38. Pete and Gabe visit Brendon in the hospital.

"We would be terrible friends if we didn't go and see Brendon," Gabe said after Mikey and Gerard had gone back into the house to figure out what to do now.

"What about the visions?" I asked. "There are only two left before you die, and we'll be making one of them come true if we go to the hospital now."

"As I said, we're Brendon's friends," Gabe said. "We have to make sure he's okay. It's not like his family is going to drive all the way here from Shermer."

Gabe was right, so the two of us climbed into the DeLorean, and Gabe pulled out a map. I put on the road trip mixtape, but the first song that came on was far too cheerful. "What else do you have?" Gabe asked. He looked through my collection and then said, "There isn't a mixtape for driving to a hospital in New Jersey to see Brendon because that idiot broke his foot from jumping out the second floor."

"I never thought that would happen," I said. I then suggested that one of my mixtapes for crying on the couch might work. Gabe put the mixtape in, and we listened to The Cure and Joy Division as Gabe navigated me through Belleville.

When Gabe and I arrived at the hospital, we had to argue with the nurses a little bit, but we were eventually allowed to see our friend. Brendon was lying on a hospital bed, and I caught a whiff of the scent of dead skin on a linoleum floor. His left foot was covered in bandages, but he looked okay otherwise. He smiled when he saw us walk in, and he said, "Hey guys."

"Hey Brendon," I said. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," Brendon said. "They just gave me an X-ray, and they called my parents. I got to call them after that, and both of them were really freaked out, but they were nice enough to hand the phone over to Ryan for a few minutes. It was great to hear from him." A lovesick smile appeared on Brendon's face. He then asked, "Did anything else happen at the Ways' house?"

"Mikey, Gerard, and I went inside," I explained. "The iDKHOW merch guy stole everything that wasn't nailed down, and a few things that were."

Brendon sighed. "I should have known that guy was evil," he said. "You're lucky that he didn't steal the DeLorean."

"He didn't steal Gerard's sketchbook either," I said.

"That's pretty odd," Brendon said. "I'm still furious that he stole my wallet."

"It's not that big of a deal," Gabe said. "My parents were here illegally for years. I think you can get by without a wallet for a few days."

"Besides, you only had, like, twenty bucks in there," I said.

"I worked hard for those twenty bucks!" Brendon exclaimed. "Besides, that's not the problem. He has my driver's license, so he knows that we live in Illinois. If the iDKHOW guy decides that he wants revenge, he'll know exactly where to go."

"Brendon, you're being paranoid," I said.

"I'm not!" Brendon exclaimed. "He's basically stolen my identity. He could go around pretending to be me if he wanted to."

"He wouldn't do that," I said.

"Why not?" Brendon said. "He robbed Mikey and Gerard!"

All of a sudden, a nurse walked into the room. "Brendon, we got your X-ray results back," she explained. She showed Brendon the X-ray of his foot and explained everything in complicated scientific jargon, but we all understood the gist of what she was saying. Brendon's foot was broken in multiple places, and he would need surgery as soon as possible.

"It looks like it must have been a bad accident," the nurse said after she was done explaining everything in an attempt to sympathize with Brendon.

"This was no accident," Brendon said, looking toward Gabe. "It was a therapeutic chain of events."

Later that night, Brendon went into the operating room, while Gabe and I waited in the lobby. By that point, Gabe was falling asleep, and we didn't trust the quality of the hospital's coffee, so I drove the DeLorean back to the Ways' house. When I was about halfway there, I suddenly realized that the thief had stolen their coffee maker, so I stopped at a cafe near the hospital instead and bought some coffee for both myself and Gabe.

Gabe and I sat around drinking coffee in the hospital lobby for a while, hoping that Brendon's surgery was going okay. We refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room: there was only one vision left before Gabe would die. Right now, it was more important to make sure that Brendon's broken foot healed. We could worry about Gabe after we returned to Shermer.

After a few hours, we were finally allowed to see Brendon again. The anesthetic was wearing off, and he was already acting like his old self. "I hope my foot heals soon," he complained. "I just want to do backflips again."

All three of us laughed. "Brendon, it's probably going to be a long time before you're going to be able to do backflips," I said.

"Fuck you!" he shouted. Brendon then reached for the TV remote. When he couldn't get to it without moving his foot, I picked it up, turned on the TV, and then flipped through the channels. "Let me know when you see something you want to watch," I said. I flipped past a few commercials and our video, which was playing on MTV again for some reason.

"Stop there," Brendon said as the TV played a news report.

"Why?" I asked. "You don't usually watch the news." I put the TV remote down anyways. Brendon was the one who had broken his foot - he deserved to choose what we watched.

"They're reporting on the robbery," Brendon explained. All of us looked toward the TV as a reporter told us about the burglary.

"The police suspect Mike Pedicone, a former merchandise vendor for a local Chicago band called I Don't Know How But They Found Me, to be the man who robbed several Belleville homes last night," the reporter said onscreen. "They have not yet apprehended Pedicone, but they believe that he is traveling west, possibly toward his home state of Illinois."

"I was right," Brendon said. "The robber was the iDKHOW merch guy, and he's going back to Illinois to get his revenge on us."

"I doubt that, and even if he was trying to get his revenge, the police is going to catch him before he gets to Shermer," I said. "We're all going to be okay." It was an empty promise, but it was the best thing that I could say when Gabe was dying and Brendon was lying in a hospital bed with a broken foot.

The following morning, Brendon was finally allowed to leave the hospital. The doctors had put his foot in a cast, and he was able to get out to the car on crutches. All of us climbed into the DeLorean, and after Brendon finished playing with the doors, I drove back to the Ways' house.

I knocked on the door, and Mikey answered. "Hey guys," he said. "Brendon, it's good to see that you're doing better."

"There's no sunshine this impossible year," Brendon said as he hobbled into the house on his crutches.

"How's everything going here?" I asked Mikey.

"Not well," Mikey said. "We lost everything. Gerard and I just went to the comic book store to replenish our collections, but it's not the same. I lost my limited edition Batman comic!"

"Not to mention that we don't have a computer anymore," Gerard interjected. "Do you even realize how long Mom and Dad saved up to buy that thing?"

"This is just a disaster," Mikey said.

"Maybe it would be easier if we left," I said.

"I don't want you guys to leave so soon," Mikey said, frowning.

"Let's be honest with ourselves, Mikey," Gerard said. "We can barely feed ourselves and take care of your friends at the same time. We're lucky that Mike Pedicone didn't steal the refrigerator too. It would be easier if Pete, Gabe, and Brendon left."

"You just want the basement back," Mikey said.

Gerard laughed and said, "You're right, but they were only going to stay for another day or two anyways."

"It's okay," Gabe said. "We'll leave if it would be easier for you. You guys probably don't want to be around when the world ends anyways."

"The world is ending?" Gerard said.

"I'll explain later," Mikey said. I gave Mikey a hug and said goodbye to him. "I'm going to miss you so much, Pete," he said. "I'll send you a letter as soon as I can."

"I'll miss you too," I said. I knew that I would enjoy seeing my friends back home again, but I would certainly miss Mikey. Maybe I'll never see him again, I thought. I fought back tears as I let go of Mikey and turned to his brother. "It's been nice hanging out with you too, Gerard."

"I guess being around you three wasn't as bad as I thought it would be," Gerard said.

Gabe and Brendon said their goodbyes to Mikey and Gerard as well, but finally, we all had to leave. I nearly broke down altogether as I walked out of the Ways' house, knowing that I might never come back here, and that the robbery was all our fault. The Ways had lost everything because of Gabe's visions. We should have never come to New Jersey at all, but if the world really was ending, I was glad that I had gotten to see Mikey one last time.

The three of us got back into the DeLorean, and I waved to Mikey as I drove away from his house and out of Belleville. Gabe handed the map to Brendon, who helped me navigate from the backseat. As Brendon told me how to get onto I-80, Gabe put the road trip mixtape on, and we sang along to every song that played. However, the drive back to Shermer wasn't quite as fun as the drive to New Jersey. We didn't get lost and nobody cut me off in traffic, but we also didn't have the sort of naive excitement that we had a week and a half earlier. We ruined everything for ourselves and for the Way brothers, and we knew it.

We drove from New Jersey into Pennsylvania and then into Ohio, occasionally stopping for junk food. We were still on vacation, after all. My siblings would be furious that I was home early, and my parents would be mad that I had wasted their money, but that wasn't something that I had to worry about at that moment. I tried to enjoy singing along to the mixtape with my friends, even as I thought about everything that waited for us back home.

Gabe was trying his best to lose himself in the music, dancing wildly whenever Blondie or Depeche Mode came on. Brendon, on the other hand, alternated between cracking dumb jokes and complaining about his broken foot. We stopped for coffee near the border between Ohio and Indiana, and I just wished that I could do this whole summer over. There had been some amazing moments, like going on a date in the city with Patrick or getting to see Mikey for the first time in seven years, but there had been so many things that had gone horribly wrong. The fact that one of my best friends was lying in the backseat with a cast over his left foot and my other best friend was about to die proved that.

After twelve and a half hours of driving, we finally arrived in Shermer. I dropped Brendon off first, and Ryan ran out of the house to greet him and carry his luggage inside. Penny Lane came outside too, nearly knocking Brendon over when she first saw him. Ryan eventually picked Penny up, but she kept trying to jump over to Brendon. The three of them went inside and waved goodbye to us, and I drove to Gabe's house.

I parked the DeLorean in Gabe's driveway, and he climbed out of the car. "I'll see you later, Pete," he said. He took his bags out of the trunk, and once he was inside the house, I drove home.

As expected, my family was surprised that I was home so early. Mom asked a lot of questions about the New Jersey trip, and I told her everything, but I didn't mention the visions. We ordered deep dish pizza that evening, the one food that I had missed while I was away.

However, there was one thing that was still on my mind. There was only one vision left before Gabe's death, so I had to find a way to stop it.

I had to make sure that I didn't become the Employee of the Month at Fall Out Bros. Pizza.