You're Not Even Mine to Miss [Fall Out Boy - Wattys 2014]

➽ Patrick's Prologue (Part One).

Patrick’s Prologue (Part One): I set my clocks early because I know I’m always late.

(April 1st, 2008)

I couldn’t stop staring at the telephone for almost an hour and a half.

Okay, fine, I had blinked a few times during the past ninety minutes because you just couldn’t stop yourself from not blinking – it’s a part of the natural reaction of all humans. But, anyway, going back to the topic sentence: I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the telephone.

Something didn’t just feel right. The second Donnie had hung-up, I felt something different – a bad different, like an evil aura had suddenly enveloped me and had crept under my skin. It felt as if something really bad was going to happen, and I didn’t like the sound of it. And to think that it could happen to Donnie just really made me feel even more worried.

I admit (since it seemed pretty obvious already): I had a crush on London Cassidy McKenzie—ever since I met her in high school. I had a crush on her on the very first day of freshman year in high school. Well, imagine that.

It was easy to be friends with Donnie. She was quite well-known in school because she knew almost everyone in school, from the teachers, to the principal, to the students, to the school faculty, and even to the janitors. She was really friendly to everybody and was very approachable, which was probably why she was elected as the president of our student council. Everybody in our school knew Donnie.

When we were in high school, I used to get beaten up a lot by the jocks because I was “too nerdy to look at” and they kept on pushing me in hallways because I was “so slow in walking due to all the fat I was bringing all the time”. Most of the time, I didn’t mind them pushing me around and publicly teasing me in front of the whole student body (since I couldn’t really defend myself; I was so short and they were all like 6-footers, plus I couldn’t even push them away from me because they were so brawny), but when London had found out about me being bullied, things had changed.

I remembered that we first had an actual social interaction in the cafeteria in our senior year (I wasn’t sure, but I think that it was our senior year). I was looking for Donnie around – since that was what I usually did the minute I step inside the cafeteria even though we weren’t friends yet – when Kurt Zimmerman, the captain of the basketball team (and a.k.a. the leader of the group who loved bullying me), stood in front of me.

*~*

(High School – August 1999)

Gulping, I looked up at Kurt, hoping that he wouldn’t see the fear in my eyes. “What do you want from me?” I asked him, gripping the tray of food that I was holding tightly.

“You getting tired of getting bullied, kid?” Kurt teased. I gulped once again. “Or just getting even more afraid that we could do even more than that?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I told him bravely, but my mind was telling me that I should run for my life.

He laughed loudly in front of my face, grabbing the attention of many students in the cafeteria, before gripping the collar of my shirt. I closed my eyes tightly, knowing that he would be punching me in the gut just like what they always did, but I never expected to hear one very familiar voice.

“I believe that you’re violating the school rules again, Mr Zimmerman.”

Opening my eyes and snapping my head to the source of the voice, I was very relieved to see London, with her arms across her chest, and she looked very annoyed. Kurt looked around the room and realized that everybody was already looking at him. He then released his tight grip from me before pushing me away from him, and I nearly toppled back. Donnie was still glaring at Kurt as he stormed off the cafeteria with his group following him out.