KINGSTON, alexia

[alexia kingston]

alexia philippa kingston

name: Katja
age: nearly nineteen
gender: female
writing experience: Aeons…
how’d you find us?: I hid in Melinda’s suitcase during both moves. Shh, don't tell!
a favorite book: The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
other character(s): Julianna Sellenger, Neil Balcombe, Lucas Murray, others


name: Alexia Philippa Kingston
age: 21
citizen? upper or lower schooling?: upper
previous residence: Ipswich, England
eye color: green
hair color: naturally blonde, though it has been through various stages of dyeing, as well as a period of baldness due to repeated chemotherapy treatments
height: 5’7
distinguishing features: a large amount of freckles scattered across her body and a large, raised scar beginning on her left side and continuing across the left half of her back

four good personality traits

four bad personality traits

three quirks

important people

history

Alexia’s story does not begin with a happily ever after, nor has one ever been inserted at a later date. The story of her conception is hardly a romantic one. Rebekah Randal and Philip Kingston met at a bar in Ipswich, England and spent a total of three meaningless nights together over the next month. After Rebekah announced her pregnancy, Philip quickly lost interest. He was a free spirit, a man who held no solid profession and never committed to anything but his own desires. He spent years of his life travelling, living out of a worn pack, picking up odd jobs along the way. This was how he was content to live his life. He had no room in his life for a wife or a child, nor did he choose to make any.

It was only by incessant demands from Rebekah that Philip came around at all during Alexia’s childhood. His visits were limited to one or two Saturdays per year. The early years of her childhood were filled with questions. Why was her father primarily absent in her life? Didn’t he love her? Why did her bother coming around at all if only to give her a present from an exotic location and take her to ice cream or play a game of cards before disappearing once more? As a small girl, she would often beg him not to leave her, throwing temper tantrums in attempt to coerce him into remaining. Invariably, he always left. His last visit was a mere three weeks after her fifth birthday, a day she celebrated with her favourite stuffed animals, an imaginary cake and tea party, and wistful glances out the window while her mother spent a day out with a man she had met only once and would never meet again. Her father’s final visit was unremarkable in itself, though it came to be a day that Alexia replayed in her head often over the following years as she attempted to hold on to his memory while simultaneously wondering if she had done something to chase him away. He had promised before leaving that he would return soon and disentangled his leg from her firm grasp before walking out of her life forever. She spent every Saturday for the next sixteen months by the window, eagerly awaiting his arrival. He never came.

Her childhood was both uneventful and lonely, spent in relative solitude. She was cast into the role of mini-adult, cleaning up after her mother’s wild nights, learning to cook at a relatively young age, even going so far as to pick up odd jobs around the neighbourhood beginning at eight years of age. Her mother was continuously busy bringing a number of men into the house, each time declaring , “He’s the one, babydoll.” Invariably, each time she would end up in various states of emotional turmoil when the one turned out to be just another sleazebag (as Alexia took to calling them). Meanwhile, Alexia did what she could to keep their small family of two together, taking upon herself the responsibilities of a mother while Rebekah played the role of a rebellious teenager. It was role reversal at its finest, an exchange that neither took the time to speak of. There was no point, after all. Each knew their place well, and Rebekah, at least, had no desire whatsoever to change.

With time came resentment. By her teenage years, Alexia held no affection for the woman who had given birth to her, merely contempt and pity. She had become the backbone of their duo, picking her mother up when she fell only to look down not long after and find her laying in the same untidy heap as before. It was a never ending circle of destruction, at least on Rebekah’s part. Over time, Alexia simply stopped trying to change the woman’s mind. She began to regard her as a child, one who needed coddling—or a good whooping, but she was not about to take that task upon herself. Naïveté was the role her mother played and it had no place in Alexia's own life. She donned responsibility instead, carrying it upon heavy shoulders. She began to wonder if there was such a thing as happiness.

She was thirteen when Mark came into her life. Secondary school had just begun. She played the role of the quiet, studious girl who easily faded into the background. She was never late, whether in terms of attendance or assignments, always among the first to answer questions but never speaking out of turn. She was, for all intents and purposes, the ideal student. On the surface, she appeared to have everything together, regardless of how far from the truth this was. Halfway through the year, Markus moved into the flat beside hers with his single mother and three younger brothers. He played the role of the class clown—though this was an act she typically witnessed only in the hallways, as she was the grade below him—the comic relief that even teachers found it difficult to resist. He made friends easily, quickly growing in popularity amongst their peers. By appearance, he was everything that Alexia was not. In the end, perhaps this was the very thing that brought them together.

They met for the first time on a rainy Friday in February, dreadfully cold—too cold, in fact, to be outside for any length of time. However, outside Alexia was, as her mother had taken over the flat with another of her boyfriends, ordering Alexia away to “Take a walk or something, darling.” She had opted, instead, to remain huddled under the awning of their small porch, textbook in lap, hoping that the rain would ease up soon and the evening would pass quickly. This was how Mark found her when he returned home from his part-time job. Despite her insistences that she was just fine, thank you very much, he urged her to come inside, only for a while, and just to stay dry. What followed was a night of fun—something she was not entirely familiar with at the time—with Mark and his brothers. They watched movies, ate junk food, and generally made fools of themselves. Alexia felt very at ease in the Waldgrave home, even after Mark’s mother returned home, ordered the younger boys to bed and Mark to his room, and proceeded to have a lengthy chat with Alexia about her life. It was surprisingly easy to bring the information into the open, allow Felicity Waldgrave to make her up a bed on the couch, and remain in that place through the night.

Over the next few years, she spent more time with the Waldgraves than she did at home. Mark quickly became her closest friend—and she his—and his family held even a fond place in her heart. For the first time in her life, she had a support system, people to carry her through when things grew rough in a way that her mother never had. This would turn out to be much more necessary than any of them would have expected, least of all Alexia. Looking back, she can now say that, when her world came crashing down, there were people beside her to ensure that she did not collapse along with it.

The illness began as a simple cold in the middle of her sixteenth year. That is, it only seemed to be a cold, with bouts of coughing and slight difficulty breathing. No one thought that it was anything to be concerned about at the beginning. However, as time progressed, the symptoms only grew worse to the point where Alexia was out of school for a full week and a half, coughing up blood and spending the majority of her time curled up beneath her bedsheets, in too much pain to even eat. It was Felicity who made her an appointment with the doctor and drove her to the office, held her hand through the tests, and drove her back home. It was Markus who gently rocked her in his arms when she heard the results, smoothing her hair and promising her that it would be alright. At the time, however, it was too much for either of them to actually believe.

She spent much of the next two years in the hospital being treated for bronchioloalveolar carcinoma, a form of lung cancer. Despite encouragement from the Waldgraves and her doctors, she remained fully convinced that she was not going to survive. It did not help matters any that, though Mark spent nearly every moment he was not in school or work by her side and his family came to visit often, her mother never once came to visit her in the hospital. She remained distant and relatively uncaring even when Alexia was home, leading her to eventually move in temporarily with the Waldgraves. If she was going to die, she decided, she might as well do so amongst people who actually cared for her. However, this did not end up being the case, for, two surgeries and various bouts of chemotherapy later, she went onto remission.

During rehabilitation, she began to discuss with Markus her thoughts on why she had survived. Whether fate or God or some other force had saved her, she did not know, but she was not about to let it go to waste. She began her own “bucket list”, filling pages upon pages with things she would like to do before she died. Number one was to see the Eiffel Tower. Mark agreed to come with her to Paris; they pooled their funds to pay for tickets and flew out together. However, she fell in love with France during their two-week long trip and insisted on returning one day. After much discussion with Mark and Felicity, she decided to attend university in France, provided she could attend on scholarship. She applied to a number of schools, ultimately ending up with the Académie d'Ouvrard as her final option. Mere months later, she was on the second plane ride of her life, experiencing true freedom for the first time. She had been given a second chance, and she intended to take full advantage of it, regardless of what anyone else might think.

if you could be anywhere, where would you be? “Right where I am. The fact that I’m still alive means that I have a purpose here. Maybe I don’t know exactly what that is yet, but I’m determined to figure out. But for now, I’m happy here.”

character’s play-by: Anne Vyalitsyna

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[headmaster.]

allemagne
arscene
to be determined