The new student arrived on a Thursday, which everyone agreed was an unusual day to start at a new school, though nobody seemed to mind once they actually met him.
Ethan Vale had the kind of easy confidence that made rooms rearrange themselves around him without him seeming to try. He introduced himself to the class with a joke that actually landed, remembered everyone's names by the end of the first period, and somehow, within about three days, had integrated himself so completely into their friend group that it was hard to remember what it had been like before he showed up.
He was, by every reasonable measure, likeable.
Loid did not like him.
He couldn't explain why, not at first. Ethan hadn't done anything wrong — hadn't been rude, hadn't been anything other than friendly and a little too good at making people laugh. But there was something about the way he talked to Charlotte specifically that set Loid's teeth on edge, something he couldn't name and didn't especially want to look at too closely.
"He's just being nice," Jay said, when Loid made the mistake of mentioning it out loud. "That's what new people do. They're nice so people like them."
"I know that."
"Then why do you look like you want to fight him?"
"I don't look like anything."
Jay gave him a long, unimpressed stare, the kind that made it very clear he wasn't buying a word of it. "You are jealous," he said, delighted, like he'd solved a math problem he'd been stuck on for weeks.
"I'm not."
"You absolutely are."
"I'm really not."
"Loid. Buddy. You've been staring at Ethan across the cafeteria for five straight minutes and you haven't touched your lunch."
Loid looked down. His lunch was, in fact, untouched. He pushed the tray away like that would somehow undo the evidence.
"It's not jealousy," he said, mostly to convince himself. "I just don't know him yet."
"Sure," Jay said, in the tone of someone who had absolutely no intention of dropping this and was simply choosing his moment.
Loid told himself, repeatedly and with increasing insistence, that Jay was wrong. That there was nothing unusual about noticing a new student, that it was perfectly normal to be a little cautious around someone you didn't know well, that none of this had anything to do with the fact that Ethan had spent most of lunch making Charlotte laugh at something Loid hadn't even heard the beginning of.
It didn't have anything to do with that. It absolutely didn't.
He almost believed it, right up until the end of the day, when he saw Ethan walking beside Charlotte toward the front gates, saying something that made her laugh so hard she had to stop walking for a second, and something twisted, sharp and unfamiliar, low in Loid's chest.
He looked away before either of them could catch him watching.
That night he lay in bed turning the feeling over, trying to find a name for it that wasn't the one Jay had already handed him, and coming up empty every time. He didn't want it to be jealousy. Jealousy implied he had some claim on Charlotte's time, her laughter, her attention — and he didn't. They were friends. That was all they'd ever officially been, all they'd ever actually said out loud to each other, no matter what the hallway rumors thought.
But if that was true, he couldn't explain why the sight of Ethan making her laugh had felt like something had been taken from him.
He fell asleep without an answer, and woke up the next morning no closer to one, only mildly annoyed that Jay was probably going to be smug about this for the rest of the week.
Jay was, in fact, smug about it for the rest of the week.
It didn't help that Ethan turned out to be genuinely good company once you got past the initial reflexive dislike Loid had decided, unfairly, to assign him. He was funny in a way that didn't try too hard, curious about people without being nosy about it, and — most annoyingly of all — he seemed to actually like Loid, going out of his way more than once to include him in conversations, ask his opinion, save him a seat if the group ended up somewhere crowded. It was hard to hold a grudge against someone actively trying to be your friend.
Loid hated that too, in its own small way. It would have been so much simpler if Ethan had been unpleasant. Then the dislike would have made sense, would have had somewhere honest to live. Instead it just sat there, tangled up with something closer to guilt, because Loid knew, somewhere under all the noise in his own head, that none of this was actually Ethan's fault.
"He asked about you today," Jay mentioned once, apropos of nothing, watching Loid's reaction carefully.
"Who, Ethan?"
"No, the janitor. Yes, Ethan. He asked if you were doing okay. Said you seemed kind of off lately."
Loid felt something twist, uncomfortable, low in his stomach. "What did you say?"
"I said you were probably just tired." Jay shrugged. "Didn't think it was my business to say anything else."
Loid was quietly, embarrassingly grateful for that, even as the guilt sharpened a little further. It was one thing to be jealous in the privacy of his own head. It was another thing entirely to learn that the person he'd been quietly resenting had noticed something was wrong and had, apparently, actually cared enough to ask.
He brought it up at least once a day, usually at the worst possible moment — in the middle of a class, or right as Charlotte walked up to join them at lunch, dropping some pointed comment about jealousy and then looking wildly pleased with himself when Loid nearly choked on whatever he'd been eating.
"You're going to get us both in trouble," Loid muttered, after one particularly close call.
"I'm not doing anything. I'm just observing. Observing isn't a crime."
"It's annoying."
"Annoying isn't a crime either."
Loid gave up arguing with him, mostly because arguing only seemed to encourage him, and instead spent the rest of the week trying, with limited success, to act normal around Ethan. It wasn't that Ethan had done anything to earn Loid's coldness — if anything, Ethan seemed genuinely oblivious to it, cheerfully including Loid in conversations, offering him half his lunch once without a second thought, behaving exactly like someone with no idea he'd become the center of somebody else's quiet, ridiculous anxiety.
That almost made it worse. It was hard to dislike someone who was being nothing but friendly. Loid knew that, logically. He knew Ethan hadn't done a single thing wrong, knew the feeling twisting in his chest wasn't Ethan's fault at all, and yet the logic didn't seem to make much difference to the feeling itself, which sat there anyway, stubborn and inconvenient, refusing to be reasoned with just because Loid wanted it to leave.
He caught himself once, watching Ethan laugh at something Charlotte said, and had to consciously unclench his jaw. It startled him a little, how physical the reaction was. He hadn't known jealousy could live in a body like that, tight and wordless, until it was actually happening to him.
He didn't have a name for what to do about it yet. He just kept hoping it would fade on its own, the way most uncomfortable feelings eventually did.
It didn't fade. It just waited for the next thing to make it worse.