Revenge11 min read
The Year of the Drumstick: Family, Shame, and the Little Wars at Home
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I never thought a cat could be the beginning of a war.
"This is my house," I said, white-knuckled and breathing like I'd just run a sprint. "You get your feet off her, Tucker."
He didn't move. He had one sneaker on Drumstick's tail and the other on her head, and the sound she made cut through the apartment like a siren.
"Get off!" I pushed him. My voice was thin with pull and anger. "What are you doing?"
Tucker Schumacher blinked up at me like he had been caught stealing candy. "She scratched me," he said, voice small and sneering at once. "She scratched my arm."
"She did not," I said. "She lives here. She's been with us eight years. You are hurting her."
He wagged the sneaker on Drumstick and laughed — the laugh of a boy used to being able to laugh his way out of trouble. "Whatever, Val. It's just a cat."
"Val?" My mother called from the kitchen. "What on earth—"
"He's stepping on Drumstick," I said. "He was stomping her."
My mother's spoon clanged into the pot. "Children, no fighting inside," she said, voice tired. "It is Lunar New Year. Keep the peace."
"Peace?" I said, and I couldn't keep it inside anymore. "Then teach your son not to be a monster in other people's homes."
Tucker's father, my uncle Enrique Cardenas, sat at the head of the table and peered over his newspaper like I had not spoken. "Chen—" he began.
"No, don't start," I cut in. I had to stop calling myself by my original family name in his mouth. "Enrique, your son is hurting our cat. Would you like him to be taught like that in front of everyone?"
Enrique's face tightened into a familiar smirk that made my skin crawl. "She's only a cat. Kids will be kids."
"Kids will be cruel," I said, and it came out harder than I meant. "Teach him otherwise."
Tucker squinted and mouthed, "Psycho," then kicked the cat again when no one was looking.
There were more words. There were plates placed down more loudly than usual. I left the kitchen to be alone with Drumstick, because even when you're the adult in your home, sometimes your chest will tighten like a child's.
My brother York Schmidt tried to soothe the cat. "She's okay. She'll be okay," he murmured as he stroked her matted orange fur. York was twelve and steady in the way little brothers can be steady: earnest, protective, and easily reminded of the world’s unfairness.
"You two can keep whispering," Tucker said later as he skulked past our door. "Cowards."
I shut the door on his voice and went to the only place I could breathe: the room where I kept my laptop and my sleepless nights.
The next thing I found was that Tucker had been in my room while I had been at dinner.
"How dare you—" I started when I saw the mess.
He was sprawled on my bed, shoes on, sleeping like the world owed him something.
"Wake up," I hissed. He didn't. His hand was curled around a small purple bottle that smelled faintly like berries and cost a fortune.
"Is that—" I said.
He had taken the bottle with my name on it. It was a bottle of melatonin that I kept for nights when my insomnia swelled like waves. The bottle was empty.
I shook him until his eyes popped open. "Tucker, wake up, are you out of your mind? Get up now!"
He didn't. He blinked slowly and murmured like he had been somewhere else. I stumbled from my room into the kitchen and shouted the words that blinked red inside me.
"Call an ambulance! Tucker ate my melatonin!"
The kitchen became chaos. My grandmother asked, "What is that? An herbal medicine?" My father, Francisco Mathieu, got to his feet with that slow, heavy motion that comes from people who have had to bear more than their share. "We need to call an ambulance," he said.
My uncle went from fury to triumph in a breath.
"Chen Yanmeng—" his voice turned a knife. "You put pills where a child could reach. You wanted this to happen so you could be a martyr."
My cheek was signal-hot from the slap I had never seen coming. Enrique had raised a hand and cut across my face before I could protect myself.
"You hit me?" I said, stunned.
"You deserved it," he snarled. "You knew kids would find your things."
"Tucker opened my drawer!" York said, small and fierce. "He told me he saw it. He did it himself."
"I didn't!" Tucker wailed, cheeks wet. "She puts dangerous stuff out. She wanted me to—"
By the time the ambulance arrived, Enrique had already announced we would pay whatever was needed. My father, with a exhaustion that comes from holding a family up for years, let the quarrel fall into silence. It was a relief that made me want to cry and laugh at once.
At the hospital, they told us the bottle had been emptied, but Tucker was going to be okay after a lavage and a night under observation.
Enrique shook me with one last glare before he left with his wife, Johanna Coleman. "If anything happens to him," he hissed, "you will be paying."
"Of course," my father said stiffly. "Of course we will cover the costs."
That night sleep came like a thin blanket that never warmed.
For weeks, small tensions hung in the air like dust. At dinner tables, my aunt Johanna found new reasons to criticize the way I grew vegetables or let York play video games. My parents went back to being polite to Enrique and Johanna because they were adults bound by complicated history of favors and old debts.
Two months later, York came home battered and blooming with pain.
"They beat me up," he said that evening, eyes spilling. "Tucker and his friends ambushed me after school."
"What?" I felt something in my throat burn hot and slow. "Who?"
"Tucker, and some older kids he hangs with. They dragged me somewhere and started on me. I tried to defend myself and then—"
I did what any sister would do who had finally had enough of whispers: I took a stance.
I found Hunter Costa, my boyfriend, and Aurelius Curtis, our old sparring coach, and said, "We will not be bullied."
"Are you planning to pick a fight?" Hunter asked, brows up. "Because I could break up with you and someone will lose a teeth debate."
"No," I said. "We will let York fight once. Not to injure, just to let him stand."
Aurelius was a tall man with a kind mouth and a clearer mind. "Let him win fair," he said. "If anyone complains, we'll handle it."
We arranged it all along the back road Tucker used to pass on his way home. When Tucker came, puffed and cocky, and pushed York, York did not fall back. He swung. It was clumsy at first, then it became precise like someone who had been training rage into discipline. He knocked Tucker down.
The scene looked messy. People watched. The three older boys, the ones who had been Tucker’s backup, lurched away when Hunter and Aurelius moved to block them.
"You—" Tucker spat as he got to his feet, nose bloody. "You'll regret this."
"Apologize," I said. "To York and to Drumstick."
He scoffed, sniffed blood into oblivion, then muttered, "Sorry," the word squeezed and tiny like a mercy.
We left Tucker limp and quicker than he had expected.
The taste of small victory crackled in my mouth. The house that night was warm. My father even suggested, "Bring Hunter by. It's time to meet him." My mother looked relieved. "Someone to help protect our girls," she said with the small smile of a woman who had carried too many quiet fears.
The peace lasted until something worse unfolded.
It was a month later, in the strangest way this modern world gives justice: a short video and a furious Internet.
"House number 704 is lying about quarantine, hiding from the health workers, and going out," someone posted. "They are omitting travel history and spreading infection."
The clip came with a timestamp and a shaky camera lens. It showed a doorway, a family in a hallway, and the muffled sound of a neighbor's angry voice. The caption flashed; it said, "They are positive."
From our living room, the family watched the comments piling like a landslide. "That's them," my father said slowly. "Doesn't that sound like—"
"It is them," my mother whispered.
Enrique, Johanna, and a younger Tucker had apparently refused testing during a small outbreak and had been recorded walking around the block and meeting people, and later, the contact tracers had found them positive. In a town already alarmed and waiting at the edge of panic, betrayal was a dangerous currency.
The neighborhood group chat exploded.
"Don't let them out of their apartment!" someone wrote. "They are the reason we will have to isolate for two weeks!"
"Who let them into our building?" someone else typed. "That family ruined everything."
Hand-made signs went up on elevators: "No entry for 704." People taped up lists of possible infection routes with arrows and dates. The moral fury that lives in small towns is immediate and perfect. Their sins, petty and large, became a fuse.
The public punishment began small and then swelled.
At first, neighbors left notes — "Shame on you," "Think of others" — ever so carefully tucked under their cracked apartment door. Then voices started to call out across the stairwell. "We know what you did!" a man shouted. A woman filmed them in the corridor. "Smile for the camera," she said, and the clip went live before anyone could blink.
Tucker's father strode to the door with that practiced politeness that says, "Don't mistake me for weak," and the shutters of neighborhood opinion flew open.
"What are you doing, Edgar?" Enrique barked when they called him "Edgar" by his legal name. He hated that — hated what it implied: there was no special treatment for him now.
"Answer for your actions," one neighbor said into the phone as if they were a judge. "You put people at risk. You lied. You walked around crying 'I'm fine' and you went shopping. Do you know how many families this will affect?"
Enrique's face went from stone to color to a heat that vibrated in his voice. "You don't understand—"
"No," the woman cut him off. "We do understand. We understand what it is to care for others because we do. You hid. You endanger us."
Tucker, sitting on the stairs, looked small with his sweatshirt caked in half-dried mud and fear. He had been cocky three months ago. Now he couldn't speak without stuttering. He had been so sure the world owed him mercy that he hadn't learned to be cautious.
The crowd grew.
"How could you?" someone asked. "You stomped a family's cat. You lied about quarantine. Now you come asking for pity?"
"Maybe we should push his car," someone suggested with that reckless sort of humor that comes out of outrage. "Smash it a little. Give him a taste."
Voices got louder. At first, Enrique tried to bargain. "We were trying to protect ourselves. The testing center was crowded. We have elders at home. We are under stress."
"Everyone is under stress," a woman cried. "But you hid from health workers!"
A younger neighbor, a woman with two kids in a stroller, pulled out her phone and held it up. "Record everything," she said. People started recording. "He will never want to be on camera again," she whispered triumphantly.
Gathered together, they turned this private lack of character into public spectacle.
Enrique's mouth opened, shut, and then opened again. "This is a misunderstanding," he said. "This is slander."
"You're not recording the truth," Johanna wailed. "You don't know the whole situation."
"Then tell it," someone snapped. "Tell your whole neighborhood about it."
He moved from denial into panic. At first, he tried to shout louder than the crowd. That only made it worse.
"This man," the neighbor said, pointing now at Enrique, "blamed his neighbor for his son's illness, attacked a woman in her home, and now he is the cause of our quarantine extension. I want the managers to know what this family has done." Papers were pulled out. People demanded statements sent to the community board, to the local news.
Within twenty-four hours, posts went viral across the town’s private groups. They posted the video of Tucker in our room playing with the melatonin bottle. They posted stories of Drumstick being kicked. People remembered small wrongs and tied them to this family with the neatness of a knot. "This is who they are," the comments read. "This is their character."
The online shaming translated into physical consequences. The caretaker found his car's windows smashed with baseball-sized rocks. Someone stuffed glue into the apartment door lock. A grocery bag of rotten food was left at their doorstep with a sign that said, "Take this as a token of how we feel."
Enrique's face—first proud, then angry, then small—went through all the stages.
"I wasn't the only one who left the door unlocked!" Johanna protested to anyone who would listen. "You can't blame us for the entire neighborhood."
"Start with being honest," a man said. "Start with admitting fault."
He tried to bargain with the property office, to plead to the security guard, to call our shared acquaintances to vouch for him. It was useless. The neighborhood had made a decision. In small towns, once a rumor becomes a truth, the social machinery turns.
He tried to phone my father. "Francisco, listen—"
My father picked up and let the call go to the voicemail that played like a record in a tiny apartment. Enrique left a voice message that slid from anger to pleading to a sudden embarrassment.
"You will pay for what you did," my father left for him. "It is over."
At the worst point, Enrique, usually loud and combative at parties, stood at a small circle of neighbors with his face wet at the corners and said, "Please. Forgive us. We'll do whatever it takes."
"Do you see what he does?" someone hissed. "Now he's trying to play poor, tragic, innocent."
He had been smug once, walking like he owned our hallway, but the crowd had flipped him into a spectacle. Tucker, who had delighted in being the bully, now rummaged for excuses and found only a cracked shell for them. He slid from anger to denial to a stuttering shame that made him recoil.
"You're not welcome in our building," the notice read the next morning on the elevator door. "You are not welcome anywhere here."
They left the next week. They boxed up things and crawled away with their heads low. The brass of public shame had done its slow, cutting work. They lost friends who had been neighbors, and their car needed months of repair.
For us, the punishment was a cleansing. For them, it was a collapse.
My father bought their old unit from them for a price they accepted because their options were fewer than they had imagined. He did it without gloating. He wanted Drumstick to have a place where she was not threatened by the swagger of a neighbor's child.
We tore the apartment apart and built something new in it — a clean, pale place where our family could live without sour whispers outside the door. I picked the curtains myself and chose paint colors that made the kitchen light seem to laugh. We filled it with small gestures: a basket for shoes by the door, a notice on the wall reminding ourselves to be careful and kind.
The day we moved in, my father sent a modest notice to the neighborhood groups: "New owner," he wrote, with an emoji of a house. He made sure the neighbors knew the apartment had changed hands. He sent small boxes of tea and bottles of oil to the closest doors. He gave red envelopes to the old ladies who had watched over our building for decades.
"You did well," Hunter said that night, taking my hand across a small table. He squeezed it and let the heat of his fingers say the things he did not say in words.
"I did what I could," I said. I looked across at York, who was glittery-eyed and still proud from his fight. Maybe it wasn't vengeance so much as balance.
Two years later, the small dramas had started to feel like the way neighborhoods reshape themselves: remember, forget, reframe.
Then a message flashed on the phone across the lunch table — a call to my aunt Anastasia Ivanov. She had always been our measure of justice. She loved Bronson De Santis, her son, fiercely; Bronson collected models and treasured them like secrets. He kept a pristine replica of a single-track train in a display case. It was precious and, yes, expensive in ways my family couldn't always understand. But Bronson loved it like one would love a childhood memory.
"Who is it?" my mother asked when Anastasia's face changed.
"It's Enrique again," she said slowly. "Tucker got into trouble back home — in another town. He started a fight and the other boy was badly hurt. They want him dealt with."
We all looked up. York's eyes hardened. "He's sixteen now," he said, quiet.
"You reap what you sow," Hunter said.
Years teach you that the world moves in cycles. The bullies who think they can do whatever they want are often caught by their own loose ends.
On a bright winter afternoon, at our renovated home, my grandmother raised her teacup and muttered, "New year, new things."
We all clinked our glasses and laughed.
Drumstick sat on the windowsill, licking a paw and looking like she had never known fear. The little orange cat who had been the reason for a fight and for the long shame of a neighbor had lived through it all, and in the end her simple presence was what counted.
"Drumstick," York said, stroking her, "you survived the year of storms."
She closed her eyes like she agreed.
Outside, the neighborhood moved on. In our living room, we toasted quiet things: a fixed roof, a boy who had learned to stand up, a family that had learned a harder kind of protection.
"I owe you one," Hunter said into my palm.
"No, you don't," I said. "Just keep your hands warm."
He smiled. It was the small, careful smile of someone who had chosen to be near me even when things got messy.
And for once, it felt enough.
The End
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