A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 8: The Comment Section Knows Too Much
I went to Harper first, which felt strange even as I was doing it, given that a few weeks earlier I'd spent an entire sandwich shop visit privately convinced she was some kind of romantic threat. She listened to the whole story — the anonymous account, the export logs, the footage of a sponsor representative telling Blake exactly what to trim — with the calm, focused attention of someone who processes information the way other people process gossip, filing it neatly instead of reacting to it.
"I still have access to the old system logs from when I co-hosted with Ethan," she said finally, already pulling out her laptop. "If someone's been quietly managing what gets kept and what gets cut, there'll be a pattern. There's always a pattern."
"For what it's worth," I added, feeling suddenly, ridiculously awkward, "I'm sorry I spent weeks assuming you and Ethan were secretly still a thing."
Harper didn't even look up from her screen. "Ethan and I dated for exactly six days in ninth grade and spent the entire time arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza. We are, categorically, better as friends."
"Good to know. Extremely good to know, actually, in hindsight."
There was, in fact, a pattern. Line after line of edit approvals, export timestamps, permission overrides, almost all of them tracing back to a handful of accounts with full editorial access — mine, Ethan's, Blake's, and, buried further down than either of us expected, one belonging to a StreamForge account embedded directly in the Pulse Live system itself, quietly granted access months before any of this had started.
"Someone's had a backdoor into your entire system since before you two even started co-hosting," Harper said, scrolling slower now, jaw tight. "This isn't opportunistic. This was planned, from the very first week."
• • •
Blake confessed before either of us had to ask him directly, which somehow made it both easier and worse. We found him in the editing room after school, staring at his own monitor like it had personally wronged him, and he started talking before I'd even fully sat down.
"I didn't create every clip," he said, voice low, not quite meeting either of our eyes. "I want that on the record. But I knew. I saw the sponsor's notes on what to trim, and I told myself it was just good editing instinct, that I was following the numbers, that the numbers don't lie. I let myself believe that long enough that it stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like just... doing my job."
"You knew the video calling me fake was cut out of context," I said, quieter than I meant to.
"Yeah," Blake said. "I knew. I told myself it wasn't my call to make, that I was just following instructions, and I let that be enough for way longer than it should have been." He finally looked up. "I'm not asking you to forgive that. I just want you to actually know it happened, instead of finding out secondhand from someone else's spreadsheet."
I didn't forgive him on the spot. I'm not sure I've fully forgiven him even now, months later, looking back on all of it. But something in the way he said it — plainly, without excuses dressed up as explanations — made it easier to believe he actually meant it. Ethan, for his part, just put a hand on Blake's shoulder and said, "Fix it going forward. That's the only part that's actually still up to you," which was, somehow, a more generous response than I would have managed in his position.
• • •
While I was dealing with Blake, Ethan was, apparently, having an entirely different confrontation of his own, one that took considerably more courage than mine, because his was with his father.
He told me about it afterward, in pieces, sitting on the curb outside Cole Sports while his dad restocked shelves inside, visible through the window, moving boxes with the same tired, determined energy he'd had every single time I'd ever walked past that store. "I told him I wasn't signing the solo contract," Ethan said. "Not if it means turning Riley into the villain of my own story just so the numbers look cleaner."
"What did he say?"
"He got quiet. Then he said he just wanted things to be easier for me than they'd been for him. And I said easier isn't the same as right, and he didn't really have an answer for that, and neither did I, honestly, but at least now we're both quiet about the same thing instead of two different things."
It wasn't a clean resolution. I don't think either of us expected one. But it was, I think, the first time Ethan had ever told his father no about anything related to the cameras, and something about saying it out loud, even messily, even without a tidy ending, seemed to loosen something in his shoulders that had been tight for a very long time. "He did help me carry boxes afterward, though," Ethan added. "Didn't say anything. Just handed me one and nodded at the stockroom. I think that's as close to 'I hear you' as I'm going to get for now, and honestly, I'll take it."
• • •
We ended up back at Moonbean that evening, off the clock, no cameras, just the two of us and my mother pointedly leaving us alone at the corner table under the pretense of restocking napkins she did not actually need to restock.
"I lied because I was scared you'd lose everything," I said, before he could say anything first, because I'd rehearsed this in my head at least a dozen times on the walk over and knew if I didn't say it now I'd talk myself out of it. "I thought I could just decide, on my own, what was best for you, without asking, the same way everyone always seems to decide things about me without asking first. And I hated it when it happened to me. I don't know why I thought it was okay to do it to you."
Ethan was quiet for a moment, turning his cup slowly between his hands. "I hid the scholarship thing because I was scared you'd think I felt sorry for you," he said. "Which, in hindsight, is a genuinely stupid thing to be scared of, compared to what actually happened, which is that you thought I was hiding something so much worse."
"We're both, apparently, extremely bad at this."
"Historically bad," he agreed. "A new low, even for us. Somewhere, Ms. Chen is grading our communication skills and it is not going well."
Something in that shared, quiet admission of how badly we'd both handled it loosened the knot that had been sitting in my chest since the interview. We didn't fix everything in one conversation. But we agreed, finally, on the one thing that actually mattered: no more scripts, no more sponsors deciding which version of us got to exist. One final livestream, entirely unscripted, entirely honest, whatever that ended up costing either of us.
• • •
We had exactly one day to prepare for it. We didn't get that day.
I got the notification at six the next morning, still half asleep, and read it twice before it fully registered: the official Pulse Live channel — our channel, the one Ethan and I had built an entire semester of chaos and honesty into — had been suspended, pending review, effective immediately, no further explanation given.
I called Ethan before I'd even gotten out of bed. He answered on the first ring, which told me he'd probably been staring at the exact same notification for just as long as I had.
"They shut us down," I said, "the night before we were finally going to do this right."
"Yeah," he said, and I could hear, even through the phone, that he was already thinking the same thing I was. "So I guess the only question left is whether we let that actually stop us."