Episode 6: The Breakup That Wasn't in the Plan
I showed Iris the screenshot the next morning, before first period, in the empty stairwell behind the gym where we'd started meeting because it was the one place in Northbridge that hadn't yet been colonized by anonymous phone cameras.
She read it twice. I watched her face while she did, looking for the particular kind of stillness that meant she was hiding something, and found instead something closer to genuine bewilderment, the furrow of someone trying to solve a math problem with half the numbers missing.
"I didn't write this," she said. "Evan, I swear to you, I have never said any version of this to anyone, ever."
"I believe you," I said, and meant it, though some small, exhausted part of me noted that I'd now said I believe you about three different pieces of contradictory evidence in the space of a week, and wondered how long belief alone could keep holding a relationship together against a steady drip of manufactured doubt. "But someone sent it from the school's own announcement account. That's not some random troll with a fake profile picture. That's someone with real access."
"Someone with staff access," Iris said slowly, echoing June's video from the night before, and I watched the pieces click into place behind her eyes at the same moment they clicked into place behind mine. "Someone who knew exactly when to send it. Right after dinner at Mara's. Right after I finally told you about the video."
"They're watching us," I said. "Or watching one of us closely enough to know the timing would land hardest right then."
Iris didn't answer right away. She leaned back against the cold cinderblock wall of the stairwell, arms crossed, and for the first time in five weeks of knowing her, I watched something that looked almost like fear cross her face and stay there instead of getting swallowed immediately behind flat competence.
"This is what happened before," she said, quietly. "With June. Somebody good enough to make the truth look exactly like a lie, timed exactly to land when it would do the most damage. I watched it destroy her case before she ever got a chance to make it."
"So we don't let it work this time."
"You don't understand." Her voice had an edge to it now, sharp in a way that wasn't aimed at me but landed close enough to sting anyway. "It already worked once, Evan. It's already working. You spent all night wondering if I actually said those things. Don't tell me you didn't."
I didn't answer fast enough. That was the whole problem, right there, in the half-second of silence before I found the right words — because she was right, I had spent half the night turning the screenshot over, looking for the seam where it was fake, and some ugly, honest corner of me had also spent a few of those minutes wondering, just slightly, if there was a version of Iris capable of writing exactly that.
"That's what I thought," Iris said, and pushed off the wall.
She broke up with me three hours later, in the hallway outside the library, in full view of at least a dozen students who would, I had no doubt, have the story rewritten and circulating on Northbridge After Bell before the next bell even rang.
"This isn't working," she said, flat, final, handing me back the dating rulebook — the actual printed copy, plastic sleeve and all — folded at exactly the crease where rule thirteen sat. "The arrangement's gotten dangerous. Whoever's doing this knows exactly how to use you against me now, which means the safest thing for both of us is to stop giving them a target."
"Iris, we can figure this out together, that's the whole—"
"I'm not doing this in a hallway." Her voice cracked, just slightly, on the word hallway, the only sign that any of this cost her anything at all before the flatness slammed back down over it. "It's done, Evan. Thirty days was never supposed to turn into this."
She walked away before I could construct any of the four contingency arguments I'd apparently been keeping loaded for exactly this scenario without even realizing it, and I stood there holding a plastic-sleeved rulebook while half the hallway pretended not to watch me not chase after her.
I did the only thing I know how to do when something feels catastrophically out of my control: I made a list.
Seventeen reasons Iris and I should talk, numbered, cross-referenced against every conversation we'd had in the past five weeks, color-coded by urgency the way I'd once color-coded legal exposure in a dating rulebook that now felt like evidence from a much simpler era of my life. I brought it to Mia's locker the next morning, fully intending to read all seventeen points aloud until she agreed to help me deliver them to Iris in person.
Mia read exactly four lines before taking the paper directly out of my hands.
"Evan. Read reason number three back to me."
I looked at it. Reason 3: Iris needs someone to help her manage the investigation into Nolan, and I am uniquely positioned to provide logistical support.
"That's not — okay, in context—"
"Read reason nine."
Reason 9: Without my involvement, Iris is statistically more likely to act alone and get hurt.
"Do you notice a pattern," Mia said, not unkindly, "in what every single one of these seventeen reasons is actually about?"
I stared at the list. Every reason, all seventeen of them, framed Iris as a problem requiring my specific input to be solved correctly. Not one of them said the actual truth sitting underneath all of it, the one I'd been too embarrassed, or too scared, to write down in numbered format.
"None of them say I miss her," I said, quietly.
"None of them say you miss her," Mia agreed, and tore the list neatly in half, then in half again, dropping the pieces into the recycling bin beside her locker with the finality of a judge's gavel. "Go find her and say that instead. The actual thing. Not a plan for managing her. The plain, unplanned, embarrassing truth."
I didn't get the chance, not that day — because by lunch, the video had already been posted, and by the time I found a working link, it had four thousand views and climbing.
It showed Iris, in a hallway I recognized as the one outside the chemistry wing, backing a freshman I didn't know against a row of lockers, her voice raised, one hand braced on the locker beside his head in a way that looked, from the angle the footage was shot at, unmistakably threatening. "I'll make you regret it," the audio caught her saying, right before the clip cut off.
Iris was called to the principal's office within the hour. By the end of the day, a formal notice had gone up: pending review of "conduct concerns," she was barred from any festival-related duties, effective immediately, with her full disciplinary file — the one she'd made a thirty-day arrangement specifically to keep closed — reopened for the first time since the truss came down five weeks earlier.
She didn't defend herself. That was the part that broke something loose in my chest when Mia described the meeting to me secondhand — Iris had sat in the principal's office and said almost nothing at all, offered no explanation, no outrage, nothing but a flat, resigned kind of silence that looked, to anyone who didn't know her, exactly like guilt.
I knew better. I spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the evening in the radio room with Mia, running the original, unedited recording pulled from the chemistry wing's hallway camera, the one nobody had thought to check because the video everyone was watching had already told them everything they thought they needed to know.
The full audio told a different story entirely. Iris hadn't been threatening the freshman. She'd been warning him — the same hallway, the same day, a loose ceiling panel above locker row six that maintenance hadn't gotten around to fixing since the incident with the truss. "Don't stand there, that panel's coming loose, I'll make sure you regret it if you don't move," the full sentence went, before the doctored clip sliced it down to three threatening-sounding words and let the rest hang in the air unexplained.
"We have it," I said, staring at the waveform on Mia's editing software like it might disappear if I looked away. "We have the actual proof, we can clear her right now—"
"Evan." Mia's voice had gone strange, tight in a way I didn't like. She was staring at her own login screen, at an activity log she'd pulled up to timestamp the original recording against the edited upload. "The account that posted the doctored clip. It used the radio room's system credentials to access the raw footage before cutting it."
"Someone hacked the radio room?"
"Nobody hacked anything." Mia's face had gone pale. "It logged in with my password."
By the next morning, the story had mutated exactly the way I should have known it would: not just Iris under suspicion now, but Mia too, whispered about in the same breath, two girls suddenly painted as co-conspirators in something neither of them had done, the actual perpetrator nowhere near either name being said out loud in the hallways.
I understood, then, with a clarity that felt almost physically unpleasant, exactly what was happening. Nolan — or whoever was standing behind Nolan, the staff-access ghost June had warned about — wasn't just trying to get Iris expelled. He was systematically isolating everyone capable of vouching for her, one relationship at a time, until there was nobody left in her corner with enough credibility to be believed.
I went to find Iris after school, planning — of course I was planning, it's the only language I fully speak — a full defense strategy: the unedited audio, a timeline of account access, a case clean enough that even a skeptical administration would have no choice but to reconsider.
She wouldn't open the door. I knocked twice, said her name once, heard footsteps stop just on the other side of it.
"Iris. I have proof. The real audio, the login records, all of it. I can fix this."
There was a long pause. When she finally spoke, her voice came through the door thin and tired in a way I'd never heard from her before, all the flatness worn away to something rawer underneath.
"Don't save me this time," she said. "Not like that. Not you standing there with a plan I didn't ask for, fixing something for me before you've even asked what I want to do about it."
"Then tell me what you want to do."
Another pause, longer this time.
"I don't know yet," she admitted, finally, quietly, through a door I still hadn't managed to get her to open. "But I need to be the one who figures it out. Not you, doing it for me because it's easier than watching me struggle with it. If that's still something you can respect, come back when I do know. If it's not, I understand that too."
I stood in that hallway for a long time after her footsteps retreated back into the room, holding a folder full of evidence that suddenly felt less like a rescue plan and more like exactly the kind of thing she'd just asked me not to be — one more person deciding, on her behalf, what saving her was supposed to look like.
For the first time since the truss came down on top of both of us, I didn't have a next step ready. I just had a closed door, a folder of proof I didn't know when I'd be allowed to use, and the uncomfortable, overdue realization that loving Iris Vale might mean learning to wait for an invitation instead of building myself a way in.
End of Episode 6.