Revenge13 min read
The Roof, the Pill, and the Price of Playing God
ButterPicks13 views
I still remember the sound the crowd made that day on the rooftop — a raw, animal noise that rode the wind like a warning. The railing under my palms felt cold and thin, like a promise ready to snap. I didn't move. I only watched.
"Don't do it, Jayce," Faron Graves shouted from below, voice blown through a megaphone. His hair flapped in the wind and his eyes were all teeth and light. "Come down, talk to us. We'll help you."
"Stay away!" Jayce Koch screamed back. His voice had gone from pleading to war. Students flooded the courtyard, their faces small and stupid the way they look in a crowd. Teachers barked and begged. The principal kept glancing around like someone trying to find a loophole in an accident.
"Please," Celine Fuchs, our math teacher, said into the megaphone like a prayer. "Jayce, we can talk. Come inside. Please—"
"Look at him," Faron muttered when he finally clambered up the stairs with the others. He said it for me and for everyone: "our friend. He needs help."
I moved closer because everyone else moved closer. I kept my hands in my pockets, fingers curled around a nothing that felt like a stone. The crowd's energy made my stomach ache.
I had followed Faron Graves for reasons I couldn't justify cleanly. He was charm in a jacket, danger wrapped in a smile. His money screamed a name over every conversation — a name that opened doors and shut consciences. He looked at me like a patient finally satisfied with a diagnosis. "Avery," he'd say, "I need you."
"How can I help?" I always replied because helping him meant being close enough to learn everything he wanted hidden.
"Just think," he would say, "how much fun we can make."
The first time I saw Jayce eat from Faron's plate, it was like watching a small animal discovering a new taste for the world. Faron had tipped a server outside the school to deliver a lunch — wagyu, steamed fish, sauces like paint. Jayce's hands were clumsy. He fumbled utensils like they were toys he had no right to play with, and Faron watched him like an audience watches a trick.
"Eat, you idiot," Faron said once, smiling.
"Thank you," Jayce whispered, as if blessing the thief of his dignity.
It was a game for Faron. He loved the control. He loved the surprise on a poor face when flavors he had never even imagined bloomed. He loved the way people adjusted their posture to pay him homage.
"He is my friend," Faron told anyone who would listen. "He trusts me. Don't you think that's worth something?"
Everyone believed him. He bought trust like a collector buys art, and he drained it.
When Jayce threw himself off the rooftop, there was an explosion of sound and a thousand small regrets. People pointed. Hands reached. The principal covered her mouth. Faron knelt and sobbed like an actor finishing a scene. He let the tears fall and the camera flashed, and somewhere in the crowd a phone recorded every perfect moment.
"Why did you do it?" I asked later, when we sat at a table in a private room and he wiped his face as if polishing a trophy.
"Because I can," Faron said simply. "Because I wanted to see what he would give for sanctuary."
"That isn't... mercy," I said.
"Do you think I ever pretended to be merciful? I made him need me. He leapt."
I remember Jayce's face in the stretcher. A mess of light and limbs. I remember the flash of pity that was mostly light on TV. Faron's pockets were full of coins and my hands smelled like the drafts he tipped to make people move. I felt dirty in a calculable way, like a business that had done its sums.
After that, the school put on a careful show: "Private moment," the teacher said, "we mustn't chase headlines." They moved on to other things, and I stayed because the plan I'd started needed the inside of Faron's trust like a keyhole needed light.
"I'm not your puppet," Jayce told him once, months later, when he wasn't well and smiled too easily as if apologizing for being alive.
"You're not my puppet," Faron said, "you're an experiment." He laughed.
I told myself I'd only go so far. "Only so far" was diagrammed in my head like a set of steps leading downhill. I told myself I would walk back up when things were done. But steps are slippery.
"Do it," Faron said to me one day in an empty parking garage. "Prove you're useful."
So I proved it. I learned the art of frights: the driver who stopped and called things "strange," the drunk in the stairwell, the face in the panel above—small things assembled into a wrecking ball for a mind. We broke people to feed a kind of amusement. I told my ideas like a scientist, and Faron licensed them like products.
"Old games," I said once. "Old tricks."
"They work," Faron said. "Did you see her that night?"
"She'll never step outside without a light again," I muttered.
We did it to others, too. Teachers, shopkeepers, random people who had annoyed us or who Faron deemed disposable. I would place a plan like a coin under a tile and watch it flip someone's life.
"Are you proud?" I asked myself when the first real casualty sank in.
"Don't be naive," Faron said as if he could hear me. "You were the instrument."
The one I couldn't forgive myself for was the teacher. Celine Fuchs — just twenty-six, wide-eyed and fierce — who had once been a sister to someone like myself from the country. She would bring me snacks, scold me for slacking, slide a book to my desk with a pencil-studded smile and ask, "Avery, are you sure you're not trying this problem again?"
She didn't deserve the hand I put in the water.
"Take this," I told Jayce the night before the plan.
"What is it?" he asked, voice shaking.
"A pill," I lied. "To test her reaction. It's harmless, a laxative, like you said to me it would be."
"I don't like this," Jayce whispered.
"You promised."
He put the pill in her drink. She drank and smiled at him like only who she was could. "You're working too hard," she told him. "Take a break."
Hours later, the house filled with strangers at her door. They came like wolves with permission slips. Jayce sat on the floor and covered his face. Faron sat on a chair smoking for the show.
"How could you?" Jayce moaned later, when the truth was revealed in one of our late-night conspiracies. "I thought—"
"That's the point," Faron said, slapping the table. "You did exactly what I needed. You're useful. Don't you feel special?"
She survived, but not whole. She couldn't stand the memories; she slashed her arms, she stopped coming to work. The hospital swallowed her and coughed her out a ghost.
"Avery, what did we do?" I asked the mirror, but the mirror had already stopped wanting answers.
Faron wanted more. He wanted his elder brother's throne.
"You know my brother will come," he said one night. "He's a man who weighs cities with his pinky. Felix Makarov is a machine. If he thinks I'm playing with him, he'll step on me."
"Then why shove the needle?" I asked.
"Because he should be pushed," Faron said. "Because we want it all."
Felix Makarov — a man who wore glass like armor and a smile like a contract — was worse than Faron, if possible. When he visited the school once, he walked with a calm designed to pass for magnanimous. But the way his fingers brushed Faron's shoulder was a small violence. He was the puppetmaster with cleaner hands.
"Let him come and sit with me," Faron demanded. "I'll show him what I have."
My plan was perverse in a scientist's way: set brothers to fight, pull wires, let old jealousies boil. To do it I needed someone inside Felix's world, someone with a clean face.
Peter Powell, Felix's driver, had eyes that didn't fit his clothes. He was too kind to work for men like Felix. I met him in a cafe and told him things he already suspected. I told him about the ledger, the secrets, the little humiliations. I promised protection. "Felix will not like you if he suspects you," I said. "He will make you disappear."
He listened like a man who had been waiting for permission. He gave me files. He whispered. We stitched together an accusation big enough to topple a skyscraper. We set traps: evidence planted, men bought, a spectacle assembled.
And yet nothing goes like you plan.
"Someone took Peter," I said one morning when the news was empty of his face. "Someone cleaned him up."
"They're probably fine," Faron said, putting on a poker face. "My brother plays dirty. He has to."
We tried to save Peter when we found him — half-dead on a dock, the salt of the sea in his beard like a cape. We stole him out of a van in the middle of the night and wrapped him in a blanket. He woke with a look that belonged to men who have met an abyss and decided to negotiate with it.
"Your brother took my sister," he told Felix once, rage hot enough to burn pavement. "You will pay."
We used that rage like a match. We turned news cameras toward the Makarov name. We leaked files, shamed him with whispers of murders, of things too obscene to say aloud. The public watched like a swarm, hungry.
Then the public punishment began.
It started as a press conference — a staged thing, with reporters and flashing cameras, a podium positioned directly in front of the Makarov Building. I stood in the crowd with Peter beside me and watched Felix Makarov step up. He was as polished as a coin. He smiled like a banker slides checks across a table.
"Mr. Makarov," a reporter said. "These allegations — are there any truth to them?"
Felix blinked. His smile didn't falter, but the eyelid tremble was the first tell of something not entirely controlled. He opened his mouth like someone selecting the right button on a machine.
"I have nothing to hide," he said smoothly. "These are baseless attacks."
"Then will you submit to an investigation?" another reporter asked, this one holding up a stack of documents our side had leaked.
There were murmurs. The cameras moved in like predator fish. For thirty minutes the questioning was a slow torture. We had arranged to have former employees speak. We had placed CCTV clips and bank transfers on screens for everyone to see.
"Do you recognize these payments?" Peter's voice, when the video cut to greased bank statements, sounded like a judge banging a gavel. He didn't look like the same man who had been pulled from the water. He looked large and dangerous.
Felix's face changed in a way that stayed with me. It was a slide from polished charm to a hard, small animal. First he narrowed his lips. Then he laughed, a brittle thing. Then he tried to deny, hands fluttering like a man fending off flies. "This is a smear campaign," he said. "This is blackmail."
"Are you denying the ledger?" someone shouted.
"No," he said. "I'm denying the context."
We had made sure the context was messy and undeniable. There was footage of Felix arriving at properties at odd hours, photos of men visiting rooms, pages of payments to accounts registered in off-shore names. The public peeled apart like old paint.
Then a woman stepped forward — one of Felix's earlier victims, who had last year taken a restraining order out that had vanished somehow into a desk drawer. She walked to the microphone with a cane and a face lined by years of hidden things.
"This man," she said, her voice steady, "is the man who took my child."
The crowd inhaled as if dragged through a throat. A dozen phones pointed like lights. Cameras pushed until the lenses were nearly touching his forehead. Felix staggered, a deer hit by light. "You lie," he said.
"I have your handwriting," she said, "and your signature."
That was when it became public in a way that could not be scrubbed. Men who had once smiled with Felix at the country club began to frown. Shareholders called brokers. The stock took a trip downwards like an elevator without cables. Felix's confessions — the ones he couldn't keep — were trotted out by the press like animals in cages. The man who ruled with a soft word watched the roof fill with bright bulbs.
He moved like a predator in retreat. Anger flickered into denial. He sneered. He shouted that it was a lie. He cursed journalists. He threatened lawsuits that could drown small nations. His voice climbed and then cracked.
"Felix," I heard Peter whisper behind me, and even his whisper was vindictive. "Look."
Felix's face was a carousel of motions: surprise, then anger, then despair, then greed. At one point he tried to call for his security, but the noise swallowed him. He had been scientisted, stripped publicly. Once the cameras turned, there was no return. The courtroom of public opinion took its verdict in a matter of hours.
"Why is this happening to me?" he asked finally, fingers clawing at the collar of his shirt.
"Because you chose to be cruel," the woman with the cane replied. "Because other people found their courage."
The stockholders met in emergency session. Felix was forced to step down. A committee took over. He left the podium with his face like a coin scraped on the pavement. Outside, people spat. His car was greeted by protesters who held placards and small torches like simple, righteous weapons.
When the scene died down, when Felix had been taken to a hospital not by choice but by the state's hand — drugged, catalogued, declared unwell and dangerous — he was not merely removed; he was made public broke. It was satisfying and grotesque. The world watched a man fall not with stone but with documentation. Cameras recorded his face as it started to show the marks of collapse.
But that was not the end. Faron needed his own fall.
We arranged the school assembly like a stage production. The principal believed he was hosting a "character-building" session, Faron believed it would be a show of grief and solidarity, and the students believed they were getting a normal talk.
"Everyone, please sit," the principal said into the microphone with a smile that held the same terror as anyone's.
I had smuggled a tablet into the room and queued the footage. It began with small things: receipts, dinner photos, texts. Then it moved — inexorable — to the worst. Clips of manipulation, of money offered for silence. Clips of the parties. Clips from the private room where Jayce had been humiliated. Clips of the teacher, humiliated and unable to stand. They filled the screen. The room smelled of old paper and new panic.
Faron's face went through the same stages Felix had exhibited: amusement, denial, fury, and a perfunctory sadness that quickly curdled into panic. He tried to laugh it off, to toss the blame back at me as a "revenge plot," but the assembly had ears and mouths and phones.
"You set him up," he said at one point. "Avery, you traitor."
"I set up what you were doing," I answered, voice steady. "I showed them the same camera we were showing the world. You made them watch."
The students who had once walked behind him like branches now pointed at him. Mothers covered their children's eyes. A father cried softly and then slammed his hands together. Someone wept out loud. Phones recorded. An older man stood up and shouted, "How dare you!"
Faron shifted. He looked for an exit but found only faces. The principal's face was a map of arithmetic: scorched and blank.
"Is this true?" the principal asked, voice trembling.
"Yes," several students said at once. "Yes, it is."
Faron's jaw worked. His expression slid from calculation to animal fear. He denied, then accused, then tried to speak louder than the room. When he finally tried to storm out, a group of students blocked the door. Someone pushed him. The shove was not a murder blow. It was a human judgement.
"You're a coward," someone yelled.
"Look at him," another said, "this is what you get."
He began to beg, a sound none of us expected. He dropped to his knees not in penance but from the knock of disbelief: the sky had opened and someone had thrown stones. I watched his hands curl, watched him try to scoop the dirt of sympathy back into his mouth.
"I'm sorry," he said at last, the words like a child's pleading note. "I didn't mean—"
"No," Jayce said from the front row, voice like a blade. He had come to the assembly despite everything. His face was hollow, but his eyes had iron. "You meant everything."
There were phones held high. The video spread like fire. Outside the school gates, parents argued, neighbors gathered, reporters arrived. A mother spat in the gutter where his limo might have once shined. The principal read a statement: "Faron Graves will be suspended pending investigation." The Board called for a meeting, and in public he lost scholarships, privileges, and the careful veneer his father had paid for.
The punishment was a thousand small humiliations: withdrawal of privileges, public scorn, students chanting his name like a verdict. His reflection in shop windows had become a stranger. It was, I admit, delicious. It was also not enough.
But when the law moved slowly and when money tried to buy time, some kinds of judgment require less polish and more exposure. Faron's face, once a poster of crafted charm, now tired in the static of news feeds and gossip. He begged in the street. He tried to call his father. The calls went unanswered. He walked past stores and people turned their heads. His security was withdrawn overnight like a trust cut loose.
Public punishment for the two men took different shapes: one collapsed under weight and confession, the other under the gaze of a thousand ordinary witnesses. Both were stripped of the private absolution they had thought money could buy.
But neither punishment healed what we'd broken.
One night I realized that we had become exactly the kind of predators we used to scorn. We had traded cameras for knives, and the wounds were not only on the people we had hurt. They were on us. My palms kept smelling like other people's secrets, and the pill in my pocket — the small object of my first deceit — was a weight I could not empty.
Celine's last smile came to me suddenly: she stood by the classroom window and waved, like someone who had learned to forgive without forgetting. The memory stung.
"What now?" Peter asked me once, when the world cleaned its hands on the bodies of the arrogant.
"Now," I said, "I leave."
I took the money Faron had given me and burned it in a way that fools call symbolic. I couldn't find a way to fix the teacher, to bring back the ribs of days when we walked without stepping on people. All I could do was walk away with a new name for the old shame.
When the final day came, there was no rooftop and no dramatic crowd. There was only an exam — a test of geometry and patience. Celine tapped my paper and said, "Avery, why are you losing marks on purpose?"
"Because I don't want to win their approval anymore," I said.
"Who are 'they'?" she asked.
She didn't need my answer. Her eyes asked it and then turned away with something like mercy. "Don't do this to yourself," she said.
"I already did," I said.
Outside, the city roared its excuses and its laughter. In my pocket, the pill was a pebble that would never dissolve. The teacher's last smile, the rooftop railing, the name Jayce Koch carved into my memory — they followed me like a shadow with a weight.
When people later asked me why I had started it — why I had set the flames beneath the rich and pitied the poor — I told them: "I wanted justice." But justice is a blunt instrument. It cuts both ways. It wounds as much as it mends.
"Are you sorry?" someone asked me years later, when my face had lost its youth and gained the look of someone who had stayed up too many nights with bad thoughts.
"Yes," I said. "And no. Because if I had not acted, Celine would still be dead inside. Jayce would be broken alone. Someone had to do something."
They forgive me only in the small ways that people forgive prisoners and knives — with a look that is practical but not tender.
At the end of my story there is a small thing that keeps me honest: the pill, the tablet, the memory of a teacher's wrist. I keep the memory like a fossil. It reminds me that cruelty can be planned and paid for, but the cost is never only theirs.
The roof is closed now. The school tightened security and played the right ads at its next parents' night. People went on. Faron Graves disappeared into lawsuits and a different kind of ruin; Felix Makarov's name withered under public scorn until it was a husk of hearings and cold rooms and a certificate that said "unwell" in a bureaucrat's ink. Jayce left town. Celine recovered in small increments. Peter Powell moved away with his hands still shaking.
As for me — I keep the pill in a small tin at the bottom of a drawer. Every morning I thumb it with the same dull regret, and every morning I decide not to use it to hurt anyone else.
"Why keep it?" Celine once asked, in that rare moment when she looked at me without the fog of therapy and asked like a simple child.
"Because," I said, "it is evidence of what I once was."
She sighed like someone who had learned to live with ghosts. "Then let it be your guilt," she said. "Use it to remember."
I put it back in the drawer and shut it. The world kept moving forward with its loud breathing and small cruelties. People still laughed at the expensive cars and at the poor mistakes. But somewhere, in the gutter under a broken streetlight, an old coin rolled and stopped. It was quiet, and I sat down and watched it.
This is not a redemption story. It is not a confession that comes with absolution. It is a record. I kept the pill as a measure: how far I would descend, and how far I might, one chosen day, try to climb back.
The End
— Thank you for reading —