The Parkers
Iwas halfway through second period arithmetic when the pain first announced itself, not as a warning or a slow discomfort I could politely ignore, but as a sharp bright stab in the lower right side of my abdomen, quick and precise, like something inside me had been waiting years to fail and had chosen this particular Tuesday in Mr. Henson’s classroom to do it. At first I did what I had been trained to do.
I pretended nothing was happening. That was not a medical decision. It was a survival instinct.
In the Parker house, pain was not treated as information from your body. Pain was a request, and requests were dangerous. Requests made people look up from whatever they were doing and decide whether you were worth the interruption.
If the pain belonged to my younger half sister Samantha, the whole house shifted around it. If Sam had a headache, my mother dimmed the lights and Greg drove to CVS and everyone spoke in soft voices. If I had a fever, my mother stood in the doorway with folded arms and asked if I was sure I was not just trying to get out of something.
By eighteen, you learn the rules of your own home even when nobody admits there are rules. Mine were simple. Need less.
Want less. Hurt quietly. My name is Ethan Parker.
My mother, Kelly, got pregnant with me during her junior year of college. My biological father, David Miller, existed in our house only as a story, and the story changed depending on who was listening. Sometimes he had vanished.
Sometimes he had been dangerous. Sometimes he had been selfish and immature. I knew almost nothing about him except that I looked like him, the same dark eyes, the same stubborn chin, and that this resemblance seemed to be the original sin I carried into every room.
My mother once told a neighbor at a cookout, laughing, “It’s like living with my ex’s face every day.” Greg laughed too. Greg always laughed when my mother found a way to make me smaller. Greg Parker entered our lives when I was eight.
He worked in commercial flooring and believed that sarcasm counted as leadership. He was not violent in the way people imagine when they hear the word stepfather. He did not throw me through walls.
He specialized in making cruelty sound like common sense. “Don’t be soft.” “Stop playing victim.” “You’re just like your dad.” That last line worked because it carried a whole mythology with it. My father was supposedly selfish, therefore my needs were selfish.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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