Between Us, Part 9: A Day Without Phones

Between Us, Part 9: A Day Without Phones

The Story Begins

On Monday morning, Class 8.B looked as it always did: half the students had their heads down, their fingers flying over screens, while someone quietly laughed at a video without headphones. Only Nela sat with an open notebook on her desk. In one corner of the page, she was drawing small squares meant to become note boxes, but so far they looked only like crooked windows.

Then the loudspeaker came on so loudly that Filip’s phone jumped from his hand.

“Good morning, students,” began a voice from the principal’s office. “Today, as part of a school project, we are holding a Day Without Phones. Phones must remain switched off and put away in your bags throughout lessons and breaks. Thank you for following the rules.”

At first, there was silence. Brief, startled silence. Then the classroom began to buzz.

“Seriously?” someone called from the back.

“What if my mum messages me?” Tamara asked from by the window.

“Then you can answer after school. Or send her a pigeon,” Filip said, glancing dramatically at the ceiling. “Anyone got a pigeon?”

A few classmates laughed. Filip smiled too, a little too loudly and a little longer than necessary.

Kaja set her phone on the desk as though it had personally annoyed her. “Completely pointless. I honestly don’t know what they’re trying to prove. That we’ll spend the whole morning staring at a wall?”

“Maybe you’ll discover the wall has a personality,” Filip said.

“Maybe you’ll discover that not every one of your jokes has to survive,” she snapped.

The boy looked as though he found that funny, but his smile softened for a moment. Meanwhile, Adam switched off his phone without a word, slipped it into his black backpack, and pulled the zip all the way closed. Then he sat down, leaned back in his chair, and looked ahead.

Nela noticed that his hands lay empty on the desk. Suddenly, her own hands did not know what to do either. Usually, at a moment like this, she would open the class chat, read who was complaining about what, and feel as though the day was somehow moving along without her.

Now everything was right there in the room. Kaja’s furrowed brows. Filip tapping his pencil against the desk. Adam’s calm gaze, never resting on anyone for too long.

Nela wrote in her notebook: Without screens, faces are louder.

After the first lesson, 8.B discovered that it was actually hard to stay quiet without phones. While the teacher explained fractions, whispers drifted from the window. By the door, someone dropped a pen three times. Filip carved a tiny boat out of an eraser and sailed it across his desk until the teacher silently took it away.

“At least tell me whether it sank,” he whispered to Nela.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe it got fined for sailing without permission.”

Filip turned to her. “You can be funny?”

“Sometimes,” Nela said, lowering her eyes to her notebook.

That brief exchange pleased her more than she wanted to let on. Then she noticed Kaja. She sat with an elbow on the desk, staring at the empty space beside her where she usually kept her phone. When two girls near the board started laughing, Kaja glanced at them so quickly that both fell quiet.

“What?” one of them asked.

“Nothing,” Kaja said.

But that “nothing” sounded like a closed door.

When Things Start to Change

During the next lesson, Filip kept trying to make the class laugh. Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he did not. After every weaker joke, he looked around at once, as though waiting to see whether someone would smile, roll their eyes, or look bored. Without the chat, reactions, and tiny icons, no one gave him a quick answer about whether he was doing okay.

Adam sat two desks away. He did not seem bored. If anything, he appeared to breathe more easily than most of the class. When the teacher asked a question, he raised his hand without much hesitation. When someone beside him made a mistake in a problem, he quietly showed them the right method. Even so, he did not join conversations unless someone addressed him directly.

Nela caught herself looking at him more often than she meant to. Maybe because Adam was completely different in the class chat. There, he wrote briefly, sometimes sent only a reaction, and then did not say anything for hours. In person, though, he could listen with such focus that it seemed unusual.

When the bell finally rang for the long break, everyone sprang from their chairs as if they had been released from a room that was too cramped. The corridor was even louder. People who would normally stand beside each other staring at their phones were now talking over one another, bumping shoulders, and looking for something to do with their hands.

Nela stood by the windowsill with Kaja. Filip leaned against a radiator, while Adam stood a little apart by a noticeboard covered with faded pictures from a school trip.

“So, are you surviving?” Filip asked. “I’m starting to hear my own thoughts. Pretty unpleasant.”

Kaja did not even smile. “At least yours come wrapped in jokes.”

“That was a normal joke,” Filip said. “You don’t have to act as if I ate your lunch.”

“Not everything is about you, Filip.”

The boy pushed himself away from the radiator. “I didn’t say it was.”

“You don’t have to. It always ends up that way somehow.”

A group of seventh graders passed them. One nudged another, someone laughed, and their voices faded near the stairs. But among the four classmates, a silence remained that was more uncomfortable than all the noise in the corridor.

Filip ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. What have I done this time?”

Kaja drew a breath as if she had a long answer ready. Then she only shrugged. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

“Sure. When someone says it doesn’t matter, they mean exactly the opposite,” he said.

“And when someone makes a joke, it means they don’t want to say anything real,” she burst out.

Filip’s smile vanished. This time, he could not bring it back in his usual quick way.

Adam shifted as if he wanted to say something, but stopped. Nela knew that, if they had their phones, this might have looked different. Kaja would have walked a few steps away and messaged her: He’s awful. Filip would have thrown some meme into the chat, and everyone would have latched on to something easier. Adam might have sent one neutral reaction. Nothing would have been solved; it would only have disappeared beneath new messages for a while.

Just then, the teacher on corridor duty stopped beside them. “Please don’t stand around by the stairs. And you four, if you’re waiting for the bell, you may as well go back to the classroom.”

Kaja set off first. Nela followed her, but looked back once at the door. Filip stood still, his hands in his pockets. Adam looked at him, then at Nela, as if waiting to see where she would go.

An Important Moment

Back in the classroom, Kaja sat down and began peeling a tiny piece of blue sticker from her pen. Nela pulled her chair closer, though not all the way. She did not know what she should say. Sentences kept coming to her, each one either too gentle or too direct.

Filip came in a moment later. He sat differently from usual, sideways at his desk. Adam placed his backpack on the floor but did not unzip it. His phone remained inside, out of sight.

“Sorry,” Filip said suddenly. It was not clear exactly who he meant. “I just… I don’t know. When it’s this quiet, I feel like everyone can see exactly when I say something stupid.”

Kaja looked up. “Not every joke you make is stupid.”

“That helps a lot,” he muttered.

“That’s not what I meant.” Kaja shrugged. “It’s just that everything is getting on my nerves today. And when no one says anything, I feel as if everyone’s angry with me.”

Nela looked at her. Kaja’s voice was no longer sharp. It sounded tired instead, like someone who had been carrying a heavy bag for too long and did not want to admit that their arm hurt.

“I’m not angry with you,” Nela said.

Kaja looked at her, surprised. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do,” Nela continued, feeling her cheeks burn. “Because when you say that nothing matters, no one knows whether they should stay or go.”

For a moment, none of them moved. Nela wished she could pull that sentence back, hide it in her drafts, and rewrite it better. But there was no delete button in the room.

Kaja put her pen down on the desk. “That was pretty direct.”

“I know,” Nela admitted.

“But probably true.”

Adam rested his palms on the edge of his desk. “Maybe it’s enough if you don’t say it like an attack. Then people can stay.”

They all turned towards him. It was nothing huge, only one sentence, but he said it calmly. Without trying to please anyone and without withdrawing straight afterwards.

Filip nodded. “Okay. So… can we start by not pretending that any of us is completely fine today?”

“You start,” Kaja said.

“I already did.”

“With half a sentence.”

“That still counts as an achievement,” Filip said, but this time he did not smile in a way that covered everything up.

Nela could not help a small smile. Kaja caught it and, after a moment, smiled too. It was not an apology or some grand reconciliation. More like a moment when nobody walked away.

A few minutes later, the teacher arrived and the lesson began. The class was still restless. Someone at the back slid a ruler across a desk, two classmates by the window argued over a marker, and Tamara asked what time it was for the third time. Even so, Nela felt that the air around their desks was a little lighter.

At the end of the school day, the teacher allowed everyone to switch their phones back on. Screens lit up across the classroom at once, and familiar sounds rang out. Messages appeared, phones buzzed in pockets, and someone shouted that they had forty-seven notifications.

Filip took out his phone, looked at the screen, then held it for a while without opening anything. Kaja read one message, frowned, and slipped her phone back into her pocket. Adam did not even take his out.

By the door, Kaja turned to Nela. “Listen, what you said… it wasn’t bad.”

What Comes Next

“That’s almost a compliment,” Nela replied.

“Don’t get used to it,” Kaja said, but her voice no longer had an edge to it.

Filip looked at them. “And me? Can I get used to being less annoying today?”

“That would be too big a school project,” Kaja said.

This time, all four of them laughed, even Adam. But at the stairs, they split up. Kaja left with Tamara, Filip stayed by the lockers, and Adam headed in the opposite direction. Nela stood between them for a moment and felt that something still hung in the air. Not an argument. More like a question no one had said aloud.

That evening, she sat at the desk in her room. Her phone lay off to one side, face down. Nela opened her sticker-covered notebook and stared at the blank page for a long time. Then she wrote that when notifications disappear, people remain. Beneath that sentence, in smaller letters, she added that some things could not be solved in a single chat.

Finally, she stopped, crossed out two words, and wrote at the bottom of the page:

Silence has no back button.