Worst Luck, Best Timing
Chapter Three: The Dating Rumor
By Monday morning, I had a nickname I never asked for.
"Theo's girl," Juno read aloud from her phone, in the flat, deadpan voice she uses specifically to torment me. "That's what they're calling you now. Not disaster girl. Not fire alarm girl. Theo's girl."
"I would like to formally reject that nickname," I said, stabbing at my cereal like it had personally wronged me.
"You can reject it all you want. The internet doesn't care about your feelings." She turned her phone around so I could see the screen, which I immediately regretted looking at, because it was a screenshot of a comment thread with over three hundred replies, all variations on the same theme: are they dating, are they NOT dating, when's the wedding, ha ha, jk, unless.
By the time I got to my locker, three separate people had already asked me, with varying degrees of subtlety, whether it was true. One girl from my chemistry class simply held up her phone, wordlessly, as if the screen itself constituted a question. I said no. She looked unconvinced, in the specific way people look unconvinced when they have already decided what they want the answer to be and are simply waiting for reality to catch up.
It had started, as far as anyone could tell, with a single photo — me and Theo standing a little too close together outside the library after the bake sale disaster, both of us laughing at something, flour still dusting my sleeve. Someone had captioned it something soft and vague and completely untrue, and by the time I'd woken up on Monday, it had traveled to accounts I had never heard of, attached to captions I had never approved.
"It's not real," I told Juno, for what felt like the fortieth time that morning. "We're not dating. We're barely coworkers who happen to keep setting things on fire together."
"Sure," Juno said, in the tone of someone who has already made up her mind and is simply waiting, with great patience, for the world to catch up to her.
"I mean it. There's nothing to catch up to."
"Okay." Juno set her phone down and folded her hands like a talk show host about to ask a very serious question. "Then explain the eye contact."
"What eye contact."
"In the bake sale video. Frame forty-two. You look at him for exactly one and a half seconds longer than the joke required."
"You counted frames."
"I have a lot of free time and a great deal of faith in my own instincts," Juno said. "Both are currently pointing at you."
I did not have a good response to that, so I ate my cereal instead, which Juno correctly interpreted as a small, silent surrender.
• • •
Theo found me by my locker before first period, holding his own phone like it had personally offended him, which, given the week I'd had, felt entirely fair.
"Have you seen—"
"I've seen it," I said. "Juno's made sure I've seen it approximately nine times."
"Right." He leaned against the locker next to mine, arms crossed, and for a second neither of us said anything, the noise of the hallway rushing past around us like water around two stubborn rocks. "So. Option one, we ignore it and it eventually dies down on its own."
"And option two?"
"Option two, we use it."
I closed my locker a little harder than necessary. "Use it how, exactly?"
"The campaign's been getting traction because of us specifically. Not the bake sale, not the good deeds — us. If people are already talking, we lean into it for a few days. Do the video challenge everyone's doing right now, get the engagement, funnel it back into the actual campaign." He said it fast, practiced, like he'd already rehearsed the pitch to himself in the mirror that morning. "It's not really pretending to date. It's just — not correcting people. For a little while."
"That sounds exactly like pretending to date."
"It's a gray area," he said, with the particular confidence of someone who has spent a lot of his life living comfortably inside gray areas.
I should have said no. I want that on the record, clearly, in case anyone ever asks. I knew, even standing there in the hallway with my locker door still faintly rattling on its hinge, that saying yes was going to complicate something that was already complicated enough. But the campaign needed views, Ms. Alvarez needed results, and some small, unhelpful, entirely inconvenient part of me did not actually mind the idea of an excuse to keep standing this close to him.
"Fine," I said. "A few days. And we're doing the dance thing, aren't we."
His smile answered before he did. "We're doing the dance thing."
• • •
I would like it noted, again, formally, for whoever is keeping score, that I do not dance. I have never danced. My body and rhythm exist in a state of permanent, unresolved conflict, and no amount of preparation was going to fix that in the twenty minutes we had before Ms. Alvarez wanted the video posted.
"You just have to follow my feet," Theo said, in the media room after school, phone propped on a stack of textbooks, the same trending song playing for what felt like the eleventh time in a row. "It's not complicated."
"Everything is complicated when it involves my feet," I said. "That is a documented fact about my body."
"Just try it once before you decide it's impossible."
I tried it once. I stepped on his foot almost immediately, apologized, tried again, stepped on the other foot, and by the third attempt had somehow managed to turn myself entirely the wrong direction, which sent me stumbling backward into the prop table — the same prop table, I noted grimly, that had started this entire chain of disasters in the first place.
Theo caught my arm before I hit the ground, which meant that for one entire second, we were standing far closer together than either of us had planned, his hand still wrapped around my forearm, the trending song still playing tinnily from his phone like it hadn't noticed anything had gone wrong.
For a second, neither of us moved. The song kept playing, tinny and oblivious, and somewhere behind us Juno had gone suspiciously quiet, which in hindsight should have worried me more than it did.
"You okay?" he asked, and his voice had dropped just slightly, quieter than it had been a second earlier.
"Fine," I said, which came out smaller than I meant it to. "Very graceful. Very smooth. Exactly what we were going for."
He laughed, and let go of my arm, and something about the way he did it — a little slower than strictly necessary — made me distinctly aware of my own pulse for the rest of the afternoon.
By the second attempt, Ms. Alvarez had wandered in to check on us, taken one look at the state of the media room — chairs shoved aside, prop table still faintly dented from its earlier collapse — and simply said, "I don't want to know," before retreating back into the hallway, which I took as tacit approval.
We filmed the actual video on the fourth attempt, and it was, if I'm being honest, a disaster from start to finish — me missing every third beat, Theo overcorrecting to compensate, both of us ending in a heap on the floor of the media room, laughing too hard to finish the final pose Ms. Alvarez had specifically requested. Juno, watching from the doorway with the concentration of a woman documenting a historical event, said it was, without question, the most-watched thing either of us had ever posted.
• • •
It was, in fact, the most-watched thing either of us had ever posted, and by Wednesday, the comment section had shifted from speculation into something closer to certainty. People had decided, apparently, that we were definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent together, and no correction from either of us seemed capable of talking them out of it.
Theo started noticing something else had shifted, too, somewhere around Wednesday afternoon, when I caught him watching me a beat too long in the hallway, or laughing a half-second before I'd actually finished the joke, like he was waiting for it rather than reacting to it. I told myself I was imagining things. I have never been particularly good at telling myself convincing lies.
It was that same Wednesday, after school, that I overheard something I wasn't supposed to hear.
I had gone back to the media room to grab the folder I'd left behind, expecting it empty, and instead found Theo on the phone near the supply closet, his back to the door, his voice pitched low in a way I hadn't heard from him before — not the easy, camera-ready voice he used with everyone else, but something tighter, more careful.
"I know, Mom. I know the numbers are good. I'm handling it." A pause. "No, it's not — it's a school project, it's not a real relationship, you don't need to—" Another pause, longer this time. "Because it looks good for the family page, that's why you're asking. I know how this works."
I stood frozen just outside the door, folder pressed against my chest, feeling like I had wandered into a room I wasn't supposed to see into. I hadn't meant to eavesdrop. I told myself that afterward, more than once, like repeating it would make it true. But I also didn't move, not right away, because something in his voice — flat, resigned, entirely unlike the boy who joked about screwdrivers and fire alarms — had rooted me to the spot.
I thought about the family page he'd mentioned — the polished photos, the captions written in someone else's careful, upbeat voice, the version of Theo that existed for an audience that had never once seen him panic over a smoking oven. I thought about how strange it must be, to have your own face used as evidence for somebody else's argument, over and over, without ever being asked if you agreed to it.
By the time I made myself step back and knock properly on the doorframe, he'd already hung up, already turned around with that same easy smile sliding back into place like a mask clicking shut.
"Hey," he said. "Forget something?"
"Just my folder," I said, holding it up as evidence, aware that my voice had come out a half-step too bright, the way it does when I'm trying very hard to seem like I hadn't just heard something I shouldn't have.
He studied me for a second, and something in his expression flickered — a brief, searching look, like he was trying to work out how much I'd caught. Whatever he decided, he let it go without comment, and the moment passed, thin and fragile, the way moments do when neither person wants to be the one to bring them up.
• • •
We ended up walking out to the parking lot together, the late afternoon sun throwing long shadows across the pavement, both of us quiet in a way that felt less awkward than it probably should have.
"Can I ask you something," I said, before I'd fully decided whether I actually wanted the answer.
"Depends on the question."
"Is any of this — the campaign, the videos, all of it — actually easy for you? Or is it just easy to make it look easy?"
He didn't answer right away. He looked out at the parking lot for a long moment, hands in his pockets, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its usual polish. "Everyone thinks I don't have to try at anything," he said. "Lucky Park. Things just work out for me." A short, humorless laugh. "Nobody asks what happens on the days they don't."
I didn't say anything. I didn't trust myself to say the right thing, and for once, I didn't want to fill the silence just to fill it.
"Anyway," he said, shaking it off with visible effort, the mask sliding back into place piece by piece. "Forget I said that."
"I'm not going to forget it," I said. "But I'm not going to bring it up either. Not unless you want me to."
Something in his face eased, just slightly, like he hadn't expected that particular answer and was relieved by it anyway.
"For what it's worth," I said, as we crossed the last stretch of pavement, "I don't think you're only lucky because things work out. I think you're lucky because you keep showing up even when they don't. That's a different kind of lucky. A better one, honestly."
He glanced at me sideways, like he wasn't sure what to do with that, like nobody had handed him that particular compliment before and he didn't have a rehearsed answer ready.
"That's a very generous read of a guy who just broke a school oven," he said, finally, but his voice had gone soft around the edges in a way that told me the joke was mostly armor.
"I contain multitudes," I said. "Also I helped break the oven. I'm not blameless here."
We reached my bike rack first. I unlocked my bike, and he stood there a second longer than the moment strictly required, hands still in his pockets, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name.
"Thanks," he said, "for not asking more."
"Don't thank me yet," I said. "I'm extremely nosy. I'm just choosing not to be, today, specifically."
That got the real laugh out of him, the short surprised one I was starting to recognize, the one that didn't feel rehearsed at all.
And then, without either of us quite deciding to do it, his hand found mine — not dramatic, not a whole scene, just his fingers closing loosely around mine as we stood there by the bike rack, like it was the most natural thing in the world, like his hand had simply forgotten to let go of the moment before.
Neither of us said anything about it. Neither of us pulled away either.
We stood like that for one long, quiet second, in front of an entirely empty parking lot with no cameras anywhere in sight, which felt, after everything, like the strangest kind of luck of all — the kind nobody would ever post about, the kind that belonged to no one but us.
I rode home that afternoon replaying it the whole way, the particular warmth of his hand around mine, the particular quiet of a parking lot with no phones raised and nothing to prove to anyone. It was, I thought, the first honest moment either of us had had all week — the one thing in seven days of chaos that hadn't been staged, timed, or posted for anyone else to see.