Page 140 of Pick Me Up On Tuesdays

Ethan scratched the back of his neck. “Kind of. Mia sent me raw footage to pick highlights for the documentary. But I started collecting stuff I knew we wouldn’t use. Stuff that… felt real.” “You edited all this?”

“Yep.”

“For me?”

He looked away. “Well, not for Max.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

And then I didn’t.

I sat there, frozen in the middle of a hurricane made of pixels and feelings, wondering when I’d handed him the keys to my entire emotional archive.

“I’m gonna combust,” I muttered.

“You already did,” he said. “It was beautiful.”

I turned to him, my throat doing weird tight things. “Why would you show me this?”

Ethan met my eyes. And for once, he wasn’t smirking. “Because you never see it, Clark. But I do.”

Then he reached forward and paused the video—right on a frame where I was smiling at him. Small. Honest. Open.

“I fell for this,” he said softly. “Thought maybe you did too.”

I didn’t answer right away.

Because I was too busy falling all over again.

Still reeling from the emotional sucker punch of Ethan’s video, a lightning bolt of unhinged genius hit me like a caffeine overdose. I sat up so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.

“Wait,” I blurted, pointing a dramatic finger at nothing in particular. “The competition.”

Ethan looked up from where he was lazily poking at his phone, his brow lifting. “What competition? Is this another Clark Crisis?”

I ignored the sarcasm and pushed off the bed. “The documentary competition. Joy’s holy grail.

Mia’s entire personality. The reason we almost died like… twenty times.”

He blinked, still not following. “Didn’t we already miss that? Like, weren’t we supposed to have submitted it… two weeks ago?”

“Yes,” I said, grabbing his shoulders like I was about to deliver a prophecy. “But remember when the students from Boulder High egg-bombed our bus? That threw the whole event into a controversy-fueled PR nightmare. Turns out sabotage and projectile lunch foods are frowned upon in scholastic events.”

“Go figure,” Ethan muttered.

“So,” I said, practically vibrating now, “the organizers extended the deadline by twenty-two days.” I stopped and calculated. “Meaning we have about, I dunno, three or four hours.”

Ethan sat up straighter, brow creasing. “And you’re telling me this now because…?”

“Because I think we should submit your video,” I said, pointing to the paused frame of me mid-laugh, hair a mess, joy ridiculously evident on my face. I looked… human. Real. Alive.

He frowned. “Clark, this isn’t a documentary. This is a chaotic mess of unfiltered teen drama. It’s got Max screaming in the background like he’s being sacrificed, our camera taking a nosedive into a river, and that one time you threw a sandwich at a bird that attacked Joy’s hair.”

“Exactly,” I said, eyes gleaming. “Not as a nature documentary. As something else. A teen field trip disaster masterpiece. A story about real emotions. How things went from awkward bus rides to something that feels like… I dunno, home. With you.”

Ethan looked like I’d just suggested we start a revolution.

Which, I kind of had.

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