You really need to work on your writing. Don’t get me wrong, the premise of your story does sound very interesting but your tenses switched in and out so many times I didn’t make it past the prologue.
Prologue
• Jen also remarked how her dad was still in the states
Should be ‘the States’, as it refers to a country
These next three errors are in this one big paragraph that I think you should split, so that the description of the mother has it’s own paragraph, to make reading a little easier
• You decided to also go with the white sash to go around your waste
Waist, not waste
• Hopefully you won’t get any cake on it or Mom will have your head.
Should be, ‘Hopefully you wouldn’t get any cake on it or Mom would have your head,’ as it’s in the past tense.
• Again, this sentence should be in the past tense
She’s starting to develop bags under her eyes and she seemed to be more tired than usually. Also, ‘usual’ fits better than ‘usually’
• Finishing her conversation, she turns her attention back to you.
You might want to elaborate that she was finishing the conversation that she was having on the phone.
Why does the mother refer to Jennifer as ‘Jen’? Why would she be on nickname terms with a child her daughter is barely friends with?
• Jennifer is a jerk. She was saying how dad Shouldn’t ‘dad’ be capitalised, like ‘Mom’?
Your tenses are all over the place again on the rest of this page, and I think you really need to start separating the big walls of text especially the dialogue
I’ll show you what I mean, by splitting up (and editing) the whole Mr. Parsley story (by the way, would a seven year old kid, really be able to distinguish between all different type of the same flower? Like I get knowing the difference between a tulip and a Venus fly trap, but five types of geraniums? Really?):
Jennifer’s house was just outside of New York City–so it was going to take a while to get there. On the way, you stared out the window watching everything going by.
The houses in your neighborhood looked all the same, each being two-stories tall with a large yard. You noticed Mr. Parsley cutting the grass. He usually acted like a stereotypical old grouch, but you were able to get to his soft side when you helped him pull weeds out of his garden last summer.
Mr. Parsley was genuinely impressed when he heard you talking about your own flower garden and how you were hoping to have petunias and peonies later that year. He then took you around back and showed you his greenhouse. Inside, your marvelled at all the different plant species he was growing in there.
From where you stood, you could see tulips, geraniums and even a few Venus fly traps–and many other species of plants, of course–all alive and thriving in Mr. Parsley’s little piece of heaven.
The following spring, you, Mr. Parsley, and Dad made regular trips to the local home improvement store to buy flower seeds so that you could start planting a garden of your own.
Of course, that was before Dad was deployed.
I didn’t read much more of your story–sorry!–because overall I think you really need to revise your grammar and tenses and work on making your story easier to read!
One question though, why does WWIII seem so similar to WWII? Or is it just that I haven’t read far enough?
