Unbeknownst To You, Stump

Chapter 3: An Honest Near Breakup

Kourtney's/Harley's POV.

It's only been three days since I met Patrick, Andy, Joe and Pete, and the entirety of the world already knows everything. Magazine covers are plastered with our faces from pictures taken when we weren't looking, news casters talking about it nonstop, talk shows mentioning the situation, people freaking out on social media. It's insane. Something got out somewhere while we were at the police station, and now the world is a wreck over it. Pete was so upset when he was the first to find out about everyone knowing. One change of the channel, and there's an instant mood change from relaxed to furious and destructive. He found out and flipped.

"Patrick! Andy! Joe!" Pete shouted angrily. "Get in here!"

"What's up, Panda?" Patrick asked with slight concern, Joe and Andy following him into the living room.

"Look at this bullshit! Everyone knows everything now! It's all over the place!"

"What!?" Andy questioned, irritation obvious in his tone. "No way! How did it get out!?"

"I don't fucking know! Someone is going to have to explain what's going on!"

"That's impossible, there's no way anyone could know this," Patrick muttered. "I don't understand... It just doesn't make sense."

"There's gotta be a good reason, you guys," Joe stated. "Does our manager know about the news story?" Pete shrugged in response. "Someone should call him. See what's with this. How it got out." Everyone nodded in agreement and Pete volunteered to call, stomping out of the room.

Patrick followed him out while Joe and Andy sat with me on the couch, watching what the story was saying. There were a few pictures of all of us showing up on the screen and Joe grabbed the remote from the floor where Pete dropped it to turn up the volume. There was a woman reporter talking and a man sitting beside her on the talk show. They talked about what was happening, what they knew about it. But what the woman said next was terrible and beyond unnecessary.

"Could the Fall Out Boy star have been secretly keeping his daughter all this time with the help of his band mates?" she asked skeptically. The guy next to her agreed.

"Could it be true?" the man asked. "Fall Out Boy hiding Patrick Stump's daughter, saying it's a kidnapping, gaining more attention? No one just 'goes missing' for fourteen years, living in the same city for all that time, do they?"

"No goddamn way," Andy muttered quietly. Joe shook his head in disbelief.

"I know who I'm getting fired today," Patrick grumbled, absolutely infuriated. I hadn't noticed he came back. "Do I look like a criminal mastermind? How the hell can I hide anything for that long!? That is ridiculous! It's impossible! Just because this happened when Fall Out Boy ended, that doesn't mean I was the one who did it! How is it even probable!?"

"Patrick, chill," Andy said, getting up from the couch and walking over to him. "All they're doing is creating gossip and finding ways to get people to believe that bull. It's their job to try and ruin people. Make the rest of the world think shit that isn't true. Anyone with half a brain could tell it was a stupid idea. Really."

"Yeah, but it's their jobs to make everyone believe it. So they're good at telling lies. They know how to pull the wool over people's eyes and make fools out of the ones they lie about. They'll make us the idiots. The bad guys."

"Well," I started quietly. "You could bring the band back... Just because people die doesn't mean the music has to go with them..."

"What?" Andy asked, facing me. "What do you mean-"

"She has a point," Joe stated, stepping up on the coffee table to gain their attention. "If we bring back Fall Out Boy, start back up with the Youngblood fans, we can grab their attention. We can grab everyone and their mother's attention. We can explain what happened in this, set the record straight. Because by tomorrow, this is going to be on everyone's page on every social media site. On every headline. We need to do something drastic so they pay attention to what we have to say. We finalized the end of FOB just about a week ago, we need to get back up off our asses and make people freak. Let's get back out there. Then once we're noticed, explain everything."