No Regrets

Everyone acts like I'm the one in the wrong. It's all because I killed a couple of kids. So what! They were sniveling brats! What was I supposed to do? Allow them to beat me up everyday? Let them send me home bruised and beaten to my foster parents, who are abusive enough already?1

I've never been anything like the guys I killed. They had the fancy names like Jonathan Goodman and Henry Woodrow. Not me. I had to be given the stupidest name in the world: Critter. Critter Camolot. Who the Hell names their kid Critter?! I guess that's why I was put in a foster home.2

Those guys always looked a whole lot more different than me. They were WHITE! I swear, those cops arrested me because I was black! Then again, it could've been because I was guilty, too. I mean, just because I don't look as tall and cool like them, dressed in leather and saggy clothing instead of the gay crap they wore, doesn't entitle them to treat me like I didn't deserve to breathe the same air they did.3

So what if I killed them! They cornered me. I was in the guy's bathroom, doing my business, when they came barreling in like they owned these projects. They were all carrying knives, taunting me, telling me that this would be the last time I would ever see the light of day. They told me to give the Devil a message on my way to Hell. They told me to tell him that they had fun kicking me around. They made fun of the color of my skin and my terrible grades. They told me that I'd made them and their fellow classmates look like trash just because I was different. They accused me of so many things that they themselves had done just to get me in trouble.4

When they came in closer for the fight, I feared for my life. It was six of them against puny, little me. But a spark lit up inside of me as their knives appeared closer to me. I got angry. I was angrier than I ever had been before in my life. I knew, at that moment, that I was tired of being the bad person, an 'imposter' among imposters. I was tired...and I wanted revenge.5

I dodged the first guy's knife, punched him in the face as the others moved in closer. I snatched the knife he'd dropped in order to rub his sore face. That's for all the times you punched me! I lashed out at the other guys, cutting their chests open, driving the single knife that I had deeper into them. That's for all the pain you put me through! I continued attacking, like a Viking going berserk. I wanted them to scream louder, bleed more, die slowly. I wanted them to feel what I'd felt as a boy, growing up in the care of abusive foster parents and cruel school kids. I wanted them to scream in pain as I had when I had been beaten senseless. I wanted them to pay for what they had done to me.6

When their bodies lay on that bathroom floor, I could hardly believe that it wasn't my blood drenching the room, bodies, and my clothes. It was theirs. It wasn't my voice still screaming my ears. It was theirs. It wasn't them sitting in this interrogation room talking to you, a cop wanting me to tell you what I had done when you obviously already know what happened. It wasn't them, spending their last days in cell, waiting for a sentence. It wasn't them that was going to be put to sleep like a stray dog whose time was up. It was me. Black, small, puny, little me. The teenage, dark, failing, orphaned me. The person who'd had the last word. The one no one had ever liked. The one that no one ever took the time to get to know. It was me. Me me me. And I don't regret a single thing.