someone choose who's left and who's leaving

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 01:48:15 GMT

NAME. Laurel Wolanski
D.O.B. February 18th, 1990
GRADE. Junior (11th)
GPA. .93
EXTRACURRICULARS. Beyond getting into fights, Laurel doesn't seem to have much going on outside of the minimum she's required to do (and often not even that, as her grades show).

DESCRIPTION. Laurel is 5'9" and skinny as hell, built out of angles and pure spiteful refusal to act like the twig she is. She has short flipped brown hair, blue-gray eyes, fairly sharp features, and light skin. She wears a lot of dark eyeliner on a regular basis, along with chunky rings and generally a locket of some kind on a cord around her neck. Her wardrobe consists of faded jeans, scuffed workboots, wifebeaters, and a treasured replica bomber's jacket, with a few other pieces of leather and tight cotton shirts carefully hidden from her aunt. She takes up as much space as she can at all times; sprawling in chairs, gesturing widely with her arms when she speaks, and otherwise figuring out ways to be obviously obnoxious. Her voice, used frequently, is throaty and purposefully more than a little sexual.

PERSONALITY. Laurel is a brassy, for lack of a better term to sum her up; she's cocky to the extreme, walks with a swagger, and she's too cool for anyone or anything, or so she presents herself. She acts like a mixture of juvenile delinquents from the fifties onward, but underneath that she carries a core better suited to a screaming protestor - she hasn't has a chance to bloom into it yet, but eventually she will. Even now, she sticks up for people on a personal level. This doesn't make her a white knight as much as it makes her a thug, and she doesn't cling to illusions about that, either. She's also making a determined effort to sleep her way through St. Jude's female high school population, and hitting on every girl she meets is having mixed results so far.

She's something of a mess, obviously enough, but how much of a mess is something she keeps strictly to herself. She doesn't talk to her aunt or her guidance counsellor, or she does and she lies as outrageously as possible, and the only one who has a real idea of what her problems are is her brother; mainly because he was there, because she doesn't talk to him either. She has cluster headaches with varying frequencies, which started at a young age and have reoccured every few months since, and entertains more than a few issues with depression and sucidal impulses. The more slowly self-destructive activities she engages in include frequent binges of going out to get hammered, laid, and beaten up, in whatever order that happens, and challenging everyone she meets in hundreds of ways whether it's right or not. She doesn't think coathanger jokes are funny. She has a great deal of trouble expressing affection directly to anyone, and lashes out at people who are nice to her; in her mind, no one could do something like that without ulterior motives.

She's been considering leaving her aunt pretty much since she arrived in December, and now that she's eighteen the only thing stopping her is her father's promise to eventually come by so they can get to know each other ("After everything is secure, Laurel.") and her brother. She could bring him with her, but she doesn't think he could make it out there, even with her help. More importantly, if something she's in denial about, she's not sure he'd come with her if she asked him to, and she's afraid to go without him. This is, of course, a secret.

HISTORY. Katrine Wolanski was eighteen when she joined the Children of God in with her two year old twins, and twenty when she left both the cult and her children behind in the care of one of their 'step-fathers' who'd adopted them to try to keep her there. Even though she left regardless, they were still pleased to have such bright, attractive children with them, even though they tended to be moody.

When Laurel tried to run away at twelve - the age she was considered an adult within the cult, as it happens - she only made it one town over before she was recovered and brought back, screaming and biting the whole way.

When she was five months pregnant at fifteen, an 'aunt' caught her in the bathroom with her pants around her ankles and a broken dowel in her hand, and she was confined to her room for the next four months, and delivered her daughter at home. She hasn't seen her child since, the baby having been taken to Brazil (or so she was told) shortly after the delivery, what with Laurel being such a troubled lamb that she couldn't raise her child properly.

When she was seventeen, the father she'd never known about arranged for them to end up with the aunt no one had told her or her brother about to avoid political scandal, and now Laurel's doing her best to put all of her past behind her. The details of her upbringing aren't known to more than a handful of people, and she refuses to talk about her pregnancy with anyone, and has sworn Stefan to secrecy as well - her aunt has suspicions, but no way of knowing for sure.

Her household currently is one marked by extreme tension between everyone living there, but most noticeably her and and her aunt; Laurel thinks Olena is a 'close-minded cunt' and Olena thinks Laurel is a 'cocky little slut'. Screaming fights are a common feature of their evening's entertainments, and after the few months they've spent together it's become apparent that they're never really going to get along. She treats Stefan almost as charmingly, with the exception of the fact that she does feel a deep, guilty loyalty towards him. Towards her distant father, Laurel feels a lot more hope than she really should, but he's one of the few people she entertains pleasant illusions about, not hurt by the fact she sees him as a savior from her life in the cult.

FAMILY. Stefan Wolanski, 18, is her brother, closer to her than anyone and terrifying to her for just that reason. Again, their relationship is complicated; she usually treats him like dirt when she's not ignoring him, and thinks he's still too tied to the Children of God, but if anyone else so much as breathes a bad word against him they're likely to end up with her fist in their face. Olena Wolanski, 42, is her maternal aunt, an iron-jawed Catholic who never approved of her sister's life choices and definitely doesn't approve of her psychotic daughter. Her parents, Katrine Wolanski and Michael Halliday, are most notable in their absence; Katrine was a loving, if flighty, mother before she vanished, and her father is a staunch Republican aiming himself for great political heights in Washington. Her daughter, Ruth, is almost three now, and that's all Laurel knows about her.

OTHER. Nothing much, if you don't count being traumatized by being raised by an abusive cult. This Laurel is fully human, even when she doesn't act like it.

MUN NAME. Liz!
CONTACT INFO. double raincoat

do it do it or die

someone choose who's left and who's leaving