All The Ways I Hate You [Solangelo]

Chapter 3

The rain tapping on Nico's window set the mood for a million things he would like to be doing: sketching, reading, daydreaming—but of course he was writing a social studies report on the life and disappearance of Theodosia Burr. He thought it was interesting, that's why he chose it, but he came alive in the rain and being stuck indoors with the cool water only a few feet away from his desk was driving him up the walls. He let his head sink into his hands and groaned.

The social studies report wasn't important, is what it came to. It wasn't important and in five years he would long for rainy days spent outside sketching at the park he was still technically young enough to be allowed into, so that's what he did. He wrapped his sketchbook in a plastic bag and crawled into the tube slide at the park, light shining through the rainbow plastic and casting the perfect atmosphere into it. He plugged in earbuds and worked for seventeen songs, the scratches of his pencil getting harder with the angry tempos and softer with melodic tunes. He didn't even realize what he was making until the side of Will Solace's head was staring back at him.

It was just his hair, his ear, the curve of his face and neck and the collar of the stupid orange shirt he always wore. It was just these things but they came together to ruin him, just like they did in real life. Nico would always be upset that he could draw Will's ear better than he could draw his face looking straight ahead. It was a testament to stolen glances and the narrowing of eyes whenever Will tried to talk to him.

The sketchbook and pencil seemed to buzz in his hand—and then it stopped. And the world was still saved for the ever faster falling raindrops hitting the plastic tube. The song switched and Neutral Milk Hotel was on. He hated himself for making a playlist with My Chemical Romance AND nmh. The emotional whiplash it caused was one for the record books, but it was appropriate. Will Solace also caused him whiplash for the record books. He dropped the pencil back into the bag and looked for an inking pen. There was none. He'd forgotten it in the rush to get here before the rain turned too much to stand walking in (and now that it was, he didn't want to cross the street just to come back.)

He groaned and was about to flip the page and start something new, something that hopefully wouldn't make him want to cry when he felt the weight behind his ear. It was always there, so a part of him he barely realized it anymore, but there was indeed a cheap office pen hiding just out of sight. He had inked with those pens for years, it wouldn't be a tragedy to fall back into old habits now.

The freckles on Will's face wrapped around it. In fact, they covered almost every inch of it (even though it took a while to notice most of them. Most of them had almost faded into his regular skin tone—but when he came back to school in September of Sophomore year he had a tan that rivaled a god's and all of his freckles stood to attention, and now Nico could never forget where they were.) They were even on the tips of his ears. He couldn't ever get them exactly right on paper, but he tried his best and it seemed like with every new drawing he came closer and closer to accuracy.

The Aeroplane Over The Sea played as he began his inking. It ended sometime before he finished, but he didn't notice. The pen started to die around the time he was outlining the way the rumpled t-shirt fell against his collarbone and wrapped around his neck. He shook it, trying to get the last bit of ink to settle in the nib when he heard the rustling. Nico would always admit that he knew nothing about the world, this was just a fact—but he'd worked with enough stationary to know this was abnormal.

This kind of pen had a back that came off for basic assembly, but he had never considered putting something in it. Wrapped around the cheap plastic ink cartridge was a piece of paper, obviously ripped from a notebook, with the fringes where it attached to the spiral carefully pulled off. He eyed it suspiciously before opening it.

Pieces of sunshine dance in his hair
And His eyes hold enough sunrises for a lifetime together
His eyes have no malice, they just reflect the weather
Except his smile controls the clouds and all the shapes they take
The first person I think of when I wake
And I want to love him, but he just doesn't care

This continued for seven more stanzas, each one more sweet and sadder than the last. When he came to the last line his face was wet and he couldn't blame it on the rain for once.

Who wrote this? Who was it for? How the hell did it get inside of his fucking pen? The questions ran through his head as fast as the next song on his playlist, something fast and raw and loud, completely conflicting with the tone of the poem. And then he remembered. The one person he had lent out a pen to, because he was the only person he would ever lend a pen out to, because he was the only person he could trust to return it. And probably some other reasons he didn't like to think about. It was definitely in the handwriting he had spent hours dissecting after letting Will write the answers to a shared paper on a project in eighth grade before things got unbearable. He still had the paper pinned to a corkboard above his desk, his reason for keeping it being the 98% grade from a teacher who never gave out more than a 86%. That was a lie of course, but his parents didn't care about that.

His whole chest was collapsing in on him, suffocating him in repressed thoughts. Drowning him in a sea of possibilities to overwhelming to consider, too painful to be real. The walk back to his house was wet, but he couldn't tell whether that was from tears or the rain. He hadn't tied the plastic bag up, the edges of his sketchbook were getting
soaked. He wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking of the folded piece of paper he was clutching in the pocket of his hoodie. He was numb. He chalked it up to the cold. Nico di Angelo, ever the reject, ever in denial.