Solangelo One Shots

Alone Surrounded by People

This is a request for @Kawaii_Eren_Aot, who wanted a one shot with Will and Nico's moods switched. It's a little hard to explain, but it'll be more understandable in the story itself.

Will's POV

Raucous laughter surrounded me on all sides, the sound of fun all around. I stared around at the lunch table, at the pretty girls and the hot boys and the first thing that popped into my mind was that I didn't belong here, in the midst of people I had been friends with for years but had never truly gotten to know. I didn't belong with these people who bathed in happiness and confidence, who could think of a joke in a second and have it roll off of their tongue as naturally as breathing. The people surrounding me were confident people, pretty people, happy people. And as I stared around at the lunch table, I could tell that I didn't belong. I was the single spot of black paint on a pure white canvas, the stain on a favorite shirt that wouldn't wash out no matter how hard you tried. 

"You good, man?" Brad Johnson asked, clapping me so hard on the back my juice nearly spilled out of the carton. The chatter stopped like someone had flipped a switch and I could feel seven sets of eyes on me, boring into me. Maybe I liked it better when I was ignored. 

"Yeah, just thinking about a test," I lied, the words effortlessly spilling off of my tongue. 

"I feel that, man," Brad said, offering a nod. He turned back to Rachael Goodrich and the conversations around the table resumed and once again I was alone in the middle of a crowd.

During environmental studies I felt a tap on my shoulder and glanced back to see the smiling face of Nico Di Angelo. "Hey," he said, his chipper voice somehow even happier than the day before. "You ready to work on our project?" Even nodding seemed to take a toll on me, my head feeling like a hundred pound weight dragging my spine into a perpetual curve. Nico brought his chair over to my desk and spread out a spiral notebook, small doodles of birds in the margins where the lines of his neat handwriting didn't reach. "Have you made any observations?" Nico asked. "I got some, but you can go first, if you want." I pulled my notes out of my backpack, a crumpled sheet of white lined paper with a few sentences scrawled out, crumpled from being shoved inside of my bag. I smoothed them out on the desk in an effort to make them look slightly less inferior to Nico's. 

"I found a nest near my house," I said, squinting at my handwriting. "It's got berries, some seeds and nuts. We can check it out, if you want." Nico was beaming. 

"Yeah, that'll be perfect!" he said. "Does today after school work for you?" 

"After lacrosse, yeah," I said. I despised lacrosse, but I couldn't skip. "Meet me at the field at three thirty?" 

"I'll be there," Nico said. "Should we go over some of my notes?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, my voice noticeably flatter and duller than Nico's. Nico began talking exuberantly, every movement animated. As Nico talked I found myself wondering how, despite the fact that Nico didn't have nearly as many friends as I had and despite the fact that he didn't have quite as much as I did, he still managed to stay so much happier than me. And then I found myself wondering how, despite the fact that I had so much, I was still so sad no matter how many people I surrounded myself with or how many things I did to fill up the time I was wasting away.

I stepped off of the lacrosse field drenched in sweat and exhausted. Brad waved goodbye to me as he slipped inside of his car, packed with his other friends. While we sat together at lunch every day I wasn't quite close enough to ever talk to him outside of school. I wasn't close enough with anyone to talk to them outside of school. I wasn't sure when I would accept that, that I would always fall just shy of having a real friend. Maybe I never would.