My mother Daniella Retali was always a fountain of bubbly energy and inspirational words. She brightened up the room like a lighthouse at sea, always somehow becoming the center of attention wherever she went.

It also helped that she was a petite beauty whose face you wouldn't find weird spotting on the front page of magazines, but despite the many doors her appearance could have opened for her she preferred working as a small-time author, which my fathers well of job allowed for.

As for Joseph Retali my father, he absolutely loved my mother to death, willing to go through to any lengths to make her happy despite her pouting whenever he overworked himself.

They made for a beautiful and striking couple. My mother’s soft milky Asian skin and features, contrasting nicely with my fathers own lightly tanned Hispanic looks. Beautiful and handsome, it wasn't a surprise their children also came out like cherubs, always being praised for their cute looks.

Now when it came to personality wise, I didn't see myself like my go-lucky and caring mother, or a passionate individual who worked however hard he needed to for his loved ones such as my father.

I myself was more a free floater, always willing to listen to their thoughts but never really paying too much attention to them. Why worry about anything when a decent hammock and good weather was all I needed to unwind and deal with the problems when they arose?

Experiencing lower than normal grades? Find yourself a relaxing area allowing you to focus, without distractions. I always retained information better after a nice rest after all.

School Bullies? Try and teach them the relaxing ways of life, and if that didn't work take a nap in their faces. While verbal violence isn't easily stopped there wasn't much they could do if I simply ignored them in class and avoided them outside of it.

Relationship issues?.... Well can’t help with that one, but you can think about it yourself during your downtime.

My mom loved showering me with praises even I didn't deserve most of them, as well as constantly giving me loving words she hoped would help me out as I grew up.

“My little Isaac, life can be such a beautiful and cruel thing. Sometimes it’s tenderness caresses us lovenly, and other times its thorns mercilessly dig into our hearts, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't accept both sides. Don’t ever let despair drown you because of a few thorns, just as you wouldn't become too complacent in good times. Take life in strides or relaxingly, as you so often do. Just make sure you know what makes you happy.”

Her words were followed by a tight hug full of her love as she wrapped my 11-year-old self in her arms. The memory of that time went on to become one of the most important in my heart, yet I wouldn't follow her wordsof wisdom for years to come.

So young I never thought I'd be one of those individuals who’d have tragedy strike them so young. We all think that way. 'Why worry? As long as their carful they should be ok.' But I guess I couldn't blame anyone for being like this otherwise, worry would consume every moment our loved ones weren't in our sight.

The thorns my mother spoke of came soon after as she died the following month, in a car accident caused by a drunk asshole who’s actions caused both my mom and his entire family their lives.

The thorns of anguish pierced everyone in our family leaving no one untouched, deep they dug latching on like a tick to flesh. Slowly draining that happiness my mother worked so hard to build.

My father to dull the pain of losing the love of his life dove into his work, giving us everything we needed to grow up beside his presence.

My younger brother of ten at the time hid in his room, unwilling to accept mom’s death and choosing to delude himself that she was simply out for groceries as she was the day she died. His eyes became lifeless as he became obsessed with RPG type games as well as with moms hobby of anime. Unable to get him to leave his room for anything besides the bathroom dad ended up hiring homeschool tutors to shut the school system up, though it's not like they manage to teach him anything anyway.

Even our dear cat Cleopatra started to ignore everyone, in the house. Mom had been the one to raise her from a kitten to her ripe age of 13 years old so to her it was as though her most important person had disappeared, and those around her weren't in the mood to console her when they couldn't even comfort each other. If it weren’t for me feeding her she probably would have succumbed to starvation in her old age.

My father likely thought I was the one taking it the best, but oh how wrong he was. My relaxed personality showed its useful colors as the only change in my demeanor being that I spoke slightly less.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stay calm. I couldn’t relax like I use to. My dreams became ripe with nightmares of watching my mothers death or looking at her mangled and disfigured corpse despite not knowing what it actually ended up like.

It hurt so much. I needed to make the hurt go away. Anything to ease the suffering.

 And then like the whisper of a demon, a stray thought wormed itself into my brain.

‘If everyone else hurts maybe I’ll hurt less?’

That one depraved thought led me to cause as much chaos and pain that I could.

While I wasn’t a genius of any kind, my ability to subconsciously pay attention to details had always been my strongest strength as my late mom once loved to point out.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The end result of such circumstances was a child with excellent planning skills far beyond his age, an absent guardian and zero remorse for the chaos just a few levels shy from terror attacks he was about to spread.

School flooding? All you needed was the right clogging agents, and a map of the school’s plumbing system, which could all be found in the unlocked janitor's closets.

Painful chemical burns? The security guard watching the pool went to lunch every day at 12:15 to purchase his meal and didn’t return till 12:30. That time window was plenty long enough to add more than the regulated amounts chlorine into the pool.

Spending an entire night hiding in a cupboard in the kitchens just to turn off the refrigerators long enough to let the meat go bad causing the largest school food poisoning event the district had ever seen in its history? Easy and effective with a total of 58 students having to be rushed to the hospital and almost five dying because of the incident.

Things only got worse from there until eventually, they brought in a professional to try and discover exactly who was causing such rampant attacks at the school.

It as a Friday night when I was finally caught. My most recent act of evil was shoving clay into the exhaust pipes of cars in the schools parking lot late in the evening.

The moment I heard them yelling at me I tried running but they quickly tackled me painfully into the ground. A twelve-year-old couldn’t expect to outrun physically fit guards that easily had a half meter on him.

From there everything went further downhill.

Normally they would send someone my age to a juvenile detention center, but my actions were too abnormal for someone so young. I didn’t leave traces of my actions, and the only reason I was caught was that I was trying to dispose of the remaining clay in a sewer drain, but the damn thing got stuck.

After a week of discussions and trips to the psychiatrist. the verdict they chose? Sending my crazy ass to a to a psych-ward. They concluded that the loss of my mother had been too much for me, and I’d lost the ability to feel for others. Which I guess wasn't far of from the truth.

Too smart to be left alone, too crazy to be sent to with the other less desirables. I ended up in an asylum for the next two years. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, things got to the point where they had to put me in an actual padded room with a strait-jacket, just like in the movies.

Now, what damage could I have caused while being constantly watched to end up like that you might ask? Well as they say the devil is in the details.

I learned the routines of the workers and guards which wasn’t all too hard allowing me to almost escape four times in total, with the final of the attempts involving me breaking the legs of a nice lady that had tried her hardest to help me.

Undoing a strait-jacket? Harder but it didn't take a genius to figure out that all you needed was to create enough slack to pull your arm out.

Saying the darkest things imaginable about your psychiatrist's life with the odd bits of information you had heard over the course of a few months, and then using the facilities library to further fuel these words of mal-intent? Priceless.

Honestly, I was a lost cause looking back at it now. I wasn’t too far from actually killing someone I'm sure. Nothing mattered anymore to me. I just wanted to cause pain and misery. The me of the past that simply wanted to laze around had been all but erased.

At least it seemed so until the day my father came by with a recording. Strapping me to a chair I could see the tears in my father eye’s as he hit the play button on the remote.

A video played. It was my mom's 27th birthday party, and she was walking around the room looking for someone.

“Now where’s my little Issy? Is he hiding!” She yelled happily as she found my seven-year-old self sleeping behind the curtains, a pillow in hand.

Without a care in the world, she picked me up and spun me around in a tight hug as the young me had his eye’s spinning with light tears in them.

“Mom!!! Stop it!” The young me cried in a voice tinged with annoyance and the slightest trace of nausea.

“But It's my birthday and I blew my candles! Can you guess what my wish was?” Her beautiful voice making the others in the room laugh at her antics.

“A new pillow?” The young me answered earnestly, as that was what I would have asked for.

“Hahaha, you silly kid, you sure your not part cat like Cleo over there.”

The camera switched its view to a lazy Bombay cat that was sprawled out comfortably even with the disturbance around it. Its sleek black fur didn't show any indication of its age. It’s gentle meow being the only response that it gave my mom.

Turning towards the camera my mom puffed up her chest like a kid and gave everyone the answer they were waiting for.

“I want to keep our happiness deep in my heart no matter what happens. My treasure children and dear husband I’ll work my hardest to be the best wife and mother ever!”

“Your such a kid at times Daniella.” My father chimed in as the video was paused by my father in the present day. The contrast between the man on the screen and the one before me appearing was drastic as though it weren't a difference of eight years but twenty.

I wanted to laugh. To sneer in my fathers face. What was the point of showing me this I wondered? It wasn't going to change the fact that she was dead. Dead because some asshole killed her in his reckless actions. Never to come back. Ever....

And with those thoughts, the emotions I had buried deep in my heart burst forth.

I don't know when the tears started flowing but when they didn't stop.

It was then that I realized how much worse I had become than the asshole who had killed my mother. Yes, his actions were terrible but could they really compare to the planning and scheming I had done? While no one had died, had I not caused more widespread pain than that man would likely ever cause? Then I remember that random stray thought that I had when I was fresh in my despair, oh how disgustingly selfish I'd been. How brutally I’d disgraced my mother with my actions.

My heart-wrenching wails didn’t stop, and I felt as though all the pain I’d cause to everyone was returning to me tenfold as my mother looked down at me tears of disappointment in her eyes.

I was eventually sedated as the inner pain and screaming were causing the capillaries in my eyes to burst, leading to tears of blood to stream down my face. My father hugging me with his own tears promising it would all get better.

I’d gone against everything my mother wished for me and my family. I’d let the thorns pierce every part of my heart until I myself was little more than said thorns looking to latch on to others to spread like a disease.

The following weeks I completely stopped all my actions and retaliation. I no longer wanted to treat my mother's ideals like they meant nothing to me. I’d live for my happiness and my family’s from now on.

The weeks turned to months until at the one-year anniversary of the video being played I eventually was diagnosed mentally fit enough to return to the outside world. Of course, I’d be under watch and listed but it didn't matter to me. I’d do my best to work out the issues in the house. I’d help my brother leave his room, I’d take care of the beautiful old cat that mom had treated more like a daughter than a pet, and I’d work to help my father who had to deal with the loss of his wife and his son becoming a psychopath.

All would have a happy ending and I'll apologize to my mother in heaven with my actions and make her proud.

It should have been easy, simple, walk in the park, a piece of cake........

Yet I never got to do any of that.