Meeting the Payton family
Clay and Emmalie Payton were the proud parents of Rayne Payton their eldest daughter who at the bright age of fourteen planned to graduate high school early and get a teachers degree so she could one day be an elementary school teacher hopefully in history but science would've been her second choice.
Parker and Kit Payton were the young identical twins; well at least they were identical when they were ten. Parker though a girl kept her hair cut just as short as her younger by three minutes brother's they both liked to dress exactly the same just to drive their parents crazy. No matter what Emmalie tried she never could get Parker to wear a dress or anything girly. It wasn't until Parker was fourteen that the other children at school realized she was a girl. Kit was exactly like her though where Parker was docile and tended to let people walk over her, and always think the best of them, (with the exception of her family members of course) Kit was strong willed, sometimes arrogant and almost always cruel to everyone except Parker.
Their family was like any other family. They fought, they bickered and they almost always took a joke too far. But at the end of the day they always hugged and made up.
Tragedy struck their small Texas town on Parker and Kit's tenth birthday, Kit had been away at boarding school excited to finally be heading home for the winter holidays and to see his family again after three boring months of endless schooling.
Emmalie and her two daughters had gone out to the big city nearly four hours away to try and find the perfect gift for Kit. Walking around for hours they had become helplessly lost in the unfamiliar city. It had become dark as they trekked deeper into the city, trying to ask for help from people they met on the side streets, the people kept sending them different directions or just shrugged their shoulders.
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The next day Clay was taken to a hospital to find his two baby girls in hospital beds and his wife hooked up to life support in the ICU wing.
Emmalie never recovered.
And try as he might Clay couldn't keep his family together much longer.
Rayne was affected the most. By the time she was sixteen she had dropped out of school and started drinking on a nightly basis. Soon many different drugs made an appearance in her life. Which had then lead to an attempt at armed robbery. Of course her friends had left her to the police and she was sent to a disciplinary school for troubled teens. She lasted two months before getting ahold of some over the counter drugs which she immediately overdosed on.
Parker was a smart child, possibly just as smart as Rayne. But not many could tell. She finally let her hair grow but it was long and oily hanging around her face hiding her dull green lifeless eyes. Her appearance was not her fault; that could easily be blamed on the bucket load of depressants she had to take every night before bed. Or the psychiatrist she had to see every day after school, or the teasing from other students or the physical bullying that soon followed. She trudged through seven years of her life with her shoulders hunched and her head bowed until she was seventeen and the doctors were sure she'd do just fine without the medications although the visits to the psychiatrist were still very much needed.
Kit still went to his prestigious all boys' boarding school as if nothing had ever happened. Though he had become noticeably crueler and extremely uncaring he threw himself into his schooling and filled his free time with girls and booze. Anytime he ever went home he stayed at his friend's house and only spent time with a half there Parker.
