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( CHAPTER NINE: DEBT COLLECTOR ) August, 1976.
❛ what's it gonna be?the money, or your life? ❜
✦
Tyler Cain has always been curious. Ever since his piercing hazel eyes could absorb the sights around him, he began to grow an unusual thirst for the unknown. In 1976, five years after he was brought into this world, it was clear that him and his curiosity, were greatly unwelcome. Even a five-year-old could sense the confusion, the pain, the horror at the sight of his mix-matched features galavanting down the Brooklyn streets.
One would've thought that the culturally diverse backdrop of 1970s New York would've been more accepting. However, Tyler Cain was a curious case himself, the worst kind for that matter, the 'scandalous type'.
"He needs to be in a school where he can be comfortable," Tyler heard his mother talking one night, having crawled out of his bed from a bad dream. He hid himself behind the railings of the faded wooden stairs, fearing that they might see him. "He's fine where he is," his father grumbled back, and Tyler saw his tall, able-bodied father, dark and handsome, even in all his rage, pacing through the kitchen angrily. Tyler flinched at his footsteps, fear beating inside his small, five-year-old body.
"Rodney, Tyler is a fragile boy, we can't put him in Brooklyn Elementary—"
"—Why not?!" He thundered back, staggering to a dramatic stop to look at Tyler's mother in the eye. Her eyes wilted at his loud tone. "You know why," she slowly answered, her soft, deep voice one of the things that Tyler had inherited.
"You don't want to send that boy to a black school, is that it?" That was it. As Tyler's mother put it, he looked too different to attend a predominately black school. She didn't want him to feel alienated, left out. So, she decided that a white elementary school would be a better environment to him.
However, his father thought differently. "Fine, do what you what with him, that cracker ain't my son, anyway," the older man said, and at the time, Tyler Cain didn't know what the words meant. So, he kept it with him for years until he could finally make sense of the sentence. And once he did? Oh, he took that shit personally. Father of the fucking year.
In 1977, Tyler Cain was enrolled in Nelson Elementary School, a few months after his 6th birthday. In September, he stumbled up the steps of the Manhattan school, the fresh exterior causing for his anxious nature to skyrocket. The school was new, expensive, and his mother was pulling double shifts at the office to keep him there. But alas, all that money was a waste.
