FULL THROTTLE
Chapter Seven: Static
The screenshot arrived in Mia's group chat at 7:14 on a Tuesday morning, sent by someone she didn't even follow, and by the time she'd finished reading it, her hands were cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. It was a text conversation, allegedly Jordan's, allegedly with Derek, and the two lines that mattered most read exactly like this: the whole Reyes thing is honestly good for my numbers though. RYSN loves it. Keep the storyline going a few more weeks, then I can wind it down easy.
That was in about ten hours. First, there was the part where she believed it completely.
She read it four more times at her locker, Priya reading over her shoulder, both of them quiet in a way that felt heavier than either of their usual reactions to bad news. "It doesn't look real," Priya said finally, though she didn't sound entirely convinced of her own sentence. "The formatting's weird. Look at the timestamps, they don't line up right."
"It's his phone case in the background of the screenshot. That green case with the scuff on the corner. That's his phone, Priya."
"That doesn't mean he sent those exact words."
"It's a screenshot. Screenshots are what happened." Mia closed her locker harder than she meant to, the sound echoing down the hallway. "I spent seven weeks thinking this was real. The parking lot. The storm. All of it. And the whole time it was numbers for his channel."
By second period, the screenshot had made its way around most of Bayview, and by lunch it had crossed over to Northgate too, forwarded and reforwarded until nobody could say for certain anymore who had posted it first. Priya spent the entire lunch period trying to trace it back to a source, scrolling through account after account, but every trail dead-ended at a burner profile with no posts and no followers, created, according to the account's own information, less than a week earlier.
"That's not nothing," Priya said, chewing on the end of a pen. "Real people don't screenshot private texts and post them from a brand new account with zero history. Somebody made that account specifically to do this."
"Or somebody made that account to hide who leaked something true," Mia said, unwilling, even now, to let go of the anger, because the anger was easier to sit with than the alternative, which was the possibility that she'd spent the whole day being furious at someone who didn't deserve it.
"You don't actually believe that."
"I don't know what I believe anymore." Mia pushed her lunch tray away, appetite gone. "Seven weeks ago I would have believed the worst about him instantly, no question, no doubt. Now I don't know if I'm defending him because it's true or because I don't want it not to be."
She did not answer his texts that morning. She did not answer them at lunch, or during fifth period, or during practice, where she ran so hard through finishing drills that Coach Whitfield actually told her to ease up before she hurt herself, and by the time Jordan finally caught up to her outside the fieldhouse after Falcons practice let out, he had sent nine messages and gotten back exactly none.
"Mia." He said her first name, not Reyes, which she noticed even through the anger, and hated herself a little for noticing. "Whatever you saw, it's not what it looks like."
"It's a screenshot of your phone, Jordan. It's exactly what it looks like."
"I never sent that. I don't even know what conversation that's from." He held his own phone out, scrolling frantically through his messages with Derek. "Look, here, this is my actual thread with him, there's nothing like that in here, I don't know where that screenshot came from."
"Anyone can scroll through their own phone and show me whatever they want me to see."
"Then ask Derek. Ask him directly, right now, I'll call him."
"Convenient that your best friend would back you up."
Jordan's jaw tightened, the first real flash of hurt crossing his face instead of just frustration. "You've known me for seven weeks and you're telling me you believe a screenshot from an account you don't even follow over everything that's actually happened between us. The car in the rain. The parking lot. Me driving to your fieldhouse with no camera crew to apologize for something I said a year before I knew you. None of that gets to count for anything against one blurry photo from a stranger?"
He's right, some small, quiet part of Mia's brain said, and you know he's right, and you're too scared to admit it because being wrong about this feels worse than being hurt by it. She shoved the thought down hard enough that it didn't reach her mouth.
"Maybe I don't know you as well as I thought I did," she said instead, and watched something close in his expression, like a door swinging shut.
"Fine," Jordan said quietly. "Believe whatever you want to believe, Reyes."
He hadn't called her Reyes in weeks. It landed exactly the way she suspected he meant it to.
She watched him walk to his car without looking back, and for a long moment she stood there in the empty lot, furious and hollow in equal measure, wanting badly to call after him and take it back and knowing, with the stubborn part of her that had never once in her life admitted to being wrong first, that she wasn't going to.
At home that night, her mom found her picking at dinner without eating any of it, phone face down on the table like she couldn't stand to look at it. "You look like someone let the air out of you."
"Jordan and I aren't talking anymore."
Her mom sat down slowly, giving the sentence the weight it apparently deserved. "That's a fast turn from two weeks ago, when you couldn't stop smiling every time his name popped up on your phone."
Mia told her the whole thing, the screenshot, the numbers on his phone case, the group chat, the fake account nobody could trace, and her mom listened without interrupting, the way she always did, until Mia finally ran out of words.
"Do you actually believe he said that," her mom asked. "Not what the screenshot says. What you actually believe, underneath all of it."
Mia opened her mouth to say yes, and found, to her own surprise, that the word wouldn't come out. "I don't know," she admitted instead. "I want to believe he didn't. I'm just scared that wanting to believe it is exactly why I shouldn't trust myself right now."
"That's not nothing to sit with," her mom said gently. "But it might be worth finding out for certain, instead of deciding based on how scared you are. Fear's not usually a great judge of truth, mija. It's just loud."
Derek found Jordan an hour later, slumped against his own car in the Northgate lot long after everyone else had gone home, phone dark in his hand. "Heard you two aren't speaking."
"She thinks I've been using her for views. Somebody sent her a fake screenshot of us texting about it and she believed it over everything real that's happened."
Derek was quiet for a moment, something uncomfortable crossing his face that Jordan didn't immediately clock as guilt. "About that."
Jordan looked up. "What about that."
"I might have said something like that. Not to her. To you, weeks ago, back before the group stage, when I was still trying to get you to focus on Regionals instead of Bayview's striker. I said something like, hey, worst case this whole thing is good for your numbers even if it doesn't work out, keep RYSN happy either way. It wasn't a real conversation, it was me trying to talk you out of caring so much. I didn't think anyone had screenshots of it. I didn't think anyone was even watching that thread."
The cold feeling that had sat in Jordan's stomach since that morning turned, abruptly, into something much sharper. "You said that. About me. About her."
"I said it to get you to stop moping about a Bayview striker before a group-stage match, Jordan, it wasn't me actually thinking you were using her, I know you better than that."
"Doesn't matter what you actually thought. Somebody screenshotted it, cropped it to look like it came from me, and now Mia thinks I've spent two months lying to her." Jordan pushed off his car, adrenaline replacing the numbness from an hour ago. "I need to find out who sent this and I need Mia to see the real thread before she spends one more night thinking I meant any of that."
"I'll fix it," Derek said, already pulling out his own phone. "I'll post the real thread. My screenshots, my timestamps, everything, so it's not just your word against a burner account."
"You'd do that? Put your own messages out there, the ones where you were trying to talk me out of caring about her?"
"I said something dumb to help my friend focus on a soccer season. I didn't say it to hurt anybody, and I'm not going to let you lose something good because I was careless with a text thread six weeks ago." Derek was already typing, thumbs moving fast. "Besides, if I don't fix this, you're going to spend the group-stage rematch staring at the Bayview bench looking heartbroken instead of stopping shots, and that's a much bigger problem for me personally."
Jordan almost laughed, despite everything. "You're a good friend, you know that."
"I'm aware. Now stop talking to me and go find a way to actually get her to look at her phone, because I guarantee you she's not reading anything you send her right now."
Jordan thought about that the whole drive home, about seven weeks of texts she wasn't answering and a girl who'd learned, the hard way, long before he ever met her, that people who said nice things sometimes turned out to be lying. He didn't want to be one more name on that list. He just didn't know yet how to prove it to someone who'd already decided not to listen.
*
Mia spent that same hour lying on her bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling, replaying seven weeks of parking lots and rainstorms and a promise to ask her properly after Regionals, all of it now tangled up with a screenshot she couldn't stop looking at even though some traitorous, quieter part of her kept snagging on the same detail Priya had flagged that morning. The timestamps really didn't line up right. She'd noticed it too, and ignored it, because believing the worst had felt, in the moment, safer than believing the best and being wrong.
Her phone buzzed. Not Jordan. Priya.
Derek posted something. Group chat. You need to see it.
Mia sat up so fast she got dizzy, and by the time she'd opened the thread, her hands were shaking again, this time for a very different reason, because whatever Derek had posted, the whole school was already talking about it, and she had a sinking, hopeful feeling she'd gotten the last hour badly wrong.