A full day passed, and it was, without question, the longest day Loid had experienced in longer than he could remember.
No messages. No "good morning." No half-formed joke sent at an inconvenient hour just because Charlotte had thought of something and wanted to share it immediately. The absence of all of it sat in his chest like something physical, heavier than it had any right to be for something that, technically, was just silence — the lack of a thing, not the presence of one.
He hadn't realized how much space Charlotte had taken up in his ordinary days until that space was suddenly empty. Small things kept catching him off guard — reaching for his phone out of habit to tell her something and remembering, halfway through typing, that he wasn't going to send it. Walking to his locker and half-expecting to find her there, the way she usually was, and finding nothing but the ordinary hallway noise instead.
Everything felt strangely quiet in a way that had nothing to do with actual sound.
He tried, at one point, to focus on something else entirely — a history assignment he'd been putting off for a week — and found he'd read the same paragraph about trade routes four times without a single fact of it sticking. He gave up eventually, closed the textbook, and just sat there instead, staring at nothing in particular, doing the thing he was apparently very good at now, which was thinking about Charlotte while pretending, unconvincingly, to be doing something else.
Charlotte, on her end, wasn't doing much better, though Loid had no way of knowing that yet. She sat through her classes distracted, answered Emily's questions a beat too late, and generally gave off the unmistakable air of someone whose thoughts were somewhere entirely different from wherever her body currently was.
She kept replaying the argument in her head, trying to figure out what exactly Loid had meant by that one careless sentence, and coming up with half a dozen possible explanations, none of which she liked, and none of which she could actually confirm without talking to him — which was, of course, the one thing neither of them seemed able to bring themselves to do yet. It was a strange kind of stubbornness, she thought, the way two people who usually talked about everything could suddenly go completely silent over something neither of them fully understood.
Emily noticed. Emily noticed most things, in that quiet, patient way of hers.
"You've been weird all day," she said, at lunch, when Charlotte had pushed the same fry around her tray for a solid minute without eating it.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You and Loid usually sit together. You're sitting with me instead, and you keep looking at the door like you're expecting him to walk in and you're not sure if you want him to."
Charlotte set down her fork. "We had a fight."
"About what?"
"I don't know, exactly. He said something weird, and I got upset, and I walked away before he could explain."
"Do you want him to explain?"
Charlotte didn't answer right away, which was, in itself, an answer.
"I think I hurt him," she said finally, quieter now. "Somehow. I don't even know how, but I think I did."
Emily studied her for a moment, the kind of careful, assessing look she gave when she was about to say something she'd clearly already figured out and was just waiting for the right moment to share.
"Do you miss him?" she asked.
Charlotte opened her mouth to say something dismissive, something easy, and found that nothing easy would come. The truth sat right there, obvious and a little embarrassing, and she didn't need to say it out loud for Emily to see it written plainly across her face.
She didn't answer.
She didn't need to.
Emily just reached over and squeezed her hand once, briefly, and let the silence sit there between them instead of pushing further, which Charlotte was grateful for, because she genuinely didn't know what she would have said if pushed. Twenty-four hours without talking to Loid had made something uncomfortably clear to her, something she'd maybe known for a while but hadn't let herself look at directly — that whatever this thing between them was, it had stopped being simple friendship a while ago, quietly, without either of them announcing it, and now that it was interrupted even for a single day, the absence was loud enough that she couldn't pretend not to notice it anymore.
She spent the rest of lunch only half-present, and the rest of the day the same way. In her last class, she caught herself doodling in the margin of her notebook without really meaning to — nothing in particular, just idle lines — and only realized afterward that she'd absentmindedly written Loid's name in the corner and then scribbled over it, embarrassed at herself for a habit she hadn't indulged since she was much younger and much less careful about what she let herself think in ink.
That evening, alone in her room, she found herself picking up her phone the same way Loid had the night before — typing something, deleting it, typing something else, deleting that too. She got as far once as "I'm sorry too" before her thumb hovered over send and then, for reasons she couldn't fully explain even to herself, pulled back. It felt too small for what she actually wanted to say, and too big to send into a silence she wasn't sure yet how to end.
She set the phone down, turned off her lamp, and lay in the dark a long while, thinking about a boy who noticed the way she doodled birds in her notebook margins, and wondering, with a kind of nervous, unfamiliar hope, whether tomorrow might finally be the day one of them stopped being so careful.
Neither of them managed to close the distance first that night. Both of them sat in the same quiet on opposite sides of it, wanting the same thing and unable, for one more day, to say so.