Mrs. Alden had a habit of rearranging the seating chart whenever she decided the class had gotten "too comfortable," which apparently happened about once a semester, usually right when everyone had settled into a rhythm they liked.
She announced it on a Tuesday, reading names off a clipboard in that flat, unhurried voice of hers while the whole class groaned in unison. Loid sat through the recitation half-listening, mentally preparing to end up next to Marcus, who chewed his pen caps and hummed under his breath during tests, when he heard his name paired with one he actually wanted to hear.
"Loid — beside Charlotte."
He didn't react. He was fairly proud of that, actually, the not-reacting, though Jay caught his eye from across the room and grinned like he'd won something.
Charlotte was already gathering her things when he got to the desk, and there was a beat — just a beat — where neither of them said anything, both of them apparently unsure how to behave now that "sitting together" was assigned instead of chosen. It was a strange kind of awkward, the kind that came from something good suddenly having rules attached to it.
"Well," Charlotte said eventually, sliding her bag under the desk. "This is efficient, I guess. Saves us the trouble of choosing."
"Very efficient," Loid agreed, and then couldn't think of anything else to say, so he opened his notebook and stared at it like it contained something interesting.
It took about a day for the awkwardness to wear off, and after that, the arrangement turned out to be dangerously good. They started sharing notes without asking — she'd just slide her notebook toward him when he was writing too slowly, he'd nudge his highlighter over when hers ran dry. Small things. Nothing anyone would notice, except that Loid noticed, because he noticed everything about Charlotte lately, whether he meant to or not.
Like the way she wrote her dates in the corner of every page, always underlined twice. Like the fact that she doodled tiny, terrible cartoon birds in the margins whenever a lecture ran long. Like how she chewed the end of her pen when she was concentrating and somehow made even that look deliberate.
"You're staring at my handwriting," she said on Thursday, not looking up from her notes.
"I'm reading your handwriting."
"You've been reading the same line for two minutes."
He had, in fact, been reading the same line for two minutes, and it hadn't had anything to do with the actual words on the page. He shut the notebook a little too fast.
What surprised him more was realizing Charlotte noticed things about him too — the way he tapped his foot when he was bored, the fact that he always ate the crust of his sandwich last, like he was saving it, some odd little ritual he hadn't known was visible to anyone but him. She brought it up once, casually, like it was nothing, and he'd felt something warm and unfamiliar settle in his chest at the idea that she'd been paying that much attention.
It became a quiet kind of game between them — who remembered more about the other. Neither of them called it that, but that's what it was.
By Friday, the seating chart had stopped feeling like an assignment and started feeling like the way things were supposed to be, and when the final bell rang and the classroom emptied out around them, Charlotte lingered a moment longer than usual, packing her bag slowly, like she wasn't quite ready to leave.
"You know," she said, not looking at him, "I like sitting beside you."
It was such a simple sentence. Six words, nothing dramatic about any of them individually. But something about the way she said it — quiet, almost like she hadn't fully decided to say it out loud until it was already out — made it land differently than it should have.
Loid opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He tried again.
"I like it too," he managed, which felt embarrassingly inadequate compared to whatever she'd actually meant, but Charlotte just smiled, small and a little private, and slung her bag over her shoulder like nothing unusual had happened at all.
"See you tomorrow," she said, and left.
Loid sat there a moment longer, alone in the emptying classroom, replaying the sentence in his head like it might mean something different the fifth time through. It didn't. It meant exactly what it said, which was somehow both a relief and a problem, because now he had to go home and think about why six ordinary words had rearranged something in his chest more thoroughly than Mrs. Alden had rearranged the seating chart.
He didn't sleep especially well that night. He blamed the eggs.
It wasn't the eggs.
He lay there a long time, staring at the ceiling, running back through the small, unremarkable moments of the day like they were evidence in a case he hadn't realized he was building. The way Charlotte's pen had stopped tapping the second he'd said something that actually made her laugh. The birds doodled in the margin that, on closer inspection, all had the same slightly crooked wing, like she'd drawn the first one wrong and then kept the mistake on purpose, out of habit, or maybe affection for her own error. He'd never have noticed a thing like that about anyone else. He wasn't sure he'd ever noticed that much about anyone, actually, not even people he'd known his whole life.
It should have worried him more than it did. Instead it just sat there, warm and a little unwieldy, refusing to be filed away as "nothing," the way he kept trying to file it.
The next morning he got to class early, for no reason he could fully admit to himself, and found Charlotte already there, sunlight cutting across her desk in a long yellow stripe. She looked up when he came in and didn't say anything about it being early, didn't tease him the way Jay would have. She just slid her notebook a few inches toward the middle of the desk, the way she'd started doing without either of them commenting on it, and said, "Morning," like the whole conversation from the day before hadn't rearranged something quietly and permanently between them.
"Morning," he said back, and sat down, and told himself, again, that it was nothing.
He was getting worse at believing that particular lie every time he told it.