Mighty Fall {Trohley, Petekey}

1: this chapter is accidentally about pete whoops

"Mom! We need to leave like, right now," eleven-year-old Pete Wentz yelled at his mother. He woke up early so he could be "on time" for his first day at his new school. Of course, his idea of "on time" was precisely one hour before school started. Could you blame the poor kid? He was desperate to make friends since he left all of his behind in Missouri. Not that he had ever made any worth keeping. His friends would constantly tease him about everything he liked. No, Pete Wentz wasn't like the other kids. He liked Metallica, and black, and poetry.

But there was one other thing he liked that set him apart from the other kids.

Well, it wasn't something that he went around telling people, oh no, this wasn't going to be accepted by the other kids. Most of them already teased him about it, but none of them actually believed it.

The truth was, Pete Wentz liked boys.

There wasn't a particular boy that made him realize this. To be truthful, all the boys at his school were assholes. But he felt something about boys in general that he never felt about girls, and that was that.

Pete didn't like calling himself gay, maybe because it had been used to insult him so many times, but it was true that he liked boys and not girls.

At this moment, Pete was fantasizing about meeting a nice boy at his new middle school and falling in love, while waiting for his mom to find her goddamn car keys. Mr. Wentz had replaced them after he spent all of last night drinking at some gross bar and taking some definitely underage girl home while his wife pretended not to notice. The Wentz family's marriage was obviously not the best marriage. It was more of a housemate situation than it was a loving partnership between two people. Pete's parents slept in different rooms in their new house. His dad rarely talked to him. Sometimes Pete wondered if his father even recognized him at all in his almost always drunken state.

Pete was snapped out of his state of wondering as his mother finally found the keys. He grabbed his stuffed backpack, excited about what lay ahead of him.

And what lay ahead of him was something he could never imagine.

By the end of the week, he had made three of his friends: Joe, a small Jewish boy who had a weird hairdo that's as actually kind of cool if you didn't pay attention to, like, half of it, because it was fucking huge. There was also Andy, who was intimidating at first but was actually a sweetheart on the inside. And finally, there was Kelsey, who had a short haircut and shopped in the boy's section and was the funniest person Pete had ever met.

Four months later, Pete and his friends were a force to be reckoned with. They all stood up for each other and were practically inseparable. They helped Pete gather the courage to ask out Ryan Ross, the only sixth grader who wore makeup, and he was a guy. Surprisingly, Ryan was into girls, but was interested in hanging out with Pete sometime, strictly as friends. It was at this moment that Pete realized he had figured out his sexuality at a very young age and there wasn't a whole ton of eleven-year-old gay guys for him to date. But Pete was okay with that. He didn't need a boyfriend at eleven years old.

That year, the Gang of Four got together for New Year's. Pete got all sappy and emotional because it was his first time spending a holiday with people he actually liked. He made everyone choose a word to describe their year together, and then he put the words together to make a sentence. Of course, they were only eleven, so it wasn't the thing of their childhood that they were the most proud of.

In seventh grade, they spent New Year's together again. This time, they came up with something slightly less cringey. By then, Pete had convinced his mom to divorce her asshole of a husband. That year, Pete's word was "free."