This is just a little indulgent AU that happened because I was curious about what would have happened if Nice met someone like himself when he was back at Allister High. And like most things I do, it later ballooned. Willow is getting his own book at some point, but I thought it might be nice if you could meet him the same way I did, here.

1

Willow reminded Ren of Nice. He was thin and graceful, modelesque. He looked out of place in their school uniforms, like a model who had wandered off the set of a high school-themed shoot and into Allister High. He wore the school shorts, which none of the boys did, opting for the plain, stiff, boring navy slacks instead. Even Nice wore the slacks.

Willow carried it off, though. His legs were smooth, slim and pale beneath the khaki-colored shorts. The caps of his knees were bony and somehow attractive. Even the hair on his legs was so light that it was almost invisible. They looked almost like girl legs.

He had long, chestnut-colored hair tied up in a messy half-bun behind his head, part of the hair caught up in a loop and the rest of it trailing softly down to curl around the nape of his long neck. He sits by the window in the back of the class, biting the back of his pen lightly and staring out the window at the quad below.

There was one key difference, though, between Willow and Nice—Ren had never liked Willow.

He was always weirdly afraid of Nice and Willow interacting too much. Maybe it was because they were too much alike, like he had this sense that Willow would steal Nice away from him.

He brought it up one day when they were sucking bubble tea through straws out in front of the strip mall’s cinema, Nice’s long, skinny legs stuck out in front of him while they both sat on the curb.

“Hey.”

Nice’s head was tipped back, his light, pale white hair loose and spilling around his shoulders, swaying softly every time the breeze blew. His eyes were lightly closed while he enjoyed the feeling of the sun on his face. He usually didn’t, but the sun was so weak today, its touch so gentle. He figured he could indulge for just a minute or two without tanning. He’d go seek shade in a second.

“Mm,” Nice mumbled in lazy acknowledgment, caught in the languid torpor of such a sleepy afternoon. His drink melted softly on the warm pavement beside him, its condensation steadily seeping into the sidewalk and trickling lazily down off the curb.

“What do you think of that guy in our class?”

“What guy?”

Nice felt too good. He didn’t want to open his eyes, and Ren’s words just skimmed lightly over the surface of his mind, like dragonflies buzzing across the water. They were both 16 that year, at the height of their coltishness. Nice had turned 16 first with Ren tripping along not far behind.

“You know, that guy.” Ren found himself stubbornly reluctant to say his name, but then describing him outright would be worse, as if putting that guy into words would somehow make it clear to Nice just how alike they really were. How much better suited to being Nice’s friend he was than Ren. “Willow.”

“Hm?” Nice finally blinks open his eyes, thinking that perhaps his skin feels a little too hot. He touches a hand to his cheek. “Willow?” It takes him a second to place a face to the name. “I don’t know, he seems alright, I guess. Why?”

There’s so much comfort in this, in Nice’s oblivious apathy. The nervous, clutching part of Ren steadily calms down. Maybe he was being silly after all.

“No reason,” Ren says, and he slurps at his drink.

* * *

What Ren had said piqued his curiosity. The next day at school, Nice found himself looking in Willow’s direction. He was sitting by the window, and the sun was shining through the panes of glass in such a way as to light up Willow’s grey eyes.

Nice found himself caught in their depths for a moment, looking at the veins of greenish light that seemed to be shot through. Then the moment ended, and Willow blinked.

“Can I help you?” he asked Nice, tossing his pen onto the desk.

Nice glanced toward the front of the room. The teacher wasn’t here yet. Math problems from last period were still scrawled across the green chalkboard in white chalk and a messy hand.

“Can I sit here?” Nice asked, trailing his fingertips along the desk next to Willow’s.

Willow nodded his head, a go ahead gesture.

Math class is math class. It’s eternally whatever.

Afterward, Willow turns to look at Nice. Nice is a lot of things, but one thing he’s never been is shy. He lets Willow look just fine.

“What’s your deal?” Willow asks. They’re both still sitting in their chairs long after all their other classmates have filtered out into the bustling hall.

Some people curiously turn to look on their way out the door, wondering what was the deal with the two class beauties getting together like that.

“Maybe it’s some kind of weird star alignment thing,” one of the girls whispers to the other.

“You think?” her friend asks dubiously, clearly buoyed by the glee of hot gossip.

The first girl shrugs. “Who knows.”

At the back of the class, these two beauties are in a casual stare-off with each other. Nice sits back in his seat. “What do you mean what’s my deal? What’s your deal?”

“I’m just trying to get out of high school, counting down the days to graduation like everyone else.” Big words for a sophomore. Willow leans back in his chair, tipping it so far back that its front legs leave the ground. “You too? Are you just an ordinary high school student pushed by the tides of first through seventh period bells, skipping your homework and skimming by until you can blow this popsicle stand?”

Nice snorts lightly through his nose. “You’re weird. Who talks like that?”

“I do. So, are you gonna tell me, or are you going to scamper back along to your little redheaded friend?”

Nice feels a spark catch in his chest at that exact moment. He can’t tell if it’s like or dislike. Something about the meeting of him and Willow made friction—Willow’s attitude rubbed him in all the wrong ways, like a cat with its fur sticking up.

Nice says, “Whatever, you’re weird. What are you doing after school?”

Ren was surprised when Nice texted him and said he wouldn’t be going home with him.

Detention again? Ren texted back, and Nice said

something like that

Ren checked the clock on his phone.

You want me to wait for you?

nah

So that was that. It’s not like Nice had never gotten detention before. Usually for wearing his uniform wrong. Ren flipped his phone shut and stuck it back in his pockets.

2

Willow looked Nice up and down when they met out front the school gates after school.

“Is that what you’re wearing?”

Nice is still in his uniform slacks, his tie loose around his neck with the first few buttons of his collared shirt open.

Nice holds up a bag of clothes.

“Hurry up and go change,” Willow urges. “I don’t want to be seen with you like that.”

Nice snorts. “What’re you wearing?”

Willow flashes open his backpack like it’s full of contraband. Nice sees a t-shirt and a flash of candy-colored buttons.

“Whatever,” Nice says, his brow creasing. “Go change, too, then, if you’re going to make a big deal out of it.”

They disappear to two separate bathrooms and meet out front the school once again, eyeing each other’s outfits skeptically but thinking with a sigh, I guess you’ll do.

They hit the mall looking like a couple of off-duty models. Nice is long and leggy in his slim-fit jeans and narrow black t-shirt, and Willow looks like a cool, tall drink of ice water. The shirt he’s wearing is a kind of awful pukey green with rude-looking smiley faces decorating it at the breast and hem. It’s oversized on him. He does look cool, though, Nice has to grudgingly admit. With the bucket hat covering his pretty brown hair, looped lazily into a low ponytail, with the bright can badges pinned all over the hat, he looks kind of like a candy raver.

Willow takes Nice’s hand as they walk through the mall, easily looping his fingers around Nice’s wrist to pull him along.

“You want to hold hands with me?” Nice asks with one pale eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, so what? Why, does it bother you?”

He thinks about it, and it doesn’t. Nice answers by pulling his wrist out of Willow’s hand. Willow waits with patient indulgence to see what he’s going to do. A second later, Nice fits his fingers in the slots between Willow’s, threading their hands together without another word.

If you’re going to hold my hand, you could at least hold it properly.

They walk through the mall, looking at all the various stores.

It would be too cliche to walk into the clothing stores. Allister’s got kinda crappy selections, anyway. They walk past a bright and cheery candy shop, and Willow tugs on Nice’s hand, the link between them like a rudder.

“I wanna go in here.”

“Hm? Okay.”

Nice isn’t very interested, but he follows Willow in anyway. There are rows of clear plastic dispensers with white plastic scoops attached, filled with brightly colored mixes of every kind of candy imaginable. In the center, there are shelves filled with boxed candies. Still connected by the hand, Nice can’t do anything but follow behind Willow as he’s tugged over to one of the shelves of candy.

Willow lets go of his hand to grab a clear plastic bag. He picks a second one up and hands it to Nice.

“Get something. I’ll buy it for you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Nice says. It comes out acerbic, but the way he feels… he’s a little at a loss confronted with rows and rows of gleaming sugar. These are the kinds of places he and Ren always sneer at as a waste of money.

Willow feels no such compunctions. Despite the brightly colored accents on his outfit, he doesn’t look like he belongs here, either. He picks up a scoop and puts a few confetti-colored jawbreakers in his bag, moving on to grab some big, blue gummy sharks the teal-blue color of the ocean. Nice looks dubiously at the candy and puts a couple of candy Lego bricks into his bag. They hit the bottom with a couple of dull smacks.

Willow is having a great time, feeling like the maestro of the candy store, mixing a little bit of this and that into his bag to some arcane specifications that exist solely in his head.

“Don’t just grab the first thing you see,” Willow snipes at him. “Get stuff you actually want. I’m not paying for it just to pay for it.”

Nice wonders if Willow is rich or middle-class, or what. Nice isn’t—rich, really. He knows Lydia worries about money sometimes. She tugs absently at her hair and worries about it aloud to him in the bad months, the months when none of her paintings will sell, but Nice never really feels it. His grandpa left the apartment to his mom when he died, so they always have a place to live. They always have food to eat, too. It’s not like they need much.

Once when he was a little kid, he kind of remembers all of the lights in the house going off for a couple days.

Lydia had dragged their pillows into the living room and set up a blanket fort over the backs of the chairs and the back of the sofa. She’d gotten flashlights from the junk drawer, and red tapered candles from the kitchen had glowed on top of the kitchen table and the counters.

“Let’s sleep here tonight,” Lydia had said, pushing her face close to Nice’s little face until their noses booped together and it made him giggle and touch his nose. “Let’s pretend we’re camping,” she said conspiratorially.

Nice can understand at this point that the electric company had shut their power off. It doesn’t make that moment any less magical.

Nice is spacing out in the middle of a candy store, clutching a bag with a couple of candy Legos in primary colors at the bottom of it.

Willow looks at him, tilting his head, and Nice ignores it.

He looks around the store, looking for something he actually wants.

Something he wants, huh?

He’s drawn to this big, stupid-looking lollipop. It’s the kind of lollipop you see in cartoons, swirled with cotton candy pink, baby blue, and yellow. It looks like a dream, wide and flat and as big as a tea saucer.

“You like it?” Willow asks.

“No.”

Nice frowns. For some reason, he can’t pull his eyes away from it, though.

Willow looks from Nice to the lollipop, studying the look on his face. After another second, he picks it up off the shelf and puts it in Nice’s hand, wrapping his thin, spindly fingers around it to make him hold it.

“I told you, I don’t like it.”

“You want it, though?”

It’s really ridiculous. It would probably take him days to actually eat it. It would probably make him feel sick.

The air inside the candy store is ridiculously cold for some reason. It blows around them and raises goosebumps on Nice’s arms.

In the end, he walks out of the store with a couple of candy Legos and a big, dumb lollipop clutched in one hand, the other tucked into Willow’s jacket pocket. Willow needs both of his hands at this point, because he’s hellbent on tossing pieces of multicolored sugar in his mouth as they walk through the mall, looking at all the stuff.

“Why’d you buy so much candy?” Nice asks.

The long, thin cellophane bags come tied with a shiny gold twist-tie, a twist-tie that’s currently twined around Willow’s little finger like a cheap carnival ring. It looks unfairly good on him, teenage and punk, but also still pretty.

Willow actually does think about it.

“I wanted to visit a candy store with you.”

“Weirdo.”

Maybe it’s because Willow keeps munching on candy sharks and Sno Caps, pretty, neat little sweets disappearing behind his white, even teeth. He’s taller than Nice, and it’s weirdly nice, in a way, to have someone taller and skinnier than him to look up to. He looks at the side of Willow’s long, narrow nose with its bump on the bridge and wonders if Willow is prettier than him.

Willow makes him feel weird, and it sort of makes it easier to act weird. To do things he wouldn’t normally do, to not think too hard about it. He’s weirdly sure that that’s exactly what Willow wants. Nice doesn’t really know him; he kind of makes Nice feel on edge.

Ren never makes him feel like that. Ren only ever makes Nice feel soothed… and maybe sometimes a little trapped.

Nice follows a little fleeting urge and pinches the wrapper on his lollipop open.

It tastes kind of like lemon when it touches his tongue. There’s no good way to eat it, so he sucks on an upper corner, fastening his lips to it and licking along its ridges lightly. It clicks against his teeth, hard and slick and shiny.

“Good?” Willow asks. “You look good like that.”

“Mm,” Nice says. Maybe it’s an answer to one thing or the other. “Take a picture, then.”

Willow takes his phone out of his pocket and snaps a picture of his new friend. He leans over and steals a taste of Nice’s candy, fastening his mouth to it and sucking some of the lemon-flavored sweetness from the gooey part of its softening surface.

Before Nice can complain that Willow took some of his candy, Willow preemptively reaches into his bag and stuffs a couple of gumdrops into Nice’s mouth. In the time it takes him to chew them and swallow, Willow has already pulled back.

He licks his lips while Nice coughs at the sugar crystals he’d accidentally inhaled.

“Not bad.”

3

They hang around the mall until it starts to get late, until the neon lights outside turn on and the parking lot lights flicker to life. The stores inside are starting to shutter, heavy metal grates rolling down to seal off individual shops as the Allister mall turns into a ghost town.

This is later than Nice usually stays out with Ren. Usually Ren has to get back to have dinner with his family.

“You don’t have to go back home?” Nice asks Willow. This is the most honestly curious he’s sounded about anything to do with him all day.

“No. Do you?”

“Not really.”

The lollipop from earlier is crudely wrapped back in its original packaging, probably getting something kind of sticky inside Nice’s backpack. His stomach growls distantly, mostly knowing better than to bother him. So much sugar on an empty stomach has unsettled it.

“Let’s walk around for a while more, then,” Willow says.

Nice shrugs. “Okay.”

The mall isn’t any fun when it’s actually closed. The security guards will come to chase them away soon, anyway.

“Want to climb onto the mall roof?” Willow asks.

Nice stares at him. “No?”

“Come on, it’ll be fun. There’s barely any actual climbing required.”

“What are you, a secret hoodlum or something?”

“What are you, a square? Come on, I want to do something fun.”

Nice is dubious as Willow leads him around to the back of the mall building. The mall in Allister isn’t very tall. It’s a single-story building with a wide, flat roof. Nice has heard that some of the kids in gangs like to climb up there to smoke. Sometimes you can smell the scent of pot wafting down. He’s tried pot before. He didn’t like it very much.

“Are you a secret pothead?” Nice asks.

“No,” Willow laughs.

There’s a place where you can climb onto the lid of the dumpster and grab onto the fire escape ladder to get up to the roof.

“Come on, it’s pretty safe. Even if you fall, you’ll probably just twist an ankle.”

“I don’t want to twist an ankle.”

“So don’t fall. Just don’t let go of the ladder.”

As if anyone ever means to fall. As if a lack of strength is a lack of will power. Well, they’re both young and strong.

Willow’s legs are long enough to make getting on top of the dumpster no trouble at all. Nice struggles a little more, and the plastic of the cover feels flimsy and soft beneath his feet. He watches Willow’s lean, retreating back as he shimmies up the ladder. His shirt is big on him, but every now and then, a strong breeze blows, and it lifts the fabric up, letting Nice see his nipped, thin waist.

“This is stupid, and I don’t like it,” Nice mutters under his breath. The words are instantly carried away on the wind.

As soon as Willow has vacated the ladder, Nice stretches his hands up. He takes a deep breath and makes a little jump, feeling his stomach plummet down to his feet in the instant before his hands wrap around the bottom rung of the ladder. His breath catches in his throat, his exhale into the gloaming night suddenly loud and close by his ears.

Willow’s eyes sparkle from up above as Nice grunts and pulls his upper body up enough to grab the side of the ladder with his other hand. The metal of the fire escape is corrugated and a little rusty in parts. He feels small splinters of metal bite into his skin. His hands are so thin, faint muscle wrapped over bone, that there’s no padding at all.

It’s difficult to pull himself up. He has to strain for it, the bottom half of his body twisting in the air like a lithe, hooked fish.

With a grunt of effort, he finally manages to haul his body up, all of his abdominal muscles crunching together with a searing burn. When he finally gets his sneakered toe over the bottom rung, it finally gets easier to push himself up. He’s only a little out of breath as he finishes climbing the ladder and flopping himself kind of ungainily over the roof.

Willow just watches him and doesn’t help him at all.

Nice stands up, breathing out and letting the adrenaline flow through him. This is such a stupid, bone-headed thing to do. The night air feels so crisp and clean in his lungs.

They stay up there until Nice’s fingers go numb. Until—

“Hey! What are you two doing up here?”

A beam of light from the security guard’s flashlight finds them. Nice squints against the bright glare. Willow doesn’t say anything, although he’s clearly been the more talkative of the two of them all night. It’s like he’s waiting for Nice to say something, so Nice finally does.

The security guard, at least, is impatiently waiting for an answer.

“Sorry,” Nice says. “Our friends dared us to climb up here.”

The security guard huffs. “You can’t be up here. It’s off-limits. Besides, what if you got hurt?”

“Sorry,” Nice mumbles again.

“I’m not going to call the cops, but I should at least call your parents.”

Maybe he misinterprets the look that passes between Willow and Nice at that—calling their parents isn’t much of a threat at all, but he doesn’t need to know that. Maybe he misinterprets the look as fright.

“Well, we can talk about that later. Come on, come on, get down.” He waves his flashlight at them, moving slowly so they don’t decide to freak out at the last second and jump or something.

Nice swings his legs over the concrete lip of the ledge, touching down onto the roof, while Willow does the same with his longer legs beside him. The security guard blinks momentarily, thinking these are some really good-looking kids. At first, he’d mistaken the smaller one for a girl, but he’s definitely a boy, judging from the sound of his voice. He wonders briefly if they’re famous or something.

Nice and Willow let the security guard herd them back inside and down through the service stairway. It’s quiet inside. Their footsteps echo in the enclosed concrete space. Willow thinks distantly that this seems like the kind of place where people get raped.

When they get downstairs, the security guard thinks of asking for their parent’s contact information but then lets them off with a warning. He chides himself for being too soft while he looks into their bright eyes and says, “Don’t do it again. And go home right now.”

They bob their heads, saying yes, thank you. Sorry, we don’t do it again.

They’re not halfway across the parking lot before Willow picks up Nice’s hand again. Willow reaches out and grabs Nice’s wrist, ringing his fingers around it. All the fingers on his hand are long and spindly. The skin clings tight to the bone, to every ridge of knuckle. His fingernails are blunt and rounded, cut into short little half-moons.

Nice huffs out a breath through his nose, tugging his hand back lightly. Willow lets himself be pulled, and the connection between them doesn’t break.

“Your wrist is squishy.”

He presses his thumb into the underside of Nice’s wrist and feels tendon and warm muscle giving way beneath his touch. Nice registers the light, steady pressure, and then it’s gone.

Willow takes his hand back, and Nice rubs his thumb along the place on his wrist where he can still feel the echo of Willow’s touch.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, his lips pulling into a flat line.

“Nothing,” Willow shrugs.

4

Willow skips school.

He skips again.

Eventually, someone has to bring him his homework.

Nice doesn’t know what he’s expecting when he opens the door to Willow’s room. Whatever it is, it isn’t what he sees. Willow’s room… it seems like it could be nice, most of the time. Clean and neat and elegant—and a little eclectic, just like Willow.

Right now it looks like a disaster zone. There are wrappers strewn over the floor. Nice recognizes the empty plastic bag from the time they went to It’Sugar together. There are plates with the remnants of food stacked haphazardly in… no real recognizable order. Some of them clatter against the top of a messy desk. A few others line the floor beside Willow’s bed, like he finished them and couldn’t find the strength to do more than put them wherever they lay.

Clothes are piled on the floor. A mint-green jacket dangles from the back of Willow’s computer chair by its arm. And there in the middle of the mess is Willow, lying prone and motionless on the bed. It takes a little while for Nice to find him in all the mess. More to the point, it takes Willow a while to actually move. When he does, it’s a slow, glacial thing. He turns his head to the side slowly, peeking out from behind the cradle of his long, lanky arms.

His hair is a mess. Even from here, Nice can tell it’s dirty. It’s strewn tangled and listless across his face.

“Ngh,” is all the greeting he manages for Nice.

The air in the room feels cold against Willow’s exposed skin. Goosebumps rise on the back of his arms, and he regrets pulling them out of the covers. Distantly, rationally, he knows it’s not actually cold in this room, just like he knows he’s burning up. On a truer, realer, more animal level, he knows he’s cold and wants to go back to the stuffy, hot, suffocating warmth beneath his piles of blankets, lying in his own filth. He knows his bed is starting to smell, but he finds the smell of himself comforting.

His teeth chatter.

He doesn’t really care if Nice sees him this way. At this point, he doesn’t really care about anything.

It’s dark in here. It takes Nice’s eyes a second to adjust when he shuts the door behind him. He has to wait by the door until they do. He doesn’t want to crash into anything.

To the left of the bed, Nice sees a lamp shattered to pieces like it’s been shoved off the nightstand. He’s careful of the glass when he moves.

“Did my parents let you in?”

“Um. I think it was a maid, actually.”

Willow grunts.

Nice is a little mystified by the difference between Willow’s room and the rest of the house. The rest of the house is neatly kept, spotless without feeling sterile, kind of like something out of one of the magazines that Nice used to page through lying on the floor of Lydia’s studio. Willow’s room is a stark difference, a dull and stuffy cave.

That’s because Willow hasn’t let anybody in his room through all of this. Not to clean, not to touch any of his stuff, and certainly not to witness him.

He doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Nice. The room lapses into an awkward silence.

“You shouldn’t leave glass lying on the floor,” Nice says. “You might get hurt.”

“Thank you for the concern~”

Willow’s voice takes on a weird, eerie, hollow sound. He already knows Willow isn’t going to do anything about it, isn’t going to clean the glass up out of the carpet.

He sees a pair of house slippers beside the mattress and figures that at least Willow won’t cut himself.

Nice finally approaches the bed, and Willow takes that as his cue to roll over with great effort. He ends up in a sprawl, with hair in his mouth and his body twisted in the blankets.

“You like me better when I’m medicated,” Willow says, rolling his head to the side like it’s too much effort for him to lift it up. It is. It really, really is. He snorts lightly. “Everyone likes me better when I’m medicated.”

Nice… he’s not top of the class. He’s never going to be some kind of brilliant genius. Even so, the pieces rapidly reconfigure themselves in his mind, everything he knows about Willow. So he’s on medication, okay.

He finds a spot, sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. “I haven’t seen you, so how would I know?”

Willow doesn’t seem to mind it because he doesn’t bitch at him. Or maybe Willow when he’s like this can’t bitch at Nice, even if he doesn’t like it. I guess it’s a risk Nice just has to take.

He looks at Willow lying listlessly on the bed. He’s tall in person. When he’s laid up like this, he seems to be all limb, lankier, like all that height has nowhere to go. Willow stares listlessly back. His grey eyes shine unhealthily.

“Is there a reason you don’t want to take your meds?” Nice asks gingerly.

“Would you believe me if I said I don’t like the way they feel?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

Willow pushes himself up with a tiny grunt of effort.

“Well then, I hate it. I hate feeling like my head’s stuffed with cotton, like there’s a barrier between me and the rest of the world. It makes me want to hurt myself, you know. It makes me want to stab myself to see if I can pry out the part that feels wrong.”

Willow sounds a little more alive just then. There’s a flash of vehemence, there and then gone. It blows through him like a vicious wind. It leaves him feeling hollow again like a wind-swept house.

If only Nice had come to see him when he was manic instead.

Nice wishes for a minute to hand Willow a knife so he can do what he wants. He blinks, and then it passes. He still hasn’t said anything, just standing there like he’s dumb.

Willow sways a little bit, feeling weak and woozy. It’s been too long since he’d eaten.

He waves a tired hand. “If you don’t want to deal with me like this, don’t worry. You can just leave. They’re going to make me take my meds again as soon as they can get a hold of the psychiatrist to adjust my dose. I’ll be back to normal in a week.”

He pushes his hand through his hair. Even like this, unshowered, unfocused, and unkempt, Nice thinks that Willow is still so beautiful.

He’s still standing there.

“Get out of here, Nice.”

Willow sounds so tired.

Nice purses his lips. He wavers, but ultimately he gets up and does what Willow says. He’s so used to doing what people say, what people want.

But what is it? he thinks about Willow. What is it that you want?

* * *

Willow isn’t at school for the rest of the week. Nice hangs out with Ren, who treats him with kid gloves, like he’s afraid to do or say the wrong thing that might set Nice off, that might lead to Nice not hanging out with him again.

Nice looks over at the empty desk in the back of the room from time to time. He can’t figure out what the confused feeling swirling in his gut is, exactly.

Willow was right in his estimates. He’s back at his desk not a week later, sitting at his desk looking elegantly disheveled, and pristine, and untouchable. Looking at him, it feels like the version of Willow he’d seen that night in his room had been something he’d made up, some kind of shameful, sick fantasy. Willow maybe looks a little thinner, but he’s still far from gaunt. His skin is as smooth and clear as glass, stretching over his cheekbones and curving over the long, graceful bones of his face.

His lashes are long and rich as they sweep against his cheeks, like little mink trims. He’s a little wan, and there are the traces of dark circles beneath his eyes.

Nice bumps into his desk with one skinny leg, and Willow looks up at the sudden commotion.

“Hey,” Nice says.

“Hey, yourself.”

Willow’s voice is a little scratchy, a little tired.

Nice thinks about that night, in Willow’s bedroom. He puts the memory firmly away and doesn’t ask.

“Do you wanna come over to my house after school? We can play video games.”

Willow tips his head to the side. His hair that’s tied up in a messy ponytail drapes cleanly around his neck. “What game did you have in mind?”

“Smash Brothers?”

Willow shrugs. “Yeah, okay.”

After class, Nice gets the especially unenviable task of uninviting Ren.

He does it, and Ren looks devastated, and Nice pretends he doesn’t see it. He’s kind of a bad person that way.

Later, in Nice’s house, they end up talking about it, raiding Lydia’s weed stash and splayed out beneath the kitchen table, arms stretched out to the sides and their fingers just barely touching. The noise from the abandoned video game console blares through the living room, and the tablecloth around them looks like the shroud of a ghost.

It’s like unspooling a worn tape, gutting an old scar.

“Yeah, I don’t know. My uncle touched me a bunch when I was a little kid. It went on for a while because I didn’t know enough to say something to anybody.” He shrugs a thin, sharp shoulder beneath his cardigan. “Eventually someone figured it out, and my parents got me away from him. We moved away. I think he went to jail.”

“You think?”

“I don’t exactly write the guy postcards. I don’t know, nobody talks to me about him. People get upset when I bring him up, so I never asked.”

Nice wonders what that’s like, having a person in your memory that’s just a big blotted X.

“That sounds… lonely. Carrying that by yourself.”

Willow snorts and shrugs again. He bundles his cardigan around himself. “Whatever. It’s not some sad story.” He shoots Nice a hard, sharp look. “Don’t think about me like that.”

Think about him like what?

It’s like a pink elephant. Now that someone’s told him not to, Nice can’t help but think about it. Willow little, probably looking as pretty as he does now, someone touching him, someone hurting him. He doesn’t like it.

He wonders if that’s where it came from, the part of Willow that wants him to pick up a knife.

He’s never seen scars on Willow’s body, at least not in any of the places that he’s looked. He wonders, if he were allowed to see more of Willow’s body, if he’d find them lurking somewhere.

Can I see is right on the tip of his tongue, but that’s for sure a fucked up thing to say to someone who just told you about being molested when they were little.

Hey, cool story about your uncle touching you. Can you take off your clothes so I can see if and where you cut yourself?

It’s not that he wants to touch Willow, exactly. It’s not that he doesn’t.

* * *

Maybe this is the mating ritual of the beautiful people, Ren thinks as he watches Willow and Nice eat lunch together. They don’t sit in the cafeteria. Instead, they take their food and head to one of the hills on campus, ducking under railings to get to the fenced-off area of clean, untouched grass. They sit in the shade and pass their food between them, taking carrot sticks and fish sticks from between grease-blotted napkins, eating with their long, spindly limbs and clean, ridged throats, seeming effortlessly cool and completely untouchable to normal mortals.

“What do you want to do when you get out of here?” Willow asks Nice.

“You mean like, today, or what?”

“You’re always so literal.” Willow wrinkles his nose and brings his knees close to his chest, his long legs folding like a crane’s. “Use your brain. What do you think I mean, stupid?”

Nice’s eyelids flicker, and he doesn’t answer him.

“I have to go get Ren,” he says instead, changing the subject. He flicks a blade of recently-mowed grass from his lapel. “After school. I can’t hang out with you.”

Willow gives him a skeptical look. “What, are you each other’s pets, attached at the hip? You can’t do anything without the other person?”

He crumples his milk carton in one hand and sends it sailing in a perfect arc down the hill. It lands perfectly in the trash can chained to the tree at the bottom, and despite being pissed at him, Nice wants to tell him it was a good shot.

Willow is a little taller than Nice. He’s got about half a head on him. They look good beside each other; they both know it.

Anger’s always felt filmy to Nice. Like a puff of smoke—hard to hold onto.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Nice finally sighs, letting go of his smoke. “Your place today? Lydia wants me out of the house—big new commission.”

Willow reaches down and squeezes his fingers in a moment of fleeting, plausibly denial sympathy. The only dosage that Nice can stand.

But all that was in another life.

In this life, Willow chews his pen cap in the back of the class. He notices, briefly, a white-haired boy in some of his classes. He seems pretty and remote, and he walks on by.

From the hallway, Willow can hear him laughing with his friend.

Book Tie-In

And if you want to watch Ren and Nice fall apart in real-time, you can catch their book Heartline here.