The Price of Stolen Genius

My phone screen was the only light in the suffocating darkness, casting a sickly blue glow on the corrugated steel walls closing in around me.

A notification popped up with Nicole' s latest livestream, her face triumphant, showing a thumbnail of me, huddled and sketching on a dirty cardboard box.

"My pathetic 'brother' making trash art for change," the title read, a cruel mockery of my homelessness and desperation.

Then, her message: "Feeling cramped, Caleb? I remember you don't like small spaces."

My heart hammered as the air thinned, the walls pressing in; I was trapped, locked in a storage unit, betrayed by the girl I once called my sister.

I gasped, scrabbling against the unyielding metal as my vision blurred, the darkness crawling inward.

My last conscious thought was the cold, unyielding finality of it all; heart failure, alone and forgotten.

But then, the distinct smell of turpentine and acrylic paint jolted me awake.

I wasn' t in a storage unit; I was back in the bright art room of Northgate High, eighteen years old again.

And there she was: Nicole, laughing perfectly, with Ethan, the star quarterback, arrogant and untouched by his future accident, by his downfall.

The raw memory of my death, the cold, suffocating terror, slammed into me, a tidal wave of pure, undiluted rage.

I grabbed the nearest jar of murky paint water, and without a second thought, hurled it straight at Ethan' s chest.

His pristine jacket exploded with gray water and glass, and the fight that ensued was just the beginning.

I was back, and this time, the masterpiece of revenge would be mine.