The new term started the way every term started — with too much noise in the hallway and not enough coffee in Loid's system, because apparently his grandmother had decided that "growing boys" didn't need caffeine, they needed "proper breakfast," whatever that meant at six in the morning.
Still, something about this term felt different, though it took him most of the walk to school to figure out what.
It was Charlotte.
Not that she was different, exactly. She still wore her hair the same way, still carried that beat-up canvas bag with the keychain shaped like a fox that Emily had given her two Christmases ago. But the space between them had changed shape somehow. Last term they'd been two people who happened to end up in the same conversations a lot. Now it felt like the conversations were the point, and everything else — class, homework, the entire rest of the school — was just what happened in between.
He found her by the lockers, already talking to Emily about something that made them both laugh, and when she noticed him she didn't wave like she used to. She just kind of — smiled, like his arrival was expected, like it was a fact of the morning the same way the sun coming up was a fact of the morning.
"You look tired," she said, which was not exactly a warm greeting, but from Charlotte it counted as one.
"I am tired. My grandmother thinks eggs are a personality trait now."
"Better than my dad's smoothies. He put spinach in mine yesterday and told me I 'wouldn't taste it.' I tasted it."
They fell into step together without discussing it, the way they always did now, and it wasn't until they reached the classroom door that Loid realized Jay was watching them with the specific, unbearable expression of someone who was about to say something.
"Morning, lovebirds," Jay said.
"We're not—" Loid started.
"I didn't say you were anything. I said 'morning, lovebirds.' You're the one who jumped straight to defending yourself."
Loid opened his mouth, found nothing useful in it, and closed it again. Beside him, Charlotte didn't deny it either. She just rolled her eyes at Jay and walked past him into the room, leaving Loid standing there with the distinct feeling that he'd lost an argument he hadn't even agreed to have.
They sat together, like they had been for weeks now, close enough that their elbows sometimes bumped when they reached for the same pencil case. Charlotte had this habit of tapping her pen against the desk when she was thinking, a soft, absent rhythm that Loid had started noticing more than he probably should. He knew, for instance, that she tapped faster when she was nervous about a test and slower when she was just bored. He didn't know when he'd started cataloguing these things. He just had.
At lunch, they sat at their usual table, the one by the window that nobody else seemed to want, though Loid privately thought it was the best seat in the cafeteria — you could see the courtyard, and in autumn the leaves did this thing where they caught the light on the way down. Charlotte had noticed it too, once, and pointed it out to him without saying anything else, like she assumed he'd just get it. He had.
Across the courtyard, half-hidden behind a pillar, Shaw was watching them.
He wasn't doing anything. Not talking to anyone, not really doing much of anything except standing there with his hands in his pockets, but his eyes kept drifting toward their table in a way that made the back of Loid's neck itch a little. Loid didn't know Shaw well — a year above them, quiet, the kind of person who existed at the edges of every social group without belonging to any of them — but something about the attention felt deliberate. Not friendly. Not hostile either, not yet. Just — noted. Like Loid had been filed away as something worth paying attention to.
"You okay?" Charlotte asked, following his gaze.
"Yeah. Just thought I saw someone."
She glanced toward the pillar, but by then Shaw had already turned and walked off, and there was nothing there but a stretch of empty courtyard and a few leaves doing their slow autumn spiral to the ground.
"Weird," she said, and went back to her sandwich, and Loid told himself it was nothing, because there wasn't really anything else to tell himself. But some small, stubborn part of his brain kept the image anyway — Shaw's eyes, and the two of them at the window table, close enough that anyone looking could probably guess what neither of them had said out loud yet.
After school, they walked home together, which had become such an ordinary thing that Loid almost didn't register it as a thing anymore, except that it was — it very much still was, because his stomach still did something complicated when Charlotte laughed at one of his terrible jokes, and he still found himself slowing his pace so the walk would last a little longer than it needed to.
"Same time tomorrow?" Charlotte asked when they reached her street.
"Same time tomorrow," he agreed, and watched her go, and thought — not for the first time, though maybe for the first time he actually let himself think it clearly — that he didn't really remember what his life had looked like before all of this. Before her.
It was a strange thing to notice about a friendship.
He decided not to think about it too hard. There'd be time for that later, probably. There always seemed to be time, with Charlotte. That was sort of the whole problem, if he was being honest with himself, which he mostly wasn't, not yet.
That night, over dinner, his grandmother asked him — the way she always did, without much preamble — how his day had gone, and Loid found himself talking about Charlotte more than he'd meant to. Not anything specific, really. Just small things. The way she'd laughed at his joke about the smoothie. The window seat and the leaves. His grandmother listened with the particular patience of someone who'd clearly noticed something before he had, and when he finally trailed off, a little self-conscious about how much he'd said, she just smiled and passed him the rice.
"She sounds like a good friend," was all she said, but there was something in the way she said "friend" — a slight, knowing weight on the word — that made Loid feel oddly exposed, like she'd seen straight through to the part he hadn't said out loud even to himself.
"She is," he said, and left it there, because he genuinely didn't have anything else to add that wouldn't have required admitting more than he was ready to.
He thought about Shaw again before he fell asleep — the stillness of him behind that pillar, the way his attention had felt less like curiosity and more like calculation. It was a small, strange worry, easy enough to set aside in the daylight, but at night, in the quiet, it lingered a little longer than it probably should have. He told himself it was nothing. New term, new faces paying attention to new things. That was all it was.
He almost believed it by the time he fell asleep.