Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,43

streets go dark, the lights come on. The future is happening, but it can wait until tomorrow. Neither of us knows what will come next, or where we go from here, or even what anyone will say about us, but none of it matters. We’ve got each other right now.

Later that night, as she’s taking a shower, I call my parents from Her phone. It was largely anticlimactic. They weren’t even mad that I took my brother’s car. Turns out John Miller had told them where I was going that morning, over breakfast and coffee in the kitchen. I never told him my plans, but he probably knew them even before I did.

17

O happy, blustery Chicago days, the sky getting heavier, the leaves changing colors. O endless fall nights, the wind getting colder, the stars brighter. Everything is beautiful when you are mindlessly in love, when you ignore your fears and doubts and focus hard on the here and now. We are inseparable again, she and I, making the scene at the bars, walking the campus of Columbia arm in arm. There are doubters, those who shoot us disapproving glances from across tabletops and crowded rooms, but they all seem insignificant and far away. Her friends aren’t talking to Her anymore. The guys in the band just sort of nod in that knowing, weary way. None of them matter to us. I haven’t had a rational thought for weeks now, haven’t felt the need to worry. She does something to me, something no one else on the planet can do. She makes me normal, she makes me free.

We never even forgave one another for the past. It didn’t seem important. We just picked up right where we left off, before it all went bad and I lost my mind. I haven’t thought about the band in a long time, haven’t felt the promise of the open road course through my veins. Everything goes into Her. We talk about getting married, we think up names for our children (I want to call my son Martin, she prefers Oliver). We are perfect and in love and we are making everyone around us sick. At night, when I lie next to Her in bed, sometimes I worry that I am delusional, that perhaps I am rushing things. My heart may be in the driver’s seat at the moment, but my brain is still shouting directions from the back. Why? How? Really? But then she’ll stir, will turn into me to protect Her from whatever bad dream she’s having, and the doubting stops. I am a believer. I want to believe.

John Miller and I find an apartment in Bucktown, a slightly dingy place above a bar on Wabansia. When we had originally cooked up the idea of moving in together, we had envisioned our place as a sort of clubhouse/ rendezvous point, a launching pad for our great adventures; we had plans for wild nights spent carousing and conquering, for weekday mornings spent sprawled out on the couch, for gluttony and sloth and adultery and all sorts of lesser, decidedly venial sins. Instead, she is basically over every single night, cooking us dinners, watching movies, playing three-person power hours. John Miller doesn’t mind. He loves anyone who will make him a hot meal, and he especially loves someone who can handle their liquor. She can do both. They develop a rather amazing bond, like an overprotective brother and his kid sister, or one of those YouTube clips where a bear raises a kitten or something. One night, when we are all good and drunk, when nothing seems impossible and everything is unspeakably right, she is dancing in the middle of the living room to some old record, and he leans over and tells me, “I kin see why you love Her.” He is my best friend. She is my girl. Our lives are simple and insular and beautiful. I don’t even worry about how John Miller is going to pay his share of the rent. It doesn’t seem all that important right now.

Of course, it can’t last forever. Our manager is leaving me messages on my phone, “checking in” on me, ending each one with the promise (threat?) of “Talk to you soon.” I never return his calls, hoping he’ll just give up and go away. Instead, he starts calling more frequently, his voice getting increasingly nervous with each message he leaves. When we do finally speak, the conversation starts with broad, friendly generalities—How