Caught On Camera: Fake Dating The Hockey Captain

Chapter Two

Melanie:

It was him.

Sammy stood in the middle of a hallway three states away from where he was supposed to exist.

For a second the hallway noise dropped away entirely , the lockers slamming, the laughter, someone’s phone playing music too loud out of a cracked-open backpack pocket — all of it folding into background static while my whole body did the math on how he could possibly be standing there.

“I knew that was you.” He said it easily, delighted, like he’d just won something. “Even from behind. You walk the same. Fast, like you’re mad at the floor.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t get my mouth to catch up to my pulse.

“You cut your hair,” he said, tilting his head.

My hand went to it before I could stop it. Traitor hand, traitor everything — and I hated that he’d noticed, hated even more that I’d reacted.

“Still making observations before saying hello?” I managed.

“You're still sarcastic before saying anything at all.” He laughed, and it was the same laugh, warm and a little too pleased with itself, and it landed somewhere under my ribs like a bruise being pressed on purpose.

“What are you doing here.”

Not a question. I didn’t have the bandwidth to make it sound like one.

“I transferred last week, actually.” He shrugged, hands in his pockets, like it was nothing, like it wasn’t currently rearranging the entire floor plan of my life. “My dad’s job. You know how it goes.”

I did know how it went. That was the horrible part. It was the same sentence that had uprooted me six times, except this time it’d uprooted him into my life instead of out of it.

Last week.

So he hadn’t followed me.

He hadn’t come looking for me.

He’d just… landed here.

That should’ve made it better.

But it didn’t.

“Small world,” he said.

“Hilarious.”

“You look good, Mel. Better than good.” His eyes did a slow pass over me, and I felt every inch of it, unwelcome and familiar at the same time. “The new school suits you already.”

“You’ve known me for four minutes of it.”

“Some things you can just tell.”

I didn’t have a comeback for that one ready, and he seemed to enjoy watching me not have one, which was somehow worse than anything he could’ve actually said.

“Sammy!”

A voice echoed down the hall.

A guy in a letterman jacket waved him over.

“Coach wants you at conditioning. Let’s go!”

Sammy glanced over, then back at me.

“That’s my ride. We should catch up sometime. For real.”

He’d been here a week and already had friends.

I’d been here six hours and still felt like I was borrowing someone else’s hallway.

That stung more than I wanted it to.

“Sure,” I said, because it was easier than the truth, and I turned before he could watch my face do anything else.

I made it to the girls’ bathroom before I let myself breathe properly. Ran the cold tap, didn’t drink, just let it run while I looked at myself in the mirror and reminded my face it wasn’t allowed to fall apart over someone who’d once made an entire cafeteria laugh at my expense and called it a joke. Six months. I’d given myself six months to stop flinching at his name. Apparently the universe didn’t care about my timeline.

By the time the bell rang for lunch, I’d rebuilt whatever version of myself I needed to survive a cafeteria full of strangers.

I sat by myself at the end of a table nobody had claimed, which was fine, which was always fine, and pulled out my phone.

Mom: How’s the first day?

I typed:

It’s fine.

Deleted it.

Typed:

I’ll tell you later.

Sent it before I could second-guess myself into something more honest.

The cafeteria at Northridge ran the way they all did — invisible borders nobody had drawn but everyone somehow knew, hockey table by the windows, theater kids loud near the vending machines, a whole ecosystem I hadn’t been assigned a place in yet and wasn’t in a hurry to find one. I picked at my sandwich and let my eyes wander instead of my thoughts, because if I let my thoughts wander they’d go straight back to a hallway and a voice saying Mel like it still owned the right to.

I was halfway through my sandwich, not really tasting it, when I spotted him across the cafeteria.

Sawyer.

He sat at a table full of guys in matching hoodies, laughing at something someone said, looking exactly like the photo in the trophy case come to life.

Except…

There was a textbook open in front of him.

He wasn’t reading it.

He was just staring at the page like it had personally offended him, his thumb tapping the corner over and over while the conversation carried on around him. One of his teammates said something, elbowed him, and Sawyer laughed on cue, half a beat late, like he’d rehearsed the reaction rather than felt it.

As if he felt someone watching, his head lifted.

Our eyes met.

Just for a second.

I looked away first.

No hockey. No captaincy. Every scholarship offer disappears.

I thought about the folder sitting in my bag, the words Behind the Season printed across the front like they meant something innocent, and wondered exactly how much “behind” Mr. Bennett actually wanted me to go.

The bell rang.

I dumped my tray and headed for class, Sammy’s laugh and Sawyer’s tired expression taking up space in my head for completely different reasons.

History dragged. Mr. Lawson had the kind of voice that could put a double espresso to sleep, and I spent most of the period sketching the outline of a documentary I hadn’t shot a single frame of yet in the margin of my notebook, half-listening, half-somewhere else entirely.

When class finally ended, everyone shoved books into bags and hurried toward the door.

Mr. Lawson stopped someone before they could leave.

“Sawyer.”

I looked up without meaning to.

Sawyer paused.

“Stay back for a minute.”

A few students glanced over before filing out.

Sawyer nodded once.

“Okay.”

No complaints.

No excuses.

Just… okay.

I looked away before I could hear anything else.

Maybe it wasn’t my business.

But it was getting harder to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way toward my locker, still assigned but not yet decorated, empty except for the syllabus packet someone had shoved through the vents. I was fighting with a stuck combination lock when two girls stopped at the bank of lockers beside mine, close enough that I caught every word whether I wanted to or not.

“—I’m telling you, he’s getting suspended from the team.”

“No way. Sawyer? He’s the captain.”

“Doesn’t matter. My cousin’s in his history class. She said he’s failing a couple of classes right now. If his grades don’t come up he loses eligibility, easy.”

“Coach would never let that happen.”

“Coach doesn’t get a vote. That’s not how it works.”

The lock finally gave. I didn’t move right away.

I already knew this — I’d heard it firsthand, half-swallowed through a door before first period even started. But hearing it now, tossed between two girls like ordinary gossip, landed differently. It meant it wasn’t a secret contained to one office anymore. It meant the whole school was one bad test away from watching the golden boy’s entire life come apart in public, the exact way mine once had, somewhere else, in front of people who’d laughed instead of looked away.

I closed my locker and headed for the parking lot.

Somewhere between the History wing and the front doors, something that wasn’t quite an idea yet started turning over in the back of my mind.

I hated the thought the second it crossed my mind.

Which probably meant I was going to think about it all night.