A Northbridge Academy Story
Episode 10: Off Script
I walked into the scholarship interview with a perfectly prepared answer memorized and ready, the kind of polished, professional response I'd rehearsed in the mirror at least a dozen times the night before, all clean sentences and safe ambition. I'd practiced it enough times that I could have delivered it in my sleep, complete with a rehearsed pause exactly where I wanted the board to nod thoughtfully. Then they asked me what kind of creator I actually wanted to become, and I opened my mouth to deliver the rehearsed version, and something else came out instead.
I told them about my mom. About the one-star review that called her espresso 'sadness and burnt rubber,' about watching her cry in the storeroom and lie about it being allergies, about building an entire online persona out of the specific fear that if I didn't say the cruel thing about myself first, someone else would say it worse. I told them about the mascot room, about the fake date, about the interview where I'd used my own sharpest instincts to hurt someone I actually loved, and about the ten minutes on that gymnasium stage when I finally stopped editing myself down into something smaller and safer. I told them I didn't want to make content that turned people into punchlines anymore. I wanted to make content that actually let people be heard, instead of just entertaining.
There was a long pause after I finished. One of the board members, an older woman who hadn't said much the entire interview, finally set down her pen and said, quietly, "That's the first honest answer anyone's given us all week."
"Is that good or bad?" I asked, before I could stop myself, because apparently even in the most important interview of my life, I couldn't resist asking a slightly ridiculous question.
She actually laughed. "It's the only kind that matters, Ms. Monroe."
I walked out of that room not entirely sure I'd said the right things, in the strategic sense, the sense I'd spent an entire semester optimizing for. But for the first time since I'd started dreaming about this scholarship back in sophomore year, I felt like the person who might get it and the person who actually existed were, finally, the exact same person, and whatever happened next, that alone felt worth something.
• • •
Ethan, meanwhile, was busy declining the solo contract entirely, in person, in an actual meeting, instead of over a half-drafted email he never sent. He told me about it afterward, still slightly giddy with the specific relief of a person who has just said no to something everyone assumed he'd say yes to. The StreamForge representative, apparently, had spent a full five minutes trying to sweeten the offer before finally accepting that Ethan genuinely, calmly, was not interested, no matter how many zeroes they added.
Instead, he submitted an application to a young director's mentorship program, portfolio built entirely from behind-the-scenes footage he'd quietly been collecting all semester without telling anyone — including, apparently, me.
"You've been secretly directing us this whole time?" I asked, equal parts impressed and mildly offended.
"I prefer 'documenting an emerging creative partnership,'" he said. "Also, in my defense, some of it is genuinely just footage of you yelling at a megaphone. There's a whole three-minute sequence. It's very compelling."
"That footage is not going in your portfolio, Ethan."
"It's already in the portfolio, Riley. It's the strongest section. The mentorship coordinator specifically commented on your form with the megaphone. She called it 'a masterclass in barely controlled chaos.'"
He also pitched something to Ms. Chen that neither of us had fully talked through beforehand: turning Pulse Live into a program run entirely by students, with no sponsor holding editorial control, no outside account quietly granted backdoor access, no anonymous voice deciding which version of any of us got to exist online. Ms. Chen, to her credit, didn't even pretend to hesitate. "I should have suggested that myself, years ago," she said. "Consider it approved before you've even finished the sentence."
His dad, for what it's worth, showed up to the mentorship program's parent information night without being asked, sat in the back row the entire time, said almost nothing during the presentation, and afterward, in the parking lot, told Ethan he was proud of him in roughly four words total, which, for a man who communicates almost exclusively through inventory restocking, apparently counted as an entire speech. Ethan told me about it with the specific, quiet disbelief of someone still getting used to a version of his father he'd never quite believed would show up.
• • •
I got the media scholarship. Ethan got into the director's mentorship program. We built the new Pulse Live together with Mina, Harper, and — after a longer conversation than I expected, one that ended with him crying a little and neither of us mentioning it again — Blake, who insisted on drafting an actual written consent policy before anyone touched another camera, complete with rules about private footage, editing transparency, and what he called, with complete sincerity, "a zero-tolerance policy for secret backdoors, effective immediately, no exceptions, I mean it this time."
"You've become very serious about this," I told him, reading over the draft, which ran to four full pages and included, memorably, an entire appendix about password hygiene.
"I have things to make up for," he said, simply, and I let that be enough.
Mina, naturally, appointed herself head of what she called "vibes and continuity," a title nobody asked her to invent and nobody had the energy to argue against, and immediately began drawing up an actual organizational chart with her own name at the top in the largest font available. Harper signed on as our actual sports editor, no longer anyone's assumed romantic subplot, just genuinely, finally, good at her job, and spent her first official meeting patiently explaining to Mina why the organizational chart needed more than one box.
We held our first production meeting in a room that still smelled faintly of old scoreboard equipment and, somewhere underneath that, the ghost of a foam eagle head that Blake had, with great solemnity, decided to keep displayed on a shelf as what he called "a monument to our journey."
• • •
At the spring festival, Ethan and I appeared on camera together for the first time as an actual couple, not rivals, not a manufactured narrative, just two people who'd spent an entire semester arguing their way into something real. The whole thing was supposed to be a simple, low-stakes segment about the festival's food stalls. It did not stay low-stakes for long.
Someone in the crowd — I still don't know who, and at this point I've stopped trying to find out — shouted the question everyone had apparently been dying to ask since the mascot room clip first leaked, months ago now, back when neither of us would have admitted anything.
"Who liked who first?"
We both, without any coordination whatsoever, pointed directly at each other.
"That's not an answer," someone else yelled, and the crowd, sensing blood in the water, began chanting some variation of tell us until it became genuinely impossible to ignore.
I lunged for the camera, half laughing, fully mortified, trying to shut off the stream before this became its own permanent piece of internet history. Ethan got there first, leaned into frame, and said, with the easy, unbothered grin I'd once found so deeply infuriating and now, somehow, found unbearably fond:
"I liked her since she called me a walking livestream with legs."
The crowd lost it. Mina, somewhere off camera, could be heard shouting "I CALLED IT IN SEPTEMBER" loud enough to be picked up by at least three of the forty personal livestreams still running out of pure habit. Harper, more composed, simply held up a small handwritten sign that said, plainly, TOLD YOU SO. I gave up trying to stop the stream entirely and just stood there, laughing, mortified, happy, in a way that felt entirely too honest to edit down into anything smaller.
• • •
I used to think love meant losing control of yourself completely. Now I think maybe it's the opposite — maybe it's the moment you stop needing to control everything at all, the moment you finally let someone see the parts you spent years cutting out of every frame.
These days, Ethan and I sit in the new media room most afternoons, arguing over who gets to hold the camera, which is, all things considered, a significantly better argument than the ones we used to have. We're still rivals, in our own way. We still compete, still tease, still disagree loudly about shot composition and comma usage and whether basketball statistics are relevant context for a library fundraiser.
We just don't need to win against each other anymore. We're finally, for the first time all year, on exactly the same side, and if the internet ever wants to know who liked who first, the honest answer, at this point, is that it stopped mattering the moment we both admitted it out loud.