When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
FOR CALEB PARKER'S FOURTH birthday, his father got him a brother. He vividly remembered asking for a dog from his parents and as he stomped on his birthday hat and squashed the beautiful three-tiered birthday cake all over his mother's ugly wall-papered walls ready to throw the biggest toddler-tantrum his father has ever seen, his eyes landed on the sickly pale boy standing by the door. His eyes were blue and so was his heart.
Caleb remembered the distant forlorn look in his brother's eyes. The boy couldn't be more than six but something about him appeared to be older—as if he's been through a lifetime of grief in his barely six years of existence. The boy looked broken in a way no six-year-old is supposed to look like. So, Caleb Parker did what he'd do with his pet puppy, he loved his brother till he couldn't anymore.
He remembered following Clyde around the house. From a young age he knew that Clyde Parker was a man of a very few words even when he had a lot to say. So, they didn't talk. But Clyde Parker, his older brother, he was always there playing his part, protecting him from the monsters under his bed and the ones in the real world out to get him. Caleb Parker didn't understand why his mother couldn't look at Clyde and why his father could never love his brother like he loved him. But he had learned from his past encounters to not ask. What he couldn't understand was simply not meant for him to understand, or that's what he was taught.
But that was before the word 'bastard' came into the picture, before his parents started screaming and breaking things and his heart every night. Before, the fights started and his father stayed away in his business trips and his mother would take off for a vacation and not show up for weeks at an end.
Suddenly, Clyde Parker wasn't Caleb's brother anymore, he was just an intruder in his life. Clyde Parker walked in and tore the picture-perfect image of his family into shreds.
It was then, the love seeped out of his heart and hatred and anger filled in the spaces. When Caleb Parker was 14 years old, he fell under bad influence and became chummy with Johnny Wheeler, the town's notorious dealer. With new friendships came new addictions. And his downfall shortly followed. But like always, Clyde Parker had taken the fall for him.
His brother, had to bear the brunt of his bad decisions. But it's not like Caleb had left him with any other choice in that regard. Caleb's grueling hatred for his brother and Clyde Parker's rebellious streak made it easy for Caleb to pin the blame on him. On the last day of summer'16, while the rest of Avery Field's teenagers were busy getting blackout drunk in pool parties, Clyde Parker was sent off to a rehab far away into the outskirts of the town for his dearest little brother had planted his stash of coke right under his pillow and his father came sniffing.
Just like that, Clyde Parker lost two years of his life and Caleb Parker lost his conscience.
•°•°•
Clyde Parker was really trying to quit smoking. He didn't know when this urge to let go of a habit he'd had since he hit puberty, started but perhaps it was when Dawn Marshal would stare at the cigarette between his lips with utter disgust or when she had whispered oh so coyly, "Youseem to be incapable of functioning without a Marlboro pack. Do your habits control you or do you control them?" He hated it when she was being a know-it-all, talking as if she was carrying all the wisdom in the universe. But it was one of the reasons he loved her too.
