Mack ripped of his tie viciously when he returned home from the funeral of his father. Listening to people lie for the past hour had nearly drove him crazy; it made him want to jump out of his spot in the pew and scream to the people there, “My father was the lowest-down bastard of this world, the scum of the earth! He tried to slit my wrists because I’m freaking gay! How does that make y’all feel? Hard to be all ‘Poor Lansman,’ now, isn’t it? Hmm? Come on, say something, you sanctimonious slanderers sitting there in your black and pretending to cry…”

But that would haven’t done anything except getting the rest of the world upset and having him labeled a horrible person and how all the gay people are disrespectful and then life would suck even more and then…

Dear God, why couldn’t you just have orphaned me?

Not even an urchin. Just have my parents abandon me somewhere and let me starve. Or have people find me and adopt me. Or something. Anything but this, where I feel like being a self-made orphan.

And yet, it still wasn’t worth killing himself over. He was fairly sure that he would someday, inadvertently or otherwise (he doubted that pyrokinesis was good for his health) but that thought was far from comforting. It was actually fairly scary, the thought that he might end his own life.

Oh well, he thought. Thousands of people do it yearly. Who’s to say I might not join them? Even though if I did, Mommy dearest might have a fit…her husband and only child dead, leaving her alone and childless.

You deserve it, you ugly old hag. Damn you and your sarcasm and your hatred and those crooked, yellow, unbrushed teeth in your dirty old mouth that just loves to insult me and my homosexuality and every bit of your filthy, evil, cruel, slave-driving, heartless soul. I hope you stay in purgatory for a millennium to wonder about your fate…and then the angels say, “Come on, we’re taking you to heaven,” and then they ask your name, and you tell them, and they realize you’re the wrong person. And then they push you down that stairway to Heaven until you fall on your ass right in the middle of Hell.

That’s what you deserve, Mommy dearest. And for some reason I can’t understand, I don’t want to kill myself just because it’ll make you sad. How’s that, Mom? I still have a bond to you.

But you don’t have a bond to me, do you? Dad didn’t either. Knowing the two of you, you used condoms every time you had your freaking heterosexual sex that I don’t want and then somehow, those random percentages that condoms will lead to not having little children running around the house and falling against your knees and why on earth didn’t you wash off the dog crap with the hose?

She didn’t abort, because Grandma would have disowned her, and she didn’t send me off to an orphanage, because Grandma would have disowned her, and she didn’t smother me when I was little because not only would Grandma disowned her, she would have had to deal with the legal consequences. My life probably would have been easier if she had suffocated me when I was an infant.

God, why couldn’t you have just overlooked the possibility of making this pathetic scrap of humanity, Mack Lansman? The kid who always gets the girls, what good does that do me? The kid who gets made fun of for being gay, is hated by his father for being gay, is insulted by his mother for being gay. The only mercy you’ve granted me so far is that I’m not in prison for patricide. And I’ve never been to jail before, so I’m not sure if I’d rather be here or there.

You make this so difficult! Does anyone else heckle with you like this? I hope so, because as far as I can see, you really suck.