Spectrum (Frerard, Petekey)

13: Pete Wentz, Who Cares More About His Eyeliner Than His Dignity

Patrick had never been keen to move house: to move away from Joe and Andy, and to this whole new world in a whole new town, because Patrick wasn't exactly the most confident person in the world, and with that in consideration, it was pretty easy to see how a move to a town where he was completely alone and knew no one was hardly the best idea.

But of course, as parents tend to do, his parents had ignored his protests and even the most well thought out of arguments, and just moved anyway, because fuck what Patrick thought: fuck his friends, and fuck his life.

He'd heard quite a bit about Jersey, however it hadn't really lived up to the expectations he'd put upon it, in fact, Patrick had easily come to conclude that besides the people and the town, it wasn't that much different from Chicago.

Of course, the very important, and entirely unmissable difference lay in the boy who lived across the street from the odd little house with the intriguing attic bedroom that Patrick had moved into, and that boy went by the name of Pete Wentz; he was thirteen, a year younger than Patrick, but short, about as short as Patrick, and with an apparent lack of self control and rational thinking when it came to the concept of 'too much eyeliner'.

Pete was unlike anyone whom Patrick had ever met before, and it was that very first visit across the road to their new neighbours when Patrick had found himself utterly intrigued by Pete, who was something like a very emo enigma: an apparent anomaly, because try as he might, Patrick just couldn't make sense of the boy.

And somewhere down the line, he'd finally come to the conclusion that perhaps Pete's deal was not being figured out: being the asshole, being the mysterious piece of shit, and that perhaps he should just stop trying, and the very moment Patrick did, and that was stopping texting him, and making his way across the room to sit in Pete's yard and talk to the only person vaguely near his own age he actually knew in this town, that was the very moment that Pete cracked so to speak.

Because Patrick had been wrong, and for once in his life, he found himself happy to be so, because Pete didn't want to be a mystery: distant, and unapproachable, he was just nervous, always thinking: so caught up in his own head that he found it difficult to make time for and to think of others, especially people like Patrick.

Pete had been the one to come over that day: wearing a long sleeve shirt and a pair of skinny jeans, and Patrick had paid far too much attention to his appearance, because Pete had looked far too good, and Patrick wasn't quite sure what to make of that, or what to make of the boy that said very little until the two were sat in Patrick's attic bedroom with light streaming in through the windows and the door locked behind them.

It was then that Pete hadn't shut up, almost as if he'd sprung into life with millions of thoughts and feelings, and Patrick had listened attentively, with no questions asked, and that had been what Pete had really needed, always really needed.

Because that one day, when everything had changed, Pete's voice had been shaky at first, his eyes never meeting Patrick's, until the very end of it all, that was, and he'd spoken at first for perhaps ten minutes in one sitting, and somehow, every word had been a new adventure, to which Patrick had approached with the utmost interest and concern.

Perhaps Patrick was just an unfathomably good listener, but there was indeed no denying that something had changed for Pete, right then and right there as he'd detailed his whole world: his life at home, the boy called Mikey, so much about the boy called Mikey, about Mikey's sister Gee, and her boyfriend Frank, who Mikey had been apprehensive about, but had turned out to be fine in the end, as Pete had known, about school, about assholes, about the guy he'd punched in the face for the same Mikey, about his childhood, about Patrick and them moving in, and the way his head worked in the quiet, in the dark, when he was alone.