Subscribing to the Enemy: An Enemies to Lovers YA Sweet Romance

by Jen Brady

  And she needed to win.

  But so did I, unless I wanted to end up sitting behind a desk studying for the next eight years of my life. Reading. Writing papers. Reading more. Putting YouTube on hold. There would be no time for “that movie hobby,” in grad school, and that’s where I was heading if I couldn’t do something to convince my dad my channel was a worthwhile endeavor.

  I had until 11:59 tonight to figure it all out.

  31

  JOANNA

  I STOOD BEHIND OUR kitchen counter, which was filled with ingredients from our fridge and pantry. Bethany stood in front of us, the camera on a tripod, counting down from five with her fingers.

  I plastered a fake smile on my face as she pointed at me, and announced, “Hey, guys, I’m Joanna March.”

  Mya spread her arms out in an over-the-top “ta-da” pose. “And I’m Mya March!”

  “You’re watching JoJo Plus Teddy Equals BFF Forever,” I said. “Ted’s not available today, so my awesome sister Mya has agreed to join me for a challenge.”

  And, yes, it pained me to call Mya my awesome sister, but Megan was baby-sitting and Bethany refused to be on camera, so I was stuck with Mya.

  The cheesy grin on Mya’s face somehow spread even wider, and she waved frantically. I fought the urge to tell Bethany to start the filming over. If I did that every time Mya messed something up, it would take all day to film a twelve-minute segment, and I just wanted to get it over with.

  This promised to be just as much fun as the other three videos I’d filmed with Mya in the past month since Ted’s livestream, and by “just as much fun” I mean “painful and awful.” She tried to steal the spotlight every two minutes, and she was terrible at acting natural. Everything was overdone and included big winks, melodramatic looks of shock, and lots of gasping that made it very evident it was scripted, not genuine surprise.

  Filming with Mya was nowhere near as fun as filming with Ted, from brainstorming concepts (her ideas were all dumb and involved sickeningly girly things like makeup tutorials), setting the stage (she let me do about 95 percent of the work), filming, and post (she never helped me edit, which wasn’t new since Ted wasn’t a whole lot of help there, but she also didn’t help me clean up).

  It was best just to get this over with. What did it matter? We were getting a quarter of the views we usually got anyway. Nobody would see the video, even if Mya made it dumb.

  I plunged ahead.

  “Today, we’re doing a guess-the-ingredients blender challenge,” I explained. “We’ve gathered some . . . unusual contents from our fridge and pantry, and we’ll take turns choosing three items from the table and blending them into an oh-so-delicious concoction. Whoever drinks it has to guess the three ingredients, and whoever gets the most correct wins.” I turned to my sister, who was still grinning at the camera and batting her overly-mascaraed fake eyelashes. “Are you ready, Mya?”

  “Yes!” she exclaimed, overenunciating the simple word.

  “Would you like to mix or taste first?”

  “I’ll taste.”

  “Okay, leave the room, and I’ll tell you when to come back.”

  She dutifully followed my directions, prancing out of the kitchen.

  Mya’s theatrics had put me in a bit of a vindictive mood, so I chose ketchup, graham crackers, and orange juice. I put a dash of each in the blender, announcing my choices as I did. From behind the camera, Bethany’s face puckered, and when our eyes met, she gave me a grossed-out look. I probably should have taken it easier on Mya since this was her first food-related challenge, but I hadn’t had a movie to enter in Lights, Camera, Vance! because of her, and the winners were being notified this week, so I was feeling extra salty.

  I finished blending everything up and poured it into a glass.

  “Oh, Mya!” I called out in a sing-song voice. “It’s ready!”

  She came back, all smiles, took a dainty sip of her concoction, and gagged. She coughed and coughed, and her eyes watered, then spilled over.

  “That was disgusting!” she exclaimed. “What was in it?”

  “You’re supposed to guess.”

  “I have no idea. And I’m not tasting it again.”

  “But you have to guess. It’s the point of the challenge.”

  “Then I guess . . . what’s something disgusting? Mayonnaise! Mayonnaise and Brussel sprouts and black licorice.”

  “Seriously? That’s your guess?”

  She nodded.

  I held the glass out to her. “You don’t want to try another taste to make sure?”

  She let out a violent shudder that brought back memories of her dying Chihuahua faint. I would have fought back a snicker and exchanged knowing looks with Ted if he were here. But he wasn’t, and there was nothing to laugh about these days.

  “Well, you got none of your secret ingredients right, so you get zero points,” I summed up, then left the room so Mya could blend three ingredients for me to guess. She’d probably make it awful to get back at me.

  I stood in the entryway of our house, gazing out the window while I waited. Ted’s house looked big and imposing in a way it never had before. It had always been my second home, or maybe more like an extension of my home since it was so close. But now it was just a neighbor’s house, like the Coopers’ across the street or the Stacks’ on the other side of our place.

  Why did he have to go and be all stupid and mess everything up? Our friendship, the channel, my relationship with Rick. Because that had to be it, didn’t it? Rick and I were fine—better than fine—and all of a sudden, after Ted’s video, we weren’t. He said he’d seen it. What about it had made him hate me? What had reverted our relationship back to worse than it had been when we met? Was it because I said no to Ted’s pizza prom-posal? Shouldn’t Rick have been happy about that? Or did it scare him off because Ted claimed I broke his heart?

  “Ready!” Mya called out, and I went back to the kitchen to face my three-ingredient blended fate.

  I took the glass from her without looking. If I saw a disgusting brown-gray, lumpy mess, I wouldn’t be able to eat it, and she’d win by default. I wasn’t losing to Mya in my own YouTube challenge. She’d won enough lately.

  I raised the glass to my mouth and was pleasantly surprised when I smelled something fruity with a hint of cocoa. I took a hesitant taste. It was grainy, but not lumpy, and it tasted like chocolate and cinnamon. It actually tasted good. I took another sip, trying to place the consistency. It was thick and familiar but not gross at all. But it wasn’t something that usually tasted like chocolate.

  “Um . . . chocolate sauce and cinnamon?” I guessed.

  “Almost!” Mya exclaimed, excitedly. She clapped her hands and bounced up and down, like she was the one who had made a correct guess. “Chocolate syrup and cinnamon. That counts as two correct guesses, right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What’s the last thing?” she pressed.

  I took another taste, but I couldn’t figure it out. “I give up.”

  “Applesauce! Did you like it?”

  I gave her a suspicious side-eye glance. “Yeeees,” I said slowly, drawing the word out. “It was good. But you realize, you basically made chocolate-flavored cinnamon applesauce, don’t you?”

  “I win! I made the best dish!”

  “No, Mya.” I gave Bethany the look that meant the take was ruined and she could stop filming. I set the glass down on the counter. “That’s not how the challenge works. You’re supposed to make something weird or disgusting so it’s hard for me to guess the ingredients.”

  “But how can you win a cooking challenge if your dish tastes bad?”

  “That’s not the point of the challenge.”

  “That’s always the point of a cooking challenge.”

  “This isn’t a cooking challenge.”

  “It’s food,” she protested. “And mine tasted better, so I win.” She threw her arms up in triumph and smiled victoriously at the camera, unaware that Beth
any had stopped filming. “See you next time on Mya Plus JoJo Equals Sisters Forever.” After a dramatic freeze frame, she turned to me and said, “Guess I win,” then pranced off.

  I sat down on one of the stools behind the kitchen counter and gazed over the mess I had to clean up by myself now.

  This wasn’t working. Forcing Mya to do a dumb challenge she wasn’t cut out for wasn’t going to bring viewers back. Yes, they’d watched for the practical jokes, challenges, and stunts, but they’d watched more so for Ted and me. Our chemistry was what made the channel what it was. Without Ted, the magic was missing.

  Which meant I needed Ted. We had to get past this somehow. I had to agree to go to prom and give “us” a try, or he had to be fine keeping things “just friends” the way it always had been, or we both had to give a little and let our relationship evolve into whatever it could become now.

  As annoyed with Ted as I was, I missed him. We’d been two halves of one person for so long that I didn’t know how to be without him. Everything we’d done had been together. We were inseparable.

  I needed my best friend, and I needed my YouTube partner.

  Why couldn’t he have fallen for Megs or Bethany . . . or even Princess Mya of all people . . . and left our relationship the way it was?

  I sighed as I met Bethany’s eyes. “I have to call Ted, don’t I?”

  She nodded. “Call or go over there. This isn’t working without him.”

  “It’s going to be awkward.”

  She leaned against the counter with her forearms. “Probably. But I don’t think you have a choice. You and Ted have been fiercely loyal best friends since the day you met. If anybody can get through this, it’s you two. And . . .”

  She trailed off.

  “And what?” I prompted.

  “You should call Rick, too.”

  “No! He made it clear he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”

  “But you’re in love with him.”

  “Gosh, no, Bethany! Why would you say that? Dating in high school is a waste of time.”

  “Oh, drop the act.” Bethany rarely gets forceful and blunt. I must have been insufferable the past several weeks to bring out that side of her. “You already admitted it to me once. You’re in love with him and too stubborn to ask what happened. There has to be a reasonable explanation.”

  “He needed my camera. That’s the explanation.”

  “He does documentaries on crossing guards who risk their lives to save little kids,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Do you really think he has it in him to use a person the way you’re convinced he used you?”

  That was the problem. No, I didn’t think he’d do that. But he had.

  “I’m going upstairs to edit,” I muttered.

  32

  RICK

  I TICKED MY WINDSHIELD wipers up a level as I turned onto Orchard Street. In the fifteen minutes it had taken me to drive from my house to Joanna’s, the rain had graduated from light, little pitter-patters to large, incessant drops. There was no way I was getting out of this without getting soaked.

  I deserved it. I’d screwed up big time. Actually, what I deserved was to stand under a perpetual rain cloud and get poured on for the rest of my life.

  She told me they weren’t involved. Several times. She’d been completely honest with me about everything, even some things I suspected she hadn’t been honest with anybody else about. And I’d chosen not to believe her and had even thrown the whole thing in her face when she’d shown up on my doorstep, probably to talk to me about it before I jumped to conclusions.

  I pulled up to the curb outside her house and killed the engine. It didn’t take long for the sheets of rain to blur my view of the house. That was okay; if I couldn’t see her, maybe she wouldn’t be able to make out that it was me parked a few feet from her mailbox, hiding like a coward instead of manning up to face her.

  I picked up the plaque that sat next to me on the passenger’s seat. It was still wrapped in bubble wrap, and although I’d lifted up one corner to take a peek, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to unroll the rest of the protective casing. It didn’t belong to me. Not really. And after the heinous way I’d behaved, I didn’t have the right to be in its unmasked presence unless she allowed me to.

  I’d received two emails from Vance Sanders on Tuesday. One had been a form email, probably sent by an assistant of some sort, thanking me for entering the Lights, Camera, Vance! contest but regretting to inform me that while my documentary “had shown creativity and potential” it hadn’t placed in the competition.

  The other email had been the announcement that the film collaboration I was listed as contact person for had placed fourth out of three thousand-plus entries along with a warning to expect a package that would have to be signed for to arrive within the next 48 hours. The package would contain the fourth-place trophy.

  Receiving those emails had made me do something I’d avoided for several weeks: check out Joanna’s channel.

  I’d thought about her every day since I saw her last.

  Every. Single. Day.

  I’d thought about her long, silky hair grazing my arm, her beautiful gray eyes lighting up during a creative breakthrough, her lips brushing against mine. But I hadn’t had any desire to watch her and Laurence hamming it up all lovey-dovey for the camera, so I’d unsubscribed from their channel and averted my eyes whenever one of their thumbnail images ended up on my Recommended list.

  Hearing the news about the contest had instilled in me this need to see her, even though I knew it would rip my heart out, so I’d pulled up JoJo+Teddy=BFF4EVAH for the first time in almost two months . . . and that’s when I discovered what a dummkopf I’d been.

  Five videos had been posted over the past month and a half. That was it. Four were of Joanna trying in vain to carry segments of herself and her blond-haired sister that attempted to replicate the magic and hilarity of JoJo+Teddy. It hadn’t worked. It came off stilted, like a bad parody of the original.

  The remaining post was of Laurence and a pretty brunette doing the “pause challenge” where they took turns surprising each other at inopportune times by pointing a remote control and shouting, “Pause!” Then whoever had been “paused” had to freeze no matter what they were doing, whether that was pouring a glass of milk, riding a scooter, or bending over to pick something up. The girl didn’t seem to understand that the point of the challenge was to be goofy and kept waiting until whatever would cause disaster had passed before declaring, “Pause!” When Laurence would pause her, she’d quickly finish up what she was doing, then strike a frantic pose for her freeze. At first, he laughed and joked about how she didn’t get the concept of the “pause challenge,” but as the video went on, he got visibly more and more irritated until it ended with an abrupt call to action to buy merch now because “it’ll soon be disappearing.”

  It was evident he and Joanna weren’t together and despite the claims made on Laurence’s live video (which had since been taken down), they weren’t a happy couple getting ready to attend prom together this spring.

  Something had happened, and it hadn’t been a happily ever after to the “Cinderella story” Joanna claimed her viewers dreamed about.

  Which meant she’d never lied to me, played me, duped me, etc. My insecurities had done that all on their own. I’d doubted her, doubted us, and that had cost me the best thing that had walked into my life, right in front of my shot at the mall.

  It had been the perfect shot after all, but I’d gone and messed it up.

  All I’d thought about since then was what sort of grand apology I could make. It had to be something huge, something that would make up for acting like a total jerk. I dreamed up flash mob apology songs and writing in the sky, but nothing seemed right.

  I’d also run out of time. The emails from Vance Sanders’s team had also informed me that he planned to announce the winners live from his channel this Saturday at one o’clock Eastern Standard Time. It was now
twelve forty-eight, and I didn’t want her to hear it from the internet. I wanted to be with her as we watched together, ready to rip the bubble wrap off the plaque and hand it to her at the right moment. Or, better yet, a private celebration moments before the big announcement when I told her I was completely in love with her and wanted to give us a second chance.

  Despite my obsessing over a grand gesture apology, all I’d come up with were honest, sincere words about how I’d been wrong not to listen to her. Maybe she’d be so thrilled about placing in the contest that she’d cut me some slack, whether it was deserved or not.

  I checked my phone. Twelve fifty-two. Eight minutes until showtime.

  It was now or never.

  I tucked the bubble-wrapped plaque into my flannel to protect it from the rain and opened the car door. I was pleasantly surprised to find the sheets of rain had downgraded themselves to a steady but less-torrential rhythm of large droplets. I stepped out and focused on her front door.

  My heartrate picked up its pace and my stomach flared nervously at what I was about to do. She might slam the door in my face like I had done to her. With her fire, there was no might about it. There was a 99.9 percent probability I was getting a door slammed in my face within the next minute.

  If she did, I’d knock again and again until she heard me out. I’d grovel if I had to. I had it bad for this girl, and we deserved a shot. I had to make her see that.

  I took a deep breath, honed in on the dark blue front door, and stepped away from my car, ready to march up the sidewalk to get Joanna back.

  Her front door opened, startling me. I hadn’t expected my focus object to move. It swung open and out walked Ted Laurence. He was laughing and waving, and a chorus of female laughter sounded from inside the house.

  “Come back for dinner!” a voice called.

  “You bet,” Laurence said over his shoulder. When he turned, the huge grin on his obnoxious face was evident. He jumped off the porch onto the grass and took off through the yard, dodging raindrops all the way to his own door.