The earnest crackling of a fire would be a welcomed respite from the massacre of heat occurring outside, but that's not the crackling that erupts from my phone as it's guarded in secrecy so that my friends won't truly understand the extent at which my brain was chewed up and spat out for dead.

So Pete will have to move on without an introduction to Dr. Gabe Saporta, because in all honesty, that's the luckier end of the deal, primarily now that he's tossing my problems in his mind and discovering solutions that would only succeed for his kind of folk, or anyway far from me.

This has all become very boring, ponderous subjects spewed out to perpetuate his doctorate without any substance at all, but Dr. Saporta, being the ostentatious fool that he is, has no idea that what he's doing is unnecessary and grey.

But as they preach, the pride comes before the fall, and after all he's done, I'd rather he fall quite hard, but until he finishes this meeting with me over the telephone, he's never tipping off the building to his fate.

"You know the drill, Patrick," Saporta hums, and I swear there's a leering field of triumph fertilizing his aging face.

"Not this again," I sigh, my hand absently swerving through my peroxide-stained vines of keratin that I've never really taken care of.

"For old times' sake."

"I'm not doing the drill with you, okay?" My timbre is phlegmatic, sculpting venom into the phone line. "I have other issues."

"You always do, don't you?"

A psychologist isn't supposed to be so acidic, principally when referring to his patient that he promises to bolster throughout their time together, but I'm frankly unconvinced that Dr. Saporta even has a degree in psychology, so any argument towards him is automatically invalid, and if he does, in fact, own that esoteric degree, it doesn't show by the way he continuously heckles me.

"Anyway, what's your current problem?"

I debate hanging up, just forgetting about this blight of a man, but my mother would dry up my phone bill by calling me about abandoning the psychologist towards whom she's so well-disposed, and quarreling with her does nothing for my vantage, so I decide against it.

That hassle materializes in the form of my taciturnity, but once it's resolved, my answer spouts from the mouth on which it previously slept. "Pete Wentz."

A bout of cachinnation bursts the speaker, also bursting my stomach with spite, and Dr. Saporta stammers, "A few days ago, you were telling me he was the best thing since sliced bread."

"Yeah, he is, and that's why it's all the more painful when he dies from not medicating himself."

Saporta's deliberation transfers from between him to the receiver, an odd disappointment recoiling in his silence. "You always pick the ones with flaws, Patrick."

This man is utterly obnoxious. As if I can choose who waltzes into my life with the most peculiar entrance I've seen yet, and it just keeps getting better — better, that is, until they ruin my life even more so than it was, and then I adapt myself for more.

Brows wadding, a single sentence lashes out at Dr. Saporta, with cyanide dripping from the end. "Is that my fault?"

A groan is filtered through the radio, unfavorably provoked by my resistance. "Perhaps you should review your choice in friends before indulging in the sanity they grant you."

"So it is my fault."

Fragments of blackout cloud his response-time, eventually punctured by a spear of consciousness. "I'm not saying that."

"You're almost as cryptic as I am," I judge, a sardonic blade shaping my reasoning.

"All you do is get people off-track," Dr. Saporta recalls. "We were talking about Pete, so let's go back to that."

"All right," I permit with a mouse feeding my inflection.

"Sometimes I wonder if you do this intentionally," the man drones on without a needed goal; I'm already listening.

"Sometimes I wonder if I would be better in—"

"Patrick?" the mellow intonation of Pete Wentz calls, hand holstered in the air by the door as his knocking warrants the aperture's splitting.

My fingers grope the phone, endeavoring to shield it from Pete, who would unquestionably interrogate me about why I have my psychologist on speed dial and why I've utilized that advantage to separate my dilemmas with a person who never offers genuine advice but purports to do so anyway, but his eyes expatiate not on me, but the device.

"Who's this?" Dr. Saporta inquires from behind the phone, his voice a mumble due to the position of the cell.

"Um, yeah, Pete?" I respond, ignoring my raw psychologist.

"What are you doing?" Pete's shoes soar along the wooden tundra of the ground, entering the room on the quest to intrude more so than he already is.

Panic hunts my demeanor, looting my pores for a credible alibi as to why I'm hovering over my phone with the utmost precaution, and just as it's about to give up, a treasure springs from its fingertips. "Just talking to someone."

Pete roosts into the wicker furniture near the window, his visage as neutral as it comes. "By 'someone', do you mean your psychologist?"

My teeth infest the inferior lip that circumscribes them, releasing it to allow me to say, "Would it be disappointing if it were?"

Conglomerate emotions stitch Pete's face together, some joyful, some puzzled, some still oblique. "I won't condemn you for badgering help."

"Then should I return to my call?" My accent ties a lethargic resonance around the room, a bit sardonic from the spice of my personality.

"Of course." Pete sutures his extremities together, chaperoning a dexterous stance residing even in the locale of his feet on the table, and he adds, "Put it on speaker."

Without a dash of haste, my pinkie extends to shift the setting from insular to social, and the anxious shouting of Dr. Saporta trying to capture my attention caresses the walls with a bitter touch.

"I hypothesize this is Pete, correct?"

Now that he's been faced with a new person, Saporta's all of the sudden deploying his best words to impress my friend, who will never like him if I don't, so his pompousness is in vain.

"Yeah," I draw out, and a conflicted expression washes over Pete, astonished that I've told my doctor about him, proud for the same reason.

"You know he isn't healthy for you." A part of Dr. Saporta is probably ignorant of the fact that Pete can hear him, but even if he is, informing me of this is a deed done no matter who's around.

My eyes wire with anger, though my psychologist can't detect it. "And do you think I care in the slightest?"

"No, just thought it would be effective if you heard it again."

A pause.

"You should ask Pete why he's not—"

My hands pound the device, hanging up before Dr. Saporta can complete his phrase, which would ultimately result in Pete scolding me for telling my philandering doctor about his affairs with medication, but with all the commotion, my friend is still interested.

"What was that all about?" The voice, however, is not Pete's, but Dallon's, streaming from his poised figure in the doorframe with absolute grandiosity.

My phone fleetly snares in my pocket so that it won't await any further trial at the hands of Dallon Weekes. "What are you doing here?"

"And what are you doing with a bloody psychologist?" he chuckles, unhitching himself from the threshold to greet the slightly different aroma of this new room.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Pete growls, elevating from his chair and approaching Dallon with a sneer splicing the entirety of his features.

"Woah, we got a badass over here." Dallon's gloves float in the oxygen as if under arrest, and with the current state of things, that arrest is foreseeable.

My friend's finger lifts with the idea of accusing the other, more stilted man, and his speech follows suit. "If you think for one moment that hiring a psychologist is—"

"Pete, stop." My command juts into both people standing before me like a knife soaked in the grasp of the hemlock plant, and their puckers are sprinkled with a patronizing disillusion.

"Patrick, are you serious?" Pete's brows are even more wreathed in a junction than mine were while calling Dr. Saporta, and his expression begs for clarification. "Dallon's being a fucking cunt."

"Yes, I'm serious."

Pete's mahogany oculi carve my own grave within my soul, but after a few seconds, he subsides for another location and leaves the air to form around Dallon and me.

Meditation shimmers in the sapphires mounted between my attacker's lashes, and his characteristics enunciate a smug language. "Your buddy is a bit too combative for my liking."

My jacket flutters onto the couch as its owner is met with a disturbed roar. "I don't give a shit what you like, okay?"

"Thought you would, 'cause you're still here." When I don't react, Dallon's ambition to aggravate me more grows to a formidable size. "But then again, you go to a psychologist because you can't do anything on your own."

That evokes the perfect feedback for Dallon's standards, for while I'm pinning him against the wall, all that lights the space is vanity.

"You know, the last time you held me like this, you ended up kissing me."

My clasp on his shoulders restricts him an ounce per second, nourished by my innate hatred for the man. "Shut the fuck up, you peasant."

He bastes his bubblegum lips, cooing, "Aww, your psychologist has taught you well."

"I don't even care anymore if you don't like my psychologist, because I hate him, too." My breathing is heavy with hysterics, inflamed by the malice I retain for Dallon Weekes. "And do you know why that is?"

Nothing.

I push him farther against the wall, sealing the gap between him and the structure. "Do you know why that is?" I demand, my motive being to at least die with an answer.

Dallon finally backfires with a mischievous shrug, tempting me to slap him, but I'm already hoarding the upper-hand in this view.

"Because you were the one who practically engaged him." My mouth wrenches into a labyrinth, lukewarm and passionless. "Cause and effect."

"How can that be so?" Dallon denies, portraying the victim when he isn't the one who visits a psychologist often without compliance. "I'm but your jaded friend from years past in Newark."

"I was already sick, and I concluded that it was better to leave you because of that." Tears flick the knots of my eyes, and the sensation trails to my melody. "But you couldn't process that, so whatever ill-will you possess towards me, just know that it's your fault."

Dallon winces, ambivalent about my statement. "Are you sure about that?"

"Of course I'm sure!" When I thought there wasn't any more room to push my attacker, I was wrong, and a loud echo ruptures the wood behind him.

A frightful shuffle clobbers the door, and the fearing forms of Lindsey and Gerard bustle through, a nightmare alive in their step.

"Patrick, what are you doing?" Lindsey wails, a strip of currant missing from her lip from the worrying she's done throughout the day.

Once again, I neglect my friends for the glamor of asperity, a storm tremoring inside me. "You did this, Dallon!"

"Patrick!" Lindsey repeats, forcibly detaining me in her vigorous embrace as an array of phenomena navigate Dallon's skin, and despite some of them being harmless, a single piece of insolence would command a punch, were it not for my location inside Lindsey's hold.

Gerard is flustered, specks of sangria merging with his complexion until he's the epidermis of a glass of wine and just as sophisticated, but in this moment, that last detail is irrelevant, for his body jumps from topic to topic, scouring his mind for an elucidation and returning empty.

It's as if Gerard had no idea I would ever spark trouble, as if I don't exercise psychology to conduct my emotions, as if I'm only a neurotypical to him, even through knowledge of my condition, and perhaps worst of all, the logic may be that Dallon Weekes is his companion.

And that nauseates me.

"Let go!" I cry, wriggling inside my bonds with no prevail, and part of me feels culpable for my actions, but it needs to be known that my attacker is an evil man, that any thought of hanging out with him should be revised.

"I'm not doing that," Lindsey renounces, a definite grit bending into her. "You need to tell me what's going on."

Then those sapphire eyes twinkle, his conceited stance replenished, and a single lexeme cracks it all. "Agreed."

~~~~~

A/N: LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THIS CHAPTER NEEDS TO STAY IN THEIR FUCKING LANE

THE TITLE IS MORE RELEVANT THAN I HAD ONCE THOUGHT

current vibe: when I sat in my room for five hours, just eating watermelon

~Dakootnoot