By the time Loid arrived at the festival Saturday evening, the school had transformed into something he almost didn't recognize — string lights zigzagging overhead between the buildings, food stalls lined up along the courtyard smelling of grilled skewers and something sugary Loid couldn't place, the whole campus buzzing with a kind of energy that never existed on a normal school day.
He found Jay near the entrance first, already holding some questionable-looking fried thing on a stick, and the two of them wandered together for a while, poking through booths, arguing about which games were rigged (Jay was convinced the ring toss was, on principle, impossible; Loid suspected Jay was simply bad at ring toss).
It wasn't until they'd made a full loop of the courtyard that Loid saw her.
Charlotte was standing near the gymnasium entrance, talking to Emily, and for a second Loid genuinely didn't recognize her — not because anything about her had actually changed, but because she was wearing something different from the plain school uniform he'd grown so used to seeing her in. A soft green dress, nothing extravagant, her hair pulled back in a way that left a few loose strands framing her face, and something about the whole picture of her standing there under the string lights made Loid forget, entirely, whatever he'd been about to say to Jay.
He didn't say anything for a solid five seconds, which was apparently long enough for Jay to notice.
"You alright there?"
"What? Yeah. Fine."
"You're doing the staring thing again."
"I'm not staring."
"You are extremely staring. Your mouth is actually open a little."
Loid closed his mouth, immediately, and felt his face go warm. He was saved from further commentary by Charlotte spotting them and waving them over, and by the time he reached her, he'd managed to arrange his expression into something he hoped looked normal.
"You clean up nice," Charlotte said, looking him over — he'd worn an actual collared shirt instead of his usual t-shirt, at his grandmother's insistence.
"Thanks. You too. I mean — you look really nice. The dress. It's nice."
Charlotte raised an eyebrow, clearly amused at how thoroughly he'd tripped over the compliment. "Are you okay?"
"Yes. Completely."
"You've said three sentences and used the word 'nice' four times."
"I have a limited vocabulary tonight, apparently."
That got a laugh out of her, and the awkwardness broke, mostly, though Loid still caught himself glancing at her more than strictly necessary as the evening went on — while they wandered between booths, while Jay dragged them all toward some ring toss game he was determined to conquer out of pure spite, while Emily insisted on a group photo that none of them were quite arranged properly for.
At some point, without either of them planning it, Loid and Charlotte drifted away from the others, the noise of the festival softening behind them as they found a quieter corner near the back of the school, away from the crowds, where the string lights thinned out and the sky above was actually visible, clear and dark and scattered with more stars than the courtyard's glow usually let you see.
"It's nice out here," Charlotte said, tipping her head back.
"Yeah."
They stood there for a while, not saying much, comfortable in the way they usually were, except that something in the air between them felt different tonight — charged, somehow, in a way Loid couldn't quite name but could absolutely feel, humming under every ordinary word they exchanged.
"Do you ever wonder," Charlotte said eventually, still looking up at the sky, "what would happen if things between us changed?"
Loid's heart did something complicated. He looked at her — really looked, the string lights catching gold in her hair, her expression unreadable but her voice carefully, deliberately casual, like she'd been building up to the question for longer than the sentence itself would suggest.
"Sometimes," he admitted, quiet.
She looked at him then, and for one long moment neither of them said anything else. The distant noise of the festival kept going somewhere behind them — laughter, music, the ordinary chaos of a school having fun — but right there, in that particular quiet corner, it felt like the whole world had narrowed down to just the two of them and whatever unspoken thing was sitting in the space between their shoulders.
Neither of them said anything more. Loid thought, for one wild, terrifying second, that he might actually say something — close the distance, put a name to whatever this was — but the moment passed, the way moments like that sometimes did, slipping by before either of them found the courage to reach for it.
"We should probably get back," Charlotte said eventually, though she didn't move right away.
"Probably," Loid agreed, and also didn't move right away.
Eventually they did head back, walking slowly, neither of them in any particular hurry, and when they rejoined Jay and Emily by the food stalls, Jay took one look at both of them and raised an eyebrow so pointedly that Loid nearly choked on nothing at all.
"What?" Loid said.
"Nothing," Jay said, grinning. "Nothing at all."
Loid decided not to ask further. Some things were better left unexamined, at least for one more night.
He spent the rest of the festival trailing after Jay's increasingly determined assault on the ring toss booth, which Jay eventually lost so thoroughly that the booth attendant offered him a consolation prize out of what looked like genuine pity. Charlotte laughed harder at that than at anything else all evening, and Loid found himself watching her laugh instead of watching the actual spectacle, which he supposed said something about where his priorities had quietly drifted over the past few weeks.
Later, as the crowd started thinning and the lights strung overhead began flickering off one section at a time, signaling the festival winding down for the night, the four of them ended up sitting together on the low wall outside the gymnasium, tired in the pleasant way a full day of standing and walking left you, passing around the last of some sugary drink Emily had bought and not quite ready for the night to be over yet.
"Best festival we've had," Emily declared, stretching.
"Debatable," Jay said. "The ring toss was clearly sabotaged."
"You're just bad at ring toss."
"I am extremely good at ring toss under normal circumstances."
Charlotte laughed again, leaning slightly into Loid's shoulder as she did, an easy, unthinking gesture that sent a small jolt of warmth through him regardless of how casual it clearly was to her. He didn't move away. Neither did she, not right away, and for a moment the four of them just sat there together, tired and content, the last of the string lights glowing gold overhead, and Loid thought, with a quiet certainty he hadn't expected to feel so soon, that whatever this year was turning into, he wouldn't have traded it for anything.
Eventually they all said their goodnights, splitting off toward their separate homes, and Loid walked the last stretch alone with his hands in his pockets, replaying the evening one more time before he let himself stop thinking about it entirely — the quiet corner, the question Charlotte had asked, the answer he'd given without quite meaning to say so much. He didn't know exactly what came next. But something told him it wouldn't be long before he found out.