Rogues’ Gallery

My lifelong empathy for villains begins, of all places, with my father’s enthusiasm for a vindictive Huron chieftain. I was seven years old when my dad rented The Last of the Mohicans for the first time. Michael Mann’s 1992 film adaptation of the classic nineteenth-century James Fenimore Cooper novel takes place during the French and Indian War in colonial America, and it’s the kind of swooning historical romance that flourished in the 1990s. Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe play two characters from antithetical walks of life drawn to one another through a kind of animal magnetism, against a backdrop of sweeping wilderness and bloody conflict.

But it wasn’t the smoldering stares or pledges made over thundering waterfalls that drew my father in. A widower with no romantic prospects to speak of, his face was long and fixed during the movie’s passionate interludes. What really captivated him—pulling him to the edge of his tattered recliner, his eyes pinned to our box television set—was the film’s shrewd antagonist.

A Huron warrior with a tragic backstory carefully unfurled by Mann over the course of the film, Magua drives the narrative of The Last of the Mohicans from behind pools of shadow and dissolving gun smoke. In one gruesome sequence, after his war-party ambushes a battalion of unsuspecting British soldiers, Magua exacts revenge on the colonel who murdered his children and razed his quiet village life. After shooting the colonel’s horse and watching it collapse on top of him, Magua kneels over his helpless enemy and, savoring the moment, cuts his heart out.

Whenever the ruthless Huron strode onto the screen—played by Cherokee actor Wes Studi, his wiry frame covered in inky war paint—my dad perked up, invoking his name with a kind of mock-malevolent glee (“Magua!”). Observing his fondness for this warped killer, I struggled to parse the line between fatherly mischief and genuine affinity.

Magua wasn’t the only antagonist my dad thrilled to. In the 1990s, we watched many of the films that would eventually ripen into classics for millennials—Batman, Goodfellas, Casino, Unforgiven. Whether it was historical epics or pulpy comic-book adaptations, my father was roused out of his aloofness by these films’ livewires, bad seeds, and psychopaths.

While he might have respected the heroes in these movies, it was Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito who stuck a spur in his heart—that cryptic chamber I feared and longed for in equal measure—and set it racing. What exactly this said about my father, a man repressed and elliptical enough that he often went years without once mentioning our deceased mother, is something I’ve yet to sort out. What I do know, however, is that my dad’s enthusiasm for these characters would go on to have a profound impact on me, setting in motion what would become an enduring obsession with villains.

According to Aristotle, anger is not just an instinctual response, like shuddering in the cold or blinking out dust; it’s sophisticated enough to nurture a link to the future, to serve as a promise that an injustice will be avenged.

As a preteen growing up in the leafy Connecticut suburbs, I fell in love with the X-Men, comic book characters born with genetic mutations that confer extraordinary gifts. But instead of identifying with the X-Men’s roster of superheroes—Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus—it was the supervillains who seized on my imagination. There was a certain glamour to figures like Mr. Sinister and Sebastian Shaw, shrewd tacticians whose ingenuity and acumen allowed them to lord over their heroic counterparts with cool hauteur. And few characters generated as much sheer frisson in me as Magneto, a persecuted Jew whose family was murdered during the Holocaust. Upon discovering his powers, Magneto vows to resist, even conquer, a society predicated on discrimination, oppression, and rigid racial hierarchies.

That the character was supposedly inspired by Malcolm X only bolstered his mystique for me. I may have been a white kid from New England, but the privileges that shaped my childhood did not stand out in my town. Instead, I dwelt on the sharp line in the sand between me and my peers: that I was growing up with a deceased mother and an emotionally remote father who I loved dearly but who also could not help but give the impression of spiritual defeat. I attended schools full of well-to-do children from thriving two-parent families, and the starkness of those differences left a chip in my lanky, bowed shoulders.

Like Magneto, I was an outsider. Like Magneto, I viewed the status quo persisting around me—smug, unchallenged, absent self-awareness—with visceral contempt.

In my high school and college years, I devoured novels centered around spiteful characters. In Heathcliff’s plot to avenge himself against his adopted family, I projected my own feelings of bitterness and alienation. When Frankenstein’s monster declares, “misery made me a fiend,” a flash of recognition flickered inside me. My situation was not nearly as dismal as the monster’s, but his logic still resonated. There was an unheralded symmetry between our fortunes and our character: When bad things happened to a person, those events not only shaped that person’s external circumstances but etched themselves into their identity. Our emotional climates are the sum total of everything that has happened to us; to me, these characters were proof of that.

There was a porousness to my relationship with these figures, and over time they stamped themselves on my sense of self like handprints pressed into wet concrete.

When I was in my senior year of college, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was released. In the run-up to the opening, I watched the film’s trailers with the solemnity of a jeweler caressing a large diamond. After it came out, I saw it in theaters a half dozen times. Like many, I was riveted by the movie’s antagonist—a psychopath in smeared makeup, scars hanging like tangled vines over his face. As played by Heath Ledger, the Joker is a monster with a seductive worldview, a misfit whose past traumas drive a deep cynicism toward humanity.

But unlike other fans of The Dark Knight, my enthusiasm tipped into obsession. At house parties that summer, I’d tilt my voice into the Joker’s wavering timbre, parroting lines from the movie but also trying to stretch the character into new directions. Sitting on plastic folding chairs in my dilapidated garage—where my friends and I often gathered to hash out our plans for the night—I’d squint my eyes at a buddy and pivot into a monologue inflected with the Joker’s squeaky-sinister pitch. When my girlfriend at the time called, I’d sometimes answer in the same voice.

For months, the character stayed tucked inside me, a jack-in-the-box with a deranged clown at the end of its coiled spring. While the shtick eventually grew exhausting for others, there was something in the Joker’s persona that I received with absolute seriousness, something I felt I needed to learn from. His twisty backstory includes a childhood misfortune devastating enough to eventually birth the madman we see sauntering through Gotham. But tragedy is something that typically happens to people; the Joker somehow reversed those dynamics, becoming the author of his own transformation. He takes the raw, coarse material of woe and uses it as clay for reinvention, funneling his suffering into a new person. It’s hardly incidental that the character’s first line in the movie, as he’s cramming a grenade into the mouth of a bank teller, is a perversion of Nietzsche’s famous aphorism: “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.”

These currents held real purchase for me. I found the idea that a person, fictional or otherwise, could use tragedy as fuel—or paint, or grist—to be electrifying.

His idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, the underlying logic of the Joker is actually in keeping with many of the other villains I took to in my youth. (I use the term villain broadly here, referring to both traditional antagonists opposed to the central character, and protagonists whose rage and recklessness would be perceived as villainous from any number of other points of view.) Characters like Magneto, Magua, Heathcliff, and Frankenstein’s monster are forces of not just destruction but creation, absorbing hardship, loss, and cruelty and distilling them into something else—ideology, ambition, Shakespearean machinations.

Their actions menace murderous colonialist regimes, oppressive class systems, and the undeserving beneficiaries of unjust social conditions. Whatever else they are—killers, zealots, mercurial emissaries of chaos—these characters are also catalysts for revolutionary change.

Was that why my father was so drawn to them? I’ll never know. We never talked about it. My dad embodied a certain midcentury masculinity—stoic, taciturn, unsentimental—and he put more stock in getting the measure of the world around him than in letting it get the measure of him. But after my mother passed, he did see something in the bruised and the bitter, the restless and the wicked who refused to accept the erasure imposed by tragedy, something that he clearly latched on to. And so did I.

Villains were not always the cunning, charismatic figures we know so well today. Some of the earliest records of the term date back the twelfth century, when the Old French word vilain was used to refer to a farmer of low birth, a rustic serf bound to the land, or villa, on which he worked. These vilains lived in the sharply stratified world of medieval Europe, laboring under the thumb of a landed aristocracy who regarded them with enough contempt that the term gradually shifted to suggest ignobility, conveying coarseness in mind or manners.

It evolved from there, and by the sixteenth century the term vilain evoked not just brutishness but corruptibility, a dangerous lack of honor and principles. For obvious reasons, the ruling class was fond of associating social graces with moral constitution, and that association meant that gruff peasants were regarded with suspicion. It might have been one of the earliest instances of our Western habit of demonizing the poor while allowing the upper classes to whitewash their own sins.

But there also may have been a more organic through line between vilains and villains coalescing just below the surface. Likely those serfs tilling land that would never be theirs felt a clandestine rage gathering force inside them. I like to think that there was a secret side to this etymology all along, and it was not just the demands of fiction but also the natural consequences of misery and exploitation that transformed the vilains of medieval Europe into the villains we know so intimately today.

But that transformation would take time. For centuries, the antagonists in medieval morality plays and epic poems were largely allegorical. They served as personifications of sins like pride, greed, and hypocrisy—often referred to literally as “the Vice”—or else narrative tropes created to stress-test the moral fiber of protagonists.

The Bible arguably set the template for this archetype. In Genesis, Eve is tempted by a wily serpent, who coaxes her to defy God by pulling forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. That serpent’s association with Satan would only come later, when early Christians labored to retrofit the Devil onto every instance of sin, suffering, and sordidness in their canonical texts (as a way of circumventing the theodicy problem). At the time that the Bible was put together, though, the snake was just a trial man and woman were destined to fail, a storytelling device crafted to spoil Eden and usher in our sprawling, fallen world.

It was Shakespeare who took the flat characterizations from morality plays and Bible verses and blew the warm, sour breath of life into them. Whereas the antagonists of Shakespeare’s youth were vile beasts and embodiments of Christian vices, the British playwright created villains with dimensionality and nuance, flawed characters imbued with complex motivations, layered psychology, and relatable ambition.

Macbeth executes a succession of shrewd maneuvers to seize the Scottish crown, but he is doomed by his own grief and the ambition that sought to placate it. Richard III is no less intricate: an overlooked, deformed younger brother to King Edward IV, Richard uses his dazzling intellect and eloquence to advance a sympathetic portrait of himself, blurring the lines between Machiavellian performance and sincere self-exposure.

While the actions of Shakespeare’s villains are rarely morally justifiable, he carefully walks us through how these figures came to be, how misery made them a fiend. Instead of the stark good vs. evil dichotomy that formed the foundation of so many narratives at the time, Shakespeare placed his villains on the same moral continuum as his heroes. In doing so, he invited audiences to peer into the private chambers where fortune, fate, and the fallible human psyche consorted to create the strange angels we call motivations.

More than two centuries later, Gothic writers drew from those same chambers, introducing flawed characters whose desires and moral blind spots resembled nothing so much as the antagonists from previous eras—only this time with a central point of view.

Nineteenth-century literature used the depth and lineaments permitted by the novel to push the complexity of these figures further still, giving Heathcliff, Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein’s dual protagonists layers of morality and psychology that conflicted and even contradicted one another. Often trapped in circumstances that compel them to desperate choices, these “Byronic heroes” ride out the tragic arcs of their lives like captains bolted to the bows of sinking ships.

Film’s emergence in the late nineteenth century introduced an entirely new medium for these characters, laying the groundwork for the villains I became so enthralled by in my youth. But while my father and I might have shared a peculiar exuberance for the movie antagonists of the 1990s, the same can’t be said three decades later. Instead of serving as allegorical foils to Christian virtue or grandiose men authoring their own cautionary tales, villains are now very often the characters who leave the deepest impression on us. Today, they shape our culture, crystallizing the vengeful feelings sitting just under the surface of our lives.

No longer able to relate to the optimistic everyman who once commanded the national zeitgeist, Americans from younger generations are now identifying with the warped and wounded ones—characters who’d have been regarded with disapproval and disgust by previous generations. But in the current era, more and more people are empathizing with the rogue’s gallery my dad and I were so enamored with. Like us, perhaps, they’re now turning to villains for escape, catharsis, and the vicarious chance to return the blows they feel have been dealt to them by a callous world.

Our sympathies used to lie in a much different place. In the triumphant post-WWII America of the twentieth century, audiences revered characters who embodied classical heroism and its constellation of venerated traits. Atticus Finch, the principled lawyer at the center of To Kill a Mockingbird. George Bailey, the self-sacrificing businessman whisked through a Dickensian journey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Superman, the invincible crimefighter whose most defining attribute is his conscience.

Aside from all being white men in a period when they dominated representation in pop culture, these characters exemplify certain characteristics America has long ennobled: honesty, humility, righteousness. But they have something else in common too: they serve as champions for the existing conditions of their societies. Underneath the mechanics of the plots they’re navigating, their chief purpose was arguably to preserve and perpetuate the status quo. And because this imperative existed alongside those venerable traits, it was only natural for audiences to conflate the two. Just as social coarseness came to be associated with moral corruption in medieval serfs, these American heroes braided virtue with the preservation of society as it was, suggesting that keeping our world more or less intact was a noble pursuit.

In these stories, the heroes often restore society to its previous state before it was threatened by irrevocable change—even if that change might have actually been for the better. On a subliminal level, audiences were being reminded that righteousness and success could only be achieved through adherence to order.

When Atticus Finch delivers his closing statement at the trial of the wrongly accused Tom Robinson, holding forth in the old Victorian courthouse in Maycomb, Alabama, he betrays his quaint idealization of America’s justice system. “[T]here is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president,” Finch declares. “That institution, gentlemen, is a court.” Here Finch—a character whose decency, rationalism, and fairness are meant to evoke the Platonic ideal of the justice system itself—is exhibiting his own reverence for that ideal. Though he loses the case, Finch retains his confidence in the courts, and by extension the existing order of his country.

Characters like Finch function as extensions of America’s laws, its institutions, the way the nation wants to see itself. They are sentinels of stasis, invested in society’s equilibrium. Not even systemic flaws or stubborn injustices can shake their faith in incremental progress.

But what happens when the rest of us lose faith in Finch’s incremental progress? We live in a period of yawning income inequality, the chasm wider today than at any time since the Gilded Age. America’s nine hundred or so billionaires have roughly twice as much money as the entire bottom half of American households. In the current decade, we’ve sunk deeper into the moral quicksand of late-stage capitalism; dynastic families, captains of industry, and well-heeled interests leverage their wealth to fortify their standing and the structures that make it possible. In the meantime, the country has regressed on everything from climate change to racial justice.

The result is a toxic zeitgeist, one simmering with resentment. Americans of all stripes have grown disillusioned with a nation increasingly severed from the ideals it once exalted. Unlike their predecessors, US citizens today struggle to believe that the better angels of our nature will eventually emerge. It’s becoming increasingly harder for us to subscribe to the rhetoric immortalized by our national heroes—both in fiction and real life—in the idea that the “arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice.”

This cynicism is not reflected in our traditional protagonists, who personify the moral idealism that long swelled America’s sails. The climate I see bubbling up around me today—full of rage, aggrievement, and a yearning to dash our prevailing systems against the wall—is now more aligned with the villains in our stories. Unlike Atticus Finch, George Bailey, or Superman, characters like the Joker, Magneto, Killmonger, and Walter White are mortal threats to the prevailing conditions around them, propelled by contempt for the power structures few others even call into question. Instead of conforming to the rules circumscribing those around them, they defy their confines, transgressing boundaries others see as sacrosanct.

That transgression has been a defining feature of storytelling since antiquity. Many ancient Greek tragedies feature a major character violating established norms and stepping across the invisible boundaries imposed on them. In Euripides’s Medea, written sometime in the fifth century BCE, the titular character is a former princess of Colchis and a powerful sorceress. When the play opens, she’s just learned that her husband and father to her two children, Jason, plans to abandon them to marry another princess. In a desperate bid to recast his spoiled fortunes, Jason has devised a plan to weasel his way into a new royal house.

While Medea opens the play in a state of dejection—she’s first heard, offstage, begging for her own death—she’s also silently aflame, with thoughts a servant describes as “oppressed and dangerous.” She soon hatches her own plan, one that will win her revenge against Jason, the so-called hero who used her for her magic and then betrayed her. By the play’s end, Medea has achieved a masterstroke in vengeance: using a poisoned dress and coronet, she’s killed Jason’s new wife, the princess Glauce, as well as her father Creon.

In a particularly heinous act whose premeditation scholars have debated for centuries, Medea also murders her two sons. As the scorned enchantress is swept away in a divine chariot, her children drooping from her arms like withered flowers, Jason is in shambles, shattered at the reversal of fortune his discarded wife orchestrated. Overcome with impotent rage, he curses both Medea and all of womankind: “Hateful thing! Woman! The greatest enemy to gods and me and the whole human race!”

Medea remains one of the most enduring Greek tragedies, what with its treachery, filicide, and stunning coup of retribution. But it also seizes the imagination because of how Medea confronts the norms of her time so fearlessly and slashes them to pieces. Infuriated over the conventions that dictate how a woman is expected to respond to the codes of a patriarchal society—practiced acquiescence before man’s ruthless ambition—she cannot submit herself to the writing on the wall. Instead, she uses wiles, subterfuge, and the spectacle of violence to repudiate them.

Medea and other heroines of Greek theater—including Clytemnestra and, in a more ennobling light, Antigone—still resonate because of how they boldly reject the social mores of their time and place. Their acts of violence, betrayal, and even fidelity put them in fierce opposition to not only their stage foils, but all of ancient Greece. Their defiant acts are not just dramatic but totemic, standing in for the rage and recalcitrance of large swaths of the audience.

These characters resist the dualism that started with Adam, Eve, and the serpent in Eden, and which we’ve been mapping onto our stories for centuries. While that text set us on a path to see all narratives through the lens of good versus evil, these complex misfits can’t be placed so easily in that framework. In fact, they call the entire foundation of it into question, compelling us to ask ourselves whether interpreting stories through such a binary lens obscures more than it reveals. Did we take the wrong lessons from Genesis, in which a serpent slithered into Eden and shattered that status quo—dooming paradise and forcing Adam and Eve to survive in a dramatically different world?

The most important tension in storytelling—and perhaps by extension in our own lives—is not the battle between good and evil. It’s the struggle of inertia against change, the existing conditions against the dynamism and chaos that ultimately lead to transformation. For Medea, this tension is represented by the question of whether to submit to the indignities of a patriarchal society dominated by men’s gratification, or spurn them. For Magua, it manifests as a choice between acquiescing to a colonizer’s violence, or shrewdly retaliating against it. For Magneto, it looms as the dilemma faced by marginalized groups since time immemorial: to accept being othered and persecuted, or rise up with an alternative vision for society.

When I think about the villains that populated my childhood, it’s not so difficult to understand why they played such an outsized role. As a widower raising two children in a cookie-cutter town, my dad felt firmly on the outside of a social milieu that prized the symmetry and solidity of two-parent households. And as someone who grew up in that town, I developed a molten scorn for the social norms that governed my youth, a system whose unspoken rules seemed arbitrary, stupid, and cruel. I was not drawn to villains because they were greedy, violent, or “evil.” I was drawn to them because they rejected the flawed conditions of the world around them and did everything in their power to tear them down.

More and more people are empathizing with the rogue’s gallery my dad and I were so enamored with. Like us, perhaps, they’re now turning to villains for escape, catharsis, and the vicarious chance to return the blows they feel have been dealt to them by a callous world.

On December 4, 2024, twenty-six-year-old Ivy League graduate and Maryland scion Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a meticulously planned predawn assassination. After Mangione was captured, the national conversation went in some astonishing directions. Instead of the condemnation, hand-wringing, and politicization that typically cycle around deadly gun violence in the US, droves of Americans expressed solidarity with and even admiration for Mangione and his actions. In the months following his arrest, the internet flooded with memes lionizing the rogue assassin; protest art cropped up all over the world glorifying his act of violence.

The more details that surfaced about Mangione’s history, his path to radicalization, and the particulars of the crime itself— deny, defend, and depose were scrawled on bullet casings—the more everyday Americans came to view him as a retributive force punishing a cruel and callous health care system. Polls administered in early 2025 showed citizens sharply divided, with a majority of Gen Z expressing a favorable view of him.

The high-profile assassination became a cultural flashpoint, one that vividly underscored just how bitter and fractious our country had become. But Mangione also served as a striking example of how our sympathies have evolved over the past fifty years. Someone who would have been quickly labeled a sociopath in the twentieth century was lauded, if briefly, as something of a folk hero, with internet sobriquets ranging from Saint Luigi to “The Adjuster.” Mangione’s crime and the public fervor it fomented is a real-world example of how Americans have come to embrace individuals who defy established norms and denounce the society keeping them in place—a specific genus within the larger kingdom of villains.

In a country where health care serves economic interests and systemic violence is woven into capitalism and its web of exploitation, the public saga of Mangione revealed a blistering scorn at the center of the American psyche. For some, confronting the cruelty of these conditions with explosive violence was not only cathartic but rational. Where, though, does that impulse ultimately lead us?

When thinking about the villains I grew up so attached to—and some of the real-world counterparts who mirror them—I’m often reminded of Aristotle’s definition of anger. According to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, Aristotle defined anger as “a response to a significant damage,” that, while painful, “contains within itself a hope for payback.” According to Aristotle, anger is not just an instinctual response, like shuddering in the cold or blinking out dust; it’s sophisticated enough to nurture a link to the future, to serve as a promise that an injustice will be avenged.

Many of the characters I connected with over the course of my youth—Magneto, Magua, Heathcliff, Frankenstein’s monster—personified this definition in one way or another, using the “hope for payback” as the fulcrum of their identity. This motivation has been a sharp through line in our stories—from Richard III to Captain Ahab to Michael Corleone—and is arguably a characteristic that imprinted on me as a child in ways I’m still puzzling through. My anger was also Aristotelian, in a way, serving as a pact with my future self.

But I was not bitter about my circumstances, per se. Rather, I was bitter at how wide the gap was between them and the neat, privileged lives of my peers. I was bitter, in other words, about a status quo that I couldn’t access. I longed to pursue some kind of redress—for the mother who died when I was five, the father who lived in a haze of grief and resignation, the family that hobbled along, bereft, like a three-legged dog. Deep down, I must admit, I wanted to punish peers born into more idyllic homes, their family dinners and uncomplicated affections a far cry from the TV tray tables and ambiguous feelings that landscaped our more fraught household.

Aristotle also wrote that to be angry with the right person, at the right time, for the right purpose, to the right degree, and in the right way is not easy. It is under this scouring light that my own anger—and I suspect many others’—falls apart. Anger is never as precise or elegant as we’d like to think; it’s messy, misguided, and porous, leaking out and producing more in collateral damage than any truly proportionate payback for the original wrong. These qualities make it a potent narrative force, driving many a villain to carry out destructive acts that go far beyond recompense, sucking in innocents and laying waste to their lives. But as an actual psychological modus operandi, it is corrosive and deceitful.

The summer before my senior year of high school, I got into a vicious fistfight, the kind that lands you in the back of a police van headed for the clink. It wasn’t my first fight, and it wouldn’t be my last, but it remains the one I think back to the most, slinking into my consciousness in unguarded moments.

It was a Saturday night, and I’d driven to the beach in the Connecticut town where I grew up—a sprawl of parking lots, basketball courts, and a flat, camel-colored shoreline perched over the Long Island Sound. The local beach was where teenagers gathered on weekends, and on that particular night a kid was there whom I strongly disliked. I was, in fact, open about it, calling him out for the arrogant nonchalance with which he mistreated our peers.

Teens were clustered in groups on the asphalt and sand, swaying silhouettes dappled with bright pools of lamppost light. A briny ocean breeze, the smell of cheap beer, the glowing tips of cigarettes. As I wandered from one group to the next, I spotted his tall frame leaning against an old sedan.

We exchanged words, then started shoving each other. Things escalated quickly, and before long we were scrapping on the ground, throwing punches and grappling, our bodies lunging, swinging, and tangling atop the half-lit pavement. The initial surge of adrenaline eventually gave way to a hollow exhaustion, and the fight sputtered into a slog.

The cops arrived within about twenty minutes, swept through the crowd with long black flashlights and alighted on the two of us. We were handcuffed, led into the back of a police van, and driven away to the station to be booked.

The entire incident converges on those first moments in the van’s cage. As I sat quietly on a perforated metal bench, my mind slackened, slowly emptying itself like a jar of honey turned upside down, until all I could think about was the throbbing from my swollen eye and busted lip. Time slowed, the chattering of my peers ebbed into silence, and it grew painfully clear that there was nothing left for me to do.

Instead, a dim awareness of the consequences began filtering into my mind, welling up like slow floodwaters. I’d been irritated—infuriated—by the nerve of this person’s arrogance, a smug hotshot whom I felt was in the wrong constantly  yet swaggered around our school with haughty impunity. Picking a fight with him was my own misdirected way of confronting the injustices of our sheltered enclave, my way of shaking up a social hierarchy I found contemptible. And where did it get me apart from the back of a police van?

As I traced my fingers over my battered face—feeling pockets of dark blood drying over my forehead, around the corner of my mouth, in tangles of knotted blond hair—the futility of the whole affair unfurled itself. My rage would make no difference to this person or others like him, nor would it reverberate across this or any other social sphere. It would certainly do nothing to rectify my own family’s circumstances. My attempt at realizing this act of fugitive justice had simply, predictably, backfired. The “significant damage” would not be repaired, not like this—not here, probably not anywhere.

And yet. I’m quite certain that, if given the choice, I’d do it all over again.