Page 4 of The Cuffing Game
Everyone was staring at him now. From across the lecture hall, Mia smiled. She’d somehow gotten him into trouble without even trying.
Touché,Noah thought.
He was afraid the professor would ask to see his computer screen, but fortunately, Dr. Thompson moved on with a disappointed shake of his head. Noah wondered if he was ever going to see the professor’s dog in his notifications again.
When the coast was clear, Noah reopened his laptop and starred the email from the SPC.
Evenifhe wanted to—which he did not—Noah didn’t have time to be on Mia’s show. But he’d still keep tabs on it. Just to see how things went.
Chapter Two
Mia
ATTN:Campus CrushCancellation Notice.
Due to insufficient talent interest in the program, this show will be canceled by the Student Production Center. You are welcome to submit revisions to the proposal by October 15th or retry in the spring semester.
When Mia read the SPC’s email, she rolled out of bed and called her oldest sister, Jeannette.
“Yeah?” Jeannette said. “Mia, I’m driving to school right now so I can’t talk long. What’s up?”
Guilt and gratitude twisted together in Mia’s gut, like it always did whenever she thought about Jeannette commuting to school every day from home. Two years ago, Jeannette had gotten into all her dream schools on the East Coast but had opted to go to the local state school fifteen minutes away from their house instead.
“Someone needs to stay behind and help Mom and Dad take care of y’all,” she’d said when Mia had asked why. “It’s also way more affordable!”
Besides Jeannette, Mia had three other sisters: Marie, Cara, and Lola. As the oldest, Jeannette really could have left them all to fend for themselves. But no. She had stayed so Mia, the second oldest, could move thousands of miles away instead. Her sister had sacrificed so much for her. And yet here Mia was, already a failure just two months into the semester.
She’d called Jeannette out of habit, because they always told one another about everything. But now she regretted it.
“Hello?” Jeannette said. “Mia, are you still there? If you are, talk now or call me back later. I’m seven minutes away from school.”
Looking out at her sparsely decorated side of the dorm room, Mia sighed. She condensed the mini-rant in her head to one sentence, so she could be as small of a burden on her sister as possible. “My show is going to get canceled if I don’t figure out a way to save it by next week.”
“The dating show? How come? It was such a cool idea!”
“It’s more of a documentary, but yeah. Not enough people signed up to be on it.”
“That sucks. Why do you think that happened?”
“If I had to guess...” Mia pursed her lips. “I don’t know enough people. No one wants to be on a show led by a freshman who is brand-new to campus.”
“Aw, well, you just got there. Maybe you can try again later!”
Mia bit her lip. One of the biggest differences between her and her sister was how they saw the world. For Jeannette, the glass was always half-full. While for Mia, it wasn’t a simple matter of the glass being half-full or half-empty. It was a question ofwhyit was half-empty in the first place and what she could do to fill that glass back up.
Campus Crushmay havestartedas something she’d invented to distract herself from her crush on Noah, but over the last couple of months, it’d become more than that. Thanks to the show—well, technically, the SPC—Mia had met Kallie, Damien, and Alex, her only friends so far at Marlon. And the four of them had sacrificed sleep—and a little bit of their sanity—to plan out the show and submit the proposal.
Their producer, Damien, was a senior, while Kallie, their cinematographer, was a junior. Both, like most upper-level film students at Marlon, already juggled an intensive schedule of working on studio lots and going to class. They’d barely managed to fit the show into their schedules as it was, and they would have even less time as they approached graduation. They didn’t have a “later.”
Mia was going to disappoint everyone.
“How about we take a few calming breaths together,” Jeannette continued when Mia didn’t respond. “Would that help?”
Take a few calming breathswas Jeannette’s number-one mantra, the one that she told all her younger sisters. Thosewords had—admittedly—gotten Mia through the years she’d worked her butt off to get a full ride to Marlon, a fancy private school that their parents would never have let her go to otherwise. But this time, Mia’s throat felt too tight. She wasn’t sure if a few calming breaths would help with her current predicament.
“Mia?”
“Sorry, I have to go,” Mia managed to say out loud.
