Young Writers Society

Peroxide

Chapter One

There are certain sounds that sparks thoughts, thoughts that cause speculation of death and happier times, thoughts that come to us as naturally as a breath, but what we breathe is a falsification and a lie. What we breathe is the silence, the inexplicable pounding of black in a screaming room, and it disguises itself to masquerade as the tapping of rain in the window of a childhood home, so that’s all we believe, because we are in need of a consolation.

The material we comprehend is nothing real, nothing that provides life or comfort, but we demand it to do so, because sounds are extroverted miracles that rescue humans from themselves, from their own papery thoughts, and perhaps the world will recognize the irony eventually.

And I never heard something quite as shattering as the gunfire on a battlefield, because it is born from the desire to murder to prevent more murder, and we weave that contradiction obliviously. We are falling out of line for an expectation of change, and we are fighting monsters that we cannot see.

With that idea, I can’t help but wonder if it would be more accurate to say that this is a war against ourselves.

These matters make me wish for asphyxiation, for this image of joy is so skewed that it is meaningless to the blatantly reflective.

If I die, I want my passing to be narrated by the whisper of a tragedy that was never actually a sound at all. If I die young, that is. We’re all destined for the grave, especially now.

For during this time, the things that we see are black and white — sometimes, that is quite literal — and we are convinced that a reformation is among us, but we refuse the prospect physically by not putting down our weapons.

When we are at a loss, when unbuttoned uniforms pinned on the deceased are scattered around, when the blood of our victims paints the meadow that used to represent peace, we continue to hold blades to our comrades’ noses to check for breaths of what we come to understand as nothing significant.

And just like that, we are dancing with death again. The knife could slip, could cut, could kill, but it doesn’t, even through trembling hands, and we sometimes applaud ourselves for remaining steady amidst the chaos, but we know deep down that it wouldn’t matter if we did falter, because a massacre such as this does not pick the prettiest flowers in the garden — no, it steals with the sweep of the wind those who could not hold the blade still, those who were either brave or cowardly, but we observe no distinction once we brush past sentimentality, a chemical that poisons and warps even the greatest minds.

We have nothing but hypocrisy on the terrain, but we do not act on it, and perhaps we could’ve done something about it before it was too late, though we are already lost with the sounds that we used to know; and we position the knives once more, only to find that our mistake has become a tragedy that we cannot resolve.

Then, we understand the silence.

There are multiple sounds flitting along in my realm, apparently, swarming around my head like a mass of bees honing in on a flower — though I wouldn’t describe myself as such a gift of nature — and it would seem that my amygdala hopes for me to list them all, or else suffer the wrath of my own mind’s power. I’ve never submitted to the pain, not yet, just complied; there’s still time to learn what kind of danger I will encounter, however.

The tapping of my pencil on paper is among the noises clinging to my eardrums, and it’s the only one that ceases temporarily, its amplifier scratching a bit of the parchment with a witty idea before returning to its prior duty of monotony. I’m astonished that it doesn’t grow tired of the bore.

What an obstruction of freedom that is.

Occasionally, fright fills my chest up to the brim, spiking my stomach with its overreacting spears at the shrieking of the swing-set rocking back and forth without previous warning. Vigilance is a waste, primarily when it is constant, which it is, in my case; I learned nothing from the precautions provided by parents and guardians, for it happened to turn the tables of my emotion control.

Everything is hectic now.

Then, fleeing from the inadvertent introspection of the swing-set analysis, there’s the gentle, the cliché, the start to every story written by an inexperienced collector of words, such as myself, and that’s why it fits.

The caring breeze floats along like a lark in summertime, greeting every tree obscured by the masses of dirt and unfinished playground equipment, but they never dare cross me.

Maybe it’s the peroxide in my hand. Or the pencil smothered within my fingers. Or the paper stained by hydrogenated liquid. Maybe it’s just me.

Noting on the bottle in my grasp, it seems like a cruel irony that my hair is peroxide blonde — been called out on it, too, by uncaring psychologists that have been furthermore discarded for my own well-being — but perhaps I should be more concerned with things other than the coincidence of my compulsions and physical appearance merging together.

My current psychologist tells me to exfoliate my skin, moisturize it with some sort of lotion that’s supposed to be healthy for you, but it only stands on my shelf, stationary and smirking, and the peroxide burns of desert feelings remain.

So, in a way, I presume my compulsions and appearance aren’t so different, after all. They both chase each other into homicide.

And the final sound, one that isn’t regularly droning on, jumps into existence in the form of a text from none other than the art geek I call Gerard Way.

My fingertips drag at the screen, tapping all around and unlocking my phone in a delayed movement — I keep a password on it, alleviating the unbridled paranoia in some shape — and the bubble of words appears in front of my face.

Hey, Patrick. How are you doing today?

I smirk. Gerard always asks me this, like he’s afraid of offending me, which is quite difficult when I’m wrapped inside myself. I’m not nearly as harsh on the outside.

I’m fine, I guess. What’s up? Don’t say the sky.

After a few seconds with no response, my legs become jittery, bouncing around with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free of the tingling sensation and the panic coursing through my blood.

A moment later, though, the stress is diminished.

I’m stuck at an art show, but my mom told me to pick up Mikey from daycare. I consented, of course, but didn’t realize that I had this until it was too late. Can you please bring him back home from Belleville Development Center? It’s okay if not (I can get Ryan to do it).

Usually, I hate communicating with people, whether that’s by talk, text, or call, but there’s something about Gerard that I love, most likely the patience he has with me.

Yes, I comprehend that my anxiety will prohibit me from declining the offer, but he presented it to me, anyway, and I know him well enough to recognize that it’s sincere.

Yeah, that’s all right. I can get him. Do you need me to pick up anything for you on the way?

My mother says it’s always rewarding to be overly considerate. Somehow, I don’t quite believe her, even if I should, even if I’m abiding by her rules.

No, but thank you so much. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Patrick.

I heave my bag over my shoulder once introducing my possessions to it again, peering down at my phone and texting with one thumb as I walk.

Art geek.

I discover no response.

“There are a lot of children here,” I find myself whispering as I slide from my bike. My eyes are expanding in shock at all of the tiny humans circling the room of the developmental center, possibly destroying everything in their path as if they were a formulating tornado.

I’m just about to turn around and leave in a fit of nervousness when a boy in a shadowed green apron, soft brown eyes set into his hollow face, catches my gaze, and smiles. Why would anyone be smiling at me? Did I do something wrong? Do I know him from somewhere?

Snap out of it, Patrick. Psychologists don’t like these outbursts.

He beckons me towards the entrance, and for a moment, I question whether or not he’s addressing me, but I eventually step inside, leaping at the slamming of the door behind me — and now the mob of children attacking my every limb.

Abruptly, like being swept away with a storm, my lungs fill with water, but no one notices it besides me, and that’s the scariest anecdote of this ailment — they cannot hear me scream.

The world is so fast-paced, I come to understand, and not even the inexplicably sympathetic expression of the guy in the apron can rescue me from the water trapping me inside a place of suffocation. My psychologist says it’s a symptom of anxiety, the illness he claims I have because of an event that transpired so far back that it shouldn’t mean a thing — two years is a long time.

But then again, I’m still washing my arm with peroxide.

“Who is you?” one chatters, looking up from his grip on my leg to observe a countenance crumpled with fright.

“Why are you moving so much?” another says, child-talk for, “Why are you shaking?” which sets me on edge; I don’t appreciate confrontation, even if it’s explicitly innocuous.

“He’s just so excited to see you,” the worker chimes in, moving from behind the desk and shooing the children away. “There’s a set of building blocks on the floor that you can play with. I need to talk to this nice man for a moment. Is that okay with you all?”

Without responding, the kids dash over to the set of blocks, flinging them at each other or building something worthwhile, crying when their friends knock over their creations.

A small being approaches, throwing his hands in the air and shouting, “Bob is being mean to me!”

“Ray, Lou will be here soon,” the boy addresses a kid with a curly mop glued upon his head. “You can talk to the other children while you wait, all right? Just stay away from Bob if you don’t like him, but don’t be mean back. That’s not nice.” He smiles, baring his perfectly white teeth and mildly pushing the kid back towards the crowd.

“W-wh-where is Mikey?” I am capable of choking out, my entire body continuing to quiver as the boy awaits firmly.

“Hey,” he consoles me, brushing a hand over my arm, to which I shy away. He seems to take the hint, replying, “Sorry about that. Just try to take deep breaths, yeah? It’ll calm you down.”

“T-that’s what the psy-psychologists all say.” I stifle sobs for a second to release a half-hearted laugh; at least I’m trying.

“I’ve had enough of them,” the worker admits, but undertones of melancholy lurk in his typical joyful tone. He sounds like my kind of person — messed up in the head, recoiling from any thought of interaction, buried underneath impenetrable layers of gloom, and even if I’ve only known this guy for a few minutes, I want him to make it out alive.

I’ve decided that he, at least, should receive a genuine outcome.

“Y-you’ve b-been to a psychologist?” I stammer, green eyes circling the room in case some secret agency is spying on us; fortunately for me, there are no cameras here.

It seems like the first place where I’ve been sure about that. Even if I scan the room with a thorough precision, I can never be sure that there isn’t someone creeping up on me (they could find a way), but I somehow trust this guy. He wouldn’t spy on me, would he?

I predict the paranoia will stage its entrance if I see him again. Right now, it’s dormant, but it’s more perilous that way. Alertness is ubiquitous.

“Loads of them, and they all messed me up more than I had been previously.” His glare drops low like a weighted branch but eventually springs back up to meet my own. “Anyway, Mikey is over there, the only kid with the glasses. Kind of funny, you know, always wearing them on the tip of his nose like a librarian or something.”

I nod, hastily refreshing my memory of Mikey’s image before the boy in the apron asks me more questions about him.

The worker places a finger to his lips, his focus drifting back and forth between us. “Say, is he your brother? You don’t look much like him.”

Obviously, but why is he so nosy? Humans, always trying to grasp every piece of information they can, even when it’s none of their petty little business. Frankly, I would enjoy dwelling in a cave until I grow a beard the size of my shin and my hair withers into a shining bald spot that likely hosts the manger of Jesus on top. Anything to isolate myself.

Not many people welcome the concept that misanthropy is my force, though — and where would my peroxide be in a cave?

But he’s right nevertheless. Eye color, hair color, and facial structures are all off. While we both lean towards the feminine terrain of features, Mikey and Gerard possess thinner proportions, almost like a feline.

“N-no, he’s my friend’s brother, who is currently at an art show. His name is Gerard.”

Ugh. He didn’t need to know that. Why am I like this? Constantly spewing out irrelevant details no one cares about.

“Patrick, no one remembers what you say after the maximum of an hour, all right?” Dr. Saporta, my psychologist, finds pleasure in reminding me. Does he think I’m interested in his stock phrases? Not much.

My mother says I shouldn’t be so overbearing towards him, that he’s one of the most versatile therapists she’s ever met — not that she would be familiar with many, seeing as she’s as neurotypical as it gets; that, however, brings you into suburban mom life, and that’s the downside of a clear brain — but it’s not my duty to like people. In fact, I am most often fueled by the doctrine of “guilty until proven innocent”. My mother also says I shouldn’t run by that standard. I don’t really mind.

“That’s an interesting name,” the boy comments. “I like how it flows, the capture and release of the geh sound, then the fierce flick of the rawr bit, like the tad of courage we can never have, and the abrupt end of the rd on the tail of the word.”

The tad of courage we can never have. It scares me. He knows. He’s been watching me, hasn’t he? He is aware of my anxiety, because he planted cameras, and he’s following me around.

I need to leave.

Habitually wiggling my fingers into my bag to draw out the peroxide, I stop short, pivoting my head towards an advancing Mikey, a building block held to his hair with some germy kid’s saliva — I have to force back tears.

“Patwick?” he chirps. “Is you?”

“Yeah, Mikey, it’s me,” I respond, crouching down to meet his gaze but tucking my arm behind my back so that he can’t touch it any longer. I abhor the way it makes my skin crawl, how it...breathe; Dr. Saporta instructed you not to potentially trigger anything, so snap out of it.

“Where Geewad?”

The worker swoops in heroically as I answer, picking out the building block with the protection of a paper towel, wiping it off, throwing it back into the heap of toys, and almost assailing a small kid with a premature fringe, but the apron boy doesn’t say a thing to me, only observes.

“He’s at an art show. You know how much he loves those.” I smile, and Mikey mirrors my actions. “Are you ready to go home?”

Mikey’s head bobs up and down rapidly, seizing my hand and pulling me towards the exit without properly thanking the worker.

I don’t aspire to be consorting with people who have no perception of manners.

“Uh, I, um, thank you so much!” I yell as the bell cycles all around with the swaying of the door, and I am awarded with a sheepish grin from my new companion — amused, is he? What wonders that does for my stability.

“Be careful out there!” the raven-haired teenager returns, waving his hand in a gesture that signals the departure of any party in a conversational group. I’m not sure what he means. Am I prone to injury? Does he think I can’t handle myself? Is someone being considerate for once?

Questions. Dr. Saporta doesn’t like them.

The wind brings a chill of its own, disparate from the thundering collision of panic attacks, which has me retreating within my sheer jacket that has never done a thing for me in wintertime; my mother should invest in a new one, or at least a coat with puffier material.

Then there would only be one contingence to worry about.

We’re gone now, though, but no matter how much I pray to forget the touch of the children, discard it like a scrap of newspaper, I still feel the burning, squeezing, choking sensation of their grimy fingers.

I need more peroxide.

Chapter Two

Your home seems to be a mile away when you’re lacking in hydrogen peroxide. Or time to use it. When Mikey’s around, there’s a certain itch that materializes in front of you, because he’s still here, and he shouldn’t be.

But I have the item to pour on myself.

The substance is a series of chemicals used to disinfect the skin, to treat wounds. So far, it’s not working for me yet, seeing as I continue to experience the burns of my attacker’s touch seeping into my pores, poisoning me.

The doctors say it’s obsessive to worry about a sense that lingers for years, to possess the touch at all. I don’t think it is.

Yes, maybe it isn’t normal to maintain a growing supply of peroxide bottles in your bedroom, replacing the fantasy literature that previously stocked the shelves of the bookcase. Yes, maybe it isn’t normal to take extended showers until your mother yells at you to get out, or you’ll go bankrupt from paying for the water bill. Yes, maybe it’s not normal to pour that hydrogen peroxide over your arm again and again where your assaulter grabbed you and never have it seem just right, but normal is boring.

But I suppose there’s justice in saying that compulsions are too dangerous to stand for doing away with boredom. I ignore that justice every time my skin dries up from the chemicals.

Finally, Mikey’s chatter draws to a close as the screen door on the porch bangs against the frame, as he steps inside after waving emphatically to me, but being wrapped up in my own thoughts, that event occurred almost ten minutes ago, and I have reached my home by instinct; my legs tend to do that for me, aware that I never pay attention to my surroundings.

My feet elevate to accommodate the height of the crumbling brick stairs, only coming into contact with the middle rectangle of each step to settle my raging mind, and I twist the knob — once left, once right — to greet the cordial aroma of lilac rushing around to tell me a story, almost like bubbly fairies in a film too laden with special effects.

It isn’t time for this, Patrick. Get to the shower. Remove the touch.

“Right,” I affirm to no one in particular — just sort of an indication to tug me back to reality — setting myself into motion to ascend the stairs, this time carpeted with faded white material.

The wood, hidden beneath a soft texture, creaks with even the minimal pressure of my toes, and I almost pause to apologize to it, but Dr. Saporta would disapprove, and I’ve had lots of people remind me that I’ve offended him far too many times for our relationship to be productive.

It seems like he’s taking over my thoughts.

Don’t say that. You hate paranoia, don’t you?

Don’t harbinger new ideas. Don’t allow the compulsions to evolve. Don’t corrupt your mind.

When I reach my door, I push it open with languid force — let’s skip describing the ritual with the knob; I hate to think about it, and my friends have told me I’ve been getting better at keeping it under control — staring once again at the bookshelf of hydrogen peroxide across from my frozen body.

I almost forgot that one of the bottles was removed earlier, transported to the bathroom after the previous one dwindled, but it simply won’t do. I can’t allow it, at least not in its current pose.

Anxiously, I sprint over to the case, falling to my knees and adjusting the peroxide so that the division is straight down the center, like it should be if there’s no immediate replacement.

“Fuck,” I sigh, tilting back on my haunches. “Maybe I’m not getting better.”

Yeah, you dimwit. You’re planning to take a shower, aren’t you?

“Leave me the hell alone.”

You wish.

Arresting a perfectly clear towel from its spot on my unpainted dresser — left that way so that it wouldn’t be subject to any imperfections in the dye — I snap, “Shut up. You’re not helping.”

And neither are you.

“You’re a hypocrite.” I slide out of my charcoal trousers and fold them neatly to situate them in the square-shaped hamper, then proceeding with my crimson cardigan and grey t-shirt.

For once, I neglect the icky feeling of my shifting clothes.

“See? I am improving,” I counter the voices in my head, but they don’t answer. I earn a victory, and they suddenly become dismissive. Great.

Summarily after the last piece of ostensibly rough fabric has left my body, the towel fashions a mask for my skin to protect it from the acumen of the outside world.

“No one’s watching you, Patrick,” everyone says, but the voices beg to differ, and they do so with great theatricality, ensuring that I won’t threaten them ever again.

With my head swiveling around in every direction to detect anyone’s possibly prying eyes, I stalk to the bathroom parallel to my chambers, rounding the corner in a swinging motion as my remaining hand clutches the ends of the towel to construct a cylinder around me.

Instead of turning on the shower and acquiescing the water to beat down on my back like the drumming of rain on a rooftop, I delay to gaze intently into the mirror.

I haven’t done this in a while, taken a look at myself, and the product is stupendous. How thoroughly my eyes droop into a pool of purple, into a bruise inflicted by none other than myself by postponing sleep and conceding the buildup of stress. How sharply my cheekbones model, throwing shadows onto the lower portion of the surface from their throne of elevation in regards to my face. How pale my skin has become, vampiric and reminiscent of Gerard’s pallid complexion, as if a dot of red ink landing on it could be mistaken for blood running through snow.

And not once did anyone comment on it, but I now realize that they sure as hell must have been worried.

Am I dead? Is this why I look so harrowed, so gaunt? Did I die two years ago, when the concept of death was only metaphorical after my assault? Have I been living a life in hell, and is that why I contracted such a plethora of issues? Am. I. Dead.

“Leave it,” I instruct, snapping my focus away the mirror as quickly as I formerly snapped a rubber band on my wrist to shoo away obsessions.

Twirling the handle of the shower in an action that reminds me of wrenches in a dingy handyman shop, water pours down in minuscule pellets that merge together to create a flowing stream perceived only by an outsider.

I abandon my towel by my ankles, hastily leaping inside the bathtub and closing the curtain behind me as a shield. As usual, my eyes scan the corners for any hidden cameras that may have been installed while I was running errands — you can never know, can never be safe.

As I explore new areas of the bathtub, the concoction of hydrogen and oxygen completely dampens my hair, infiltrates my skin, and this formula and the peroxide are the only two things of whom I enjoy the touch, so I permit their entrance.

Instantaneously, the grasp of the children fades away, swirling down the drain, through the sewers, soon on its journey into the ocean — or, in any case, gone from me.

By now, I’ve grown accustomed to the permanent kiss of fingertips on my arm, the sole junction that doesn’t wash out and is only layered with the collision of other humans, though every time it shrieks, I am brought back to that one day...stop.

The shower is the most dangerous place for panic attacks.

Get the hydrogen peroxide, psycho.

I scowl. “I wish you would stop calling me that. It’s incredibly ableist and damaging to one’s soul.”

Your fault, buddy.

“It’s not my fault, though!” I lash out, but my hands extend to seize the peroxide anyway as my tone lowers. “It’s not, okay?”

It’s actually amusing, as I see it. You say that it’s not your fault, but you still have to sit through psychologist appointments to mend yourself. Hah!

“Dr. Saporta is fine,” I mutter, unscrewing the cap to the clear liquid, dribbling it onto a washcloth, and holding it away from the spray of water. “Sometimes.”

Are you so sure about that, kid?

“Why do you address me as ‘kid’ all the time?” I begin to scrub my arm with the solution, the vigor of my deed reddening the skin, but I don’t halt for something as petty as that; after all, I do this almost every day. “You’re me, and I’m almost an adult.”

If I were you, then you’d be able to control me.

Imposing a scarlet streak upon my body’s textile, I retaliate, “Screw you, asshole. What if I don’t want to control you, huh? Did you ever consider that?”

I consider everything that you consider, because I live inside your brain, but that doesn’t mean that I am you. I get the advantage without the tragedy. Now isn’t that a nice little package?

“Hardly,” I deadpan. “I end up getting screwed over twice. Once by you, once by the inequity of this situation.”

I’ve just avowed the water to hail down upon my back, too frustrated by the voice in my head’s rambling, its brilliant counterattacks, but as soon as the rumbling sound waves of the garage door opening seek refuge in my ears, my fingers protrude from my by side to switch off the water.

Run fast, little boy.

I bend over to snatch my towel, tying it to my chest like a girl — though I’m a noticeably self-conscious boy — and sliding my hand over the light to rid the bathroom of luminescence.

My room seems like a mile away, when it is only about ten feet in actuality, but with a bound overestimated by my faulty impression, my feet plant themselves in front of my door, pausing to license my hands authority to perform its tedious ritual upon the circular knob.

At the very moment at which I enter my bedroom, a voice echoes from downstairs. “Patrick, are you all right? I heard a noise,” it says, to which I scream, “Yeah, I’m good, Mum. A book just fell off of my dresser, is all.”

Maybe you should take another shower to repent for your lie.

I consent.

This is by far the most time-consuming compulsion yet.

Chapter Three

Exposure therapy was the worst decision of my life, but everyone who claims they are interested in my safety has concluded that it’s the best way to get me over my anxiety of the public.

To a certain degree, it’s not like they’re telling me that it’s just hormones controlling the chains around my mind, but that’s attributed to the fact that I glare at most everyone, and they quite simply don’t wish to interact with me; I don’t blame them, to be honest.

I suppose the only upside is that I am able to wash down my medication with coffee, not some bland tap water that makes you hope to vomit after a few gulps because of how inundated you are by its deluge — and simply the fact that there is a upside, the mere shell of the concept, is comforting to the continuously anxious.

However, today is different, with the guilt flooding the chambers of my heart and accelerating its pounding, and at first, I surmise that it’s instinctual, considering this is a coffee shop packed with people, but after one quick look at the counter, my hypothesis is immediately altered.

The boy from the daycare center. The boy with whom I messed things up.

“I’ll just find another place to swallow my pills,” I decide, turning my back to the register after drawing in a deep breath.

Before I can make it out the door, before the clanging of the bells is put into action, someone shouts, “Hey, man! What can I get for you today?”

I pivot sluggishly, a meek grin embracing my lips that perhaps suggests, “Kill me now,” but my feet order me to march forward. “Don’t say anything about marching, mind voices,” I direct, knowing that they’ll transform it into something correlated to the army and, as a result, the post-traumatic stress disorder Dr. Saporta swears I have.

“You’re the guy that came in and asked about Mikey, correct?” the boy asks, draping a green towel across his shoulder. I notice, in addition, another emerald apron tied around his waist — does he wear that all day?

“Heh, yeah, that was me.” I laugh awkwardly, shoving my hands further into the pockets of my ebony skinny jeans and rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet. That’s what people do, right?

The worker’s brows crease. “Hey, are you all good after what happened? You seemed kind of shaken-up.”

Shrugging indifferently so as to not reveal my true emotions (Dr. Saporta says I’m too apathetic for my own good), I reply, “Yeah, I’m fine, I guess” — I squint to read his name-tag — “Pete Wentz.”

For whatever strange reason, the peachy complexion of the boy’s skin boils to the blossoming charm of a rose petal. Why is he doing that? Am I to blame? From all of those questions, my coating inadvertently reciprocates the action.

“So what’s your name, then? We need to get on an equal playing field.” Pete winks, and suddenly my rose petal metaphor is enhanced to the epidermis of flame.

“I-I’m Patrick Stump.” The words begin as a stutter but are pulled loose with an ounce of confidence and a toothy smile from both parties.

Pete nods, gesturing to the menu pinned to the wall above him. “What can I get for you, Patrick Stump?”

Oh, shit. I was not prepared for this. We are really in a coffee store. Wow.

“You can take your time,” Pete assures, throwing a curt glance behind me to scout out potential customers, who are, fortunately, nonexistent in the store. “There’s no one waiting.”

I release a bout of air, clear my throat, and scan the items to make it seem, at least to Pete, that I’m putting thought into this, when I actually order the same exact thing every time I wander in here — a cappuccino, with nothing else added so that the barista won’t falter, so that I won’t unintentionally make a scene and cringe about it for the next five years.

“May I just have a small cappuccino please?” I request in the politest of manners, utilizing my “mouse voice”, as my former teachers prefer to name it, and Pete bobs his cranium up and down, sliding an ingredient cup into a machine and clicking the button on its blindingly blue screen.

“What school do you go to? I don’t think I’ve seen you at mine, Belleville High.” Pete leans his intersecting arms across the freshly wiped counter — probably where the green rag’s purpose originated, though he hasn’t bothered to relocate it from his shoulder to somewhere else (I don’t work in a coffee shop, sorry; it’s not like I know where things go).

“Uh, I’m homeschooled, actually.” It sounds like the cliché response, at least from someone who quivers at the mention of sunlight, but it’s nevertheless true.

“Oh, that’s cool.” Pete’s voice is laced with despondency, as if he’s somehow offended by my educational choice, but he eventually perks up after a second. “The people at school are actually just a bunch of shitkicking ass-clowns. Nice move.”

My lip is adorned with the puncturing capabilities of my teeth, and my eyes curve all around to find something with which to engage a conversation. “Yeah, it was a nice move,” I repeat in a failed attempt to spur the speech back to life.

The coffee machine chirps heartily — not enough to trigger panic, though — and Pete’s hands migrate to entertain its needs, disposing of the wounded ingredient cup and chauffeuring my coffee over to me.

I tip my head in thanks, bracing myself for the scalding bite of the creamy substance and miscalculating the time at which it strikes my tongue, but I’ve been wielding the cup for far too long, so I return it to its spot on the counter with my mouth still bare.

Gradually, my taste buds dance with the texture of the coffee, and almost half of the cup has been dumped down my throat before Pete beckons sentences from his lips.

“Do you come here often? I need more friends to see while I juggle daycare and this job, besides that one old guy who always sits in the corner and stares at the entrance to the men’s bathroom. Don’t think he’s a stalker, do you?”

I lower the coffee from my mouth, giggling. “Yes, I’m a regular, but why are you concerned with the affairs of this elderly dude?”

“A gay stalker,” Pete interrupts, eyes trained on the man while the man’s eyes are glued on his aforementioned location. “Same,” he adds.

“You’re a stalker?” My eyes bulge, and my drink narrowly avoids being shot out. People being stalkers is remarkably problematic for my “paranoia”, or whatever it is that my mother says — there’s nothing wrong with being cautious.

Cachinnating at my expression, Pete corrects, “No, I’m gay. That isn’t an issue, is it?” His eyebrow heightens, predicting the worst.

My crown rotates horizontally. “No, not at all. I’m, um, polysexual, so I guess that’s kind of in the same ballpark.”

Pete is impressed.

Impressed, that is, until someone I assume to be his manager, a man with a bright maple beard and matching hair, strolls out from the back, requesting that Pete stop holding up the line, which consists of no one at the moment.

“Oh, sorry, Andy,” Pete atones for his mistake. Is he scared of this guy? He doesn’t look like he’d be scared by anything.

“That’s Mr. Hurley to you, Wentz.”

Pete nods, contrition projected onto his bronzed face, and he forages for a scrap of paper and a pen, both from his breast pocket, redistributing it to me. He taps the parchment twice with his finger — blessed is he who refrains from using odd numbers in movement — and I restrain the black utensil in my fingers.

“You want my number?” I clarify, skeptical.

Pete’s head shakes violently in a vertical tract as Andy grows impatient.

He’s going to exploit you, psycho.

“Go away,” I whisper, digging the pen into the dry flesh of the paper.

Pete sinks his head low to lock eyes with me. “I’m sorry?”

“Nothing. I just talk out loud sometimes,” I lie, wrapping up my scribing of the numbers. “Doesn’t really mean anything.”

Pete appears unpersuaded, but he’s too intimidated by Mr. Hurley to question me any farther, so he captures the note and stuffs it back in his pocket.

“I guess I should be going now. I don’t want to hold up the line,” I joke, glancing behind my shoulder to find no one, as always, and waving goodbye. “I’ll be looking forward to your texts.” I provide Pete with the most adorable smile I can muster.

And as I toss my empty paper cup into the trash can, I stop short — I had forgotten to take my meds.

Chapter Four

“All right, Patrick, you know the drill,” Dr. Saporta says, his eyes fixed on the report that I have to fill out every time I visit him.

“The drill”? Is that some sort of PTSD joke? Make sure he recognizes it, Patrick, that lots of people who have PTSD served in the army, and do you know what’s in an army? Drills. Call him out. Do it.

“The drill?” I stammer.

Dr. Saporta glances up from his paper briefly to restate, “Yeah, the drill. Like, what’s going on in your head, Patrick?”

My jaw clenches. “Nothing.”

“We both know that’s not quite accurate,” he laughs. “Tell the truth.”

“What makes you think there’s something going on?” I shift uncomfortably in the plush seat across from my psychologist’s, but nothing is suitable for my restlessness.

“I know for a fact that there are voices conversing with you right now. Maybe it’s a one-sided conversation, but they’re present nevertheless.” Satisfaction sails across his face, and I curse him for being so cocky, a curse manifesting in denial.

“That’s a lie, sir.”

Dr. Saporta holds up the report, waving it around in the air; I want to tell him to quit it, for the material is crinkling, but I refrain from doing so, because he’d use it against me — so much for versatile, Mother.

Command that man to stop.

“I’m the one with the diagnostic sheet, kid,” Dr. Saporta parries, lenses stooping to read it. “Obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosis, social anxiety, autism, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

So condescending. Why don’t you fire him?

“Well it seems like you did the drill for me, so there’s no use and no outcome, except that you’re a total cunt.” I frown, counting off the items spoken from the diagnostic sheet without waiting for my psychologist’s reaction. “Three anxiety disorders, one psychotic disorder, and the one people always resent. Fantastic. I hope you understand that I turn away from listing them for a reason, Doctor.”

Silence that lasts a few minutes.

“Anything unusual happen since the last time we chatted, Patrick?” Dr. Saporta ushers out of his previously quiet form, intrigue dwelling in his mahogany irises, an intrigue that puts me off.

Without severing the eye contact between myself and my lap, I respond, “I met a new friend.”

Dr. Saporta is taken aback, his brows scrunching in his labor to decipher my unusual words. “A new friend, you say? How...odd. I find you to be very anti-social, because, well...”

“You mean asocial, not anti-social,” I correct. “You, of all people, should know this.”

My psychologist chuckles. “Right, yes.”

“I don’t appreciate being compared to a psychopath or a sociopath,” I cut him off. “Not because I don’t have respect for the dilemma that is their personality disorder, but because it’s imprecise, and I thought you would value my perfectionism, Dr. Saporta. Why would you say such a thing?”

“Forgive me, Patrick, for being so inconsiderate,” the man replies sardonically, sarcastic eyes circling. “But it seems like you’re regretting sharing the news about your friend with me, for you’re diverting the subject.”

My arms cross, right one on top to prevent the concussion of the other limb and the ethereal mark. “Only because you deplore the idea of me making companions.”

Dr. Saporta leads his hands to the air in a defensive stance. “Now I wouldn’t say that’s exactly what I implied.”

“I would.”

Dr. Saporta’s lips tie into a frown, fingers wind through his hair. “Patrick, I’m concerned about you,” he admits, oxygen traveling a prolonged journey out of his lungs. “I know you’re sick of hearing it, but in order for you to get better, you have to trust me.” Sincerity highlights his features, but it only looks fabricated.

I play innocent, gearing my shoulders upward. “It’s not my responsibility to trust you, Doctor. The contract said I can trust you, therefore it is not incumbent upon me to bow down to your profession.”

Back slouching in dismay, Dr. Saporta groans, “I wish you wouldn’t think like that, Patrick.”

“And I wish I weren’t so messed up in the head, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m in a fucking psychologist’s office!”

Stillness, perpetuated by static gazes, where cinnamon swirls with chartreuse and never surrenders their bond for the ginger cradle of eyelashes.

“So...what’s your friend’s name?” Dr. Saporta finally asks, fiddling with his hands in the same way he told me not to — disgustingly ironic.

“His name is Pete,” I bark, jaw snapped shut and aimed towards the cherry-stained door on my left.

A crumble of a grin fastens to Dr. Saporta’s face. “And what is Pete like?”

“Different.”

A pause of uncertainty.

“How so?” the psychologist pushes.

“I only have three friends — Gerard, Brendon, and Ryan, about whom I’ve told you already — but beyond them, I’ve discovered the bitterness of humans often, sometimes even during random encounters at the grocery store, in some common setting.”

Dr. Saporta’s quizzical expression indicates a lack of comprehension, but I don’t allow it to dissuade me.

“But with Pete...he actually knows what it’s like to grapple with your own life, and he’s genuine about helping me through it. There aren’t very many people like that, you know? He doesn’t make me afraid, and maybe that’s more competent than these trivial appointments.”

At first, Dr. Saporta’s visage was vibrant with fervor, but after my snide comment about psychology, it hangs limp with dejection. “Must you twist something hopeful into something that ruptures my science? We were going somewhere, and that’s the problem, Patrick.”

My brow tilts, throat hums.

“You denounce any kind of recovery once you detect it, then you whine about how you’ll never get better.” Dr. Saporta’s fingers slither across the walnut terrain of his desk, eyes following to avoid meeting mine. “It’s harsh, yeah, but you need to confront it.”

Head raising to approach my psychologist, I bluntly state, “The voices have left me alone for the past few minutes. Don’t you think that signifies at least a bit of comfort?”

“Did you ever consider the possibility that they’ve left because you’re occupied with another topic, such as defying me?”

I smirk. “They would usually be cheering me on. They don’t admire you very much.”

Dr. Saporta is simply unaffected — he’s familiar with not being liked. “Do they influence you to say certain things that you may not mean?”

“I thought you hated questions,” I digress, perspiration suddenly saturating my palms.

“I hate your questions for their hypersensitivity. Answer mine — just this once, if you’re not keen on doing so later.”

I worry the inside of my cheek, acquainting my tongue with undiscovered textures as I tarry in deflecting Dr. Saporta’s inquiry, but he doesn’t relent. “Every day is a quest to purge the voice’s reign, but the only expected consequence is me responding to them in public, when people can hear me,” I confess. “Other than that, there’s not much they do besides annoy me tremendously.”

Partial truths are my forte, but seeing through them is Dr. Saporta’s.

“I have a difficult time believing that’s legitimate,” the man challenges, retreating from his desk reclining in his chair.

“Why do you never believe me? We’re supposed to have a mutual agreement. You’re supposed to be assisting me. Why aren’t you assisting me?” My fingers burrow into the armrest, an aversion to a gigantic outburst, but it only feels like my muscles are going to break free and lather blood on my lap.

Dr. Saporta bounces from his position almost on reflex, arranging his hands to block me from advancing and potentially endangering anyone, including himself, though I doubt he’d give a shit. “Patrick, you need to calm down.”

My extremities burn for the sensation of pulling my peroxide-riddled hair, and that is where they end up, though they remove nothing. “You’re not going to be that clueless boyfriend in those mainstream high school movies. You’re my psychologist — now fucking act like it. You should understand that my emotions are valid, but all you do is sit on your fucking desk and impart the knowledge that things aren’t working out, and do you know whose fault that is? Is it mine for being so messed up, or is it yours for refusing to do anything about it? I’m your patient, and it’s your job to mend my mental wounds, but you’re pathetic, unskilled, and patronizing, and you’re not aiding me in any way.” My breath is jagged after my heated spiel, requiring shallow and immediate pulses of air, but I ignore the tingling to encourage the reaction of Dr. Saporta.

He untangles a sigh from his lungs. “I’m glad you disclosed with me how you feel, Patrick.”

I ensnare a hand in my locks, pulling it free after a pinch of frustration. “Did you take away anything other than that? I’m not some subject with whom you try to test your psychology skills. I have moods, and I have depth, and I have everything that you do, even if it’s blocked by the rubble of a broken mind, so give me a better fucking answer.”

Dr. Saporta’s face contorts distressingly, capturing a bubble of oxygen before continuing. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, kid.”

“Why the hell not?” My hands are back at my head again, yanking at the warped keratin molecules stuck to my skin, and Dr. Saporta’s eyebrows are as taut as ever.

“Because you would never approbate it.”

All I want is to kick something.

Chapter Five

Electricity pangs inside me from the argument between Dr. Saporta and myself, abetting my travel to the rickety swing set in the unfinished park, and perhaps it’s a sort of empowering type of electricity, not that I would know would how positivity resonates in oneself, but it’s so disparate from what I’m used to, and I can’t establish this early whether or not I aspire to seek it in the future.

Regularly, a compression of the chest stops by for a visit, masquerading as my friend, until it induces a simulation of drowning, and in that moment, I can’t help but wonder if I am actually dying, if that would even be a problem at all.

Compression and depression go hand-in-hand, crouching down in a meadow and poisoning the flowers with their sickly touch as they concurrently intertwine fingers, and it is a sure thing that no one believes the powers of either, attributing it to hormones or being out of shape, when in verity, it is the process of decomposition at work, a process so foreign to certain people that they discredit it with the casualty of a step.

But now that I’ve broken free from Dr. Saporta’s grip, if only for this week, depression and compression fall to their knees in strife, but they are silent, for they never surrender — they are only postponed until a future date when they are most unwelcomed — and they wait for a clarion call into action, into my brain.

For the time being, my feet bound joyously to the park, free of the weights pushing them down over and over and demanding that they rise again to encounter the same fate as provided before. For the time being, I take willful note of the birds’ chirping, their jubilant melody about which no one knows. For the time being, I am content.

Is this what it feels like to be neurotypical? It’s a shame they take it for granted, simultaneously making life troublesome for the mentally ill. The only difference, however, between the neurotypicals and myself is that they are oblivious to the pounding twin forces until they are no longer neurotypical, and they then describe this ordinance as the tables turning, when it is actually a whirlpool that they approached too steadily in their seemingly permanent, innate confidence; there is no tradeoff.

Once you go, you’re trapped, and you’re defined not by the altruism of your heart, but by the complexity of your mind, and that ideology runs like silk through one’s hands, so natural and desired that it becomes second nature, and suddenly when the silk rips for one painfully neurotypical person, they break the fourth wall, and the tides sweep them up so that they might proclaim their injustice.

But do they vocalize the predicaments of the previously existing members of the bottom of the whirlpool? Very rarely do they learn. Woe is them, I suppose, for their unacceptable ignorance.

That empowerment lasts until a buzzing in my pocket jolts me back to the cruel reality of anxiety and heart palpitations, and the questions that Dr. Saporta abhors flood inside — but it’s not like I care about pleasing him, considering I stormed out of his office fifteen minutes before our session ended.

Who is it? What do they want? Am I in trouble? Have they been watching me, and is that how they got my phone number?

When I check my device to see who texted me, panic drills into my chest at the display of the unknown number.

Hey, Patrick! It’s Pete, if you didn’t catch that already.

“How do I respond to this?” I shout to no one, pinkies jabbing into the metallic chain of the swings. “There’s nothing I can do for him, so why is he texting me?”

My expression withers inside the desolate expanse of the park as my heart prepares for its horse race, visualizing how it plans to succeed before the actual threat has exposed itself, and I curse it for doing so.

Another beep flies from my phone, this time from a recognizable source.

I’m at another art show (did you know that there’s a real critic here?), but this time I didn’t tell my mother I would bring Mikey back home, though she still needs him picked up. Would you mind doing it? Brendon and Ryan are both busy doing something else, probably egging their neighbor’s car, the one who sits on his lawn in a beach chair and waters his flowers with orange juice.

My mouth discharges a sigh, perverse to my already moving fingers.

Yeah, that’s all right.

A few seconds pass.

Your aura suggests a lack of enthusiasm.

I giggle.

You can detect my aura? And I swear — I’m fine. I’m going right now, so don’t try to stop me, Gerard.

I predict the vibration in my pocket is the eldest Way brother attempting to thank me, but all I can think about is how I’ll get to see Pete.

I’m still not sure if that’s a cause for nervousness.

Chapter Six

My bike creaks agonizingly as it catches its breath by the store located directly beside the Belleville Development Center, but I don’t care for its petty games, for it’s time to rush inside to greet the beautiful Pete Wentz.

For the first time, a genuine smile clings to my face without threatening to detach itself and move to some other person — who most likely has an abundance of happy days — but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. It’s itchy, uncomfortable, tight, not tailored to fit me.

Frustrating, how I reject anything optimistic. Dr. Saporta says we need to improve this impaired function.

It helps, though, when Pete’s face mirrors my own and seems authentically thrilled to see me here. His hair is messier than I had witnessed it the last two encounters, perhaps because of the ordeal that is herding children and ushering them away from any dangerous activities — which may have grown even more risky since I came here on Tuesday — though his Hudson River eyes gleam brighter than ever before.

Immediately after the door swings open, bells clanking together in delight, Pete saunters over, a certain pep residing in the soles of his shoes. “So excited about my text that you came all the way over here to answer it?” Following my frightful stare, he laughs and adds, “I was joking, okay? You’re fine.”

It’s obvious he doesn’t comprehend how much terror that text caused me.

A steady flow of oxygen departs from my lungs, returning for an item that it forgot and leaving once more. “My friend — you know, the one I told you about earlier — has another art show, but his brother is still here, so he asked me to pick him up again.”

Pete’s brows draw together like curtains. “I’m starting to wonder whether or not you two have any friends beyond this mutual network that requires you to do him favors every other day.”

Is that a fucking threat?

A corner of my lips raises slightly, molding later into a full-fledged glow. “I have you, don’t I?”

Eyes crinkling as a result of an enormous grin, Pete acknowledges, “That you do, and as a celebration, would you like to go to the cinema with me after this?”

Shit. Movie theaters are of the worst places to be when you’re as tense as I am, with the mobs of people, the compromising content on the screen, the general atmosphere. They haven’t been safe for me since I was injured both emotionally and physically, but that disposition isn’t so different from anything else.

They’re a trigger for questions, such as, what if someone touches my arm? What if I take too long purchasing tickets? What if I have a panic attack in the middle of the film?

By the looks of it, you’re having a panic attack right now.

I wave off the voice that just now returned after an hour of dormancy, studying Pete’s hopeful expression. How can I let him down? He’s done so much for me in the short time I’ve known him, but that’ll all be ruined if I don’t approve.

How I yearn for the days where a public setting was nothing terrifying, only one bit in a world of monotony. I used to venture outside often, talk to the neighbors, invite the urge to pet strangers’ dogs. Surely that person isn’t too far down?

Ditching your psychologist won’t help you find it, though, you cowardly bitch.

Maybe I don’t want to, then. I’d rather not return to Dr. Saporta.

“I have to take Mikey home, sorry,” I surpass, guiding the fidgety kid over to me with a flick of the wrist, and he falls by my side a moment later.

“Is Geewad at art show?” Mikey inquires, tugging on the leg of my pants like a puppy tugging at a leash, to which I nod, gazing up at Pete.

“I can walk home with you, if you’d like, then we could go to the theater,” the worker offers. Faith floats on his face but is soon punctured by doubt after I fail to respond forthwith.

Give him an answer before he leaves you, dimwit. He’s already hesitating. You don’t want to end up alone, do you?

“Y-yeah, that would be fantastic.”

You just lied again, fool. Why aren’t you repenting? It doesn’t matter if you’re non-religious. You still have to punish yourself.

This voice is a hypocrite, pleading for me to attend the cinema with Pete yet criticizing me for allowing this accompaniment. I wish it were gone, but it definitely wouldn’t comply with that.

Whatever mixtures of uncertainty that hovered on Pete’s face are now vanished, dropping residual pieces of pride and glee in its place. “Great.”

Mikey’s incessant fiddling of my fingers has me on the edge of smacking him, but that would be classified as child abuse and is, in fact, frowned upon in most regions, not to mention a real turn off — but it’s not like I need to win Pete over, right?

Well he’s taking me to the movies, so it’s clear he can tolerate me for a few hours, which is unfortunately the best I can do in my situation of constant peril.

“Are Geewad at house?” Mikey babbles, bending my phalange in an action that would appear to be innocuous, were it not for the excruciating pain that it evokes.

Pete clasps a hand to his mouth upon the afflictive sight but remains silent.

Wincing, I sputter out, “Your mom will be there when you get home, but Gerard is still at his art show.”

“Why?”

Why haven’t all the children been eliminated from this earth? They do nothing but annoy, and we’re overpopulated anyway. Why don’t you taken it upon yourself to perform the obliteration on your own terms? You could finally be in control.

While the voice in my head is mostly correct, I don’t award it with the pleasure of claiming victory. Who’s to say it won’t bother me further?

“Art is very important to your brother,” I assure, deviating my location within Mikey’s flesh prison, to which he responds by squeezing tighter on my hand.

“Is Peeh very important to you?” The kid’s eyes are wholly transfixed on me, anticipating my shaky answer, while Pete’s are sprinting all around so as to seem like he’s uninterested, but a glittering expression suggests otherwise.

Mikey Way is only around four years old, but he’s made me stop and think, and I’m not clear on whether or not I should be reassessing my life, my priorities, my decisions.

And yeah, I suppose Pete is very important to me, even if I’ve only known him for a few days, because what’s even more important is to recognize who is good and who isn’t, and with him, it’s a constant reminder that there is at least one amiable person in this world, that I am not as alone as I had once thought, and epiphanies such as those deserve credit for being pivotal events in one’s career. Those epiphanies are why I’m afraid to die.

Pete is why I’m afraid to die.

So I turn to my friend, whose neck is tilted away to mask the cardinal complexion of his cheeks, my mouth angled upward on one end. “Yeah, Pete is very important to me.”

Finally, his gaze arrests mine, tears glimmering in his amber eyes, but his regard is tacitly expressed as one of gratitude and reverence.

“He your boyfriend?” Mikey chirps, gums shining through.

And this is where it ceases, though I must attribute to him a fine lack of homophobia and a replete supply of openness.

“No, sorry, Mikes. We have to draw the line somewhere.”

Pete nudges me playfully in the shoulder (by some miracle, the bugs under my skin have fled), as if requesting that I consider the concept. “Aww, come on — I think it’s cute.”

Mikey beams at the cooperation with his idea, which is shut down by my next caustic comment.

“It might be cute, but it’s not real, so no one will ever know,” I deny, shrugging.

Pete gnarls his teeth into his lip. “Yet.”

“Excuse me!” I scold, jokingly punching Pete on the shoulder.

I just don’t want to tell him that it’s entirely plausible.

Chapter Seven

My step grazes the outer edge of the sidewalk, my glimmering eyes saluting my companion's. "Do you think there's anything worthwhile at the cinema right now?" I question, dismissing a pebble to frolic in the street.

"Maybe, but the local nerds are probably taking up all the seats for any superhero films." A chuckle unties itself from Pete’s trachea, and his gaze falls to the pavement as we near the movie theater.

Reflexively, my vision zooms in on a hoard of people possibly gossiping idly about what they predict will transpire next in their favorite motion picture saga, as if it will matter until a year later, and though this random occurrence shouldn’t be nerve-wracking for anyone, it is for me — I go to a psychologist to fix it after all, but recalling how I burst out of his office earlier today, it’s a productive thing to realize that I’m not on track so far, perhaps more productive than anything our sessions teach me.

Pins of sweat carve into my skin, alerting my heart to deploy battle drummers to pound against its walls in a signal of an attack, and my brain spirals out of control right before me.

I wasn’t equipped for this many people.

“Patrick, are you okay?” Pete’s sudden awareness of my situation leads me to believe that he’s probably the second coming of Christ, in my own atheistic way, as we gravitate to the lines of movie posters bolted to the wall once I regain complete consciousness.

The simple presence of one showing replaces the battle drummers with charming fiddlers, and my finger ascends to point towards the sign. “What about this one?”

Pete squints to read the title of the flick so far down the row, whispering with each syllable, “Suffragettes of Germany. I didn’t know you were interested in feminism, Patrick.”

My hands seek refuge in the stuffy pockets of my skinny jeans, folding my shoulders together. “Yeah, I guess. Do you have a problem with that?”

Pete’s face melts into a smile. “No, not at all. I’m interested in feminism, too, and was actually really looking forward to watching this movie. It’s even better now that I’m with you.”

A stream of air humble for my circumstance topples from my lips, and I almost forget to recompense Pete for the grin with one of my own, but he’s evanesced before I can interpret what he just said.

He’s actually excited to be here with me?

“I’ll go and get the tickets,” my friend clarifies as his hip brushes the velvet rope used to contain customers, already long gone from me.

“We can split the pay,” I call back, finally making use of my hands’ position in my pockets to retrieve my wallet, but Pete waves it off.

“Nonsense! You’re my date; this one’s on me. I enjoy being classy.”

A clump of phlegm pinches my throat at the use of the word “date”, a word that’s made me nervous for as long as I can retrospect, mostly because of the flexibility of dating in middle school — the last period I attended until I withdrew for my own home — and the pressure that came with it.

What does a date mean to Pete? What does it mean to me? What does it mean to other people? And perhaps most imperatively, what does it mean to Dr. Saporta, who is so immersed in my social life (or lack thereof)?

Stop thinking about Dr. Saporta so much, or at least long enough to pay attention to your “date”.

Great, just what I needed, the voices to return on my may or may not be date. I was doing better (I swear), or at least that’s what—

No. You need to stop, Patrick. He shouldn’t enslave your thoughts.

Truth is, though, I’m worried about his judgement, whether I’d like to admit it or not. Yeah, maybe this isn’t what my mother meant by becoming more intimate with Dr. Saporta, but it’s a step away from isolation, and everyone could concur that such a thing is healthier than what I’ve been experiencing previously, so who really gives a shit?

Maybe you’re overthinking this, dimwit. Anxiety is trouble, even if it’s geared towards the right things.

“That’s the most helpful thing you’ve ever said to me,” I vocalize, head rotating ninety degrees in both directions to check if anyone saw me talking to myself like the psycho I know myself to be.

And now my voice’s language has caught on. What a hypocrite I am, reprimanding the voice for addressing me that way yet doing it to myself.

Pete waltzes back a moment later, two tickets strapped between his fingers as if taking a smoke, and with some magnificent luck (Pete is Jesus, after all), notices my discerned facial expression, his soon reflecting mine. “Are you ready to find our seats?”

Passive approach. Are you sure you should trust him if he plays that way?

I’ll always trust him.

Anticipation lingers in the air like the crisp scent before rain, but the only emotion suffusing my skin is panic, and by the way my legs jitter without ceasing, people have started to notice, though it’s not like anything matters when your world is disintegrating behind your eyelids, especially because no one else can witness the atrocity with the same vivid apprehension as the host, and it becomes rather difficult to express feelings that way.

In a precarious attempt to calm me down, Pete’s hand almost restrains my legs before pursuing the blazing fire in my eyes, which tells him off in the harshest of implicit forms.

Look what you did, psycho. You just ruined any chance of connection.

“I’m, um, I’m really sorry, Patrick,” Pete murmurs, repositioning his hand to glide through his charcoal hair instead.

Absorbing a strong breath, I restore his hand’s place to its prior location on my knee, and the timid person is now Pete, his beige eyes bulging from their sockets, as if asking, “Are you sure?” to which I nod steadily to glaze over my own ambivalence.

By the time a few seconds have ticked away on my mental clock, my body begins to tremble again with the intensity of the tectonic plates shifting — except beautiful mountains are born from that action, whereas panic attacks are born from mine.

This is where your ignorance gets you, dimwit.

Once again, Pete transforms into Jesus, cognizant of my silent struggle and unlatching his hand from my leg before I can complain about the quaking of my bones.

“You should take care of yourself, yeah?” Pete digs his head low, laboring to capture my contact. “Don’t let coercion influence you to do things that you don’t want to do.”

I don’t look at him, but only after thirty seconds do I realize that the shaking halted. He’s won.

In a couple of minutes, dusk smothers the room, and I almost forget my anxiety. I’m really enjoying the “almost”.

I was mostly inclined to survive the duration of this film, but anxiety fucks my life without rest, so why even expect a joyride? What is so special about right now that excuses me from the relentless nipping of dread in my stomach?

Is it the fact that I finally ventured to a public place after years of solitude? Is it the fact that I’m with Pete? Is it the fact that I had come close to a panic attack but didn’t quite? Is it the fact that my mind is so keen on presenting me with demise?

The reality is quite simple: we build our own torture chambers around ourselves and scream when they won’t let us out, and while we’re inside them, the construction of a box comes into play without the understanding that they will soon become our coffins, so we suffocate over and over yet still expect the gift of oxygen that never comes.

We actually believe we’re alive, but we place the blame of our following downfall on other people to remove the satisfaction of our cackling mind for tricking us once again.

And besides the cackling, I reckon there is a soundtrack that follows us humans throughout our life, and we are utterly unaware of how it proceeds. Sometimes it pulses, and sometimes it is silent, like the sickening verdict of a heart monitor, but no matter the pace of the song, we can never hear it until we first hear the shattering of our hope, when our mind is jealous of our body’s ability to die, when it desires a demise of its own and is spoiled enough to receive its wish, fucking us all.

This music, however, fucks us again, and arguably more so. It tricks us into believing that we have achieved something tremendous, that our wait must’ve meant something to the universe, that our death is a small price to pay for the fluttering melody that becomes clear to us in a state of misfortune.

It dabs the tears from our eyes and passive-aggressively demands that we observe the light show that they make out of them, and once again, we do not say a word, only thank it for doing such a miraculous thing.

It is creating art out of our pain, and not once do we question it, but don’t we humans deserve so much more than locked lips? Have we not experienced enough hell?

We injure ourselves without rest, and the music comes along, so we stop to listen to the beautiful sounds that are so disparate from what we know, but we never realize that the tune is not so different than the only other noise we hear — the clanking of chains wrapped around our soul.

We are not caged animals, and losing faith in thinking that we were imprisoned is what made us lose faith in the world, because life is working against us, and the music frankly wanted a job.

And maybe we expected something else from giving up, something other than the music, maybe our body’s extravaganza of merciful death, but all we got was the annoying melody that warps our mind into thinking that it’s long-lost and missed dearly.

Maybe our brains were trying to protect us, shut out the music until we die and can hear what it’s been doing for us forever, but now that it’s free, it knows no bounds, and our brain is struggling to keep it under control.

Then…it just stops. Our brain gives up just like we did, and the clashing of mind against music settles down to reinforce the dainty notes of our eternal soundtrack.

And as the end of our song draws near, we understand that none of this ever mattered, that we can put up with the music for a few moments longer until we descend into the ground. Suddenly, we also recognize that this is us giving up in the grandest of manners, and the last note crashes in like a wave, sharp and unforgiving as a knife.

Then finally, the music ceases.

I wonder if I’ll hear it soon, for water now furnishes my lungs with a blood-stained tapestry at the sight of one simple event on the face of the screen.

People. Hands. Reaching. Arms. Shrieking. Silence. Assault. Pete’s frightened face on my behalf, mine too stunned to react.

A snake twists around my chest, whispering in my ear and punctuating each word with a constricting force. “You’re dying,” it taunts. “You’re dying. You’re dying. You’re dying.” All I can do is accept it, given my situation.

Tiny knives clump together on my skin, and a metallic hand materializes out of the chaos of their endeavors. Before I can brush the assailants off, its fingerprints claw at me with a hatred whose origins are unknown, each patch of flesh a dagger set on murder.

“Patrick, snap out of it!” a voice pleads as spiders pry against my throat, who lose their balance due to the interminable convulsion of my body at the expense of Pete Wentz’s energy.

Don’t listen to him, psycho.

I can’t breathe, and somehow, that’s okay. My airways haven’t been clear for over two rotations of the earth around the sun, and I’ve gotten used to drowning. It’s all the same.

“It’s okay!” I scream, kicking whatever I come in contact with and not bothering if it’s my friend. “Just let go of me, Pete. Let me die, you godforsaken prat.”

“I can’t.”

Then night slaughters dusk.

The next thing I know, a tangy object is forced into my mouth by a hand that cares too much to witness me flail around, but also a hand that has no regard for my preferences.

I can’t see anything, my vision a blur in an emerald coat, but I identify the flavor of the candy as cherry, a scourge upon this land. I’m well-disposed towards the idea of spitting it out and studying its plummet onto the concrete, but Pete’s already crying, and I promised my mother I would work on sensitivity.

So here I am, lacking in visual capabilities but toughing it up anyway, and I’m beginning to question if it would be more precise to characterize this affliction as my metamorphosis into an emotionless brick, but after an acute moment of contemplation, I decide it’s not so offbeat from what I was previously and elect to drop the subject to focus on my teary companion.

“You didn’t have to buy me candy,” I attest, wrestling with the bonbon swooping through my mouth from each movement of my tongue.

“Yes, I did.” Pete holds out another piece, this time grape, without smearing his tears across his skin to conceal them.

I slant away, crinkling my nose, even though purple is my favorite type.

My date forces a sigh from his esophagus, fitting his hands to the grooves on his hips and preparing to deliver a speech. “Your blood sugar drops when you’re stressed, and from what I could tell, you were pretty damn stressed back there.”

Don’t give him the bragging rights by taking the sweets. He’s just trying to lure you into a setting of submission.

As if that isn’t what the voice in my mind does on a daily basis.

“So what?” I tug on the collar of my granite-flecked hoodie to scratch an invisible itch, and I honestly don’t care if Pete can see through my fallacy, because I’m done.

Done with this movie theater. Done with Pete’s willingness to assist. Done with myself. Done with all of it.

“I wish I had drowned.” Each sound is crushed under my ravenous teeth, the rubble forming craters in Pete’s visage as it smacks him head-on, and I can confidently say that he wasn’t expecting such ferocious intentions from me.

Pete’s brows cave in. “There was no water anywhere for you to drown in.”

That’s not the point, you dunce. You’re almost as psycho as this other dimwit, and that’s really saying something.

Hysterical giggles erupt from inside me, crowding the atmosphere of the cinema’s awning. “Never really is, no. At least not to you.”

My friend nearly touches me but retracts his extremities at the last second to instead ask, “Patrick, are you okay?”

Now dangling from the opposite pole, jagged breaths tear at my throat and demand sufficient diligence, but all I desire is to escape. “Just please take me home.”

You’re dying.

You know what? That doesn’t matter. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been dying for a while before today, and I just now lifted my head over the surface. I deserve to live. I deserve to breathe.

“If that’s what you require.”

The only thing I require is life, and having Pete Wentz makes it meaningful, but I don’t want him to know that, so I only wind my fingers into the pocket of his jacket and sigh.

I survived.

Chapter Eight

When I asked Pete to take me home, I didn’t destine him to stay, but I suppose it’s a show for my mother — who always reminds me to make new friends, as if I leave the house on an occasion other than to take my medicine — so having him here isn’t so terrible.

That, and I’m too anxious to tell Pete to leave, but after a warm welcome supplied by him to my mom, the idea of hosting him isn’t as awful as I had once predicted, and demanding that he gets out is now becoming perverse to my mother’s whims.

Not that I mind much, but someone could simply wink at my mom, and she’d be hooked and invite them over for casserole. I’m sure she has good intentions, though.

Stepping through the door, the sharp hiss of the winter air is stifled by the cozy aroma of apple and cinnamon, most likely from my mother’s favorite soap, and the small woman scurries out of the living room to greet us.

“Patrick!” she squeals, piercing my cheeks with her fingertips and moving on to Pete without questioning why this strange boy is in her house. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

My head clicks into an angled stance. “Am I usually not?”

“Perhaps it’s because you’ve brought someone new.” The edge of my mom’s rose-tinted lips curves towards the sky in an action of secrecy, and Pete reciprocates it for fear of displeasing her.

That forgetful mother of yours finally figured it out, huh?

I don’t particularly enjoy my mother’s company, but the voices are enough for me to adapt to a newer approach. This woman raised me, and though she might not have done a very good job at it, it’s still becoming to be grateful.

“Yes, Mrs. Stump.” Pete’s grin flickers on and off as my mom’s gaze rotates between us. “My name’s Pete Wentz.”

My mother’s hand extends in the most elegant of fashions, and Pete’s ironic nature would suggest that he would kiss it like he’s also strutting around a sophisticated party, but he doesn’t, only acquaints his skin with hers and shakes steadily.

“Will you be eating dinner with us, Mr. Wentz?” My mother strays from our party to boil water for a pasta dish and appear, at least to Pete, as though she has culinary expertise; I’ve been living with her long enough to understand that the best she usually creates is cup noodles, and even those are from the grocery store.

Pete’s eyes flash in a signal to me, pleading for guidance, and I nod. He dispenses a jumpy sigh and answers, “If you’ll have me.”

My mom’s wooden spoon swirls the sultry water around its pot absently, humming at my new companion’s reply. “Wonderful. I’d be glad to have you.”

After the response to Pete’s proposition has been uttered, awkwardness slithers on the walls and poisons the prior mood of jubilance.

“I’ll call you when dinner’s ready,” my mother proclaims by the time thirty seconds have gone by, taking a hammer to the unbroken ice.

My skull oscillates undeviatingly, directing Pete towards the living room until my mother finishes preparing the meal.

Hey, I guess it’s not so bad to be trapped with another person, especially when it’s Pete Wentz. For a night, though...that’s a different story.

“What’s with all the bottles of hydrogen peroxide?” Pete pauses his scavenging of my room to ask this simple question.

There is a plethora of answers to this. I could keep them because I get hurt a lot and need to clean up the wounds (though that probably wouldn’t pass by him; he’s already detected that I don’t go outside much). I could keep them because a medical drive had an unwelcome surplus and decided to give them to my family. I could keep them because I like to do experiments. Many options to choose from.

My personal favorite is to say that I donate them to my old school’s nurse’s office, so that’s what I tell Pete.

I’m not positive whether or not he believes me, though, with the quizzical character lurking in his eyes and the compression of his brows, but it’ll have to do.

“What were you expecting?” I interrogate a tad too fervidly when Pete doesn’t relent.

His nose scrunches up, head swerves to a lesser slope. “It’s a little abnormal to stock your shelves with tons of hydrogen peroxide bottles, don’t you think?”

“Why is that?” My hands cuddle my hips for protection against the anticipated confrontation in an attempt to reclaim some sort of dominance.

“First of all, you don’t even go to that school anymore” — Pete’s accusing irises contract under his furrowing skin — “and second of all, why the hell does the nurse need that many supplies? It’s a high school, not a survival island.”

That may be true, but only to a small extent, because as many deaths occur within that four-year range, if not more, and for the longest time, I was sure I would be one of them, and I was utterly convinced that I wouldn’t be remembered, because like a survival island, no one cares, and everyone’s only goal is to step on others to achieve the superiority that always lounges in people’s teenage mindset, the kind that never comes yet doesn’t matter after college.

But even so, I wouldn’t stand a chance anyway, because I’m fucked-up, and other people recognized that and acted as though my life wasn’t already hell just so they could terrorize me further, and I don’t blame them, because it was somehow better than what I was doing to myself.

It’s like a migraine, how you bang your head against the floor to block out the other strings of pain that are pulled tauter with each second, and now I’m kind of missing the company of those high-schoolers, because they were the ground that buried the migraine, and now they’re absent, so the excruciating condition has returned.

Through this, they were living an irony that cackled on the other side of the mirror, not comprehending that they were doing the exact opposite thing that they intended, which is actually helping someone. For ages, they have been exposed to the barbarity that they have no objectives of denying, and they pretend to uphold that standard so obliviously that they don’t know they’re performing.

And I’ve always been against that falsehood, so I was punished for it, and now I’m homeschooled, so that survival island is but a memory, suppressed under other equally as malicious ones, and the students have moved on with their lives, enjoying the haze of being a junior, and I’m here, also a junior but defined by different means, and the distinction is clearer than before.

So if high school is a survival island, contrary to what Pete argued, I was killed by my opponents long ago.

“Why do I have so many bottles of hydrogen peroxide in my room?” I reopen the discussion, molding a canteen of the substance to my fingers. “It’s because you often get wounded on a survival island, and you need something to dry up the blood.”

A sense of gloom pokes holes into Pete’s visage. “And this is it?”

I smirk. “This has always been it.”

Pete laces a noodle around one prong of his fork, not caring to do anything with it, just staring at me as I narrate a fable of the last time I went outside before meeting the person who’s sitting right across from me at the table. His gaze is substantial, entranced by my unassuming words and caught so thoroughly in my eyes that I’m not certain a knife could separate the connection, but I don’t aim to try, though it grows worrying after a while.

Why is he looking at me like that? Did I say something wrong? Is he actually appreciating my presence? How could that be so? Why am I so whimsical? When was the last time I faced reality?

Silence, or you’ll mess up the story, dimwit.

My mother’s focus is not nearly as fixed on me as Pete’s, but it slides in at a close second. Part of me genuinely thinks that she’s interested, but the more practical part knows that she’s just searching for an excuse to have me down here, and because I waste all of my time huddled in my room, tales such as these don’t drift into her ears as often as she would prefer.

My voice halts suddenly, for a reason not yet deciphered, and the surrounding citizens beg me to go on in a numerous amount of expressions — puppy dog visages, clinquant irises, backs hunched by the decree of intrigue gathering in their complexions.

Why do they care so much? Is it a cruel joke, the vindictive punch-line being that I no longer go outside?

You think so negatively. That’s why you’re a psycho.

I continue, not because I truly desire to do so, but because I’m endeavoring to prove the voices incorrect.

Standing up for myself is the sweetest revenge.

My mother’s nails caress the linoleum surface of the counter, an act that she once described as a nervous twitch, so naturally, panic traipses through my heart. A prolonged moment drags its feet through the sand before she starts. “Patrick, I’m not trying to criticize your choice in friends, but…”

Oh, here we go.

“Are you sure Pete will help you get better?” Her expression is palpable, her eyes shadowed by the nearing storm crawling by the windows.

“Why are you so concerned with my friends? I thought you were all about getting me outdoors.” It comes out more defensively than I had hoped for, but I can attribute that to my emotions constantly dangling over the edge.

Pete’s vision never falters from his spot near the dishwasher, aggressively caressing plates with a sunflower sponge, so it’s plausible to say that he’s not listening, but even so, the omnipotent feeling of paranoia does not cease; it never does.

My mom’s tone scales down by notice of my safety measure. “I wasn’t quite saying that I don’t want you to get outside, but I’m just taking precautions. I’m sure Pete is a wonderful guy, but if you become incredibly dependent on him, that’s not good for either of you.”

“What makes you think I’ll become dependent on him?” Residual pieces of my volume dance in Pete’s ears, but he doesn’t turn around to address them.

“Nothing.” Patricia Stump’s lips fold into a thoughtful pucker, closing the matter.

Fingertips wind through my hair as a gust of wind leaks from my lungs. “You’re lying, but you’re my mother, so you have to. If you were really interested in me getting better, you wouldn’t be so damn ambiguous.”

She doesn’t respond, pondering through the clatter of the dishes how her own son became so messed-up, and honestly, I have no fucking idea, but I roll with it like everyone says I should, because at least I’m not living on the streets, and at least I have a“caring” parent, and at least I’m not dead, but I frankly don’t accept settling for the things I do have, because the things I do have mean nothing significant when you look at them closely, and it’s time someone other than me understands that — but you know what? No one will, because I’m isolated within myself, drawing blankets across my back and hiding from the world, and once again, I’m the aforementioned messed-up son, and now even my own mother knows it.

My mother’s face echoes despondency in the way it declines so completely. “I’m sorry, Patrick. I’m just trying to be a good mother.”

“Don’t make this about yourself,” I snap, and she reels back in surprise. “Sorry, I...I just want to have a good night with Pete, okay?”

My mom nods.

“Thank you.”

Pete’s body swivels to approach us, shooting his hands into his pockets stiffly. “I finished the dishes.”

My mom’s focus sweeps back to me, as if confirming something. “I’ll be going out soon to get groceries and...do other things, I guess. Be good.”

A devious look wades in Pete’s eyes. “Sure will.”

Chapter Nine

Everything was going fine — or at least as fine as things go for someone like me — until one point of pressure wrecked it all.

Pete and I were enjoying our time while my mother went out, relaxing by the singing flames and maneuvering board game pieces to advance our plans, and our actions were tender amidst a world of judgement, so I was prepared to cherish the moment, but I should never expect such things from myself.

I’m sure Pete didn’t plan on contacting my arm — accidents happen; everyone knows that — but it still retained the same impact. Like people tell one another, an apology doesn’t heal a broken leg.

To a normal person, someone touching your arm would be nothing momentous and would probably be brushed off with a brisk “oh, sorry” before they go on their merry little way and forget about it five minutes later.

But I am most definitely not a normal person, so here I am, crunched on the floor of the bathroom after excusing myself with the lie of needing to use the toilet, a half-empty bottle of hydrogen peroxide quivering in my hand as it bleeds onto my arm, and I frankly couldn’t care less, because this is what I’ve been doing for two years, and it feels as natural as swallowing a breath. Ceasing the action would be the more dangerous option, but it’s taken a while to explain that to psychologists without them promptly interjecting to assign a cavalier diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The peroxide deposits an unquestionably hospitable aftertaste, and that’s one thing that I need after months of neglect. It’s presented itself as my one true friend, even going so far as to challenge the voice in my head, and I’ve acknowledged it to be accurate. Other people are wary about the subject, but they clearly haven’t been living inside my mind for long enough to determine what I do and do not need for myself.

So with that mapped out, I observe intently as the clear substance dribbles out of its bottle, tap-dancing over my skin as it supplies parting gifts of its own body on its way to the next area. The image is so vibrant that it hoists a smile onto my chapped lips, if only for a moment, before it bustles away at the sight in the mirror procured when I stand up.

I’m the everlasting vampire figure that I witnessed the last time, but it’s the vampire figure with auspicious foundation makeup amassed on my face. I look somehow happier, but all I desire right now is to wipe it away, strangle it in the drain of the sink to discount its existence, and I almost pound through the glass to trap it once the structure repairs itself, but I wouldn’t want Pete to go search for me at his note of the noise.

I conclude it’s better to focus on the peroxide — and what an interesting liquid it is. I take particular notice of its fluidity, how it flees from my arm, how it dries up the skin once deciding to stay, how it can go anywhere but has its destination in mind.

I wish I could do that — run away with the freedom to go back — but this is life, and it only evokes destruction.

I hadn’t comprehended how much time I spent in the bathroom until a sharp knock at the door demands a bath of hydrogen peroxide beside me, a curse word rolling out of my lips, and a sudden state of hysteria.

Instead of the person entering, their melodic voice inquires, “Patrick? Are you doing okay in there?”

Don’t say anything. Don’t let him in. You’re a psycho, yeah, but you can’t let him know that, not if you don’t want to be alone.

“Patrick, I’m coming in if you don’t answer me.”

Don’t respond.

The creaking of the door fiddles with the lock system, and Pete’s perturbed form steps through with a timid clutch on his wrist.

“It’s impolite to intrude, you know.” My gaze never departs from my chemical activity, only pursues it without a fear of chastisement from Pete, because someone interrupting my compulsion doesn’t mean that it can’t resume later, and not even the possibility of making a friend is powerful enough to override the immutable system.

“I apologize for being so tactless, but—” Pete stops short, processing what I’m doing to myself. “What is that?”

I glare at him for the first time since we met, but if we continue acting this way, it won’t be the last. “Hydrogen peroxide, you fool. What does it look like?”

Pete’s bones rattle under his clothes, but he deflects my comment outwardly. “It looks like you’re doing something that you shouldn’t be.” Glory leaks from his skin and spills into the pile of peroxide on the floor in an agile manner.

It’s a shame he’s so arrogant. I thought you two would work out.

“What do you mean?” Teeth churning their own material, I add, “I do this all the time. It’s no big deal.”

“Considering you lied to me about going to the bathroom” — Pete allows one prolonged glance of shame at the puddle of disinfectant before addressing me again — “I think it is a big deal.”

My shoulders buckle under the pressure of replying, eyes resort to staring at my battered shoes. “You don’t know what it’s like to need to do this, Pete,” I mutter. “You don’t.”

The door blinks at the command of Pete, and he curls his knees up to match my position on the tile. “Then why do you need to do it? I won’t condemn, I promise.” His attention is still directed towards me, even after drawn-out moments of waiting that now migrate to kids with fewer problems.

Tears claw at my face, and I spread their soot more evenly across so that it seems like they disappeared. “Because there are fingerprints on my arm that won’t go away, and I swear, I’ve tried everything — scratching, washing, burning — but nothing’s worked as well as the peroxide.”

“Do you know where they came from?” Pete’s tone is a recumbent hum, splashing onto the walls like blood — conspicuous and just as alarming — and whatever solace that retreated previously has now brought crumbs.

“It started two years ago (when I was still as disarranged as I am currently) with a friend and a mistake, which can be said for anything dubious, now that I think about it.” My diction snaps like the flimsiest crayon in the box, but a captivated expression from my companion glues it back together...partially. “The only thing I seemed to know was that I wasn’t okay, Pete. I wasn’t.”

Pete’s hands lunge for a square of toilet paper to capture the crisp leaves cascading from my eyes, and the first drop upon the surface is like blood upon the snow, like rain upon the ground, like acid upon flesh.

“And D-D...my friend was the only one who made things better, but I was getting worse, and I couldn’t rely on him for everything. You can’t do that to someone.”

Porcelain fragments of grief construct Pete’s visage and chip away at his prior mask of delight, which was so benefiting to see for someone as lost as I am, but it’s gone now, and truth is the only viable craftsman.

“I was hallucinating more and more, and it felt like I was fucking dying, drowning under doubt and regrets and melanoid waves, and I didn’t want him to have to fish me out and resuscitate me, so I left. I fucking left him, and at the time, it seemed like a fruitful plan, like I was somehow saving him from the starvation of loss, and even after he screamed that I was throwing him to the wolves, I didn’t listen, because the only thing worse than suffocating is watching someone else suffocate, and he wasn’t strong enough for that.”

Why would you tell Pete this? He’s going to leave you, just like you left the other fool, and you’re going to die again. Who would be here to host me, huh? You ungrateful dimwit.

“I was on my way out the door, and…” My eyes stitch together tightly, recalling the event and shuddering.

Dr. Saporta wouldn’t like this.

“He grabbed my arm and wouldn’t let go. And yeah, that doesn’t seem like a lot — it doesn’t even hurt — but that wasn’t why it stung. It was the first action of many, which included him locking me inside, him yelling at me that what I was doing was wrong and immoral and brutal, him saying that we could sort things out. But you know what?”

Pete’s head rotates back and forth with the speed of a snail, bracing himself within this time to hear the final punchline.

“We never did, and now I’m left with these scars, while he’s off doing whatever he wants, because I was too goddamn scared to say anything. I have to attend countless psychology meetings for the PTSD he gave me and the OCD that his touch gave me and the psychosis that started this all and the social anxiety that made me petrified to stand up for myself and the autism that separated me from everyone but him in the first place, and it’s still not enough to fix me.

“He’s free, and I am a fucking animal, trapped in a cage that I made for myself under the belief that it was his fault, and nothing ever changes in a life like this, so if hydrogen peroxide is the only safe haven since his company, if it’s the only thing that keeps me alive, then you’ll accept it like the kind of friend that you advertise yourself as.”

Silence snatches the color from the room, chilling it from the lack of energy, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I ruined it all.

“Thank you for telling me,” Pete finally whispers. I anticipate another moment of quiet after his comment, but he has more to say. “Though you have to realize that this isn’t good for you, Patrick, indulging in your compulsions.”

Fingers fight for my hair, asphyxiating in the thin, dry strands. “You’re just like the rest of them, always telling me not to do things, not to act a certain way, not to be myself, but this is my life now, in case you haven’t noticed, and the peroxide comes along with it.” A soft, miffed chuckle skates out of my mouth. “I thought you were beyond this, Pete, but I guess not. You’re the reincarnation of my psychologist, and I hate it.”

Stuttering in the form of closing and reopening occurs on Pete’s bronzed terrain, eyelashes folding over the lower tundra with a mission of conveying shock. “I try not to be your psychologist, because that isn’t how friendship is supposed to run.”

“That’s what everyone preaches, yet they never seem to follow by that example.” My jaw compresses, narrowly crushing my teeth under the force as my vision flicks to the opposite lateral.

It’s riveting to stop and examine the features of it — the silky blue that embraces the wall, the splattering bumps from average building, the absence of complexity with the simple, straight structure — but Pete’s still gripping my uncited focus, and it appears that he won’t let it go.

I give up and confront him.

“I want to help you, Patrick,” Pete assures once recognizing that I’m listening (though not intently).

“But I don’t want to be helped,” I murmur, toying with my extremities.

Pete’s vision lulls to a position aimed towards me, an earnest air diffusing around the room. “Well I won’t warrant that.”

Chapter Ten

“Patrick, what’s wrong? You’ve been avoiding me all night.”

My spotlight transfers from selecting a movie on the shelf to my frazzled acquaintance, whose hands levitate in the air to express a demand. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t play coy,” Pete barks anxiously, and after an astonished scowl from me, his tone slopes down. “Sorry for being so aggressive, but there’s something wrong.”

You can’t admit anything, or he won’t leave you be.

Maintaining a safe stance from the vacancy of cameras in my room, my perspective stains the disc of an opened film package to refrain from meeting Pete. “There’s been something wrong for as long as I can remember. There’s nothing different about right now.”

“I bet you say that all the time, yeah? And then you complain about no one understanding you, no one helping you.” Pete’s fingers skate through his dusty locks as a sigh rolls from his lungs. “Well I’m trying, Patrick, and you need to let me.”

My arms collapse on each other. “I don’t need to let you do anything. They’re my issues, not yours, and even if you have an abundance of them yourself, that’s irrelevant to me.”

“Yeah, I do have an abundance of issues, and I’ve had to employ numerous psychiatrists to fix my fucking bipolar brain, none of whom have worked as well as the medication they gave me, so I know what it’s like to struggle, and I am cognizant of the fact that it’s not as pretty as society makes it (on the occasions that they acknowledge mental illnesses at all), but there are always going to be people who can relate with you, and I am one of those people, so please...if you value our friendship, tell me what’s wrong.”

You can’t tell anyone anything. You already decided this, dimwit. You said you wouldn’t let people see inside your brain. They’ll manipulate you.

My tongue assails the rim of my mouth, pushing against my teeth to pass the time, while Pete is still as worried as ever, eyes creased with frustration. “Bipolar disorder, huh?” I elect to say, diverting the subject.

A strand of hair shuffles out of Pete’s view. “That doesn’t matter.”

“That’s what I always say, yet you try to force things out of me, but here you are, saying the exact same thing. Give me a moment to assess how hypocritical that is, will you?”

“I’m just trying to assist you,” Pete whispers, gaze tethered to the floor.

“There is this voice in my head, and they don’t want your assistance. I have to listen to them, not you. They’ve always been here for me, and you’re just some kid from a daycare center that just happened to notice I was panicking and retained knowledge of a remedy for it. You’re nothing special.”

I can detect the spears piercing Pete’s face, and his temple of self-esteem deteriorates into a murky dust, all because of a comment that I’m sure he’s heard many times before. He shouldn’t care that I’ve finally said it. I’m nothing special, either.

“Do you have a name for this voice?”

You just insulted him, and he only cares about what I’m called? Typical fool.

I pause and think. No, I’ve never considered what the terror that haunts my mind is named, and I don’t really care, as well, but Pete’s anticipating an answer, and I’ve been ghastly towards him, so the best I can do is comply.

“Etep,” I declare without thinking, but it soon processes as a valid choice.

Pete’s brows faint closer to each other in bewilderment. “Why Etep?”

“Because it’s your name backwards, and Etep is the complete opposite from you. You’re kinder than they are, smarter and more worthwhile, even if I won’t confess to it regularly, so it’s fitting, isn’t it?”

Don’t compliment people. They get too clingy.

But it’s true, so I’ll narrate it, and I’ve never had a sense of what I should and shouldn’t say, so it really all blurs together, and this is no exception. Pete Wentz is beautiful.

“Etep,” my friend repeats, mulling it over. “Thank you.”

I wonder how finally addressing the voice in my head is cause for him thanking me, but I respect the gesture, and a smile unwittingly pulls at my lips. “You’re welcome.”

A metaphorical embrace flows between us, and Pete’s throat shivers eventually, rumbling, “So why have you been avoiding me?”

Shit. We had shared an intimate moment, and he’s back at my neck again. The allure is all but diminished from the room, the aura sickeningly emaciated and hell-bent on wounding us — or just me, because Pete is the one with the harmless query, and I am disastrously trapped in the crossfire.

“I shouldn’t have told you what happened to me.” It’s remarkably honest for someone such as myself, and I note it as progress, but I shouldn’t be rejoicing in this moment, for Pete’s visage is ambushed with disappointment.

“And why is that? It’s important for friends to articulate their feelings, and it’s a consequential thing for humans to corner them inside themselves without acquiescing them.” My companion’s head propels back and forth with his fingers snagging the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want you to be even more of the wreck that you portray yourself as, and the only way to escape that fate is to open up to me. I want you to know that I’m here for you no matter what.”

“Fine.” A burdensome shipment of breath embarks from my mouth. “I told my story as if it were D...my friend’s fault, but it was me. I was the one who tried to leave. I was the one who cried at simplistic words thrown at me. I was the one who almost said something to my mother — I didn’t, but I could’ve decimated it all. It was my fault, not his, and I fucking spoiled everything.”

The urge to grab my hands and tell me something that needs to be heard bangs against Pete’s face, but it doesn’t shatter the glass. Only the words evade the barrier, crying, “It will never be your fault, Patrick. That guy fucking hurt you, so don’t you dare blame yourself. What he did was illegal and unethical and more immoral than he said your departure was, and there’s no one at more of a shortcoming than him. You’re fucking amazing, and don’t you debate that for a second.”

Tears demolish my solidity, but I don’t give a shit anymore. Too many years I’ve been locked up with the key thrown down the trashcan, and letting loose to just sob without judgment is a wonderful concept.

Pete won’t care. He’s known the same terrors, and maybe that’s why he appeals to me so much, and I can’t decide whether being just as disarrayed as him is a beneficial component of our relationship or not, but Dr. Saporta isn’t here to vote on my opportunities for once, so I might as well enjoy my time.

But even so, Pete is wrong. The event was entirely my doing, and I’ve known that for two years. It’s nothing new, not like a phase. It’s forever, marked upon me with an infected needle and blood red ink.

Ambivalence composes a silent tragedy on my skin, accentuating its performance with an arduous rainfall, and I struggle through its volume to choke out, “You can’t really think that all it takes is for you to say it for me to believe that it’s the truth.”

“Touch your arm,” Pete orders, saluting his subject.

“What?”

Pete nods at my bicep to clarify. “Touch your arm where your old friend did, and just feel its complexities. Don’t evaluate what transpired, only the vantage point from a third party. Did you grab your arm?”

My head wobbles to contradict.

“That’s right. Your friend did, not you. He awarded you with post-traumatic stress disorder, with obsessions and compulsions, and none of that was your fault.” Pete’s eyes dig a grave for my denial into my soul to make certain that I understand. “Now touch your arm.”

Grudgingly, hesitant fingers coast across my palpitating limb, the sensation introducing icicles and winter storms to the surface, and I surprisingly don’t get strangled by its capacity like I suspected I would.

“See that? Your touch is real, not your friend’s. His legacy ended two years ago, and I can’t find him here with us, so he’s definitely not holding contact with you. I know that you never certify your arm a passport into freedom, but you just beheld a credible taste of connection, and I’m so fucking proud of you, Patrick.” A beam circulates Pete’s demeanor, splattering liveliness on the walls.

“I’m not sure…” My lip suffers the sting of my teeth, nearly extracting blood, just because I’m an equivocal dimwit.

The boy giggles, banishing my comment to replace it with something more cheerful. “My new life goal is to assure Patrick Stump that it was clearly not his fault,” Pete announces, shaping his hands to his hips. “And I always achieve my goals.”

Chapter Eleven

There’s something oddly comforting about scrolling through your contacts one by one. Perhaps it’s like emphasizing to yourself that you actually have people that care about you just a little bit, people that you can ring whenever you please without panicking about not saving their number, and that’s something distinctive to someone with social anxiety.

But that comfort dissolves when Pete Wentz is watching you and presses the call button on Brendon Urie’s page, someone who happens to be the worst person you could prank, because he ends up unwittingly pranking you back with even more velocity than you had contributed to your plan, so it’s basically like screwing with your own army in a battle on your path to defeat.

There’s no use trying to fight it, though, because Pete realizes none of this, and if I tried to explain it to him, Brendon will have picked up the line before I can finish, and thus the chaos ensues promptly afterward.

With the homosexual’s flamboyant personality, there’s no chance in hell I could hang up on him, because he’d call me back a million times until my phone drains in battery life and I curse the very metaphorical heavens that sent down this atheistic man-whore, whose most rampant plague is calling himself a gay lord every five seconds, so I brace myself for the impact that Pete will never comprehend before he meets the guy.

My phone’s screen signals the connection between my friend and the apparent gay lord with a reputation for prostitution, stomach lurching with dread.

“I don’t think you know what you’re getting into, Pete,” I warn, glancing up at the guest from my location on the floor to his spot on the bed.

“That makes it all the more amusing,” he counters.

“No, I mean you really—”

“I got the Cheez Whiz!” a muffled voice proclaims from the alternate end of the line, its origin probably looting through a cabinet in another room.

My nose coils in perplexity. “The hell?”

“He probably accepted the call by accidentally crushing the phone under his elbow or something, and this is just the collateral,” Pete surmises, lifting the device to his ear in a labor to expel more information on the cryptic Cheez Whiz.

An extended moan insinuates our ears, like a mix between an ox and a dying boar, neither pleasant, and our senses demur.

“Or this is him just pranking us back,” I negate as more of the sounds tiptoe in pentagrams around us.

Pete visibly cringes, an action that usually doesn’t arise outside him, being all docile and such. “What’s wrong with this Brendon Urie guy?” His brows convolute intensely, like they’ll somehow aid his study of my flaming queer of a friend, but I have to admit — not even I know what’s going on inside Brendon Boyd Urie’s head, and I’ve been familiar with him for over ten years, but there’s something unique whirring in there (probably why he has such a massive forehead), something that none of us can reflect, meaning I’ve given up trying to decode his messages, which probably just have gigantic (yet exceptionally realistic) dicks drawn on all of them, so there’s not much worth competing overall. The teachers fucking hated him for being so enigmatic.

“It’s been said that his social life is bigger than his forehead,” I present bluntly, focus taped to the phone. “Aye, Brendon!”

No response.

“Ryan Ross is heterosexual!” I try, a deceptive grin lathered over my face.

“The fuck did you just say?” the “angelic” tone of Brendon Urie demands, the static from his increased volume dropping from the phone’s speakers.

“Glad we got your attention,” Pete thanks, leaning closer to me to relay the message effectively.

“Who is this?” the teenager interrogates with an astonished flair in his inflection. “Patrick Stump, I didn’t know you were a prostitute.”

“No, Brendon. That would be you.”

“Shit, that’s true.” Satire dejection dangles from Brendon’s words, but he dismisses them to move on to another subject. “Anyway, what’s up?”

“Just so you know, this is Pete Wentz from the Belleville Development Center and the coffee shop near my house, and what’s that whole Cheez Whiz thing?”

The reply returns fairly quickly. “Oh, that’s just Ryan. He likes to eat Cheez Whiz and milk together — I honestly have no idea why, because it’s pretty fucking disgusting, but he’s cute, so I allow it.”

“Ryan?” Pete mouths, and I send a “Brendon’s boy toy” back to him, to which he laughs softly.

It’s almost like you have a friend, psycho. That’ll never happen, of course, but it’s funny to see you try.

Not now. Get the hell out of my mind. All you do is bring destruction.

Hmph, it’s almost like you’re describing yourself.

That’s the thing about psychosis, though — it doesn’t cease for pastimes, only interrupts it to convey its terribly dull reports, as if I care at all; I should get back to my friends, not fret about what’s going on inside my head. I have all the time in the world for that.

“Is there even the slightest chance that you’re not crushing on Ryan Ross?” Though Brendon can’t see it, my brow hikes farther up my forehead.

“Hell no. Are you new here?” he cackles.

“You should tell him how you feel,” Pete advocates, enticed.

A roaring noise bounds against the phone line, and Brendon’s words flee in a more startled manner. “Yeah, I should, but my mom is home, and she doesn’t like Ryan to be here, so I gotta scat.”

Snickering, I shift my grip on the phone. “Classic.”

“Peace out, rainbow trout” is all I hear before Brendon supposedly tosses his device onto the bed and sprints into another area to alert his not-boyfriend to the compromising situation.

The scraping clamor of perforating a window — which is surprisingly comical — is audible from our position in my bedroom, soon chased by the gliding of legs across a wooden frame and the wrapping action of sealing the aperture.

After about a minute, the connection presses a finger to its mouth, and the life absconds from our signal, spurring a discussion between just Pete and me.

“Being thrown on a bed really reminds me of sleeping arrangements,” Pete digresses, clasping his hands together.

For a moment, I predicted Pete talking about how being thrown on a bed reminded him of a morbid love letter he read once, but that’s thankfully not the case.

“Yeah, let’s sort that out.” My voice is rather controlled for someone about to have a heart attack at the probability of Pete’s prior statement, but I’m certainly not complaining. “I can sleep on the floor.”

“Nonsense,” my guest nullifies. “You’re the host, and this is your royal mattress of divine slumber.”

An unintentional giggle strokes my lips, but Pete appears to think it’s the most adorable painting he’s ever seen, so it remains without regret. “Are you sure?”

Pete nods, a natural smile cemented to his gentle veneer. “But of course.”

My face contorts with the burden of making a decision, and I vocalize, “Eh, you can have it. The floor’s cozy enough for me.”

Pete dips his head diagonally, baffled at my eagerness to relinquish my serene setting for the solid ground. “Are you sure?”

“But of course,” I mimic, with even the smile represented perfectly.

“If you insist.” Pete mocks peevishness, but anyone can recognize that he’s bubbling with gratitude beneath the first layer. Can you believe I did that? Wow.

I withdraw a downy blanket from my closet, where Brendon Urie escaped at the age of ten years old, shocking his parents quite thoroughly and causing mass carnage among the heterosexuals, and I fold the fabric across a pad from under my bed.

Once I’ve finished assembling my mattress, Pete registers that as an authorization to amble under the covers, and my actions pursue him a few seconds later.

“Good night, Pete Wentz,” I greet underneath the aegean cloak, a simper hidden for the reign of eyes peeking out of the duvet.

“Good night, Patrick Stump.” Pete’s voice is thick like honey — and just as sweet — and the light from the lamp beside him is collared by the dominance of temporal obscurity.

Then night absorbs the heat from the air, stashing a frigid blast in its place, but that’s trivial with heaps of blankets strewn upon my body, and the warmth of my companion is the sole discussion within my thoughts.

And in the morning, no one is to know that my back conformed to Pete’s chest for a few hours, because that frankly isn’t crucial. The only thing that matters is that I got a conducive refuel, and if it was in my friend’s clutch, so be it. It’s my bed, after all.

Chapter Twelve

Watching Pete Wentz scrub tables in a mundane coffee shop would seem, at least to any regular person, like an incredibly boring activity, but it’s already been mentioned that I’m not a regular person, so I’ll enjoy myself as much as I possibly can.

The aspect of not having to worry about anything is a plus, too. The only slightly troubling occurrence is when the bell by the door wails for attention — the noise itself is terrifying, but the fact that a new person has entered is an added bonus — though other than that, peace is the supreme ruler.

Pete’s hands circle the tables with close concentration, and through this it becomes evident that he values his job excessively. I wonder why that is, but my mother has made it obvious that asking people’s introspective intentions isn’t socially appropriate, so I don’t say anything.

Instead, my eyes bounce over his actions, hollering from an elation that probably shouldn’t exist (but nevertheless does) as the auroral ambience glitters around our heads and breathes as we would through our noses.

So mesmerizing is Pete’s work that the droning of my alarm narrowly avoids being silenced by my captivity, but at the last moment, the snooze button is bulldozed by my frantic fingers.

“What was that?” Pete inquires, charcoal locks swinging around Pete’s forehead as if from coarse jungle vines.

“My alarm,” I confess, lips abbreviating with a nervous expression.

“Do you have to go somewhere?” My friend’s face is masterfully illustrated with chagrin, colors clashing as if fighting a war for artistic control upon a terrain of matchless creativity and splendor, a war that they will never win, because the vibrance has been overrun by shadowy remorse.

“To my...psychologist.” It’s an ordeal simply to launch the words out, and perhaps I shouldn’t be so grateful to myself for performing a basic human function, but the appreciation is still ubiquitously present.

“Have a good time, and do your best, yeah?” Pete really wants the best for me...

I nod hastily so that my actual emotions won’t chew through their leash. “I’ll try.”

A heartfelt smile is the last thing I see before the door separates Pete and me, and what a pleasant closing act that is.

“You seem agitated.” The words tickle Dr. Saporta’s vocal chords with the intention of being portrayed as a dull statement, confined to a minimal range, and they’re more than unnerving.

“How so?”

The man surveys me up and down as if to make it seem like he collected more data. “Your feet are tapping, your hands are squirming around, and you keep glancing at the clock. Do you have somewhere to be?”

A sly smile details my face. “Just here.”

The psychologist pushes further. “Then do you have someone to see?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. It’s Pete Wentz, about whom I told you before.”

Well you seem joyous.

Adversity tears a hole in Dr. Saporta’s countenance, speeding through every bit of durability. “You mean right before you slammed the door in my face after walking out and disrupting the other patients’ sessions?”

My mouth’s inspiration runs dry, and Dr. Saporta views it as an opportunity to ask one of his “philosophical” questions.

“Do you know your enemies, Patrick?”

I’ve always found it appalling when people would ask me this, because I thought by now they would’ve grasped the status of my mind and how non-linear it is, how knowing your enemy is by far the most befuddling thing one could require of another. The topic itself is so specific, as if enemies aren’t always circling around like vultures, waiting to strike at the most random times, which are the most relevant to them in some inexplicable manner.

So no, I don’t know my enemies, but I anticipated more from him.

But Dr. Saporta is a jerk, and whether or not that has already been established is of no importance, because the fact has been thoroughly etched into my mind, the only one who seems to know what it’s doing, and because I’m so lost at sea, I concluded a while back that the best option is to follow my brain, considering other ends aren’t so available as I had once thought, and judging by the way those voices hold such an authority over me, it’s not like I have much of a choice but to comply, and they’ve made themselves pretty clear that they’re the only things present and that they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

At least I’m not alone, though. I wonder if I should be celebrating. Dr. Saporta definitely wouldn’t, but it’s not like I give a care after describing him as a jerk.

I believe it’s fair in saying that he’s done more harm than help, even if my mother would disagree with her last breath, but she’s not the one who experiences first-hand what it’s like to need a psychologist in the first place.

I’m notably fucked up, and that’s something I have to understand or else suffer an impenetrable layer of ignorance hanging over me, but no one else seems to, only shrugging it off after assuring that I’m just like the rest of them — or better yet, just someone with minor differences that I can overcome by believing in myself; if they were true friends, they would recognize that believing in myself has never proven effective, but someone with the audacity to advise that remedy is far from a true friend anyway.

And relatively, one would assume that a patient and their psychologist must have a significant bond that excludes phrases such as those, but there is no separation between normal people and people who require treatment. We’re all just humans, which entails emotions, and erasing them is somewhat ironic, because maintaining vigorous emotions is most likely what landed the patient in psychiatric care, meaning that they should possess a stronger judgement on the person most suited for their needs.

But I didn’t receive my choice — my mother chose for me — so I might as well answer Dr. Saporta’s query.

“Maybe.”

“Well is Pete one of them?” Dr. Saporta pries, irises fluttering with an interest unfitting for a psychologist towards their patient.

“He challenges me.” And for the most part, it’s true.

Pete Wentz isn’t afraid to counter me, to remind me that I’m not the only person in this world from a perspective other than my social anxiety’s, while other people are terrified of me, maintaining a cautious distance like I carry a pathogen that will give them Ebola or something, never questioning me, and for the longest time, I viewed that as a benefit of being so jacked up, because I wouldn’t have to talk to people, and they wouldn’t have to talk to me, but in reality, it’s not healthy to be sheltered from the world. Pete knows that I am a person, and people have a substance beyond their cognitive stability, which I don’t as a result of perpetuating that aforementioned mentality, and it’s beautiful just to feel.

I am a human. I have emotions. I have friends. I have other humans that are made of lots of the same atoms and genes and structures that I am, and Pete has made me aware of the fact that I’m not so abstracted as I had one thought.

“And do you view that as a flaw in your relationship?”

Pete Wentz challenges me more than anything I’ve ever encountered, and I am extremely indebted to him for it. Previously, I counted that as a flaw, but it’s axiomatic that I was completely wrong, like I am with most things these days, and I’m emerging from my shell a tad more each second — revealing myself to the more disreputable of people, however, could be cataclysmic.

“No, I can’t say that I do. He’s made me think on many occasions.”

Head tilted, my psychologist concurs, “It’s always good to think.” Dr. Saporta’s sunflower-tinted pencil drums with shallow whispers on the diagnostic sheet, the one that makes me hesitant to visit this office, orchestrating a steady, monotonous harmony that attacks my ears with its balanced perfection; someone such as him doesn’t deserve excellence, not after everything he’s done to my mind, repercussions that can’t ever be reversed.

“Thinking...it’s been a risk for me, though,” I grant, appointing an aimless mark of burgundy to my skin so that it may wallow around and vacate at its leisure. “My thoughts are messy, especially when I have voices laced within them, and I’ve found those anecdotes to be frequent.”

Dr. Saporta’s hands mesh together, like a net to catch my constant shade. “That’s why we’re here, Patrick.”

My windpipe is then fractured by an incredulous laugh splitting away. “I thought we were here so that you can tease me about how crazy I am.”

“You’re not crazy—”

“Then explain my hallucinations! Explain the person in my mind! Explain my paranoia! Explain why I heard you talking to my mother about sending me to a fucking mental hospital!” My breathing requests pulses as hollow as the ocean in which I hope to drown myself, the nebulous depths of the New Jersey coast, but it’s all so far away now, suppressed by other memories of hardship and sin.

I desire to return to it, to feel the dismal water slipping through my fingers as a metaphor of my life slipping away like it has been for two years, and just know that nothing will ever matter anymore, because I’m practically dead anyway. This has been clear as the sea which I never want to observe, because it advertises the lies I fall for temporarily, and I hate the aftermath of realizing that they were never tangible.

“You’re not crazy,” Dr. Saporta repeats, peering down at his fingers looped in a gesticulatory cage of flesh.

My head’s genuflection defies him. “You can’t turn me against something I’ve known for a while, the harsh opinions of the people at school and at home and in public, because they’ve been ingrained within my mind, and they’ll be here forever, so you have no place to tell me that I’m not crazy — you’re just one person amidst a world of people who contradict your statement, and you’ll soon understand that your ideas about me won’t mean a thing later, because you’re transitory, but I bear the judgment for as long as I’m alive, and with the current state of things, that period won’t be long.

“Your job is to guide me through this rough time, but you’re receiving a bad grade as of now. Step up your game, Saporta, or you won’t have a patient to help, but you will have a funeral to attend.”

The impact of my speech is pronounced on Dr. Saporta’s regularly neutral visage, his brows contorting with mixed emotion, his mouth thinning like wearied hair dyed a salmon hue. “If you’re having suicidal thoughts—”

“No,” I cut him off, beryl oculi burning with candid heat into my psychologist’s copper ones and not once aiming to liberate them. “I’m having contented thoughts, and I can impute that to a special someone. Pete Wentz is not my enemy, and he will never be.”

The sounds of the room desert us, punching through the walls to evade the futile doctor perched on the desk until he crushes them within his grip to transport them back to the area. “Well that’s settled,” the man expounds rather dully.

Once again, you’ve made a mistake.

Chapter Thirteen

Sweltering tears trample my skin as they’re bombarded by the breeze from the door when it’s shoved open, and the world suddenly isn’t so exquisite anymore.

The birds’ tongues have been severed, then deposited into a roaring flame so that they may no longer sing. The trees are stationary, their roots’ purpose finally discovered as one to hold the oaks in place. The air screams in anguish for a reprieve that is more permanent than it hoped for.

You’re going to a mental hospital, psycho, right where you belong.

I fucking know, but I know after the middle-man told me. My own mother wants to lock me up, as if that’s not what I’ve been doing to myself for five years, and she didn’t even inform me of the plan. Am I not entitled to my own future?

Ever since I was a kid, I dreamt of what life would be like as a young adult, and not once did I consider what it’s like for me right now. Not once did I think I’d be forced into daily medication and doctors. Not once did I think I would hallucinate voices in my head. Not once did I think I would be under continuous surveillance. Not once did I think I would be sent to a mental institution.

I familiarized myself with football teams and school dances, with movie nights and laughter. I didn’t ask for this.

And through all of the pandemonium catapulting around the mind that turned out much different than I would’ve desired, a crimson-haired lad of eighteen approaches me, a smile chiseled into his feline lips that soon disappears due to my obvious strife.

Gerard fucking Way, the life-ruiner as a result of his chronic grin — and the last person I’d expect to see standing outside of a psychologist’s office at four in the afternoon.

“Hey, Patrick!” the teenager greets, sliding his hipster frames farther up his slim nose with the same fingers he employs to shake my hand, not bothering to mention my tears throughout the journey, because I’m sure he recognizes that I’ll never open up to anyone.

After the formality, my fists condense and camouflage in my pockets, awaiting the direction of the conversation. “Is there a reason why you’re here? I don’t mean to be rude, but my friends usually don’t show up after my psychology sessions.”

Who are you kidding? You don’t even have friends, you psycho.

Gerard clasps his hands together to signal the call into discussion. “Ah, yes, right, sorry. Seeing as it’s winter break, I’d like to invite you to my lake house in Caribou (that’s in Maine, just in case you were wondering).”

The Ways aren’t particularly rich, surfing on the spectrum of the middle class, but they managed to score a deal — whose specifics are beyond me — and won the house, but Maine is a couple hours away, so the property hasn’t been utilized often.

Now Gerard’s unearthed the perfect chance, but my requital isn’t so proclaimed in my demeanor as it should be.

“You’ve been such a great friend to me, with picking up Mikey from daycare and being amazingly supportive of my art, so I wanted to thank you,” the guy elaborates, fortifying himself to hear the final verdict, but the ambition flickers on and off. “What do you think? Are you coming?”

My stomach twists into an immovable knot, but a compromise is speedily regurgitated. “Can my friend come?”

I had predicted an uneasy expression from Gerard, but all that’s projected is surprise. “It’s fantastic that you’ve met someone else, and as my mother always says, a friend of you is a friend of me.” The boy laughs jovially. “Of course he can come. Do you want to text him?”

I fetch the phone from my pocket, unlocking it with a sheltered geography near my chest so that no one can see what I typed. Searching through my contacts until I find a one named “the neighborhood gay kid”, I draft a brief message to him, vague enough to keep him intrigued.

Hey, Pete. Please meet me by the coffee shop in ten minutes or so. I have something to ask you.

At the sign of the text’s voyage, Gerard’s face glows with yet another beam, and I somehow never grow tired of seeing it. The beam alone is enough to douse me with titillation.

This trip is not only a fun time with friends, but it’s a respite from my mother, from my old classmates, from my doctor.

“I should probably text my mom, too, but you can pack your things. After I tell Pete, my new friend, about the trip, we’ll go to your house when we’re ready.”

Gerard nods, smiling again and dashing off to prepare for our vacation to the lake, rendering me alone and outside of a sketchy psychologist’s building.

I divert my phone’s usage to write a message to my mother.

Gerard invited me to Caribou, Maine for the rest of holiday break. Sorry that it’s not the mental hospital, but it’ll have to do.

I slam the send button before I realize what I’m doing, but it’s already too late, so I attempt not to introduce any fresh guilt.

My mother’s text is displayed a moment later.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Patrick, and frankly it’s scaring me, but if you want to go to Maine with Gerard, that’s okay by my standard. He’s a nice kid.

Innocence is the most onerous emotion to fake — only a select few can master it — and so far, my mother isn’t doing a very good job of it. So many holes have punctured her depiction that it represents nothing at all, and now that she’s presented this terror to me, she will never be able to pull it off.

It’s not like I haven’t known this about her before, though.

She did tell Dr. Saporta that she was considering checking me into a mental facility, and I heard her say it. There’s no eluding this one.

I can’t bear to analyze the text any further, so I shove my phone deeper into the pocket of my jeans.

And with that, I set out for the coffee shop.

Pete’s perpetuating his job of washing the tables when I arrive, but that’s all paused when the chirping of the bells alerts him to my ecstatic figure shaking from excitement in the doorway. His spine elongates as he jogs slightly towards me, equipped to embrace me but doing so implicitly in case I panic in the middle of his workplace.

“Did you get my text?” I inquire, the breath snatched away by the exertion of my sprint to the shop, or maybe just being so close to my friend.

Pete’s lips part to unveil pearly teeth set amidst an ocean of rose. “Sure did. What did you want to tell me?”

“This guy who used to be in the grade above me at school — Gerard, the art geek whose brother I had to return home — has invited us to his lake house in Caribou, Maine for the remainder of our break.” My arms cuddle my chest vertically, vibrating with fervor.

The room thins as I wait for an answer, condensed to a planing line of nothingness, and the only three-dimensional figures are us. Fanaticism hammers plaques above the register to assert its authority over me, enslaving my emotions in favor of itself, and yet the imperceptible clock strides forward without misgiving.

When Pete doesn’t amplify his disposition towards the subject, I ask, “So what do you think?”

And that’s where it gets tense. Pete’s hands squirm by his side, eyes trace the edges of the amber walls, gathering his thoughts. “Um, I…”

I somehow take the hint, even though I’m fatally awkward in social settings. “Pffh, yeah, of course. You don’t have to come. I just assumed—”

“Patrick, don’t beat yourself up over this,” Pete chuckles, a recent countenance of jocularity snapping his trachea into shards of obsidian. I aspire to study them, but that’s apparently not appropriate for the mood, according to my mother, but ever since I overheard her considering a place at a mental asylum for me, her trust is insignificant in my mind.

“Then are you going?” The expressions of a puppy plunder my eyes’ prior storage of prospect to install the modern appliance titled begging, and Pete is smitten enough to play along with it.

Embers of many mentalities scald Pete’s skin, but after a few seconds of upholding my pleading method, the guy finally cracks. “Okay, fine. I’ll go, but only because you’re so damn cute.”

Through my lips’ broad extravaganza of zeal, I get down to business. “I have an emergency bag packed at Gerard’s house, so we only need to go to yours, and then we can drive with Gee to the lake house.” That’s a solid route for me, but for my companion...not so much.

I’ve never witnessed so much fear in my life.

Chapter Fourteen

Pete’s neighborhood is so dingy that I’m astonished he lives here.

Rubble from unfinished houses relaxes in peculiar places (or otherwise, places it shouldn’t be), which has probably clogged up too many pathways to count. The scent of trash wafts around the entire community, rotting even the previously festive trees.

Even the people look threatening, with their dirt-encrusted faces and ragged clothes, a sneer the only clean thing on them.

Normally, there would be no rancor between the citizens and me, but the times they’ve almost hit me with stray objects is too high to list, and my sole ambition is to get out of here as quickly as possible.

Pete is pensive, smothering his shoes in the dirt to distract him from the suspicion of my thoughts, and there’s a very coherent emotion that is generated as a result.

He’s ashamed that I’m here. That must’ve been the cause for his hesitance to visit Caribou with us, because in order to pack his bags, he needs to visit his house, and this dump of a place happens to be his neighborhood.

“There’s nothing wrong with you living here, you know,” I clarify amidst the shrieking of vultures in the sky — which, now that I investigate my surroundings to a greater extent, is the only perpetual beauty in this location. “Poverty can strike at any time.”

A sarcastic smile flocks to Pete’s face (and now that I’ve been to his habitat, it’s an outlier among the other residents — tidy, hygienic, nothing like the grimy mess that I’ve hastily grown accustomed to). “We have plenty of money, enough to survive well, but that’s not the issue.”

“What do you mean by that? If you have money, why are you dwelling here?” None of this makes sense, and the urge to extricate my hair topples onto me as a byproduct of the stress.

“You’ll see.” And just like that, Pete’s eyes inflate with trepidation, cast back down to his feet once more.

I can sense that Pete’s willing to open up, but an interruption arises out of the blue. “Freak!” it roars, punctuating the harsh words with stones pitched our way. One of the more precise objects strikes me directly in my upper arm, poising its cadaverous teeth over my skin to bite and retreating to the ground after its lucrative suicide mission.

“Who the hell are those people?” I demand, feet trembling with the proposal of its destination. “Why do they hate you so much?”

“Just your local bullies, nothing much.” Pete’s breath hitches over his words, and it’s tangible that the toll was more emotional than physical, but I can detect the manifestation of a bruise lurking under his complexion — and cackling about the event, because his body thinks it’s what he deserves for allowing his mind to reign.

It’s not his fault that he’s tormented by himself. It can’t be, and that’s what those bullies don’t understand. Metaphors apparently aren’t enough for them, because Pete’s been torturing himself for a while now, but it wasn’t yet physical until now.

“Why aren’t you doing anything about it?” I know I could never confront them, being all socially anxious and basically dead inside, but Pete’s soul lodges in courage (more specifically, the tad of courage I can never have), and he’s been snuffed out enough to deliver a sign to him that this isn’t right.

Or that’s what I think, for Pete isn’t doing a single thing. No plans, no words, no reactions, just the grey tones of his neighborhood, and he’s lost inside them.

I’m not.

I cup my hands around my mouth without contemplating the ramifications, but it’s me breaking free from analysis paralysis. “Hey, you peasants!”

Pete’s features writhe upon his visage, absolutely aghast, while his tone bathes in frenzy. “What are you doing?”

“What you couldn’t.” I pivot to address the kids once more, their forms frozen into the earth. “What makes Pete Wentz such a freak? What characteristics confide in him that don’t confide in you?”

The boys halt in a struggle to process my rant, as illiterate as newborns, and I consider that a chance to distribute the punchline.

“Well for one, he doesn’t throw fucking rocks at people!”

Pete’s lips graze my ear in an overshot, limbs heavy, voice burdened. “Patrick, stop this. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“I will not. This needs to be said.”

In my debate against Pete, the kids have advanced to ten feet away, an indication that I should wrap up my speech before I get socked.

“Care to defend yourself?” one with a sandy fringe stipulates, head cocked like the gun he probably hoards under his bed.

“Fuck off, Spencer,” Pete groans, armed to playfully punch him in the side, but from the menacing gleam in the boy’s cobalt irises, he refrains from doing so.

Spencer’s limbs link across his chest, tongue glissading over his gums. “Not until this twerp tells me why he’s being such a bitch.”

I ignore his comment to squint at Pete cynically. “You know these cunts?”

“Well we do live in the same area.” The rumples in his countenance suggest a desire to focus on the bullies, and I need to conclude my rant anyway, so that’s where our attention reclines.

“What you gotta say, man?” the other boy asks, stroking once the premature mustache spread across his philtrum.

“Jon, don’t encourage him,” Spencer mutters, but I don’t surrender.

My hands fissure into the dense oxygen, formulating sentences capable of wounding. “I’m saying that you can throw rocks at us all you want. We may even die, but that doesn’t concern you, and neither does the benefits of attacking us. Because there are no benefits, and harassing us won’t affect you in the long run.”

The aura is swathed in silence, and my hand yearns for Pete’s shoulder.

“It’s time to go,” I declare, dragging him along with me. “See you around, peasants.”

I would’ve suspected Pete’s shallow breathing is an outcome of my verbal assault towards the friendly neighborhood peasants, were it not for the affliction occurring as we near a scrappy old RV parked in the lot.

Nothing memorable bedecks the vehicle — it’s as denigrative as the rest of the community, perhaps even more so — but fabrics of skepticism bandage Pete’s hands to a position that is even more unrelenting than before.

“Is this it?” My nose catches the breeze of the dumpster’s aroma, even though there are no dumpsters in sight.

Pete’s fingers flounder by his lateral. “Are you disappointed?”

I shake my head, smiling. “We already discussed this, and no. To each his own.”

Shrugging, Pete complicates, “It’s not exactly like I would’ve preferred this to something nicer, but yeah — to each his own.”

At least he’s calmed down.

The door whimpers as it’s brushed aside, intending to cause the loudest commotion it can muster, and an empty beer bottle is chucked at our heads.

“Get out, you roach!” a slurred voice cries from the room next to the entrance. “No solicitors allowed!”

“Joe, quiet, would you?” Pete scoffs, kicking a plastic wrapper from his path in disdain. “It’s just me.”

The area smells like the deepest pit of hell, and I’d know from attending a high school for a year before withdrawing into myself, a specific humidity that encourages me to crawl into a hole and suffocate. There are no decorations scattered across the metal walls, but rubbish practically screams to be extruded in one of the many waste baskets, and my hand skitters to a stop right above one before Joe can ask why I’m wrecking his RV.

“As if that’s any better,” Joe mumbles, scooting his hand through his greasy Jew-fro.

“Would you stop being such a shitface for one moment so that I can ask you something?” Pete’s voice is as elevated as I’ve heard it, a snake diving into his throat to poison him.

Joe, however, seems adapted to the volume, proceeding with, “What is it, kid?”

Pete abducts a faded navy backpack from its dreary slump on the couch, the furniture equally as faded, tossing a t-shirt inside carelessly. “I’m going to Caribou with Patrick.”

“Is that in Maine?” Joe croaks as Pete continues his search for clothing items and leaves me in the doorway. The “deer in the headlights” feeling remains to exist, even though Joe’s attention poses to attract Pete.

My friend holds, supplying Joe with a sarcastic pinching of the brows. “Look who studied geography.”

“You’re so ungrateful,” Joe wanders, flicking to the floor a piece of broken glass that he had been fiddling with. “Did you know that about yourself?”

“You remind me almost every day.” Pete’s jaw stiffens, oculi hide. “Well it’s not my fault that I’m a fucking orphan, but it’s your fault that you don’t make life comfortable, even for your own needs. All you do is get drunk and sell drugs, and it’s not like I can do anything, because I’m not even eighteen yet, and if I tried to speak up, you would threaten me, but you’ve been threatening me all the time, so it’s not like it really matters anyway.”

Before I can register what’s happening, I’m scampering out the door, heart raging against my rib cage, while Pete swings a jacket around his shoulders in his pursuit of me.

“You little—”

The aperture secures as Joe is hindered, with the chilled air the only priority on our minds.

“Let’s go to Gerard’s house,” Pete offers, impeding my consternation, and all I can do is stare at him.

The trip to Caribou is not nearly as troubling.

Chapter Fifteen

In the shelter of Gerard’s van, the temperature was pleasant, donning a cozy status of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit with the accessory of our body heat, but that’s stolen away immediately after we step outside the car.

The area could’ve easily been mistaken for the North Pole, and I’m actually astounded that there aren’t any elves trooping through the dense piles of snow, but elves of another form, beings floating along the winter breeze, bite at our cheeks on their way down the mountain, ushering the tint of blood to the surface of our skin to view its performance.

The weather website wasn’t kidding when it deemed Caribou one of the coldest places in America.

Trees promenade across the jagged terrain of the bluff, wind flooding through the needles as if a flute and chiming a natural melody of the high elevation, an indigenous tune that sails through the birds’ feathers with the tranquility of a breath and deposits cheer below their wings.

The old man of a house looming above us whirls a shadow against the flurries below it, demanding that the flakes’ brothers detach themselves from its wooden structure, that they are not its insulation.

I stifle the eagerness to laugh.

Only the clicking of the trunk being slammed down distracts me from the frozen sights, Gerard suddenly tossing my duffel bag into my protected hands as his car keys jingle within his fingers, coated in the black fabric of his skeleton gloves.

I never really understood why Gerard bought those, but he’s always been fascinated with death and all things Halloween, so I suppose this is just a component of his obsession.

In my delay, Pete has passed me and is carefully tiptoeing up the steps, shabby from the moisture of the snow. “Are you coming?” he laughs, departing his watch of Gerard twisting the key into the knob to gaze upon my shivering figure.

The words spur my legs into action, trudging confidently through the ground pommeled by snow since the beginning of the season. Delight whisks in my stomach, increasing when the door is pushed open by Gerard as I ascend the stairs.

My friends scoot aside to make way for my excitement, smirking to themselves at the accomplishment of animating me so fully and observing as my eyes twirl around the grand foyer like in a movie.

The property is entirely wooden, typical of the mountain lodges high up in the clouds, a lifeless fireplace directly across the entrance, just pining for a flame to dance inside its brick walls. A loft hovers over the sitting area, apertures to other rooms sculpted into its base next to a winding staircase lowering into the pavilion. Windows illuminate the space with periodic beams of sunlight intruding through the snow, and plush chairs are littered around the area for small talk. Tucked away below the loft are more rooms, portals as maple-stained as the rest of the home, otherwise plenty of space for many activities.

My focus is on the house, while Gerard’s is on my amazement of it, as it should be — this is Gerard’s building, so he’s seen it before, but Pete hasn’t, yet he’s staring at me like I’m a diamond set against the sand.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” I marvel, cheekbones priming in a broad smile.

Gerard provides Pete with a one-sided look — secret, sarcastic, and amused by our tacit connection — but Pete has no idea what his new friend just did.

“Absolutely.”

Gerard’s hazel irises flip back and forth between Pete and me, sharing the moment with us. “So this is all nice and lovely, but you need to pick your rooms, or else you’ll have to sleep outside.”

No one here fancies being buried under an avalanche that will surely thunder down the mountain in some strange superstition of Murphy’s law, so in our hysteria, we bump into practically everything in our path as we dash towards the hallway.

Try not to sleep in the snow, dimwit.

A dimly lit room by the end of the corridor whispers subliminal messages in my ear like that one rap song that I try not to listen to, and despite the cringe-worthy connotation, my feet find themselves being hauled towards it.

It’s not like I’m complaining though, as the location is perfect for my obsessive needs, hastily pairing with the associated compulsion of swiveling the handle left and right before entering.

The scent of the area isn’t so disparate from the rest of the house, only slightly dustier from not being occupied in a while (for all I know, this could be the second time the Ways have visited here, and what an honor it is to be one of the premiering guests) but a mere candle could spice things up without a thought.

Strawberry would be my preference, but I’m not sure how well that would go down with Gerard, who smacks strawberry-flavored candy to the dirt upon sight. It’s linked with happy memories, though, so he may be more relenting.

Nevertheless, the slight tinge of lint is enough to force my fingers to my nose, gulping puffs of air through my mouth like the people I write off as “mouth-breathers”, which are apparently frowned upon on society, according to my mother and the television.

Think about something else before you pass out, okay?

I nod externally to satisfy my mind, lobbing my duffel bag onto the blue-quilted bed in the middle of the room, a walnut board bowing overhead and accompanied by multiple paintings of Caribou scenery.

My imagination meanders inside them, visualizing myself firing snowballs at unsuspecting victims, strolling through an arctic square, and enjoying myself for the first occasion in a long time. It’s nice while it lasts, but a hammering noise from the room down the corridor flicks me straight in the forehead.

Bursting through the door (but remembering to complete my ritual), my socks slide over the alder surface below me, unbothered by anything around my speeding body but the final destination. My mission is going well, until a force nearly knocks me off my feet, were it not for the acute reflexes of none other than Pete Wentz.

He tilts me upright, cheeks blazing from embarrassment, stammering, “Uh, sorry about that, Patrick.”

I’m muted for a minute, olive eyes calculating. “It’s all right.” My attention never roams anywhere other than Pete’s face, still flushed from the excursion.

After my acknowledgement of the apology, the sounds burrow into the wooden planks of the bunker, chattering quietly to one another about how the youthful silence is faring at its job, but the banging of a fist against a wall elicits their return.

“Get ready, bitches,” Gerard yells, sass infused in his gait as he unveils his entire form from behind the structure. “We’re going clubbing.”

Pete’s nimble hands labor to loop the cerulean tie around my neck (since I am so inexperienced, having never left the house for social gatherings), endeavoring with unbridled sympathy to perfect it, as if I care whether or not it’s one centimeter out of line.

Gerard granted me one of his spares, along with a black vest that he managed to find in his closet at home, and though he’s taller and broader than me (which can be said of almost anyone, to be honest), it’s a stunning fit.

By some heavenly chance, dark dress pants and a pressed white shirt were packed in my emergency duffel at Gerard’s house and fled to the mountains with me, so as I examine myself in front of the mirror by peeking around Pete’s body, who is relentlessly stationed at my neck with the tie, it’s a never before seen version of me.

And I’m determined to like it.

“I don’t understand why we have to dress like this,” Pete complains, brows bundled in a sable heap as he concentrates on twisting the blue fabric.

“Gerard is a classy lady.” My lenses lock with my other pair as I speak, fabricated in the mirror to make it seem like it’s actually me, which is oddly like the surveillance of whom I’m so frightened.

Don’t think about that, psycho.

A wordless smile converges on Pete’s coral lips, limelight chained to me. “Apparently. Maybe it’ll earn us a good reputation there.”

“We’re not going back, are we?” Alarm crowds my oculi, calmness dispersing to under my feet, where it is promptly crushed unwittingly by my sensible shoes. “Even going once is enough for me.”

Pete laughs, finishing the final touches of my tie and tucking it into my vest, a grin scheduled as the closing act. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” my friend yields, shrugging neutrally as he, too, observes me in the mirror.

“How do I look?” I pose wildly, transporting myself to a peculiar online parody of something serious, but Pete is entertained.

“Absolutely wonderful. You’ll make the people at the club jealous.” He winks.

Shuddering through a veneer of peacefulness, it’s all I can do to endorse my composure. You can’t just break down on people without a warning, and I have no motives for obligating the sentences to emancipate themselves, so I lock my mouth like I’ve been doing forever and tell myself it doesn’t matter, because Pete would argue with me about how it does, in fact, matter, that my comfortability is superior to an unnoticed panic attack in the middle of a public crowd, but he would be wrong, and you’re frankly not supposed to correct your friends, or else you won’t have them anymore, and I’ve spent enough time alone, so it’s just a debate of perspective now.

So I smile and wave, the formalities, and prepare myself for the club and the terror that will ensue.

Chapter Sixteen

“You don’t look very gay.” The bouncer’s expression is incised distinctly on his bronzed skin, unwilling to let us pass, but my companion has other ideas.

“You don’t look very polite,” Gerard retorts, brushing the man aside and stepping into the dark club before he can object.

Your friends are going to get you into trouble.

“I don’t care,” I whisper through the shadows, the blare of the music sheltering my words so that no one may hear them.

Electronic beats thud against the velvet walls of the club, mingling with the stench of sweat and alcohol from the sour (and possibly drugged) beverages of the drunk patrons, and glasses drained of their mature substance reflect the coruscating lasers of the strobe lights, which would be murderous to an epileptic person due to their disorderly vehemence.

At the end of the summer, though, I promised myself I would take note of people in addition to my surroundings, and though Dr. Saporta was biased towards that concept, it’s a proactive thing anyway, so I dignify myself by tolerating its guidelines.

Most of the lesbians have congregated to a lounge in the corner to attend a tipsy game of spin the bottle, except instead of kissing when it whirls towards them, they pour large swigs of beer down their necks and begin to giggle passionately. I haven’t met any of them, but I worry for their safety.

Two thirds of the gay men shimmy on the dance floor, some so intoxicated that they’re imagining a partner beside them, while the other third is either stumbling around in a disoriented state, or they’re sober enough to recognize that they’re devoid of an acquaintance.

From the way my eyes circle the room with infatuation, it must seem like I’m interested in at least one person in this bar, but the only people in here that don’t scare me are Pete and Gerard. These people don’t understand that, however, and one of them almost invites me to dance until Pete’s menacing glare tells him off, and the man backs away with a quite horrified tremor in his gait.

Pete preserves a guarded watch on me, glancing around to see if any homosexuals will approach me again and ask for a dance or...something else. I consider it unnecessary, as I’m short and unstable and ultimately out of place, but the consideration is appreciated with multiple smiles sent his way sporadically.

Almost instantaneously, Gerard is swept away by a short guy in a leather jacket, gripped by the hand in an act of jurisdiction, but from the facetious smile on my friend’s face, no protest is discernible.

And with that event, Gerard has officially strayed from his plan of sticking with us. My palms don’t sweat from betrayal, rather anxiousness from now being a party of two, even if Pete is the best person with whom to visit a club.

In a matter of minutes, we’re situated at the bar by request of Pete Wentz as he orders two waters to remain modest and not out on the street, a knife in our backs from a drunken mistake, and the clear liquid is catered soon after.

Stuffiness blankets us in flashing clouds around our heads, congesting the space more so than it had been since the opening hours, and I can’t help but wonder if the frosty climate of the exterior would be snugger.

But as I say, when it is hot, we wish for it to be cold. When it is cold, we wish for it to be hot. When it is just right, we find other things to worry about, imprisoned on our own heads, the torture chambers that have become familiar to us.

On the contrary, I don’t give a damn anymore, because I’ve been living life through bullshit, falling for it over and over again, and that itself is painful enough, so I might as well treat myself to my favored weather.

Just as I’m about to tap Pete’s shoulder to suggest that option, an unhinged figure slams into him, disrupting my path.

“Hey, Pete!” it yells, slurred speech expelling saliva from its unintelligible sounds, and I wouldn’t have identified Gerard if not by looking at him — but even then, it’s a struggle.

The older Way brother’s scarlet hair is matted to a forehead swaddled in perspiration, drenched strands occasionally plummeting to other areas with his capricious movement. In alliance with his tilted glasses, his tie has been removed from under his vest, ticking back and forth as he sways and chuckles for no reason other than to display how wasted he is. And through all of this absurdness, he’s wielding that fucking shit-eating grin.

“Is there a reason you stumbled into me like that?” Pete demands, brow curving into a hook.

“Just w-wanted to” — Gerard blinks furiously, collecting his thoughts — “s-say I’ll be with Frank Iero...this dude.”

“The one that basically kidnapped you?”

Gerard simply winks, tripping over his shoes as he retreats to this new friend of his, abandoning us once again.

“Hope he’s having a good time,” I comment just to add something to the conversation that has been left just to us.

And for some cursed motive, I forget Pete’s smile to zero in on the faces assembling near me, warped to resemble the aggressive beaks of crows programmed to attack. Their screams cause discord with the music, thunder standing back-to-back with clear skies, pitches duplicating bullets in a revolving pistol with the main goal of killing my sanity — and it’s prosperous.

There are so many of them, and the cloud of stuffiness is more than I can handle. It mutates into water laden with arsenic, labeling itself as nothing more than a childhood friend, so I accept its remedy only to later comprehend that my insides are liquefying and smoldering and dying along with me, and there’s nothing to stop the process.

No evidence is to decide what’s causing this, the only thing I know being that I’m drowning, but I’m drowning obscurely with no one to save me, and my pleas are but unsubstantial calls into the wilderness — irrelevant, miniscule, enveloped in the harsh fabric of a rag down my throat that only serves to drown me further.

Blood climbs towards my mouth, planting knives into my gums as support for feet crafted out of fluid and hatred for its host, and with each centimeter it conquers, rays of black burn into my irises until they’re all I see, but it’s like living through nothing, and I hate that — I hate this.

They’re only people at a bar. But they’re watching.

“Aren’t you cold?”

That should be the least of Pete’s worries after I almost died inside the club, but I nevertheless respond with a curt nod. It’s not like he knew what happened, only witnessed my frantic tugging at his collar with the absence of an adequate supply of oxygen and acted intelligently. There’s no cause for praise, but then again, he’s the only one that actually cares about me, so if salvaging my bruised body from the depths of the ocean is what he did, it’s important in a sense of perspective.

But to answer Pete’s question, yeah — I am cold, and I’ve been shivering for the entire time we’ve been outside of the club, but I didn’t notice in my haste to merely fucking survive this terrible war against myself, this terrible war that prowls only behind my eyelids so that no one can see it, so that they can just label me the kind of crazy that I already know I am.

Though it isn’t valid, what they say to me, because they’re not the ones trailing pellets of hemoglobin behind knives gleaming with a smile, but only inside of a metaphor because they’re too scared to do it in real life. They’re not the ones thinking they’re trapped in a sealed room when anyone else could twist the knob to free them, the lock having never existed at all. The superior fact is that I’ve never adhered to their warnings of my insanity, because in assuming that they can’t affect me more than I affect myself, I refuse to acknowledge their claims, and it’s in this paradox that I temporarily subsist.

Pete says none of these things that I’ve heard from the lackadaisical fools of society, meaning he isn’t as toxic as Dr. Saporta would like me to believe, and his kindness thrives in simply asking if I’m cold.

“Yes,” I reply, talking to a ground as concrete as any part of Western land. “I am very cold.”

Without speech, the zipper to Pete’s jacket tumbles down the slope of his torso, separated from its symmetrical half to be rejoined around my slender shoulders.

The operation showcases the unkempt t-shirt flung onto Pete at the last moment, much to my surprise — I surmised he had changed into something nice, but that’s apparently not the case.

Pete regards my bemusement with a sheepish partial rotation of the lips, debating whether or not he should uproot the coat from me because of my perceived distaste, but his fretting is suspended at the entrance of inconsolable quivering.

The tables have turned, and I have every intention to do something about it, so my arms snake around Pete’s back in a failed attempt to insulate him, and if he didn’t persuade me otherwise with his contented sigh, I would’ve let go, a meek wringing of my hands the only thing to keep me company, but the moment is preserved by an unbreakable casing of friendship.

A couple of minutes twirl around us, marinating in comfort and exchanged breaths of joy, before Pete murmurs, “May I hug you back?”

Instead of being a normal human being, decked with readily accessible consent in all the correct proportions, my friend’s question is more than just that, a motivation to pursue the dreams that have danced in my brain for many hours.

The dreams materialize as a kiss, pressed upon Pete’s lips with the impulsivity that I don’t reject for once. It hums with the jubilance of a child, buzzing along, fashioning a tune in its path. It inhales the bittersweet fragrance of rapport and knows that Pete Wentz is the prime choice, and this is a manifestation of truth.

Because in a room full of art, he is at home, and it’s been sculpted into my mind that he’s the only one that will ever matter.

He is the one trading a fever with me, the one whose heartbeat matches my own in a rhythmic chorus with a tempo as electric as the Earth, the one whose rose lips are sewn to harmonize with mine perfectly, and a melodic song is what they indeed produce, lacquered by covert tears, faithfully shed by the scorn of those who ever doubted that we would make it past summer.

But we did, so our heads are raised without a care, and through this triumph and this strife and this devotion to one another, I’m suddenly not so cold anymore.

Chapter Seventeen

I kissed Pete fucking Wentz, and my mind is hell-bent on making sure I am cognizant of that, igniting every crisp document of prudence with a black fire screaming inside me.

But what my mind doesn’t know is that with something like this, you can suppress it. Whatever. You can shove it deeper into the closet, as if you haven’t been doing it for years already, and you can allow yourself to forget.

But you never do, so you keep coming back and find the coffin you buried, the coffin that isn’t able to be opened anymore, but you nevertheless retain the persistent urge to know what’s been hiding inside, so your fingers crack from your effort to pry the lid off, and in the unlikely event that you actually succeed, it’s as empty as the void in your soul.

So basically, we’re all screwed in one way or another. The people who remember are haunted, while the people who forget are constantly itching for more.

I’ve understood that method forever, yet I’m still confined within my arms to a bathroom stall whose lighting plays peek-a-boo intermittently and dangles mania in front of me like a string to a cat, and therefore my anxiety is everlasting.

My hydrogen peroxide isn’t capable of being stored inside my pockets, and my obsessions are as dynamic as ever, so a damp paper towel will have to suffice. It’s not the real product, though, so my vision is attracted to everything else in the room while it rots.

Subdued voices nurse the patrons’ ears, some opting for a slurred pedagogy, some consummately sober, all far too shrill for my fondness, but it’s similar to engaging in a conversation — at least for me, because psychologists claim my conversations are often unrequited.

Shoes waddle in a muffled exhalation, circling the room so that they’re invariably visible below the plastic walls as they complete the task they entered this place to do, somehow mocking me for lingering in here with tears mauling the floor in prolonged intervals of five seconds.

And it becomes a game I play as I wait for my emotions to be flushed out in the form of deoxyribonucleic saltwater, wide eyes chasing the pellets of my own production as they languish in the smooth tile and mimic my prior death.

Unlike me, however, they behave with indomitable grace, plunging their arms into elegant twirls and bows, and they transform death into a work of theater. They make dying look beautiful, even when it is not, and it converts suicide to my taste, dipping me over the edge of a cliff with a smile kindling my lips, because it’s my desire transfused in someone else’s actions, and I’m finally earning my wish.

Death is a perplexing concept, and though I jokingly shame Gerard for feeling the same thing, the captivation often sojourns in me, too. Every time my eyelids eclipse my curious pupils, visions of graves and falcons and awe sashay through my trail, but they never fracture my bones, never paint my shadow with blood.

Rather, they transport layers of crystal streams to my aching figure and soothe my brittle heart with tender fingers contrived from silhouettes just as fearful as I am, and they cherish the fact that I’m fucking alive, because like me, they are bloody, bruised, and broken by the voice in my head that orders flames to lick their flesh until they’re as dry as skin washed in hydrogen peroxide, and they have battled by my side since their birth out of fallen leaves — a birth that sentenced the visions to death but didn’t, for they were cunning enough to diagnose the sound of swords being unsheathed and ran for their fucking lives.

But alas — where have they gone now that my tears represent the leaves from which they sprang? Perhaps once they saw the DNA soaring from my eyes, they decided it was time for them to do the same, so they split away in a lurid fragment and obliterated their own leaves. Now when I close my eyes, all I see is a sneer and a vacant road, and it’s like befriending the kind of death that’s disagreeable to the optimists.

Because of the visions’ unwillingness to stay with me, I’m still isolated in a bathroom stall for many minutes after I last acknowledged my location, and the tears continue to evacuate with a perpetual intensity that I can’t seem to govern.

That brings me to my next point, noting upon the fact that governing tears is trivial when you have death on your side. The feat is that I’ve learned there is a way to present suicide as charming: make sure no one sees it happen. You’ll be safe then, buried in an enigma once the tears have been annihilated, and it’s ensuring someone will care for a little bit. It’s ensuring they’ll glorify you, praising even your flaws when they were the things that got you killed in the first place. It’s ensuring they’ll glamorize the decease of teenagers, while simultaneously oppressing those who were just like them, as if they need more funerals on their schedule. It’s ensuring they’ll curse your grave for occupying space that could’ve been utilized for their beloved war veterans that probably died from typical heart disease. It’s ensuring they’ll hate you deep down, with the worst part being that they won’t even confess to it. It’s ensuring that you’re better off in the ground.

Informing Dr. Saporta that I don’t experience suicidal thoughts is becoming more of a strain to my fidelity, but it’s necessary, and even though that’s exactly what he calls my compulsions in relation to myself, it’s nevertheless viable.

It’s not like I’d physically mangle a gun until it’s centered around my temple, because the people from school would be required to attend my dreary funeral teeming with the citizens of Newark that frankly don’t care and just want to watch a football game, and my death should symbolize more to them than an obstruction, because this is the one and only final passing, the passing that prevails outside of my thoughts, and my chaotic world has been silenced for it.

And then the last tear before I run dry slips from my parted eyelashes and cascades to the floor, where its ankles contort and beckon death to its beauty, proving that it’s not so armored as the world expected, and for once, I’m disappointed because of that.

The tear’s silk dress is tattered and riddled with holes, whose texture is that of the stars, and the being trips dishonorably on the mess in an attempt to pirouette one last time. Blood digs a trench in its pallid face, illuminating entirely the delineated lips who are loyally glimmering white from the reflection, and towards me its lucent eyes glance, pleading inaudibly for deliverance.

The water modifies a whimper to a ripe howl that pierces the tile cradling its minuscule form — treachery of the domestic variety, which is arguably the most painful — and its whole body eventually collapses to the floor with the whisper of a yelp cleaving to its lips.

It can no longer dance for me.

Checking the clock has never been my specialty, and by effect, time evades me on a constant basis, but it’s most definitely been a century since I arrived in the bathroom — I at least understand that.

Pete must have been searching for me as my eyes were distributing its fluid children, but the last time he burst through the door of the bathroom, he ended up lecturing me on why hydrogen peroxide is bad for my skin and my mental health, and it may have been more remorseful for him than for me.

However, I just fucking kissed him a few minutes ago, and that’s a reason to stress about me even more than earlier, because someone such as myself doesn’t purge guilt as easily as others, and he’s aware of it.

But why should I be guilty for kissing him?

Because you have social anxiety, dimwit.

Social anxiety or not, Pete brought me back to the strawberry fields with the flavor that clung to his lips, and it was like tasting the childhood we were never given, the childhood we contrarily deserved, the childhood that reeked of flagrance, because we were children, yes, but we were children of rue, and only we knew how monstrous that was.

Pete knew the most out of us all, so as an anecdote of sedition, he glossed his lips with the aroma of strawberries, using only his middle finger as an applicator, and he gave no fucks. To any person whose brain is injected with happiness, strawberries are but the fruit they consume at the dinner table every night, but to us, it’s a force that clashes against the stench of disease, and Pete Wentz is undeniably our savior, if only to the ones who are familiar with him.

On the flip side, Pete’s nowhere to be seen, but that’s due to me not scanning the room enough, as well as the staggering amount of homosexuals clogging up my senses and naturally prohibiting me from doing so.

Gradually, the blockage clears to unmask the tenuous lateral view of Pete Wentz, clustered by a glass of something a little stronger than water and aiming to submerge his regrets in alcohol — though, by the equilibrium of his posture, it’s his first shot.

Energy surging through me, my dress shoes stride forward to accost my friend until a hand tangles my arm inside its tenacious grasp, barren of the incentive to surrender.

The affinity is uncanny, the brawn definite, the shape of the slim fingers adept, the feelings evoked grim, and I’m not even obligated to turn around to catalog him, because an indelible mark such as the one on my arm is an identification itself.

But I whip around anyway to face those fucking sapphire eyes that never scrapped a single tear for me, those sapphire eyes the color of the water strangling my lungs, those sapphire eyes that puncture me every time they penetrate my security with a simple stare that shouldn’t mean anything but does, because I’ve known it all too well before.

But it’s gone; it has to be, because the mental entombment was immune to any resurgences. I fucking buried those memories and stomped over the dirt — I know I did, so why the hell are they showing up? Why am I choking?

Those memories were snuffed out a while ago — two years, to be exact — but with the mere glistening of impeccable teeth, the harrowing images flood in one by one.

“Hey, Patrick!” the man greets, a height to his brow. “Remember me?”

Chapter Eighteen

I was fifteen years old when I died.

There was no warning label packaged with it — the occurrence just fucking transpired, and I was expected to keep up with the number of knife strokes from a promise engraved into my stomach, but how can you ask that of someone? How?

I didn’t notice the streaks of crimson upon me at first, because I was too hypnotized by the bastard named Dallon Weekes, and there was that damn smile that just fucking shackled me to him, and I convinced myself that I actually wanted to be there with him, instead of safe in my home, and I likely caused my own murder.

He should’ve been my arch-nemesis, but he wasn’t, and I was fucking insane for thinking that he was anything other than an abuser.

Truth is, Dallon injured me in ways I cannot describe. I was already messed up when I met him, but was okay with that, because at least I was taking care of myself, which I embodied when I endeavored to leave him, and all of this seems like a palpable encouragement that it wasn’t my fault, but that will never be so, no matter what he did to me, because he may be an abuser, but he was an abuser with a purpose — my psychologist says that’s the same mentality he finds in other victims, but it was evident that it was reality.

So I selected my poisons carefully, with an open palm towards the desolate sky, perusing the insignia of the various pill bottles and devouring every moment to study the effects it would have on my body, but it’s not like I actually considered that, because I was ready to die in any shape.

Hydrogen peroxide unquestionably budded as the winner, and now I’m hooked on my own demise.

But none of it really meant anything, because Dallon Weekes was my only drug. He was the only one that could get me lost. He was the only one who interpreted that he couldn’t possibly understand to every level. He was the only one that could make me feel like I was alive while fucking killing myself, and maybe he shouldn’t have done so much for me, but he did, and I stuck around for a while because of it.

Very soon, I was unintentionally addicted to a metaphor, to a person that was always distant yet adorned with a magnified version of himself that was skillfully presented to the world, and every distinction between a monster and a blessing was hurled into the drain, considering I was too polluted by Dallon’s charisma and too muddled by my own head to oppose myself, and an awful lot that did for me.

In my defense, throwing myself away like that seemed like the right thing to do. I was young and troubled and very much like I am now, and I would be the same if that event never developed, but in no way am I thankful for it.

True, I wouldn’t be where I am today, but today entails panic attacks, entails monotonous meetings with a psychologist, entails destruction with every blink of an eye, and today I am confronted by my attacker for the first time in two years, and he constrains me to offer a challenge.

And here I am, floundering in those sapphire eyes that meant too much to me for it to be healthy, and a smile plays on Dallon’s lips as if nothing ever happened at all.

“It sure has been a long time,” Dallon spectates, towing a hand through his sepia locks and glancing around briefly before his gems alight on me. “What have you been doing?”

Nothing drips from my mouth, overshadowed by the shrunken position of my oculi, but as Dallon’s expression tempts a response, I agree to it. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

My attacker leans in, bewildered. “No?”

I censor the urge to slap him across that fucking perfect face of his, clamping diplomacy over my jaw. “You know what you did to me.”

A chuckle recedes to his lungs. “Do you think about it often?”

“Every single day.” I protract the words in hopes of adding solemnity, but nothing submerges Dallon’s perennial joy.

“Don’t you think that’s a little obsessive?” When my countenance radiates sternness, he includes, “Just a little?”

“Yes, it is, and do you know why?”

Dallon’s face knots in hyperbolic reverie, but his head rotates back and forth a few seconds later.

“It’s the fucking obsessive-compulsive disorder that you caused by grabbing my arm the way in which you did, and it’s irrational, but it’s your touch that contaminated me, and I’ll be like this forever.”

Dallon elects for the scientific side of things, countering, “Isn’t that curable?” He didn’t even research my doom.

My foot bruises the carpet, russet material padding the grooves in my shoes, and salivated rage springs free. “Do you think it’s fucking curable?”

My assailant condenses a finger to his garnet lips, envisaging prior occurrences. “You know, you’re more aggressive than I remembered. You didn’t curse much, and now you’re on full volume.”

“And do you know whom I blame for that? You.” My teeth wound the interior of my mouth, aggregating the enmity to within my flesh. “I thought I was the one who left you to the wolves, but it was actually the other way around, and these circumstances ended up worse than I predicted.”

Dallon’s shoulders boost higher. “There’s nothing wrong with seeing an old friend.”

“Yes, and that’s an opinion originating from the man who couldn’t even bear watching me walk out the door. It means nothing.”

“It must mean something, because here you are, whining about shit that happened two years ago.”

My loafers asphyxiate my attacker’s, contrition but a side note. “Fuck you, Dallon Weekes.”

Sarcasm blooms in his sapphire eyes, a laugh trailing behind. “Oh, honey, you already did.”

A shift in the ambience cackles from the rafters, swooping down and interrogating, “Patrick, is this guy harassing you?”

My body flings around to address the unexpected Pete Wentz, and though my priorities were directed towards him a few minutes ago, Dallon is at the summit now, but I nevertheless lie, “Not at all.”

Dallon is impressed, brows insouciantly tipped to portray his emotions. When I lied to him during our relationship, I was able to surpass his dulled sagacity with the ginger flick of a tongue, but now that he knows I’m cheating my friend, intrigue sharpens his wit — though he doesn’t testify against me.

“Then you should invite him to sit with us at the bar.” Pete’s lips crimp in a friendly grin. “It’s good for being sociable.”

I say nothing, welcoming my downfall once again.

“So where are you from, Dallon?” They’re already on a first-name basis — sickening.

Observing as my friend becomes intimate with my abuser definitely wasn’t penned on my agenda, but it’s not like I can inform Pete of that, so a scowl soaks in my drink as I wait for the hell to elapse.

Dallon sloshes his whiskey against the walls of his chalice, head erect to construct contact between Pete and him. “New Jersey — Newark, more specifically.”

Excess substance shuffles down Pete’s throat in a mellow roll as nostalgia impinges on the mahogany color of his irises. “Really? We’re also from Newark.”

Dallon’s eyes hold a certain snap to them, an escape of anaphylaxis hovering on the horizon for whomever gazes into the orbs, and his returning smile pinches his lips. “It’s really nice down there, especially in summer.”

For the first time since the commencement of the conversation, Dallon ogles my trembling form with a subtle glimpse, where panic ferments in my entire body except for the pupils, who are convulsing with unfiltered animosity.

Summer. That was how long our affliction lasted, until a foggy day in August gagged our hilarity with the sharpest knife in the drawer of Dallon’s home that fumed formaldehyde from the roof, the only place that gave a damn about people like us, and as we smoked cigarettes in a pitch black storm, giggles sputtered from our lips, and it was obvious that we had made it through hell.

But what came later counteracted it. However, Dr. Saporta would feed me to the lions if I relived that day, so all I can do is mince Dallon with my internal vision and protect my stomach from the churning rhythm of dread.

“Now it’s as cold as the arctic, and summer is such a foreign concept.” Dallon’s voice caving with dejection, he annexes, “Always is so alien, though.”

“Didn’t take you for a poet,” I growl, perspective centered in my water.

Dallon’s hands slink towards mine, embraced by soot-chapped leather and eager for reconciliation. “I suppose hanging around you does that to a person.” His cobalt stones arrest my attention, weaving a rigid net from hesitance as we delve into the bitter past.

I shy away, because I’m a fucking coward, and Dallon Weekes is not mine to fall for, but he somehow thinks he is, which makes it all the more perilous when I refuse his company.

“Anyway…” Pete continues, miffed by our scene. “Would you like to hang out sometime, Dallon?”

How can I die if I’m already dead, right?

A wink breaks from my abuser’s eyelashes, insensible to Pete, reprimanding me, and a smooth “yes” tiptoes from Dallon’s manipulative tongue.

An unsettling anecdote zooms by, analogous to my rendezvous with Pete at the coffee shop, where my friend’s hand captures a pen to scrawl a phone number against a random napkin abandoned on the bar.

Dallon quells the pleas of the paper by encasing it in his pocket, cheekbones perching high on his face. “I’ll see you later then.”

That’s what he said two years ago — and he was resolute.

Chapter Nineteen

Out of all the things I should be pondering, the topic of Dallon’s gloves is the one that snares me, tosses my mind into oblivion with a prompt giggle and the release of an autonomous finger.

The ceiling staring down at me is a cue to goad my mind into thinking about the gloves — their texture, their gloomy color, their audacity to slither across terrains such as the bar and abduct my attention so thoroughly.

Dallon told me once that he hated wearing gloves, as they made him feel like a criminal who was supposed to shepherd their touch into a meadow of surreptitiousness, and he never thought that he could carry out something illegal, not in a million years.

But now that he did, it’s appropriate, and the gloves are the only things that cloak the intrusive fingers who caused it — it’s almost like he’s ashamed.

No, that can’t be. He knows what he did, but...when I saw him at the bar, he was oblique in a misconstrued air of presumptuousness, and that’s his approach wrapped into his new personality, so whatever secrets mummified in his mind are now only dwindling.

It’s a pity Dallon refuses to remember the extirpation he inflicted on a world that was comprised of just me, a lonely drifter until this guy immigrated to my perception, because my life practically revolves around it, and when my fellow citizens celebrate the gyration of the Earth around the sun, another gyration alleges to be more significant, and I accept its requisition.

The simple fact is that this event consumes my time, my social life, my sanity, and it’s a bittersweet taste that I nevertheless swallow, because I have to do so in order to spare the people around me from the terror.

The same people I try to save maintain an aversion towards my kind, but Dallon never did, and maybe that’s why this individual drag on a cigarette was particularly arduous to breathe away, but then it was like becoming asthmatic when he began to torment me, and my inhaler was hidden under the tender floorboards in the spot right below Dallon’s foot, where it was left for dead.

But still, the mystery of his hand-wear remains in the atmosphere, and I might ask for some gloves of my own.

“Where are your mittens?” My hands furl around the threshold, apprehension galvanizing my fingertips as they gouge into the oak.

My friend is situated on the couch near the fireplace, the crackling of the flames hollowing his ears as a simpering rose lights his cheeks.

Pete’s vision departs from his book as it balances on his thumb, disengaging his legs from under him. “My mittens?”

My feet scrape the floor, an anxious tilt in my gait. “Yeah, didn’t you bring any?”

“Did you not?” Pete shifts further, withdrawing his finger from the middle of the book to devote his engrossment to me.

“I probably left them at the club.”

Pete is unconvinced, but he knows better than to investigate me. “Check my bag. It’s in my room.”

Without a word, I abscond from the area, leaving Pete in startled astonishment before he can call back to me about how someone such as myself could be so foolish.

By some luck, I am drawn towards his room, the nearest to the threshold from which I entered, and the knob incarcerates my will to avoid my compulsion, so it’s flicked once left and once right before I close myself inside the strawberry field of Pete’s room.

His satchel lounges on the wooden tiles, zipper and flap diverging from halfway around and revealing a plethora of colors from products within the bag.

My extremities whisk through the items, exposing variegated clothing pieces, dirtied scraps of paper, and leaves collected in the turmoil of vacation — but none of the pills Pete claims he takes.

Forgetting my prior duty, I crush the flap of the bag on itself and scamper from the room, the door agape from my haste. My socks walk their fabric across the floor, accompanied by the electric force of friction, and my breathing wobbles with my physique, readjusting in the threshold again.

Pete descries me near the wooden frame of the aperture, brows raised from his book. “Did you get the mittens?”

“Did you get your pills?” My respiration elongates the air, frisking with the colors surrounding it, and the man’s expression melts into one of foreboding.

“Patrick, what are you talking about?” Pete is generally calm, except for a fidgety rainfall of fingers on his knee.

“You said you take pills, right?”

My friend’s face spills into the ink on the page, as black as the words pounded into the paper. “Patrick…”

I boycott a resignation, clarifying, “You professed that the pills are the only things that work. Now where the hell are they?”

Pete’s view flickers around the room, scavenging for anyone creeping behind the curtains. “Is Gerard here?”

Teeth lacerating my lip with an injurious anxiety, I reply, “No, he’s at the store.”

A flower of ambivalence wilts in Pete’s stomach, but it’s a flower amidst a garden, so that blossom is worth very little in relieving nervousness. “Okay, come and sit down.” Pete lures me towards him, and my head nestles into his quaking shoulders without proper deliberation.

A lone tear stumbles down my cheek, grappling for a switch to end it all. “Pete, I don’t want you to ruin your life like this.”

“Shh,” he coos, boxing me in a fluttering embrace. “Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t waste your time on him. He almost touched your arm.

“I will worry about it, because I’m tired of you pretending that things are all right, when they’re really not.” My doe eyes loop their fixation on the boy whose arms harbor my emotions, but that harbor is breaking, and a storm is stirring in the skies. “We’re all screwed up in this place, and maybe that’s okay, but starving yourself of medication is going to make you more than just a head-case, and the people around you won’t be able to figure out how to help.”

My speech ticks through Pete’s thoughts, kissing flames onto every structure and burning them to the ground with a signature of beauty printed in the ash. “What if I don’t want help?”

“Everyone wants help.” My visage is sketched like the desert sand — somber, melancholy, and arid. “We just don’t care to admit it.”

Antagonism pricks Pete’s Hudson River irises, and it soon dominates his entire cognition. “When I said the pills worked the best, I didn’t say they were favored.”

I recant my previous nepotism towards my friend’s embrace, praying that he didn’t espy my infuriated quivering, and my hands itch for something stimulating so that I won’t tear apart my relationship, but they eventually flat line in a bursting spark to make way for my rant. “What, would you rather shoot up with cocaine? Extinguish all your problems with a powder that doesn’t give a fuck about you? Because if that’s what healing means in your context, you’ll be dead within the minute.”

“I don’t want to die. I just...I want to live, you know? I want to feel my own heart, love someone who is gentle and kind, but those pills forbid me from doing those things, so then what? That is called dying.” Pete’s touch evaporates within his hair, a sigh trailing behind as a conditioner. “But yeah, I know drugs that waft poison will intravenously swallow me from the inside, and I don’t sit around waiting for that day, because I value life and all its benefits, and prescriptions are the ones stomping me out, not my natural mind.”

My fingers jab into an eyelid united with the skin below, attempting to make sense of this whole thing. “Pills are supposed to alleviate your symptoms and brighten your mood, not renege on their promise of restoring your cheer.”

You’re going to lose friends for being such a smartass.

Pete secures my hands in his own as some sort of solace, so that at least one part of me is near him. The size of his pupils fluctuates inquisitively, locking my focus to them as he speaks. “Patrick, I stopped taking my meds when I met you, and do you know why that is?”

My head is bowed to study our connection as it whirs back and forth in an answer.

The man compresses this tether between us in an act of reassurance, continuing, “Because I saw potential in you — potential for a friendship, potential for a wild expedition, potential to make me feel for the first time in a while — and that was fucking glorious.” A smile inspirits Pete’s countenance, a liberation that sings of splendor. “I cannot describe how elated I was when I saw you in the coffee shop after you picked up Mikey from daycare. You must’ve been pretty damn special to evoke those emotions. Truth is, you’ve always been special, even if you never knew it, and if you say I’m going to die, I want your image rooted in my eyes.”

“God, now I’m crying,” I laugh, soiling my thumb with the saltwater concoction. “I’m too weak for my own good.”

“Crying isn’t weak,” Pete contradicts, shaving the residual water away. “Crying is a sign that you survived — and damn, that’s fucking courageous.”

I intercept my friend’s hand in the air, implementing a stationary latch on it as I cower away. “Yeah, I survived, but you’re not going to if you keep this up.”

Pete enforces nothing to wriggle free from my grasp, only shrugs around it. “It’s not like I have anything to lose.”

“You have me, right?” I pry. “Tell me you didn’t forget that there are people who care about you.”

Pete then worms out of my bonds, panicked. “No one cares about me.”

“I do, and as a result, I’ve noticed that your hands shake when you hold things, that your script is always slightly rough and vapid. I’ve noticed that when you write, you scrawl things across the paper, because if you took your time, it still wouldn’t look perfect. I’ve noticed that you dry the tears of others before you dry your own, because you know what it feels like to suffer. All those things I love about you will be gone if you don’t take your goddamn pills.

“You’ve already sacrificed your body by refraining from medicating yourself. Now don’t sacrifice your mind by thinking you’re in this alone.”

A print of a grin traces the edge of Pete’s lips, introducing positive ideas to his array. “Maybe I’m not.”

On this occasion, I’m the one to squeeze our hands together. “I know you’re not.”

Pete unrolls a flow of breath from his trachea, declaring, “This is what it’s like to feel, Patrick.” My friend’s limbs slice through the area, beholding the magnificence of nature, of being awake. “And trust me — it’s miraculous.”

A giggle somersaults off of my tongue as a kiss sprouts on Pete’s raven hair. “You’ve experienced enough for now,” I dictate, inhaling the strawberry fields again. “Will you finally take your pills?”

Reciprocating my action, Pete applies a kiss to my own peroxide locks and promises, “I’ll consider it.”

And with the current state of things, that’s enough for my standards.

Chapter Twenty

My fingers fondle the length of the oak wall, shrouded in the black fabric that Pete did, in fact, store in his bag, and it isn’t as worthwhile as I had envisioned.

I predicted vibrations of suppressed memories curdling in my fingers, and though they’re ghastly, they’re necessary, and like Pete, I just want to feel — feel the jagged texture of the walls, feel the erosion filing my skin, feel the reality of knowing why Dallon chose to wear those gloves, even when drinking a beverage with condensation adhering to the sides.

No one does that, not even me, and I consider myself the worthiest of employing archaic and abnormal methods to soothe my restless mind, but now the gloves are protecting my flesh with the utmost security, and I almost hope to wear them more often, but that would remind me of Dallon, and I’ve had enough of him.

This is only an experiment. I’m not...I’m not trying to die again.

But even so, milliliters of water swish in my lungs and subtract oxygen from the equation, and even though it is slight, it’s phenomenally imperative that I attend to it before I drown, yet I’ve drowned many times before, and this is the rainbow after rain because of its gentility.

And despite the connotation of these gloves, I tear them from my body with disdain, banishing them to the floor so I won’t have to look at them.

I am nothing like Dallon Weekes.

We’re reclining in the living room when the echoing screeching of the door reduces the beams of sunlight to nothing more than an unimportant detail.

The aperture eases open, a shrill voice punishing the person to whom it’s directed, but judging by its wavering tone, the volume isn’t often exercised.

“Gerard Arthur Way!” a woman shrieks, marching into the room with her fingers pinching her companion’s ear. “Can you believe what he did?”

Pete and I trade befuddled expressions, soon projecting them onto the two people entering the place.

“Let go of me, Lindsey,” Gerard complains, feet inching away while the rest of him stays stapled to the woman next to his crouched figure.

Her lips, padded by a bright red similar to autumn leaves, part to justify her case. “I saw this man cutting flowers from the garden I planted when I came here last.” She turns to him, brows stressed. “You know how much I love those tulips.”

Gerard continues to squirm in his friend’s grasp, speaking through the cruelty being engraved into his body. “Relax — I just wanted to give them to Frank.”

In Lindsey’s excitement, her hands release Gerard’s ear and primp for some gossip. “Who’s this Frank?”

“Some kid he met at the club.” Pete’s hair folds over his extremities, eyes meandering around the room. “A lot like Stockholm syndrome, if you ask me.”

Lindsey pivots towards the man next to her, trimming her hands to her hips accusingly. “You went to another gay bar?”

“Does he have a reputation for this?” I chime in from the end of the couch.

Lindsey addresses me with a withered sigh. “That’s where he took me for my fourteenth birthday.”

Gerard smirks, but after a prompt smack to the head, he protests, “Hey, we had a good time!”

“No, we did not. That guy who smelled like urine kept trying to talk to us, and we only got in because you pretended to be too drunk to function, so the bouncer just pitied you.”

Gerard simply shrugs, defeated, and I use that as an opportunity to inquire, “So who are you?”

Lindsey exiles the wrinkles on her ebony skirt to the void, responding, “Gerard’s cousin, though most of the time I’m just his overprotective mother, because he can’t seem to do anything correctly.”

Gerard starts to riot, but the woman hushes him. “I’ll make some lunch,” she declares, skirt billowing as she exits the room to prepare sandwiches.

Pete rises, shouldering Gerard as he migrates to another place while he waits for lunch. “Are you sure she’s not your mother?”

A river of breath scuffs the eighteen year-old’s lips, hand jostling his hair. “I don’t even know anymore.”

“Make sure to invite Frank over!” Lindsey yells from the other room.

As Pete departs with a straightness to his walk, he suggests, “Why not bring Dallon, too?”

Wonderful. I sure love that Dallon Weekes fellow, so much that it’s like drowning.

“When is lunch ready?” the newly introduced Frank Iero moans, propping his feet up on the coffee table and hoping that Lindsey doesn’t stomp in here and slap them away.

“Maybe if you actually got in here and helped, you could eat sooner!” the woman quips, voice extending from the kitchen.

I would’ve registered it as a joke, but Frank seems pretty intent on devouring millions of sandwiches, whom he proclaimed as his favorite food, his one and only true love, so he ascends from his chair without an objection to go and assist Lindsey.

And now that the air is devoid of one person, that allows space for the notice of one particular man, clad in thin suspenders and gloves just as dark, a smirk tinting the edge of his pink lips without a worry of repercussions for acting so arrogantly.

He dabbles with the unlit cigarette suspended at the cliff of his mouth, ruminating, “That Frank guy seems like a good kid.”

“You’re the kid. He’s older than you,” I bark, fed-up with Dallon’s tangential observations that only he cares about but thinks everyone else does, even though palpitating eyelids and focus drifting to anywhere but him.

He hums in a prolonged tide as he develops an accord. “By one year.”

“A year is a long time.”

Dallon slants towards me, as if proposing a challenge. “Two years is a long time.”

“And by definition, three years is a long time,” Pete rambles, brows puckering. “Shall I continue with four?”

“I just like counting sometimes,” Dallon rescues, lolling on the chair again. “It’s interesting, how the numbers fit together and retain that certain merit to whomever beholds them, don’t you think?”

“My math grades have been on a rollercoaster since ninth grade,” Pete chuckles.

The cigarette trundles in Dallon’s attenuate fingers, being studied by the person possessing it. “Yes, I abhor mathematics. The numbers are fascinating, though.”

The cushions near Pete ruffle as he stands, smoothing down his pants as he pivots towards another room.

“Where are you going?” I demand, tugging at his shirt as he passes me so that he remains stationary.

A laugh escapes Pete’s mouth, subconsciously condescending in nature. “To the bathroom — relax.”

“Don’t be clingy.” A sneer elongates Dallon’s bleached complexion, and it’s awarded with a socially unacceptable hand gesture, but he simply giggles, amused by my ferocity.

I don’t aim to supply Dallon with any more ammunition to gun me down, so my extremities unwind from Pete’s clothing hesitantly, my anxiousness now quivering within my feet.

As Pete’s frame disappears behind the wall, he assures, “I’ll be back soon, if you’re concerned about my wellbeing.”

Cynosure flitting over a crinkle in his glove, my attacker refuses to acknowledge Pete visually. “Stay safe,” Dallon warns as a compromise. “Don’t fall in.”

And drown.

Promptly after Pete is whirled away to another portion of the house, Dallon’s face gleams with a business-like stare.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” My bones budge under my jacket, anticipating an icy comment from the man reposing in the chair across from me.

“You do the same.” When my demeanor implies denial, he adds, “Come on — it’s obvious. You hate me almost as much as you hate yourself, and everyone can see it.”

I fiddle with the seam of a couch pillow, fitting it between my phalanges and sliding it out a moment later. “I didn’t think it was that clear.”

“Well it is, and people are going to start asking you about it.” Dallon’s words are draped in acerbity, decorating his ominous character with the precision of a blade.

My eyes circle around, shadowing my figure with a pillow that I’ve stopped playing with long enough to relocate. “I’m sure you’ll love the attention.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?” I roar, until my voice is subdued at the thought of Lindsey, Frank, and Gerard hearing from the kitchen. “Because all you seem to do is craft your sentences with a pinch of sarcasm here, a dash of animosity there, and I’ve given up trying to decipher whether or not you’re legitimate about what you say to me, because you act as though reconciliation is on your mind, but you speak as though it’s the farthest thing away.”

Building an empire of egotism, Dallon twirls his cigarette between a slim finger and its partner, musing, “Reconciliation is an intriguing matter, now isn’t it?”

“Perhaps, but why the hell would I try to reconcile with someone like you?”

A leering smile brands Dallon’s face, disgracing him as a lascivious criminal who can’t be trusted. “Because I meant something to your petty brain, if you don’t remember, and you don’t relinquish that because of a few psychologists who tell you that it’s beneficial. You never listened to anyone except me, and though you’re bombarding my apparently terrible head with hatred of the past, you’re still sitting with me when you could be making lunch, and that’s a fantastically infatuating thing. You want to be here, because you absolutely crave our time together.”

“That’s a lie.” I leap from my chair, but Dallon restrains me with the posing of a finger.

“Is it?”

“O-of course,” I stammer, descending into the cushion once again as confusion fogs my contemplation.

Dallon’s hands pressure the armrests, climbing and dissociating from me. He pauses by the door, sentencing the cigarette to its last ember as it tumbles to the floor and closing with his final words. “Once you sit down and weigh your options, you’ll come to understand that I’m not quite the villain you think I am.”

And then I’m alone.

Chapter Twenty-One

The voices have gone away.

I don’t know how, but the stagnant blight of Etep is but a memory, passing with an odd expression and a pang of fear before it’s devoured by the sink, and I don’t know whether I should run for my life or stick around out of curiosity.

I’m convinced that both would entail my defeat, but with the state of things, it appears as though Etep is the one to be defeated.

Now that Dallon has shown up, inflicting a fervid sort of rage upon my normally docile composure, Etep is sidetracked by attempting to eliminate the new contender, and he hasn’t done a very good job of it.

He’s just disappeared completely, not even capable of trying his best, and my steadiness is gradually increasing with each minute he’s absent.

I’m confident in saying, however, that he’ll be back, and he’ll sure as hell be angry with me for betraying him, as if regaining access to my own mind is some kind of treachery that he simply can’t stand and will have punished by execution.

But then where would he live if I’m decapitated? With me, abruptly shoved into the ground with a scarcity of dirt piled atop my chilled body and my dismembered head tucked gently under my arm as if a basketball.

Because Etep has made it quite conspicuous that he never leaves, so with this knowledge, it’s fair to say that he’s only dormant, refueling himself before he strikes with twice the blow to my sanity, but it’s not like I can be bothered to be responsive towards it, because he’s been smiting me since the dawn of my post-traumatic stress disorder diagnostic meeting after the event, where things were only heating up, and if he has the audacity to declare his superiority over me on our first encounter, there’s no doubt that he’ll observe the Napoleon complex further, tearing my grasp on life to smithereens with the lack of artwork to glamorize them.

The real artwork, I come to understand, is not the scraps of destruction, because I’ve professed my hatred for that mentality many times before, rather the idea that Etep is a metaphor for Dallon, and as I brood on that, it becomes more and more legitimate, until it emerges with a blinding glory as the only absoluteness.

Too often are we raveled in affairs we don’t understand, but they seem charming enough for discussion, so we give them a go, and that was me for two years, but now I’ve finally understood why this shit is spinning around me.

There can never be a cessation for pleasure. It’s always either Etep or Dallon, mental or physical, and there’s no judging which one is worse, because I’ve been abused by both, and people just write it off as either a symptom or an attacker who was never jailed because my case is somehow superficial to their biased jury ruling.

And because of that negligence, I’ve ceased my uproar for a friendlier stance whose only purpose is to promote my likeability as I cluck at how poorly it’s working, because I’m still defiant, and I’m still irritable, and I’m still the mess that I’ve always been, but at least a lick of pessimism has been composted — or that’s only what the psychologists enjoy, in which case bedeviling them is the least of my chores.

My mother instructs otherwise, but she’s no use as well, seeing as she aims to send me to a mental hospital, and it’s not so much the environment of it but the stigma associated with the place, because not everyone is aware that receiving help is okay, that it’s taking care of yourself, and a mental institution only represents a madhouse for serial killers that must be shunned from society, and it’s a tragic ideology.

There’s no evidence to claim that I wouldn’t fit in with the people there, though, but with the departure of Etep, things are looking up for my health.

Crumbs of bread leap into the water, fleeing their life of cohesion and joints to their family to live their own destiny, and for one moment I debate jumping into the frozen lake to join them on their quest, but I’d die of hypothermia before I could get a job, so I decide against it.

“The ducks look happy today,” Lindsey remarks, tossing a chunk of transmuted wheat to the feathered animals, with a simpering shade to her cheeks.

True enough, secluded parties of ducks float around, utilizing the wonder of small talk with the others like them and chirping jubilantly without a specific route, just leisurely drifting with the wind to wherever it takes them.

“If you keep feeding them, they’ll never leave,” I caution, dividing the bread anyway, sort of like a pastime to stimulate my restless limbs.

“Who says I want that? We’re high up, and we don’t have many people here, so why not use animals to keep us company?” The breeze brushes against Lindsey’s crimson lipstick, toying with her sloppily pigtailed hair in the process and dispersing strands of black to the sky around the beaming woman.

My shoulders tense, then relaxing in a human gesture that I’m required to exploit. “I suppose that’s a fair opinion.”

“Gerard also hates ducks, so having them around is an added bonus,” Lindsey includes, the blanched teeth saddled within her mouth being unmasked. “I’m still not over my fourteenth birthday.”

“It seems like you had a good time, though,” I jest. “I don’t know what the problem is.”

My new friend’s limb protrudes to assail my clavicle, a giggle following. “The idea of two fourteen year-olds in a gay bar doesn’t scream safety.”

“Pete isn’t screaming safety, either,” I aberrate, dampening the aura of our conversation. “He hasn’t been taking his pills.”

Lindsey’s sharpened brows cave inward, suddenly distressed. “Why not?”

A sigh launches from my lungs, hand blending through my platinum locks. “He went on this whole emotional spiel about how they remove his emotions, and he apparently hates that.”

The scarlet rows on the woman’s face gather in disturbance, pondering, and she eventually rebuts, “Well wouldn’t you?”

“I have too many emotions,” I invalidate. “I go to a terrible psychologist for them, and I probably earn more when I’m with those ‘doctors’.”

“Psychologists are trash, in my personal opinion,” Lindsey agrees, tapping my knee in consolation. “I ditched all of mine. My motto is to guide your own life and stay out of danger while doing so. It excludes all those pests that call themselves doctors.”

My shoulders organize themselves in an upward position, wrangling the circumstances. “Pete also fired his psychologists, and now he’s not taking his medication. I’m not sure where it’s getting him, because he’s definitely in danger, and his moodiness is showing. He’s leaving rooms a lot as if it’s a casual thing, but it’s not like he brought anything in his bag to do.”

“You should ask Pete about it,” Lindsey suggests. “Friendships are based on trust, and part of trust is relaying how you feel.”

“Feeling is what Pete says the pills take away.”

“Then you have to give him an emotion so powerful that not even the pills can silence it.” Lindsey’s chocolate eyes tunnel into my own, confident in her advice and willing me to judge it the same. “I feel positive that you’ll be able to do it, Patrick.”

“What makes you think that?” My head swerves to the side to avoid connecting with Lindsey, just like many times before. “I can’t even control my own emotions.”

Her hands cross into each other, like those psychologists whom we both hate. “I find that it’s easier to be honest with other people than it is to be honest with yourself.”

“Just like it’s easier to punch down your own walls than it is to see others do the same.” The words course from my mouth with streaks of twilight insinuating the crepuscule skies, decimated by the lowering sun.

“Exactly.” Lindsey’s tone emanates a mellow disposition, doleful in its undertones and murky in the mutilated reeds that conceal the river grass, and she includes to her portfolio a clever “you’d rather die before you see someone else so much as scratch themselves”.

“That, or you’re just searching for excuses to bring about your own funeral.” My eyes embroil Lindsey’s with a thoughtful concentration, and it suddenly dawns on me how much she and Gerard are similar.

Their noses, trimmed up in shape, are always seamed with the firm strings of a smile, and those strings also pleat their fawn eyes on their quest to vanquish the entirety of the two’s faces with a jocular grin and a grain of sass to further their personalities. Their dynamics are different, with Lindsey portraying the sort of mother archetype and Gerard the free spirit, but their harmonization is a unique breed that would seem, at least to others, as a clashing force but is actually only a deviation of the norm, and as I’ve proclaimed countless times before, normal is boring.

And Gerard Way and Lindsey Ballato are far from boring.

But soon, Lindsey’s smile fades for the gloominess of my conjecture, allowing, “That’s a possibility, I guess.”

My breathing shivers, thoughtful. “I need to be sure, or else my anxiety brain won’t leave me be.”

A minuscule giggle dances beneath the rising moon, the fragrance of night permeating its sender as her hair replicates the dreary background. “Anxiety is a mindfuck.”

I requite the laugh, concurring, “Preach.” Instantaneously, however, my mood draws as dim as the evening air, spiraling into the earth that buzzes under my legs.

The wind exhales in operatic cries, dismissing our static conversation for the hiss of frost against our cheeks as it marvels at the rosy color it paints, yet we’re settled evermore within the trees, a blanket lodging our quaking shoulders to reject the biting temperature.

“Anxiety gets boring after a while, though,” I criticize, tightening the curtains hanging around my shoulders and steaming the air with a misty breath, a natural cigarette that illustrates my vision with smoke assembled entirely of my will. “But it’s always present, and it sucks.”

“More credible words have never been spoken, my friend.”

And as dusk grazes our lashes, my fright is everlasting.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Nothing moves in the cottage under the Caribou skies.

The fire is but a heap of ash and embers whose flames were stolen by the thief known as the moon, and a rigor varnishes the wooden strips of the floor with a curt hush to the activities of the fluttering drapes.

No one is to know what schemes Pete Wentz is fulfilling in the isolation of his bedroom, but the night is a snitch and whispers a tale of foreboding into my ear before it’s stifled by the protection of the walls.

And as my toes tattoo a burlesque onto the panels of lumber beneath them, the faint clicking of my friend’s plotting is audible under the slit of his door, where quieted beams of light splinter the wood and alert me to the danger progressing within the confines of the area.

The melancholic droning of tears down one’s face declares itself as the paramount ruler to any form of acumen feeding into Pete’s cognition, and it shows by the vigilant lock holstered inside the knob and the muffled theatric of sobbing excavating the hall.

My fist stands at attention by the door, unsure of its motives, however helpful, but after an agitating pin against the ground in the shape of something more portentous, impetus is a drug produced a gallon at a time.

To my astonishment, the lock was never fastened at all, forgotten in a hurry to schedule one’s own massacre, and as I enter, I’d rather the lock be sealed with superglue than confront this scene.

A monster of a being grovels in the space near my feet, an assortment of pills brandishing swords meant to injure the person who has already injured himself enough, and not a flash of remorse fashions his murky demeanor.

“Patrick,” my friend warns, back eschewing me for the mercy of his drugs. “Go to bed. That’s where everyone else is, and I know you love fitting in with the crowd.”

My response wavers on the ledge of my tongue, not yet verbal arms outstretched to balance itself, just to fall back into my mouth and plummet down my throat.

“Frivolous,” Pete mutters, a spit dredging his remark. “That’s what you are.”

A laugh spears my lungs with the intensity of this matter, shocked. “And what about you? Wasting your life on the pills you insist on hating?” My head droops in disbelief. “This isn’t what I meant when I told you to take your meds.”

“Then what did you mean?” Loose ends of malice disproportion Pete’s generally easygoing personality, combing a shadow through its waters. “If you want the best for me, don’t be so fucking ambiguous.”

“It isn’t my fault that you overreacted to a simple opinion!”

And in that moment, my companion’s body rotates to present a masterpiece of prescriptions, spelling out the sole word no in medicated beads of spite that embellish his true inclination towards humanity, which is deeply outlined in his abrupt disheveled hygiene.

As I analyze the production, Pete’s breath converses with mine as the flecks of gold in his irises become visible — and wondrously beautiful — and the silence is captured for the longest duration imaginable, but I break away, flustered.

I attempt persuasion from a different aspect. “Why were you trying to overdose?” My voice is the size of a mouse, scampering around the room in hopes of discovering an adequate reaction but returning fruitless.

All Pete does is stare out the window while its blinds are still crumpled over each other, as if he could make something out of the thin slices that board him from the outside world, because an effect is the exact opposite to what he’s earning with the dismal hum he provides to everything.

“Why is it important to you?” Pete’s sentences bang against the covered glass with his focus still solid, and I almost march over to him to see what he’s so fixated on if there’s a veil over it, but he would most likely cast me aside with a brutal grabbing of my arm, and a panic attack would draw a spotlight to me when it should be readily pointed towards my friend.

“It’s almost like you want to die,” I scorn, wrists chaffing my hips with the fierce velocity at which they pace to distract me from the shame of this situation.

“Well we humans tend to find people who are like us.” Pete’s neck swivels to address me, an eerie glow slicking his eyes. “So it seems we’ve both got a problem.”

“I already have a psychologist. I don’t need this, especially after you said that isn’t how relationships work.”

A slight pounce commands Pete’s shoes, just enough momentum to startle me as he quips, “And you said that everyone wants help, and a psychologist has a doctorate in repairing peoples’ twisted minds, so I’m pretty certain we fit the criteria.”

“Psychologists aren’t our friends, Pete.” My stare is as still as the night, strong in a way that I’ve never been. “I thought you knew that.”

“Psychologists are the ones who tell me to swallow my meds, though I find it cute when you tell me the same.”

“You never listen.”

My friend shrugs absently. “Yeah, but it’s still cute. You’re cute. But those pills — they are not cute.” Sins tremor in Pete’s eyes, pragmatic about one aspect of this debate.

“Do you think I give a shit about whether or not you like taking your pills?” My brows cramp, appalled at my friend’s complaints. “Because I don’t, but I do care about keeping your heart beating.

“The way you refrain from medicating yourself, you…you make dying seem like something skillful in denouncing any sort of solution, but that’s so unhealthy for you.” A sigh swings from my windpipe, depicting my insurmountable stress. “And I know that you don’t owe society anything, especially your existence, but you better stay fucking alive for all of our sakes.”

No response, only the pensive scowl of my friend who’s walking the road to death.

“Will you do that, Pete Wentz?” I press, desperation on the cusp of wrecking my soul’s faith.

The man acknowledges me with a subtle hint of poignancy in his eyes, and a word a friend never wants to hear is uttered. “No.”

The malevolent wind tosses my step as it pays close mind to the tears wandering my face with an awestruck expression plastered onto its palette of frigid air that beats me up with every passing second, but after a few moments, the death feels nice, like it’s what I deserve.

The concept that everything is my fault has been pounded into me since birth, and it’s finally caught on.

And perhaps the person who caused most of that self-hatred will have something to offer me with the cigarette chatting with him in rings of smoke and accompanying the witty grin dangling from his nose.

When he sees me, though, the mysterious ambience is pommeled.

“What are you doing?” Dallon’s inflection is flavored by bewilderment, severing the bond between him and his cigarette as his back straightens from leaning on the house.

Dallon’s tie is crinkled under his fleece jacket, peering over the v-neck of his sweater and viewing its faded surroundings with a fresh vantage that no human could decipher, and his hair, usually gelled in elaborate coiffures, is as unkempt as I’ve seen it, styled by the tumultuous breeze, and even his eyes — those sapphire eyes — aren’t onerous to look at, because they’ve been dulled by a burden sleeting on their owner to the point of a dusty layer upon glass, and it’s all coated in irresoluteness.

The man looks so fucking innocent that it’s difficult to remember how much he hurt me, how much my life dotes on the suffering, and I’ve become so cavalier to this scent that it barely means a thing what he did.

Even so, I could never love someone like him, yet it seems that my promises are off the table considering the vexing circumstances, and before I know it, Dallon’s pressed once again into the wooden structure of the Caribou house, an old friend’s hunger glossing his lips.

The affair is painful, and Dallon’s breath reeks of decomposition from a familiar blade, but it’s what I need, so our mouths are synchronized with the tears of dissolution and not a drop of regret, even though there should be a rainstorm of it.

The problem is that it feels so right, so natural, so much like the past, and it’s anyway eluded me that the past is the thing chaining me to psychologists and pills and anxiety, but terror has become glamorous in this clutch, and we’re both just scavenging for an excuse to relive it, so no one questions why I’m suddenly kissing my attacker and why there’s no objection to the action, because it’s consensual in the matter that we’re simply laboring to collapse.

There aren’t any people here besides us to witness our decease, and we could be dying forever, but I’ve had enough.

I peel away with a snarl tangling my face, berating both of us for being so foolish with the recognition that it was mostly my doing, and to evade the miffed countenance of Dallon Weekes, my ambition turns towards the water.

“Where are you going?” my assailant calls, fear taxing his volume, but I block out his pleas.

There’s a lake near here. Maybe I can envision myself drowning again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

When I kissed Pete, I was in a bathroom stall for an hour with the intentions of sorting through the variables, but with Dallon, it seems like nothing special, and it’s perplexing how my friend is a load and my attacker is a casualty, when it should be the other way around, or at least be equal in the troubling field.

But it’s not the kiss I’m fretting about — it’s the aftermath and what transpired before that caused it.

Speaking of the cause, I should be with Pete to make sure he doesn’t kill himself on the pills he says he doesn’t take, but he would probably continue with his endeavor and barely pity me when I observe his death, but then again, he wouldn’t want me to miss the show either.

So in a state of indecisiveness, I find myself sitting by the lake, submerged in the snow without a jacket to absorb my heat, but with the status of my soul, it’s not like I have any heat for it to absorb.

And I’m perfect fine (for the most part), so seeing a drunk Frank Iero stumbling into my path and crashing into the ground beside me is quite the shock.

A half-empty beer bottle wades in his hand, towed around by jittery phalanges, and his hair is even messier than Dallon’s. “Hey, Patrick!” Frank squeals, underestimating his sonority.

“Um, hi, Frank.”

I’ve never spoken to this Iero kid one on one before, for he was always with either Gerard or Lindsey, endeavoring to appeal to both of them, and I’ve been the meek guy in the corner that no one dares talk to because they’re afraid of hurting me, so those roles haven’t been compatible yet.

“So how are you?” A pinched smile fits Frank’s visage, stereotypical of teenage girls ready for gossip.

“I’m doing well, except for the fact Pete’s about to fucking die, and even after I knew that, I kissed Dallon.”

Frank’s expression is miffed, partly because I snapped at him, partly because he didn’t realize Pete is in danger, and partly because everyone can tell I hate Dallon. “Well why did you do that?” He appears genuinely confused, and I somewhat pardon him, primarily because he’s drunk and insensible.

My vision circulates the pillow terrain of my hands, made soft by the lotion I refuse to apply to my arm but continue to apply elsewhere. “Because I couldn’t control my emotions.”

Frank pats my knee reassuringly, the best he can do in this intoxicated perspective. “We all have those days. You just gotta get through them, and then you’re a-ok.” A proud beam shades his pale face, unsure if his advice was helpful, but he’s interpreting it with his own judgment, regardless of whether or not I’m still broken down.

My head whips around to glare at this Iero fellow, unnerving for him and fueling for me. “But those days aren’t everyday for other people.”

“Are you constantly tormented by it?” Frank’s words are dedicated to his feet, rinsed in scruffy tennis shoe materials and splattered by snowflakes.

“Basically.”

“Try alcohol,” Frank recommends, beer luging down his throat. “You’ll feel great.”

I flick his bottle delicately, examining it for a conclusion of “why the hell would I do that?”

Frank shrugs. “It’s what I do.”

“And you’re drunk.” I cock my head, disapproving.

“Fair point.” More beer rides a toboggan down his neck, sliding around while he attempts to speak. “But I’m not quite drunk.”

My brows arch, an aqueduct for the ebbing snow surrounding our frozen figures. “Oh?”

Reflection establishes its trade on Frank’s rouge lips, playful in nature. “It’s a memorable kind of veneer.”

A scant chuckle blows out of my lungs. “Being known as the town drunk isn’t as memorable as you’d probably like it to be.”

Frank disagrees with a mere turning of the skull. “You get some intriguing information when people think you’re passed out.”

My arm juts out to smack my new friend. “You deceptive bastard!”

Frank better not have been watching me since he came, or else my paranoia will understand no boundaries. I thought I was doing well with keeping my fear on the down low, but this...what if he installed cameras around the house?

I kick my questions from their throne of pretentiousness, calming my mind temporarily. “Even if the information is enticing, I’m not risking an alcohol addiction.”

“Whatever.” The remnants of Frank’s drink are shoved into his mouth, and the glass fidgets in his fingers once vacant of a beverage. “Your loss.”

“Not really,” I negate. “Pete’s still rotting, so I’d rather not have two of us dead.”

A sigh unwinds from Frank’s esophagus, troubled and frustrated. “You need to stop worrying so much about him.”

“Excuse me?” I clear up.

Frank slackens a bit, illustrating his perception of the case. “Yeah, I don’t want to have to arrange his funeral, but I don’t want to do the same for you when you die of stress from managing Pete’s emotions instead of your own.”

Panic sunders my stomach, fabricating shredded scraps of phobia that act as another force who won’t leave me alone. “But—”

Frank’s hands position themselves to soothe my consternation. “Patrick, it’s all right to take care of other people, but you have to take care of yourself first and foremost.”

My body shivers under my clothing, uncomfortable in this anecdote of pressure. “What if I don’t need to?”

Exasperation flosses my friend’s hazel eyes as he grapples with aiding me. “You said you didn’t want two of you dead, so don’t let that happen.”

I face away from Frank — lying’s easier that way. “You seem so confident that it will.”

“With your rebellion, it’s probable.”

Now that Etep has been banished from the kingdom of my brain, I take it upon myself to procure alarms when accosted by tyrannical people such as Frank Iero, and dodging him is part of the procedure. If he won’t believe my side, then why bother with him? I know what I’m doing; I’ve survived that way, and even if barely, it’s enough, because at least my life isn’t completely riddled with Dr. Saporta’s bullet holes.

“I’m tired of people controlling my life!” I shriek, spooking Frank. “I was born to do as I please, but apparently now that I’m all messed up and shit, that gives people the right to treat me like a pet!”

“Patrick, that’s not—”

“Don’t you dare.” My tone is icier than the climate around us, and Frank comprehends that, too, reeling back for fear of my rage, and his fear unexpectedly drives me for more anger.

But it feels strange, like this isn’t how I’m meant to react, because it’s obvious that I’m wounding Frank, determined by the quivering ocean in his irises, and I’ve never purposely done that before.

Yet Frank doesn’t seem like the person to be timid often, but perhaps it’s the unpredicted volume of my lexemes that command such a response from him, though either way Dr. Saporta will not be thankful.

I haven’t conversed with him since we traveled to Caribou, to this house with many mysteries hiding in the people who reside here, so he’s most likely scared shitless at the thought of his absence and the impact it will have on me.

I’ve discovered that there actually isn’t an impact, because I’m absolutely fantastic, but that may be a false truth with the recent occurrences, but no matter how disoriented I am because of those events, I’m still sitting in the snow with a nervous Frank Iero, and Pete Wentz might as well be dead.

I’m a terrible friend for accepting that, but any real friend would know it’s plausible, too. Even an enemy can decode Pete’s moodiness as a petition for the grave — it’s not like they’ll give a fuck, but they’ll understand what’s happening nonetheless.

Maybe I do aim to leave Frank in the ice and tend to Pete like a helpful companion, but Frank is still as tenacious as he was when I first shouted at him, and I can never suppress the magic of a puppy dog gaze.

So I crumble.

“I’m just saying you don’t know what it’s like to be reprimanded for things you can’t discipline, what it’s like to never own your mind to instead cede it to a militant voice, what it’s like to hire an amateur of a psychologist who thinks incorrectly that he can solve your problems, what it’s like to drown at the sole mention of a person, what it’s like to kill yourself and be resurrected for more torture without consent.” Tears polish my eyes, amputating any trace of balance, and I prepare for the final punch. “You will never know.”

Through this all, Frank is also prepared for his final punch. “And you will never know what it’s like to go to rehab, what it’s like to be paired with a cellmate that tried to fucking stab you, what it’s like to always be monitored by people who only pretend to sympathize with you, what it’s like to feel yourself slipping away when approached by the thought of alcohol, what it’s like to know your health is declining but not seeing how that could be worse than the facility you’ve been in for a year, what it’s like to never see the daylight in a literal sense, what it’s like to escape a metaphor for the harsh reality.” Contrary to my speech, no tears occupy Frank’s eyes, rather a stone engraved with a soft screw you. “Now you will never know.”

And suddenly that beer derives a function in my mind as Frank rises to flee this caustic adventure.

“I’m not drunk, Patrick,” he states with his back cackling at me. “Because I’ve experienced enough of that sensation.”