A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 9: Live, Unfiltered
The library fundraiser started in a state of pure chaos, which, in hindsight, feels like exactly the right way for this whole story to have gone. Twenty minutes before doors opened, an announcement went out over the school intercom that the Pulse Live broadcast had been cancelled, no further details provided, and I watched an entire gymnasium of students who had shown up specifically to see Ethan and me go visibly, audibly disappointed, some of them actually groaning out loud, one very committed junior starting a slow, sarcastic golf clap that somehow still managed to sound hopeful.
Mina found me backstage, phone already out, scrolling through a group chat that had exploded the second the announcement dropped. "People are furious," she reported, with the barely restrained delight of someone who loves chaos slightly more than is probably healthy. "In a good way. In a 'we showed up for this specifically' way."
"That doesn't help me get a working camera, Mina."
"No, but it's good context. Context is important. You taught me that."
I found Ethan pacing a tight, restless line behind the curtain, already dressed for a broadcast that officially, as far as the school administration was concerned, no longer existed. "They can cancel the channel," he said, the second he saw me, before I'd even said anything. "They can't cancel a gymnasium full of people who already showed up."
"That's a very inspiring sentence for someone who once got booed by three hundred people while dressed as the wrong mascot."
"I contain multitudes, Riley. We've been over this."
Blake appeared a moment later, out of breath, clutching what looked like an ancient tangle of cables he'd apparently sprinted an entire hallway to retrieve, and announced, with the grim determination of a man who had personally decided this night was not going to end the way the administration seemed to want it to: "I found a spare battery. It's at forty percent. We are going to make this work if it kills me."
• • •
Ms. Chen found the three of us hiding in the equipment closet — a location that, given everything that had happened in that exact type of room this semester, felt like tempting fate — holding, of all things, an ancient backup camera that technically belonged to the Media Club and had, as far as either of us knew, not been touched since before we'd even joined.
"This isn't official Pulse Live equipment," she said, in the specific tone of a woman choosing her words very carefully for reasons she had no intention of fully explaining. "It's club property. Under my supervision. If you two want to use it for ten minutes, that's between the three of us."
"Ms. Chen," Ethan said slowly, "are you helping us break the rules?"
"I'm helping you exercise appropriate club oversight," she said. "You have ten minutes to decide if you're doing this. I strongly suggest you decide quickly, because I will not be able to help you a second time, and also because I would like, eventually, to retire from this profession with my sanity intact."
She turned to leave, paused at the door, and added, almost as an afterthought, in a voice that was suddenly much less official, "For what it's worth, I left StreamForge for exactly this reason. I'm glad someone finally did something about it instead of just quietly accepting it, the way I did for far too long."
Neither Ethan nor I said anything for a moment after she left. It was the first time all semester either of us had heard her talk about her own past like it was something that still cost her something, rather than a tidy line on a résumé.
• • •
I went up first, which felt like the only fair option, given everything that had started with my own mouth and my own out-of-context clip and my own carefully built persona. Standing in front of that camera, no script in my hand, no Priya nodding along from off to the side, hands shaking slightly in a way I hoped the shot was too close to catch, I said the thing I'd been avoiding saying out loud for an entire semester.
"I use sarcasm because it feels safer than being honest," I said. "If I make the joke about myself first, in my own words, nobody else gets to make it worse. I lied to protect Ethan a few weeks ago because I was scared of losing him, and it ended up hurting him more than the truth ever would have. I'm not saying that to make myself look good. I'm saying it because I'm tired of everyone only getting the version of me that's been edited down to something safe."
I could hear the gymnasium go quiet in a way it hadn't been quiet all night, hundreds of phones still raised, but nobody cheering, nobody laughing, just listening, which was, somehow, more unnerving than any heckling could have been.
Ethan came up right after, and whatever nerves I'd expected to see on his face weren't there — just a kind of steady, quiet honesty I'd only ever seen from him off camera, in the dark of a locked storage room, on a curb outside his family's struggling store.
"I make jokes because I'm scared that if I stop being funny, people will realize there's nothing else underneath," he said. "I've spent years thinking I only get to keep people around if I'm entertaining them. I don't want to be liked for a character anymore. I just want to be liked, period, for whatever this actually is."
We didn't share every private detail. We didn't need to. What mattered was saying, clearly, in front of everyone, that the rivalry people had loved so much had been turned into a product somewhere along the way, packaged and sold without either of us fully agreeing to it, and that we were done pretending otherwise.
• • •
The sponsor's team demanded we cut the stream almost immediately — Priya's number lit up Ms. Chen's phone twice during the broadcast itself, and I could see, even from the stage, the exact moment Ms. Chen simply declined the call and slipped her phone back into her pocket without a flicker of hesitation, arms crossed, standing at the edge of the gym like a woman fully prepared to answer for this decision later and not remotely worried about the answer.
It didn't matter. By then, hundreds of students in the audience had already started streaming it themselves, from their own personal accounts, faster than anyone could have shut it down, the whole gymnasium turning into an accidental broadcast network entirely outside anyone's control. Mina later told me she'd counted at least forty different personal livestreams running simultaneously by the time we finished talking, which, given everything that had happened all semester because of a single unauthorized clip, felt like a strange, fitting kind of justice — the same tool that had been used to control our story now completely, joyfully out of anyone's control at all.
By the end of the night, the fundraiser total ticked past its goal, enough, finally, to fix the water-damaged reading room where I used to hide behind the returns cart in middle school, the same room whose repair fund had talked me into agreeing to a fake date in the first place. Somehow, it was the unscripted, unauthorized, entirely unsanctioned version of the night that raised more money than anything the sponsor had ever engineered, a fact I found almost unbearably satisfying.
Blake found me afterward, camera finally powered down, battery reading two percent, looking lighter than I'd seen him look all semester. "For what it's worth," he said, "that's the first thing I've filmed all year that I'm actually proud of."
"You kept the battery alive at two percent for a ten-minute unscripted broadcast that got us both in enormous trouble," I said. "I think that officially makes you a hero, Blake."
"I'm putting that on my college applications," he said, entirely serious, and for once, I didn't have a single joke to throw back at him.
• • •
I woke up the next morning to an email that had nothing to do with viral clips or sponsors or anonymous accounts, an email I'd been half-dreading and half-hoping for since the very start of the semester.
It was from the NextWave Fellowship board, short, formal, and utterly unrevealing about what it actually meant.
"Riley Monroe," it read, "we would like to meet with you. Alone."
I read it three times, sitting on the edge of my bed, phone glowing in the early morning light, with absolutely no idea whether that single word — alone — meant good news or the end of everything I'd spent the entire semester fighting for.