By lunch, the entire school seemed to know.
It wasn't exactly a surprise, given the number of people who'd witnessed Jay's dramatic announcement to the classroom, but Loid still found himself faintly overwhelmed by how quickly the news traveled — by the time he and Charlotte sat down at their usual table by the window, at least three separate people had already come up to congratulate them, none of whom Loid particularly knew well.
"This is what fame feels like," Jay said, sliding into the seat across from them with his tray. "You should be thanking me."
"For what, exactly?" Charlotte asked.
"For pushing this along. Somebody had to. You two would have gone another six months without saying anything if I hadn't kept dropping hints."
"You didn't drop hints," Loid said. "You just relentlessly teased us in front of everyone."
"Same thing. Different delivery method."
Emily arrived a moment later, setting her tray down with considerably more composure than Jay had managed, though the small, satisfied smile on her face suggested she was just as pleased, if less inclined to shout about it. "I'm happy for you both," she said, simply, and there was something in the way she said it — warm, sincere, without any of Jay's theatrics — that meant more to Charlotte than she quite expected.
"Thanks," Charlotte said, squeezing Emily's hand briefly across the table. "For everything, actually. For listening to me talk in circles about this for weeks."
"Somebody had to," Emily said, echoing Jay's earlier line with a small, wry smile, and the whole table laughed.
It was strange, Loid thought, how quickly the strangeness wore off. By the end of lunch, sitting there with Charlotte's hand loosely intertwined with his under the table, it already felt less like a dramatic new development and more like the natural continuation of something they'd been building toward for months. The label had changed. The feeling underneath it hadn't, not really — it had just finally been given permission to exist in the open.
There were adjustments, of course, small and mostly good-natured. Walking to class together now came with an added awareness of who might be watching, an audience they hadn't had to think about before. Sitting close together at lunch drew the occasional knowing glance from other tables. Charlotte found herself, more than once, catching herself mid-sentence trying to figure out the right way to introduce Loid to people who didn't already know — "friend" no longer quite covered it, and "boyfriend" still felt strange and new in her mouth, a word she was getting used to trying on.
"It's weird," she admitted to him that afternoon, as they walked home together — a route that had never felt ordinary exactly, but now carried an entirely new kind of significance. "Having a word for it."
"Weird bad or weird good?"
"Weird good. I think I just need to get used to it."
"Take your time," Loid said. "We've got plenty of it now."
Charlotte smiled at that, leaning slightly into his shoulder as they walked, and Loid felt, not for the first time that day, a small, persistent disbelief that this was actually happening — that the girl beside him, the one he'd spent months quietly, carefully falling for, was now walking beside him as something more than a friend, hand loosely in his, no more almosts left between them.
They stopped, at one point, outside a small shop near the corner of her street, and Charlotte pointed out a display of little paper lanterns in the window, similar to the ones that had hung at the festival.
"We should get one," she said. "For your room. As a souvenir. Of the night we didn't say anything but kind of said everything anyway."
Loid laughed. "That's a lot of meaning to put on a paper lantern."
"It's a very meaningful lantern."
They ended up buying one, a small, somewhat ridiculous purchase that Loid hung in his window that evening, and every time he looked at it over the following weeks, he thought about that quiet corner at the festival, the question she'd asked, the answer he'd given, and the long, winding month it had taken both of them to finally say the rest of it out loud.
That night, lying in bed with the small paper lantern glowing softly against the darkness of his window, Loid found himself scrolling back through old messages between himself and Charlotte, tracing the whole slow arc of it — the early awkward exchanges about homework, the gradual shift into something warmer, the careful, coded conversations that had circled everything they were now finally allowed to say plainly. It felt strange, looking back at it all with the benefit of knowing how it ended. Strange, and satisfying, and a little bittersweet too, the way looking back on any long, hard-won thing usually was.
His grandmother knocked on his door before he fell asleep, checking in the way she always did, and paused when she noticed the small paper lantern glowing in the window.
"New decoration?"
"Charlotte and I got it. From the shop near her street."
His grandmother studied it for a moment, something knowing in her expression. "It suits you both," she said simply, and left it at that, though Loid caught the small, pleased smile on her face as she closed the door behind her, and he fell asleep that night more content than he could remember being in a very long while.
He thought, drifting off, about how strange it was that something as small as a paper lantern could end up meaning so much — a cheap, slightly crooked little object that would probably fall apart within the year, and yet, somehow, exactly the kind of thing he suspected he'd keep long after it stopped working properly, simply because of what it represented. Some things earned their place that way, he thought. Not through practicality, but through the memory stitched into them, the way an ordinary object could quietly become irreplaceable simply because of who had been standing beside you when you bought it.