It happened on a Friday, which felt almost unfair, because Fridays were supposed to be good days, the kind where the whole week's tension was supposed to unwind, not tighten further.
Charlotte found him at his locker after last period, arms crossed, not quite annoyed yet but heading there.
"Okay," she said. "What is going on with you?"
"Nothing's going on."
"You've been avoiding me all week."
"I haven't been avoiding you."
"Loid." Her voice had an edge to it now, sharper than he was used to hearing from her. "You've barely said ten words to me since Monday. You used to talk to me about everything. Now I have to guess what's wrong, and I'm tired of guessing."
He should have told her the truth right there. It would have been so easy — three words, jealous of Ethan, out in the open, and maybe everything would have gone differently. But three words was somehow the hardest thing in the world to say out loud, and instead something else came out of his mouth, something careless and sharp-edged that he regretted the instant it left him.
"You seem to have enough people to talk to now."
The words landed exactly as badly as they deserved to.
Charlotte's expression shifted, hurt flickering across it before she could stop it, and Loid felt sick almost immediately, watching it happen, knowing he'd caused it and not knowing how to undo it.
For a second, neither of them said anything. The hallway around them kept moving — someone's laughter down by the stairwell, a locker slamming somewhere out of sight, the ordinary noise of a Friday afternoon completely indifferent to the fact that something important was breaking right there in the middle of it. Loid wished, absurdly, that the hallway would just stop for a second, give him a moment to figure out how to fix what he'd just said before it went any further. It didn't stop. Nothing ever stopped just because you needed it to.
"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked, quiet now instead of sharp, which was somehow worse.
"I didn't mean—"
"No, say it. What does that mean?"
He opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out. The real explanation — I've been jealous of Ethan for two weeks and I don't know how to say it without sounding insane — sat lodged in his throat, refusing to move, and all he managed instead was a weak, useless, "Forget it."
"Fine," Charlotte said, and there was something final in the way she said it, something that made it clear the conversation, whatever it might have become, was over now. "Forget it."
She turned and walked away, and Loid stood there at his locker, watching her go, feeling like he'd just done something he couldn't take back even though nothing about the moment felt irreversible yet. It felt reversible. It felt like something he could fix tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever he finally found the courage to say what he actually meant instead of the clumsy, wounded version of it that had come out instead.
He didn't fix it that day. He told himself there'd be time.
For the first time since they'd become close, Loid and Charlotte didn't talk that evening. No texts. No calls. Nothing.
He kept picking up his phone and putting it down again, typing out apologies and deleting them before he could send anything, because every version sounded either too small for what he'd said or too big for what he was ready to admit. He fell asleep with his phone still in his hand, the screen dark, no messages waiting, and woke up the next morning to the same silence, heavier now, having had all night to settle in.
It was, he thought, a strange kind of quiet — not the comfortable kind they usually shared, the kind that didn't need filling, but a quiet with a shape to it, sharp-edged and deliberate, the kind that meant something had actually broken, even if just a little, even if it was fixable.
He hoped it was fixable. He just didn't know yet how to start.
Saturday came and went with no word from either of them, both too stubborn or too scared to be the one to break the silence first. Loid spent most of the day in his room, supposedly doing homework, actually staring at the same page of his textbook for the better part of an hour without absorbing a single word of it. His grandmother noticed, of course — she noticed most things, in her quiet, unhurried way — and around dinner she set a plate down in front of him and said, without much fuss, "You look like a boy who said something he didn't mean."
Loid blinked at her. "How do you always know things like that?"
"I've been alive a long time. People who say something cruel out of fear always get that exact look on their face afterward. Your grandfather had it too, more than once." She sat down across from him, folding her hands. "Whoever it was — did you mean it?"
"No."
"Then tell them that. Simply. Don't dress it up, don't explain it away. Just tell them you didn't mean it, and tell them why you said it anyway."
It was, annoyingly, almost exactly what Jay would end up telling him a day later, though Loid didn't know that yet. He just nodded, pushed his food around his plate for a while, and went back upstairs afterward no closer to actually doing anything about it, though the advice sat there, waiting, the way good advice tended to when you weren't quite ready to use it.
He picked up his phone one more time that night, got as far as typing "hey, can we talk" before deleting it for the fifth time, and finally set the phone face-down on his nightstand and told himself he'd sort it out tomorrow.
Tomorrow arrived, and he still hadn't sorted anything out. The silence held for one more day.