Post by adelaide tellier on Dec 5, 2010 4:14:53 GMT -8
[/i] endeavors
name:mo
age: 17
gender: female
writing experience: since I’ve been writing creatively? Maybe nine or ten? I like writing poetry and short stories. I haven’t written any in a while though and I attribute this to a lack of disappointment with my life as it is.
how’d you find us?: i honestly don’t remember! i’m sorry. i was actually just looking for an rp site and i remembered your name and i googled.
a favorite book: arrow of god/things fall apart
other character(s): none yet!
name: adelaide justine tellier
age: 18
citizen upper or lower schooling?: upper schooling
previous residence: st. lucia (two years), greenwich village, NY (sixteen years).
eye color: green
hair color: luster-lacking brown
height: 5’11”
distinguishing features: People tend to note addie’s pouty lips, her mane-like hair, and her big eyes. She’s very gazelle like, in that her body seems to be rather long in all aspects. She has a small dove tattooed in the small of her back, but because no one really gets to look back there, it isn’t a feature one could use to distinguish her from another person on a regular basis.
four good personality traits
four bad personality traits
unfailingly sarcastic
reserved
easily vexed
[/ul]
three quirks
important people
history
Most biographies start with births. Addie’s took place on one of those humid December St. Lucian nights. There was no great enigma surrounding it, no sort of shame that would have forced her devout catholic grandmother to proclaim her a bastard child and refuse to celebrate the ensuing christening as she had one of Addie’s older cousins. Her parents had been married in the church. Her father was a medical doctor and there was no doubt about his capability to support she and her mother. There was little fault to be found in the circumstances of her birth; they were perfect, and all expected that the rest of her life would follow the same suit.
She spent the first two years of her life on her grandfather’s banana plantation, running wildly from invisible tarantulas and bringing laughter to the daily workers. For a child the slowness of daily life in the tropics, in addition to its lush vegetation and the room it thereby provides for imagination, is ideal. For her father, the typical malaria and dengue fever cases that he usually met at work became slightly redundant. At thirty-two he had spent little time away from the island of St. Lucia and he found himself saddled with growing ennui. The solution? On the last page of her first baby photo-album, there is a picture of Addie reaching over her father’s shoulder, her cheeks ridden with angry tears, her mouth apparently giving way to pathetic screams as she is parted from the rest of her family. Georges Tellier had procured a job in a renowned hospital within the borough of Manhattan. Here was Addie leaving the deep tones of St. Lucian patois, the first language she had ever known, leaving vibrant festivals, the enclave that was her grandfather’s banana plantation, trips to the local market with her aunts, nights of dancing to soca music, the relative ease of life in general, because her father wanted to meet patients with worse medical dilemmas. At such a young age, even she perceived something wrong with the situation.
They should have been grateful. Most immigrants don’t find their move to be that facile of a process. Adelaide can’t even seem to remember the adjustment period. Without those memories that she actually adopted from her mother’s account of the process, she would recall the situation like this; “one day I was speaking patois and playing with banana leaves, and the next day I had forgotten what patois was and I was trying to play with snow before the street sweepers came and took it away.” Somewhere on that timeline of formative years, St. Lucia was sucked out her and all that was left were the memories.
Most children don’t remain the way that they were when they were four. Addie’s personality seemed to transition with the change in climate. Her smiles became increasingly rare, and over the years she came to value solitude above anything else. Her parents didn’t have any other children, for reasons unknown to Addie. In fact, it seemed that her father became increasingly distant from she and her mother. In a way, he became a background decoration. He was always working and to Addie, he seemed to be only a source from which money could be obtained. He paid for her ballet lessons, her piano lessons, her expensive private schooling, and he never seemed to have the time to see what became of all of these investments. Her life became hopelessly regular and she found herself slowly falling off of the edge. She was free to pursue whichever new interest she desired; which meant that she played the harp for two years and then quit, took tennis lessons and then quit, took knitting classes and sewing classes. Today, she happens to have a variety of very base skills. Her mother says that Adelaide was bent on working with her hands in order to force her attention away from whatever turmoil was going on in her head.
But what kind of mental turmoil could a teenage girl who had everything be trying to avoid? When the solitude that she so desperately sought became so great that Addie spoke to almost no one, therapy was added unto Mr. Tellier’s expenses. It wasn’t as if it was unnecessary. While other girls were having sleepovers, worrying about boys, experimenting with what flirtation was like, Addie seemed to be perpetually hunched over knit work, or sewing, or piano. The thing that irked her mother most was that Adelaide would not speak. Yet, every therapist she saw said that she was fine, that it was just a phase, that it had to do with the onslaught of puberty and her height. It was the first time western science had failed them. Her mother was perhaps too backward to believe that her daughter’s silence was simply the result of being uncomfortably tall or because she was beginning to grow breasts. As a last resort, Mrs. Tellier sent her daughter back to St. Lucia with the hope that constant sunshine, warm weather and the rest of her family would be her elixir.
It was. Addie can still vividly remember the greeting she received at the airport. The crowd of faces, so similar to her own, smiling back at her with tears, was perhaps the greatest emblem of love that she had ever seen. For so many years, she had found her life void of this sort of emotion. Though no one ever found out exactly what the root of the problem was, it didn’t take long for her to find her voice again. Amongst a family of story tellers, midday dancers, and comedians, she found it difficult not to speak. In her mind, St. Lucia is always associated with laughter and color and everything vivid. When the summer was over and she returned home, her mother noted a remarkable change. From then on, she spent all of her summers on that island, paying homage to its trees, its clear blue water, the pulse that beat through its people.
Her appearance at l’Academie d’Ouvrard truly happened to be a coincidence. Everyone assumed that she was going to follow in her father’s footsteps and choose to attend the University of the West Indies. It was supposed to be an adventure really. There was a letter in the mail, she decided to apply, she was accepted. With her base knowledge of French language and culture, she didn’t expect the transition to be an easy one. Day by day, she gets by nevertheless.
if you could be anywhere, where would you be? “Where else but St. Lucia? I swear, that island heals me.”
character’s play-by: chrishell stubbs
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mercier
arcséne
ethan richardson, caden baynham