Juliet always hated Mondays, but this one was different.
It wasn't just the weather — gray and dull, the sky slouching against the windows like it didn't want to be there either. It wasn't even the endless droning of Ms. Sato's history lecture or the fact that the vending machine still hadn't restocked the strawberry drinks.
It was the silence.
Not silence, exactly — there were whispers and papers rustling, the scrape of chairs on tile. But something was off.
Something was missing.
It took Juliet until second period to realize what it was.
Aya's desk.
Empty.
She stared at it longer than she meant to. The plastic seat, slightly scuffed. The corner of the desk where Aya used to rest her elbow. Gone was the doodled sticker Aya had secretly taped underneath the ledge — a faded drawing of a frog with a little crown.
Gone was Aya.
She was just… gone.
Juliet blinked, looked away.
Maybe she was sick. Or got detention. Or—
But she didn't come back the next day either.
Or the next.
It wasn't like Juliet missed her.
Not really.
It's just… they'd been glued together for so long. Ever since they were kids. Aya was always there. Always smiling too much, laughing too loud, crying over things that didn't matter. Juliet used to love that about her. She used to think Aya was made of starlight and glue — soft and warm and impossible to shake.
Then people started to watch them.
And Juliet started to care.
That was the first fracture.
She remembered the day someone from the group chat made a joke about "two little girlfriends" walking down the hall. Juliet had laughed too hard. Too loud. She didn't look at Aya the rest of that day.
Then came the parties. The gossip. The pressure. The slippery slope where pretending became easier than staying.
Juliet told herself she was surviving.
Aya just didn't get it.
Weeks passed.
Juliet barely noticed she wasn't laughing at her friends' jokes anymore. That their group chat now annoyed her more than entertained. That she stopped sending voice notes and only reacted to messages with empty hearts and fire emojis.
She scrolled through her phone one night and realized Aya's name wasn't there anymore.
Not even in her blocked list.
Just… erased.
Her chest twisted.
It got worse in the art room.
They had to do a comic assignment. Juliet never cared for drawing, but she sat beside Yuka, pretending to sketch while listening to gossip fly around the room.
Then she heard someone from the back say, "That new girl, Aya? She's actually good. Her work's like… emotional. Makes you feel stuff."
Juliet didn't even mean to turn around.
"Aya?" she said.
The girl blinked. "Yeah. She transferred from the city or something. Real quiet. Always drawing."
Juliet's throat went dry.
She was here?
Aya was still in the same city?
Still existing, still breathing, still creating things that made people feel?
That night, Juliet didn't sleep.
She scrolled through old photos she told herself she had deleted. Aya's smile in the park. The time they made a birthday cake together — the icing had collapsed, but they laughed for hours. Voice memos Aya had sent at 2 a.m. about comic ideas, or a dream she had about growing wings and flying away.
"Do you think we'll always be like this?" Aya's voice whispered through her earbuds, soft and hopeful. "Even when we're older?"
Juliet had replied, "Of course. Always."
She shut her phone off.
Threw it across the bed.
Covered her face with her pillow and cursed herself for ever thinking that being popular meant being happy.
The next morning at school, her group laughed about something Aya had posted in middle school — an old video they'd found buried online. Something dumb, something innocent.
Juliet didn't laugh.
She stared at them instead, at their perfectly styled hair and fake laughs and plastic voices.
Then she stood up.
"I'm not doing this anymore," she said.
They blinked, confused.
"What?"
Juliet grabbed her bag.
"I said I'm done."
And then she left.
Right in the middle of lunch.
Right in the middle of everything.
She walked home.
No music. No messages. Just the pounding of her feet on concrete and the rush of blood in her ears.
Why did it take losing Aya to realize how small her world had become?
Why did it take silence to realize how loud Aya's presence used to be?
She wanted to see her.
Wanted to say something.
But what would she say?
Sorry I told you we didn't matter?
Sorry I let them laugh at you?
Sorry I pretended you were nothing when you were everything?
Juliet didn't know where Aya lived anymore.
She didn't know if Aya would even want to see her.
But in that moment, standing outside their old middle school, staring at the bench where they used to share lunch, Juliet felt something sharp twist in her ribs.
Regret.
Real. Crushing. Ugly.
She sat down.
The wind brushed through her hair. The sun tried to break through the clouds, but it couldn't. Not yet.
She closed her eyes and whispered, like a prayer:
"I miss you, Aya."
And for the first time in weeks, she meant it.