âYou cost us a lot of money, you know,â Anthonyâs mom scolded him angerily. âMaybe you thought this would make us feel bad for you, but youâre still gonna repay every cent we spent on you.â
And a lot of money I bet that was, Anthony thought. He sat in the backseat of the car, between Jack and Bartholomew, the ones responsible for his horrificly burned face.
âDid you not hear your mother, young man?!â snapped Anthonyâs dad. âWe are NOT HAPPY with you.â
âI know,â his son said. It was obvious. They really thought that he pressed his own face into a barbecue grill as an attention getter. His brothers werenât laughing, they were crying tears of sympathy. They werenât holding him there, it just looked like that when they rushed forward to pull him off.
Now Anthony would have to go through life with bars burned into his face. Wonderful.
Heâd spent two weeks in the hospital. There, he was mostly observed and given basic pain medicine and antibiotics. His parents refused to pay for a skin graft or other plastic surgery.
There were a few good things, Anthony mused as he lay in his bed that night. For one, most of the burns were third degree. That meant nerves were destroyed. He couldnât feel most of the damage.
The other good thing was the nurse who let him call her Auntie Irene. She brought him candy, let him swear as much as he wanted, and best of all, she believed him.
She was the only one who asked him for his side of the story. During his many hospital stays throughout the years, she always picked at his familyâs dumbass excuses for his injuries. She didnât believe a word of their bullshit. It was too bad that no one believed her.
He had known her most of his life. When he was nine years old, at the hospital for a routine check up, he had cried to her about how his brothers killed his bunny rabbit and blamed it on him.
As his mother texted obliviously on her phone, Anthony whispered to the kind old nurse:Â âCan I tell you a secret?â
She knelt at his height. âOf course, Sweetheart.â
âI wish you were my mommy.â
But she wasnât. Anthony woke up with tears dampening his bandages. He looked to his bedside table where the ashes of Apollo were kept. The cremation and urn were the only decent birthday present heâd ever gotten. His parents believed he did it, but at least Jack hadnât been able to convince them it wasnât an accident.
Jack was twelve when he pulled the car out of the driveway and onto Apollo. He told their parents that Anthony took him out to play without a leash and he got in the way of Jackâs driving practice. Jack wasnât strictly supposed to be doing that, but the boysâ parents gave zero fucks about that.
Anthony Huang often laughed at the bitter irony of life and his parentsâ so called logic. Once he did it in the street, and a passerby looked...scared.Â
Anthony listened to himself and realized that he sounded demented. It felt good.
Anthony rose from bed the next day and stood in the mirror to change his bandages. The scars were a deep, deep red. They looked like red prison bars. How accurate.
Back to school he went, behind two sets of bars.
âWhat the fuck happened to your face?âÂ
Anthony glanced at the boy who shared his locker. âWhat the fuck happened to your brain?â
Having your face pressed into a red hot grill changes you. It can change you in many different ways. In Anthonyâs case, it unleashed a deadly rage inside of him that had been at least partially contained before. Until his first real fight, he didnât realize that he could be as dangerous as his brothers.
When Bitchy Bastard swung his fists, Anthony blocked it with ease that shocked him. He was so surprised that he didnât expect the next blow.
Being punched in the gut hurts. Anthony knew from experience that being punched six times in the gut while pressed against a locker is much, much worse. Bitchy Bastard found that out soon, and though he got detention for two weeks, Anthony truly felt it was worth it to give someone what they deserved.
He got in a lot of fights and they showed him that it feels good to hurt people. Anthony didnât think he was like his brothers, though, because he only hurt people who deserved it.
Over the next two months, Anthony continued to change drastically. His outlook on being beaten up changed,
Donât stand there. Stand up for yourself.
âDonât kill my brothers. Give me the balls to do it myself.â
The way he perceived himself changed as well. Before, he was weak. Now he began to see himself when he looked in the mirror.
Despite being the youngest brother, he was also the tallest. Anthony saw that now. Anthony also saw that the scarring on his face made him look intimidating.Â
And he wasnât even remotely weak. He was actually more muscular and stronger looking that Bartholomew and Jack put together. Maybe that had something to do with all the hits he took.
And werenât his teachers always saying how smart he was? It became clear to him that he didnât need to wait for the death of his brothers when he could make it happen.
On a Tuesday evening, Anthony sat thinking. He didnât want to go to prison, but he wanted his family gone from the planet.
Yes, all of them. In Anthonyâs eyes, his parentsâ negligence and stupidity were just as abusive as sticking someoneâs face in a barbecue grill for kicks. They all needed to die.
Maybe he could forge a murder suicide note. That would be funny. Anthony had to bite his arm until he stopped laughing, then he kept planning. Who would the killer be?
Bartholomew. The brother whoâs name he bore between his first and third had always been the worst. They hated each other with a burning passion, literally.Â
Behind closed doors, Bartholomew was the family pyromaniac. He liked lighting butterflies wings on fire to watch them burn as they soared. Anthony was the sensitive one who cried at the sight, so of course, Bartholomew did it all the more.
When Anthony was six and and his oldest brother was nine, he lit balls of paper on fire and threw them at him, forcing him to jump in the familyâs pool and nearly drown. No one believed his reason why.
Good old Bart, always playing with fire. He had actually been the first one to press his face down on that grill.
Anthony had actually been able to smell his flesh burning. He could feel his eye melting like candy left in the sun for too long. It was agony until the burning demolished his nerve endings, and then, looking in the mirror was the true agony. That was worthy of death.
By eleven at night, the family was sleeping and Anthonyâs plan was complete. Heâd spent two hours getting the handwriting just right. Bartholomewâs handwriting.
There was rope in the shed and gloves and knives in the kitchen and a letter in Anthonyâs hand. Grinning like an even more demented Cheshire cat, Anthony carried out his plan.
He tied a noose and went to Biggest Brotherâs room. For this part he needed everybody to stay in bed. So instead of messing with the rope first, Anthony chose suffocation.
âReady to fucking die?â He smothered Bartholomew with his pillow, then wrapped his hand around the knife and rope, then stabbed Jack with the knife. Blood poured from the wound and Anthony smiled even bigger. He had dreamed of this for years, and it felt every bit as wonderful as he had imagined.
Now he had to hang Bartâs corpse from the ceiling rafters. Easier said than done, but it got done. Now for his parents, Carolina and Miles Huang.
First, Anthony put on Bartholomewâs shoes. Later, this would be important.
Miles went first, and he went easy. His wounds were identical to those of his second son, but Carolina fought. If they all died the same way, it just wouldnât be realistic. That would be suspicious, and Anthony didnât plan to get caught. He planned on a long and satisfying career of vengence.
First, Anthony replicated her husband and sonâs stab wounds. To make it look like there was a struggle, he slashed her face and arms. He then pulled her down, purposefully knocking over a lamp in the process.
Bartholomew was never methodical in anything he did, it was always chaos. Anthony had to replicate that.
He walked back to Bartholomewâs room in his shoes and tracked blood there purposefully. Then he put the shoes on Bartholomew.
After he was finished, Anthony walked through the house and made sure that all the evidence pointed toward his oldest brother. It did.
He went outside and scaled a tree, just in case a neighbor decided to spy. This was important to Anthonyâs story. He planned to tell the police that during his motherâs struggle, she shouted for him to run and call 911, so he had.
Anthony double checked the evidence again when he went back inside, as he waited for the police to arrive. It was perfect.
 Funny. Everyone said that revenge wasnât so sweet when you got it, but they were so damn wrong. It felt amazing, and Anthony laughed long and hard, because he knew he would never be caught.
