Over the next week or so, Charlie noticed he often ran into Nick Nelson in the corridor. And even though they barely knew each other, Nick always smiled and said "hi", like they were friends. He said it in form, too, every morning. Charlie had never noticed before how having someone greet him first thing made the day better, but he did now.
Often, Charlie found himself turning to stare after Nick, thinking what a shame it was that someone that cute was straight. He still had Ben, though, at least occasionally. They didn't meet up as often as they had before the holidays, but Charlie was happy when they did.
One day as Charlie turned the corner to head for maths, he met Nick just coming out of his geography class. He might have gone on by, but Nick stopped short to say "Hi."
"Hi."
"Are you going that way?" Nick gestured in the direction Charlie was, in fact, going.
"Yeah. Maths."
"Same."
They fell into step together. Nick was holding his homework on his arm, focusing on the unfinished problems on the page.
"Are you literally doing your homework while walking to your lesson?"
"I might be."
Charlie laughed. "That's very chaotic."
Nick considered that for a moment, then said, "That makes me sound way cooler than I actually am."
Not in Charlie's view—in Charlie's view, it would have been hard to be cooler than Nick Nelson. On the other hand, he was doing his homework all wrong. "Do you want me to do that for you?"
"No, I'm good."
"I can tell you the answer."
Nick looked up at him with exaggerated earnestness. "Then I won't learn."
As far as Charlie could tell, he wasn't learning anyway. "If you're stuck I can just ..." Charlie reached for the pen. "Let me just ..."
"Get off!" Nick said, laughing. In the scuffle, his pen marked Charlie's hand.
Pointing at the streak of ink, Charlie said, "How dare you?"
"Look." Nick grabbed his hand and made two extra dots above the slash of blue, turning it into a smiley face. "Better?"
Charlie looked at the smiley face and couldn't help smiling to match it. "Maybe."
They went on down the corridor together, Nick returning to his homework. As they turned a corner, Charlie saw Ben coming toward them from the other direction. He smiled shyly and said, "Hey."
"What?" Ben stopped walking and looked at him as if he had no idea who Charlie was.
"Uh ... Just ... hi."
"Why are you talking to me? I don't even know who you are."
Charlie was caught completely off-guard. He hadn't realized that Ben would actually deny knowing him.
Then Ben looked at Nick, and nodded. "All right, mate?"
"Yeah, all right."
If possible, Charlie felt even worse that this was all happening in front of Nick. How awkward. If only he'd kept his mouth shut and just let Ben pass.
Ben walked on by, leaving them there. Nick was looking at Charlie as though he wanted to ask what that was about but was too polite to do so.
"You're friends with Ben?" Charlie asked.
"Uh, yeah. He's in my year. We hang out ... sometimes."
"Oh." Well, no wonder Ben hadn't felt comfortable talking.
Charlie went on toward maths, Nick behind him, still trying to finish his homework.
The next morning, Nick's things were at his seat in form, but he wasn't there. Charlie wondered if that was to do with him, and the awkwardness with Ben from yesterday—until he heard Nick call his name and looked up to see him standing there with blue ink spattered all over his shirt and hands.
"You don't have a tissue, do you? My pen just, uh, exploded."
"I think you're way past tissues. Maybe a bath towel. Dipped in bleach."
"Do you mind coming with me to wash this off? I don't want to get ink all over everywhere."
"Sure." Charlie got up and led the way to the bathroom, opening the doors and turning on the tap.
Nick stuck his hands in the water and started scrubbing, getting plenty of blue on the sink, but with no visible result on his hands. "It's not coming off!" he said at last, after the third thorough scrubbing with soap and water.
"You're going to be blue forever."
Holding up his dripping hands, Nick said, "It looks like I'm wearing blue gloves."
"You can make it the new school fashion," Charlie suggested.
"Or I'll pretend it's a tattoo." Nick grinned.
"Why would anyone tattoo their whole hand blue?"
"Because they're incredibly fond of the Smurfs?" They both laughed, and Nick went back to scrubbing. He never did get the ink off his hands, but at least it wasn't smearing all over by the time they left the bathroom, both of them late to class.
Charlie met his good friend Isaac for lunch at the picnic tables. It was chilly out, but far more private than the canteen. Their friend Tao showed up a few minutes later, setting two bottles of apple juice on the table. "I did it again. I bought Elle's drink. Again."
Their friend Elle had transferred to the girls' school this term after transitioning over the past year. They all missed her, but they hoped she'd be happier there. The same kind of people who had made Charlie's life difficult last year had also harassed Elle. He was glad she, at least, had somewhere else to go.
"Didn't you do that yesterday, as well?" Isaac asked.
"Yes, Isaac. Yes, I did. And on Monday."
"Elle's not here," Charlie pointed out.
"I know."
"She's not been here all week."
"I know. I just keep forgetting."
"Tao, you're allowed to miss her."
"Okay, fine," Tao said. "Obviously it's better that she's at an all-girls school now. You know Mr. Reed was still refusing to call her Elle."
"Yeah. Mr. Reed's a massive transphobe." He wasn't big on gay people, either, unfortunately for Charlie.
"It's still weird, though. There used to be four of us, and now there's only three. Like, four is a group. Three is just a ... trio."
Charlie was listening to Tao, really he was ... but across the field he saw a familiar red head. Nick was playing rugby with some of his friends, and he was very distracting.
Isaac and Tao followed the line of his gaze. "Isn't that Nick Nelson? The guy you sit next to in form?"
"Who?" Charlie asked, although he could tell he wasn't fooling either of them.
"The one who looks like a golden retriever," Tao said.
"He doesn't look like a golden retriever! Okay, he does," Charlie admitted. Golden retrievers were adorable dogs, after all.
Tao laughed. "I can't believe you've been sat next to rugby king Nick Nelson. What are you going to talk about?"
"We've talked!" Charlie protested, thinking of the scuffle in the hall over Nick's maths homework and the way they had laughed this morning about Nick's blue hands. He couldn't stop the smile that spread across his face.
"Really? About what?"
Charlie felt shy talking about how much fun they'd had laughing at the ink incident. "Things."
Tao frowned at him. "Well, be careful."
"What? Why?"
"Why? Look at them."
Charlie did look. Nick was currently being taken down by a crowd of fellow rugby players, all of them laughing and looking like they were having fun.
"Look at us," Tao continued. "We are a group—no, a trio of borderline outcasts. He is the star player on the rugby team, and he's friends with a bunch of loud, gross Year 11s who are exactly like the guys who bullied you last year."
It was hard to argue with the truth of Tao's words. "But, like, Nick ... he's different. He's nice."
"I bet he's a whole different person when he's with his bro dude friends."
Isaac laughed at Tao's fake American accent, and Charlie smiled, but he couldn't stop looking at Nick. There was such an ... exuberance about him, like everything made him happy, and Charlie didn't know a lot of people who looked at their lives that way. He didn't see what the harm was in wanting to be friends with someone like that.