan's foot in the process.
"OW — Riley—"
"I can't see anything, this is technically your fault for existing in the dark—"
"That doesn't even make sense—"
"Nothing about tonight makes sense, Ethan, we are trapped in a room with a giant eagle head—"
We eventually located both phones, and, in the process, knocked over what turned out to be an entire rack of old cheerleading pom-poms, several outdated banners commemorating a state championship from a decade before either of us was born, and one enormous foam eagle head that Ethan insisted on referring to, with total sincerity, as "a genuine safety hazard," apparently forgetting that he was the one who had dropped the only working light source in the room. We settled into an uneasy truce sitting on opposite storage bins, phone flashlights pointed at the ceiling to conserve battery, waiting for someone to notice we'd gone missing, which, given how quiet the building had gone, could apparently take a while.
"For the record," Ethan said, after a few minutes of silence, "if we're stuck here overnight, I fully expect you to give me full narrative credit for finding the camera bracket first."
"You found it three seconds before the power went out. That's not a discovery, that's a coincidence with good timing."
"It's called instinct, Riley. Some of us have investigative instincts."
"Some of us also dropped the only flashlight into an abyss of pom-poms."
• • •
It's strange what darkness does to a conversation. Without a screen to perform for, without an audience to perform to, both of us seemed to run out of material at almost exactly the same time, and what filled the silence instead was something quieter and considerably more honest than anything either of us had said on camera in weeks.
"Can I tell you something humiliating," Ethan said, eventually, staring at the ceiling like it owed him an explanation. "I'm exhausted. Being funny all the time. Being the guy who makes everyone laugh so nobody asks how I'm actually doing. I don't even remember deciding to do that. I just sort of started, back when my dad first put a camera in my hands, and now I don't know how to stop without everyone thinking something's wrong with me."
I sat with that for a second, surprised by how much I recognized in it. "When I was in eighth grade," I said, before I'd fully decided to say it out loud, "someone left a one-star review of my mom's coffee shop. Said the espresso tasted like 'sadness and burnt rubber.' It got shared around school for weeks. People I'd never even talked to were quoting it at me in the hallway like it was hilarious. My mom pretended it didn't bother her. It did. I watched her cry in the storeroom once and pretend it was allergies."
"Riley—"
"So now I write everything myself, before anyone else can. If I say the mean thing about myself first, in my own words, on my own terms, nobody else gets to say it and make it worse. That's it. That's the whole embarrassing secret behind the entire Sideline persona. I turned an entire personality into a defense mechanism and monetized it."
Ethan didn't laugh, didn't joke, didn't do any of the things I half expected him to do to fill the silence I'd just created. He just said, quietly, "You don't have to fight everyone alone, you know. All the time. It's allowed to just be one person's turn sometimes."
"That's very unhelpfully wise of you, for someone who just lost a flashlight to a pile of pom-poms."
"I contain multitudes," he said, and I could hear, even in the dark, that he was smiling.
I don't know which of us moved first. I only know that at some point the space between us had gotten smaller, that his flashlight had gone dim against the ceiling, that I could hear my own heartbeat in a way that felt significantly louder than the situation warranted, and that we were close enough that I could have counted his eyelashes if counting eyelashes had been remotely relevant to anything happening in that moment.
We did not get to find out what would have happened next, because that was, with spectacularly poor timing, exactly when the enormous foam eagle head toppled off the shelf above us and landed directly between our faces with a soft, ridiculous thud, followed immediately by both of us yelping and scrambling backward into our respective storage bins like the mascot itself had personally intervened out of concern for our academic futures.
"I am going to file a complaint against this eagle," Ethan said, from somewhere behind an avalanche of foam feathers, voice still slightly unsteady. "I want that on record."
"Against a mascot head. With who. The school board?"
"Someone has to answer for this."
Neither of us noticed, in the chaos, that our mics — clipped on since the equipment room investigation began, forgotten the second the lights went out — were still very much live.
• • •
The lights came back on eleven minutes later, along with the door, and along with Ms. Chen, who took one look at the two of us sitting an entirely respectable, entirely too-deliberate three feet apart, surrounded by fallen props and what remained of a state championship banner, and simply said, "I don't want to know," before walking away, though she did pause at the door long enough to add, over her shoulder, "and somebody put that eagle head back before the mascot notices it's missing an eye now."
I woke up the next morning to several thousand notifications, which, by this point in the semester, should have stopped surprising me and somehow never did. The clip wasn't footage — there was no camera in that storage room, thank god, whatever else the mystery account had managed to capture of us. It was audio only: eleven minutes of near-total silence, two people breathing, my own voice stammering his name once, quietly, right before the crash. Someone had clipped exactly that ten-second stretch and posted it with a caption that made my stomach drop straight through the floor:
when's the mascot room kiss dropping??
Mina texted me the clip within four minutes of it going up, followed immediately by a second message that just said: I'm framing my map. This is vindication.