Work Text:
Oh, sure, Max never had it bad. His parents didn't beat him. He wasn’t starving. He lived in a nice house in the suburbs with his parents. They were immigrants- Priya and Rahul Sodhi had boarded a boat to america with nothing but the clothes on their backs and fifty american dollars. His father told him this, over and over again. His parents loved paraphrasing their experiences in america. How his father had worked seventeen hours a day when his mother was pregnant to keep them in a dingy apartment. How his mother used to wash clothes for a rich, white family.
Was it any real surprise that Max turned out to be a nihilistic psychopath?
Max had always been able to read minds. It came as more of a shock when he realized that other people couldn’t. Up until the first day of school, his ability came as natural as breathing. He had never really thought about it as strange, or abnormal.
Then he told Suzie P. about Sharon Q’s crush on her. At the age of five crushes weren’t really anything big. But those were boy-and-girl crushes. See, he lived in a relatively conservative small town. He was already the weird indian kid. Then he was the weird indian kid who was lying about Sharon Q. being a fag. See, Sharon Q was a mildly popular girl. He got a lot of… lashback, from his fellow classmates.
(Sixteen years later Sharon Q will run off and marry a strange girl from New York who passed through their town with the Renaissance Fair. But no one knew that at the time)
So, at the age of five Max becomes a social pariah. A freak.