The kids at St. Gerald's school were singing in the choir before the holidays. As he stood in the choir, holding a candle-shaped light, Kevin felt he was doing well although he was counting down the seconds towards his solo performance.

Okay, admittedly he hadn't originally planned on performing in front of the school, but he'd been talked into it by his music teacher, who also ran the choir. For weeks he had been practicing his solo out in the garden, or in the tree house where he could get a bit of privacy without any teasing from his siblings. He had been so dedicated, so determined to do a good job of it he had even asked his teacher for coaching.

While he felt ready, Kevin wished his body wouldn't make him so nervous.

"Christmas tree," the choir chanted, with Kevin adding to the song, "My Christmas tree. Lit up like a star. When I see My Christmas tree Can loved ones be far. Christmas tree, I'm certain. Wherever I roam…"

In the audience, Kate nudged her husband. "Kevin's solo's coming up. Tell Leslie," she hissed.

Peter nodded. Both of them were more than aware of how much work their youngest son had put into this solo, and both were looking forward to seeing the end result. Turning to Leslie he relayed the message. "Kevin's solo's coming up. Tell Frank."

"Okay," Leslie nodded and she turned to her husband, cursing under her breath when he saw him fast asleep and snoring gently. "Frank," she nudged him impatiently. "Frank!"

Ignorant of this, Kevin took a deep, slow calming breath; the butterflies in his stomach had faded as he'd sung, but now his time had come they were coming back. Still, he glanced over at the pianist, who smiled back encouragingly at him. Kevin smiled back warmly and hoped his nerves didn't get the better of him, and he took another deep breath as he began to put the last few weeks of practice to good effect.

"Christmastime means laughter," he sang slowly, "Toboggans in the snow," to Kevin's surprise everyone - including the kids to his side - was beginning to laugh. Ignoring them, he carried on with his solo, guessing one of the kids was doing something, "Caroling together, With faces aglow," the laughter was getting louder, and he saw the music teacher orchestrating the choir stopping and looking at a point near him with a frown on his face. What was happening? Kevin carried on, albeit more slowly while his eyes narrowed when he caught sight of his parents' faces; they looked horrified and stunned.

"Stockings on the mantel," Kevin's eyes darted left and right and in front, but there was nothing there except the other members of the chorus laughing at him, and he realised it was coming from behind him. Slowly he began turning around so he could see what was going on behind him, trailing off, "A wreath on the door, And my merriest Christmas, Needs just one thing more…." Kevin turned around, and to his horror and fury he found Buzz holding two light sticks up behind him; the fat oaf had been playing with them behind Kevin's back the whole time, grinning like the mental moronic caveman he was.

Kevin lost his temper as the smug, laughing idiot nearby started his own solo without a care in the world, but by then Kevin lashed out and fuck the consequences. "Christmas tree, My Christmas tree Lit up…"

Kevin clenched his hand into a fist and punched Buzz right in the chest. Kevin…would never understand what happened next, but with startled and angry cries, everyone started to fall in a heap, like a collection of dominos.

Amid the screaming and cursing, Kevin stood in the chaos, looking around the scene with wide-eyed shock; he hadn't planned on this happening, but what horrified him the most was the nice pianist being knocked off of her seat by a falling wooden Christmas tree near her side of the stage before he could yell out a warning to her. Kevin flinched violently in shock when he heard her gasp even as he swore blind he could hear the sound it made when it hit her head and she fell to the ground off of the stage.

Uncle Frank, the hideous orangutan/hyena hybrid that he was, was still laughing. But Kate McCallister wasn't, and Kevin saw her shoot upright from her seat.

"Kevin!"

'I'm dead!' Kevin thought to himself.

-8-

An hour later after the McCallisters gave hasty and furious apologies to the school and to the other parents before they got back to the house, Kevin and Buzz were both in front of the others in the living room.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," Buzz said at last - here, Kevin had to admit the stupid scum bag had a point; from where Kevin was sitting on one of the love seats and with how Buzz was standing, it was a bit like a courtroom. "I'd like to apologise for whatever displeasure I might have caused you."

Kevin hissed under his breath, "What?"

Did he really think an apology was going to fix this?

Buzz went on, "My prank was immature and ill-timed," he finished.

"Immature or not, it was pretty gol-darn hilarious," Frank laughed while a grinning Fuller smacked him on the back with a similar grin, ignoring the disapproving looks coming to him from nearly everyone, including his own wife and sister-in-law.

Buzz ignored this without any sign of amusement, but there was no doubt in Kevin's mind he wanted to laugh as well. "I'd also like to apologise to my brother." Buzz turned and looked down at Kevin, which was what he had done his entire life. "Kevin, I'm sorry."

Kevin was not moved.

He knew Buzz didn't mean it, that he was only saying what the others wanted him to say, and as he glanced around the room, he saw Jeff was gazing at Buzz angrily, but he dismissed it.

"Oh, Buzz," their stupid mother smiled - actually smiled as if what she had just heard was the most moving thing she had ever heard in her life. "That was very nice."

When everyone clapped, Kevin was stunned. What was it about Buzz that meant he was automatically forgiven for every single thing he had done?

The clapping died down, before Kate turned to Kevin. "Kevin, do you have something to say?"

Kevin couldn't believe it; he had worked long and hard this year to be a more mature kid. He had started reading novels, and anthology collections, doing better at school because he wanted to put the past behind him. And now because of the disaster at the school, Kevin felt as if he had gone five steps back.

Why, so then his fucking brother (he had picked the expletive up from a book) could feel better about himself?

Kevin had lost his temper with Buzz's cruel pranks in the past - all of the family pranked one another, it was a fact of life, but Buzz's jokes were not funny, they were downright cruel while Kevin usually played his pranks to get justice - but he was now starting to wish he'd thrown himself at his older brother like he had the year before, and damn the consequences.

What he didn't understand was why his own siblings who had been on the receiving end of Buzz's pranks and jokes, which were always cruel and crude, buying it.

But then again, what happened to them was different since every single prank Buzz played on Kevin was downright nasty in the extreme.

And…. everyone was buying it? As he looked around the room, staring into one judgmental face after another (his heart lurched painfully when he saw the expressions on Megan and Linnie's faces - he'd honestly thought things between them were better now, clearly not; he would remember that and do nothing the next time Buzz pranked them, he realised Jeff wasn't buying it, as he was sending Buzz a look. But could he trust Jeff?

What was it about this stupid family that made them listen to every single word Buzz said and believe him?

Movement near him made him look up, into Buzz's ghoulish face. "Beat that, you little trout-sniffer," he hissed with a smirk as he pretended to rub his face so he could hide what he was saying.

Kevin was so angry he missed Jeff's look of concern and suspicion, and he leapt off the seat to confront the others.

"I'm not sorry," Kevin angrily declared loudly enough to get his feelings across, absently noticing Megan and Linnie rolling their eyes, but he didn't care, "I did what I did because Buzz humiliated me. And I would do it again if he ever did it to me twice, only next time he won't just receive a punch. But y'know what since he gets away with everything, I let him have it. And since you're all so stupid to believe his lies, I don't care if your Florida trip gets wrecked or not. Who wants to spend Christmas in a tropical climate anyway?"

Rant over, Kevin moved to head out of the room. He needed to get away from here before he said or did something really nasty, and he didn't want to do that.

"Kevin!" Kate called angrily, making him pause.

"You walk outta here, you sleep on the 3rd floor," Peter snapped, his expression full of disappointed anger.

Kevin was not frightened of the threat. He wasn't scared of the 3rd floor or the basement anymore. To him, it didn't make a single difference

"Yeah, with me," Fuller smirked before he gulped down a mouthful of coke noisily.

Did….did Fuller just say that?

Did he really think that was a threat?

In the past, Kevin had always tried to keep the other boy at arm's length, primarily because neither of them liked one another, and likely never would, and Fuller's incontinence problem had only made it worse.

But that just showed how little the other boy knew how much he had changed; while Uncle Frank, Aunt Leslie, and their kids and even his own mother and father, Megan, Linnie, Jeff, and Buzz knew what he'd done the year before, thanks to the police visiting the McCallisters to tell them of how badly injured Marv and Harry were, they did not know he was no longer scared of the world like a little kid.

Kevin had always believed you should fight fire with fire, and he wasn't afraid of getting his hands dirty, but that side of him had become more pronounced over the last year.

To Kevin, Fuller was nothing more than a pathetic daddy's boy. If he came up to Kevin in the middle of the night and pissed all over him, Kevin would likely beat the other boy up so badly he would likely not be able to drink anything through anything other than a straw, and he'd cringe at the sight of a bed for months.

"So, what else is new?" Kevin spat, his temper flaring even more as he glared at Fuller.

But before he could give the other boy a threat, Uncle Frank growled as if he sensed the threat aimed towards his son, "You better not wreck my trip, you little sourpuss. Your dad's paying good money for it."

To the surprise of the whole McCallister clan, Kevin suddenly laughed scornfully, and it became a scary cackle of madness that actually made Megan and Linnie look at him with worry.

"Oh, I wouldn't wanna spoil your fun, Mr. Cheapskate," he spat the deep-rooted feeling he'd had towards Frank forever as he gazed at his uncle with unhidden contempt and loathing before he stormed out, shaking with rage.

He had to get out of there, he had to leave before he said or did something they would all regret….although truthfully he wished he had the time to set up a few of the traps he had used the year before. A dark sneer crossed his face, as he pictured Fuller slipping on some micro machines and sobbing his heart out, while Buzz, his father, and Uncle Frank got paint cans smashing into their faces.

Yeah, that would teach them a lesson you should never forget.

Or even better, find a way of making Buzz burn his hand, the same way Harry's had when he'd tried grasping the front door knob; the mental sound and the picture that filled his mind gave Kevin a nice little fantasy for a few minutes.

Quickly he rushed to his room, desperate to grab a book so that he could concentrate on something other than his anger, and calm down. While he was in his room, Kevin grabbed his alarm clock and his bags and took them upstairs to the attic room. Within five minutes he was reading on the bed in the attic room. He had just started to read Rudyard Kipling's Rikki Tikki Tavi, but the anger from earlier was still there.

It wasn't long before he was lost in the Kipling short story, but while he was calming down the anger wouldn't leave him. He had been humiliated before but not like this.

"They're all a bunch of jerks," he muttered to himself as he lost himself in the pages before the sound of tentative footsteps made him look up into the concerned face of his mother. But he could see she was trying to keep her expression as friendly and as neutral as possible. She was here to talk without judging him.

"Hi. Look, Kevin, last time we tried to take a trip, we had a problem just like this," she began.

Kevin looked up again. "Yeah, with me getting crapped on," Kevin replied, "and that was different from last time, and you know it. Buzz humiliated me in front of the school, and their parents. What did he think was gonna happen, that I would laugh and ignore it? Oh, come on - Get real, mum," he looked down at the pages in the book, mentally marking them off.

Kate recoiled at the anger coming from him, but she caught herself, "I don't care for your choice of words. That's not what happened. Buzz apologized to you."

Kevin looked up again, "No, he didn't. He was just saying that for you. Yeah, he said he was sorry, but then he called me a trout sniffer. He didn't mean it. He was just sucking up to you, like always. Just answer me this, why is Buzz allowed to get away with it? I have gone out of my way to not bother with him, so is it he's allowed to play pranks as terrible as that?"

For a moment, Kevin had hoped his mother would use some of the common sense in her head and think. But no such luck.

"Okay, why don't you just sit up here and think things over?" Kate asked amicably enough although Kevin interpreted it as a sign his mother didn't believe him and would do nothing about it, and that the matter was almost over. "When you're ready to apologise to everyone, you can come down… "

Kate was just turning away, but she jumped in fright when Kevin leapt off of the bed. And she had to hide a gasp. She had seen her son through every moment of his life. She had never seen him so angry before; his face was red, bordering on purple, and his jaw was twisting ferally like a tiger about to fight a bear, and his eyes were flashing madly, and what frightened her, even more, was how tightly he was clenching his fists.

For a hideous moment, she was terrified her son was going to attack her.

But fortunately for Kate, Kevin had no intention of hurting her and if he had known where her thoughts had strayed, he would have been horrified.

"I'm not apologising to Buzz. I'd rather kiss a toilet seat!" Kevin's voice rose with every single word.

"Then stay up here for the rest of the night," Kate ground out, suddenly tired of Kevin.

But that was what Kevin wanted right now. "Okay. I don't want to go down anyway! I can't trust anybody in this family. You know what? If I had my own money, I'd go on my own vacation. Alone, without any of you. And I'd have the most fun of my whole life."

"You got your wish last year," Kate replied calmly when she saw he meant it. "Maybe you will this year." She added, hoping that this would get through to Kevin. But the moment the words were out of her mouth, she saw his anger warring with hope.

"I hope so," Kevin said coldly which hurt her even more, and unbidden a memory came back to her from last year….

"I don't want a new family. I don't want any family…..I don't want to see you again for the rest of my whole life, and I don't want to see anybody else again either."

That retort, spoken in the heat of the moment, had been full of anger, just like this one. Ooh, she could kill Buzz for this! She had enough problems right now, she didn't need this, but she wanted to still make things right between herself and Kevin.

But she could see it was pointless. The moment he was finished, he turned around and sat on the bed and picked up his book, his body language tense as it delivered a final message; get lost.

Once his mother was gone, Kevin grabbed the alarm clock and began to set it; he knew the time his parents wanted to be up, but he decided to be up a couple of hours early. Finished, he went downstairs and locked the attic door from his side in case Fuller did decide to come up here, or if his father wanted to speak, but right now Kevin wanted nothing to do with his family at the moment.