He deserved it, was all Gabriel could think. The goddamn kid deserved it.

He stood on his bed, staring at the perfectly framed poster across the room, some kind of pretentious modern art that his mother made him hang up. He wasn’t allowed to have movie posters like the people he knew at school. The ones he imagined he knew. They probably had walls covered in pictures of basketball players and rock stars and superheroes. Not him, not Gabriel Thomas. His upstanding mother, nose held high in the air, would only allow the finest art in her house. In the small amount of time it took for the stereo to kick on and begin to spin the compact disc, he looked over that painting with disgust. Black, amorphous blobs stretched upward over the white background like a time lapse photo of a lava lamp. It meant something to her. To him, it meant nothing. And his spineless father told him that he didn’t have a choice because he didn’t pay rent, but what sixteen-year-old has to pay rent to stay in their own damn bedroom anyway?

Gabriel lifted the neck of the wine bottle to his mouth and took a long drink of the bitter, poisonous red stuff inside. His lips pulled back from his perfectly straight teeth and the stain of the rushing liquid was blood that drained away into his throat. Some spilled onto his chin and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

The track started with the distant howl of a wolf and Gabriel began to nod his head without grace or rhythm. With the half-empty bottle in his left hand, his whole body began to shake and the wall of guitar sound assaulted him and he started to jump. He preferred the original Misfits lineup, especially Danzig’s Morrison-esque voice, but “Dig Up Her Bones” was the right song for right now. His well-made bed turned into a nest of black blankets and green sheets under his writhing feet and he closed his eyes to dance.

That stupid kid. That dumb, fat kid with his meaty hands and his foul breath and the way he demanded everyone’s attention with that annoying fucking tone in his voice, the tone that always worked and made them turn in their seats and stand up and look at me and wait to see if I do anything today, if I do anything this time. Well, I did today, didn’t I? I really did it today.

There was still blood on the white, button-up shirt he wore even now, speckles of it across the left side of his chest. The shirt was open, revealing an even whiter undershirt as he twisted in midair. That kid’s face, if nothing else, was enough to make him drink. He took another pull and let out a feral yip and pounded his right heel up and down against the sheets.

And that anybody could have sympathy for that bully! As if Gabriel’s actions were so wrong after a semester of this bullshit. The kid wasn’t dead, the kid wasn’t even injured. He was just hurt, and so what? Don’t I hurt, too? Don’t I deserve to leave my own mark on that bastard?

His own mother couldn’t believe it. She sat across from him at dinner, her curly, brown hair cast dramatically down over her eyes, her hand sprawled out on the table before her. She looked like she was having a heart attack and all he could hear were her deep, exaggerated breaths from somewhere under that tangled mess. Her ugly purple shirt pulled back from her weak wrists. The old, black chandelier that hung from the ceiling, its candles long ago replaced by soft, flickering electric lighting, conspired with her hair to hide her face but it shone in moving yellow streaks over the tops of her pedicured nails.

Her crying made him sick and not from sympathy. He rolled his eyes and cast his gaze at the cold, empty fireplace that sat like a cave across the table. This was all deja vu, a rerun from an episode eight years ago when he made the decision to put the family Doberman pinscher out of its misery on his own. It wandered too far away from the front door and was run down by a car driven by one of their gardeners or cleaners or caterers. Nobody would admit that it was their fault, but it didn’t matter because the dog was dead by the time his parents began the inquiry. He didn’t like to think about how he had done it; he loved that dog and sometimes still dreamed about running through the expansive back lawn alongside the slim, tall, black body that kept pace with his scrawny child’s legs.

The dog didn’t deserve it. But it didn’t deserve to suffer, either. That was now some half-remembered dream, perpetrated by a boy who was cold and stoic and a stranger to him now. A stranger to him, perhaps, but not to his parents. So here they were again, his mom’s self-medication not enough to mask the fear she felt tonight and his father’s disconnection disguised as strength.

He sang the chorus as he jumped and chugged more wine. Gabriel’s head was now pleasantly buzzing but he knew that another couple swigs would give him the first throbs of a headache.

They had seafood for dinner. Rancid, tangy seafood. Another meal that rich people like them pretended to enjoy because it was imported or exotic. That meant nothing to him, he hated the saltwater taste and the way those scales and shells looked somehow alive as he popped bits into his mouth. It made him think of his grandparents. He didn’t see them very often because they weren’t rich or influential like his dad’s family; his mom didn’t “come from much,” whatever that meant. The last time he saw his grandparents, his mom and dad let him stay in their little ranch house out in the countryside for a week. He liked it there, but felt like they were trying too hard, because they took him out for three meals a day even though they couldn’t afford it. Sometimes he wished he would’ve told them not to worry about spending money on him because he didn’t give a damn about it anyway, but he never said that to them and he never would. They asked him about a million times what he liked to eat and he said over and over again that he didn’t really care. They pushed him and finally he admitted that he didn’t like seafood because of the taste and that he hated buffets because everything was too dry and grubby. Gabriel always pictured sweaty people touching every piece of food with their sausage fingers and licking their lips and then grabbing the next thing and then sneezing and coughing and belching all over everything. There were always unidentified yellow smudges on buffet utensils and bits of food on the plates.

His grandparents took him to a seafood buffet that week. They hit the empty spot between lunch and dinner so there was nothing left but dry catfish, something that was supposed to be crab, cold French fries, and melting soft-serve ice cream. He scarfed it down as his grandparents looked at him, apologetic and embarrassed. He felt bad for them, but...

Nobody listens, he thought, drowning himself in the red wine, holding it on his tongue to savor the way it bit.

Even if they didn’t listen, he hated that his grandparents felt bad for being poor. He thought about them as his mother cried over her stained wood dining room table, under her refurbished candelabra, and above shoes that were worth more than their cars. Why did they need china plates to hold their dead, smelling fish? Why would anyone spend hundreds of dollars on a bottle of wine that would almost certainly be empty by tomorrow? Why did they need fake family portraits above a frigid hearth, their skin covered up with foundation to make them look like grotesque, living mannequins?

He drank and he danced and he thought about their rich friends and their bullshit conversations about politics and business.

“It’s not how a Thomas behaves,” his father had said, looking past his perfectly circular glasses and down his long, pointed nose.

He was afraid to look Gabriel in the eyes and opted instead to watch his glass of wine. Incessantly, obsessively, he ran the tip of his pointer finger around its rim. It emitted the slightest whistling sound that must have been inaudible to his parents because it would have driven them as crazy as it was driving him. It seemed to spiral up from the wine glass and across the table in circular waves that undulated in his ears. Dogs could probably perceive that sound a mile away but no human could hear it past five feet.

In one of the family pictures, Victor Thomas had a hand on his son’s shoulder. It occurred to Gabriel that it was the last time his father ever put a hand on him. That, he realized, is not how a Thomas behaves.

His thoughts were interrupted by another breathless sob from his mother. Gabriel looked at Victor with his crystal blue eyes, eyes that were set back deep, always covered in shadow. He looked past the tips of his straw yellow bangs, past his own long nose, another imperfection passed down from his father’s family. Scrawny and slouching slightly, he looked at his father and pulled his lips back from his teeth.

“At least I’m not the only Thomas making a spectacle of myself.”

His mother’s crying stopped immediately. Gabriel, still not looking at her, blindly grabbed the wine bottle, downed the water in his own glass, and filled it halfway. He tossed it back, his father snarling back at him.

“You would speak to your mother that way?” she asked him with her small, crackling voice.

He reached for the bottle again. Victor tried to intercept it but was too slow. Gabriel poured more into the glass this time and drank it slowly, silently.

“No one in the family has ever behaved this way,” Victor said, still rolling his finger around the glass rim. “No one.”

As if saying it twice makes it true, Gabriel thought.

“Who knows,” Gabriel said, finally looking away from his father and down at the glass, “maybe I’m not really a Thomas at all. I think we could all drink to that.”

He emptied his glass and felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder. Gabriel gripped the neck of the wine bottle in his hand and walked out of the dining room without another word. His mother began to sob again as he neared the French doors leading to the hallway. The elaborate red carpets and stoic beige walls were an eyesore. He hated them, always had. Even when he was little, he felt urges to destroy the ketchup-colored floors. Here and there, more family photos hung. Some of them went back some time, back to ancestors he didn’t care to know. The carpet rolled up the staircase like a snake before him. He made sure to stomp extra hard on his way up. Loud enough to make them cringe. As he climbed, he balanced himself with the handrail and took another swig of wine. It was warm and pungent and calmed him.

He could taste the buffet seafood.

He could smell the bastard’s skin.

He could follow the flow of the poison down his throat.

Gabriel went into his bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall, past houseplants and shoulder-high sculptures. He backhanded one of the pieces on the way, a bust sitting on a brown column. There was a sharp ping as the bottom of the wine bottle made contact with the bust. It rocked on the flat surface of the display and Gabriel excitedly waited for the crash of the object as it shattered on the floor. The tick-tock of the teetering gained speed. Then slowed. Then stopped. No crash. Gabriel froze. Without looking, he used the bottle to bat the sculpture down the hall. It rolled with a series of uneven thumps but still didn’t break. Red-faced, Gabriel stepped into his room and slammed the door behind him.

He unbuttoned his shirt with one hand, drank with the other, grabbed the stereo remote and crawled onto the bed.

And still, over the heavy, dirty rock, there was still that sound in his ear, the rim of the glass whistling happily over the cries of his mother.

And on his tongue was the taste of fish.

And in his nose was the smell of that goddamn kid, fat and sweating and sitting too close and touching his head and matting his blonde hair under chubby fingers. When he closed his eyes, he saw the others staring back at him, grins on their faces; grins or, even worse, looks of sympathy and apathy and acceptance because this is the world, this is your life and this is who you are, they’ll make you apologize and you’ll hate it, so you’ll grit your teeth and do it anyway and even though they won’t believe you, they’ll never talk about it again because they think you’re disgraceful. Next week, you’ll eat the same dinner, the same raw fish, and you’ll steal the wine after they go to bed and drink yourself numb and play music as loud as you can, begging them to come in and fight with you. But their room is across thousands of square feet and there’s nothing but the slightest thump of bass, nothing a few pills can’t cover up. And he’ll make that same sound on the glass and she’ll cry next time, because there will be a next time, there will always be a next time.

And his hatred and the music hit their crescendo together and he jumped from the end of the bed into the air.

There was a blast of heat and sound, much louder than the music itself. His trajectory towards the floor was altered; he flew at the nearest wall and hit it with amazing force. The mirror over his dresser shattered against his chest and he dropped onto the top of the dresser as it burst through the bedroom wall and into what was once the upstairs hallway.

Then he was falling for real. There was a bolt of pain in his stomach when the dresser hit the floor beneath him and stopped his descent in a furious second. Something snapped his leg. Something sharp dug into the soft flesh between his ribs and hip bone. The bust from upstairs flew into his right eye, knocking him unconscious.

But not before he saw the burning house around him and the burning stars in the night sky.