Calista Carpenter

[Brackie]

Name: Calista Carpenter
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12th
School: Saint Editha Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Makeup, partying, travelling

Appearance: Calista stands at 169cm, 60kg, with a figure thinner than most but still carrying a bit of unwanted weight. Her skin is rather fair and sensitive, prone to outbreaks and problems when not taken care of, but Calista is rather diligent in her own skincare and rarely lets this happen. Her face is oval-shaped, with a rounded chin sitting beneath slightly thin lips, and her cheeks are slightly rounded, accentuated by smooth laugh lines. Her nose is of regular size, soft, and sits between a pair of protruding eyes, brown in colour. Her brows are slightly thicker and longer than your regular teenage girl, and her forehead is slightly smaller than average as well. Calista’s hair is chestnut brown, slightly wavy, reaches the middle of her back, and is often worn naturally, unless she is at work or doing something which requires her hair out of her face.

Unless she is gearing up for a night out, Calista’s clothing and style of dress is fairly casual, having a very thrown-on feel to it. Depending on the weather she opts for ensembles that include either short shorts, spaghetti string tops and plain sneakers, or long pants, long coats, and knee-high boots, and trying to look as good as possible for a party regardless of how good or bad the weather is. Both her earlobes are pierced with blue-gemmed stud earrings, and her wrists tend to have many thin bangles on them. She has a relaxed stance, although she abhors slouching, as it would ruin her already diminutive posture. On the day that she was taken, Calista was wearing full school uniform, including a white, collared, long-sleeved shirt, a striped green and blue tie, a forest green blazer, a grey knee-length skirt, white socks and black shoes.

Biography: Calista was born to Sarah and Christopher Carpenter, a beauty therapist and bricklayer respectively. She is the oldest of three siblings, including Celeste who is six years her junior, and Cody, three years Celeste’s junior. Sarah and Christopher met each other in high school, married soon after, and started a family not long after that.

Calista was a rather outgoing, wild, impulsive child, always doing things just to find out what happened and worrying about the consequences later. She never had trouble making friends, and was often surrounded by them constantly. While her impulsive nature usually meant more harm to herself than others, such as the time she climbed to the top of her playground’s monkey bars, jumped off, tried to stick the landing, and ended up breaking her arm, it sometimes resulted in conflict with other children, and as such she would get in fights at school when she didn’t like that one of her fellow schoolchildren was speaking and she would simply go up to them and hit them to get them to stop. When this became a frequent issue, to the point the school principal would call Sarah and Christopher every month, her parents began to harshly punish her every time she acted up in an effort to get her to stop. This was successful, and her physical altercations became far less frequent - if they did happen, they were only when she herself was physically attacked or provoked, and if she could help it she would do it out of the eyeline of teachers or those who would tell on her.

Calista’s impulsive nature meant that she often started hobbies and sports on a whim and gave them up just as quickly, which led to a long, eclectic line of interests. Over the course of her schooling, all before she turned twelve, Calista tried out tennis, table tennis, tee ball, soccer, cricket, basketball and netball. Most of these would not last a month, although she was rather good at them, and the only real reason she seemed to drop them was a brief lack of interest. The longest she ever stuck with a sport was soccer, which she played for three years from when she was nine years old to twelve years old. This is similar to how she would run her life, as it would take a lot of focus and personal determination to remain interested in a lot of the hobbies she maintained when she was an older teenager.

It was around the time she was twelve that Sarah and Christopher’s relationship began to fall apart. The constant stress of both raising three children and the various war-related going ons of the country meant that they would often take out their fears and worries on each other, rather than dealing with it in any constructive way. This also meant that their marriage began to rapidly deteriorate and they eventually divorced not long after Calista’s 12th birthday. Christopher disappeared from his ex-wife and childrens’ lives, which in turn forced Calista to take on sudden and unexpected responsibility in helping raise her two younger siblings.

This sudden responsibility meant that Calista no longer had time for after-school hobbies or sports - instead, she now had to make sure her siblings were cared for, as a single-income household meant that they were too poor to afford daycare or a babysitter for Cody. Nearly every day after school consisted of traveling to her mum’s work with Celeste, picking up Cody, taking them both home and looking after them until Sarah came home from work, after which she would need to take care of her own responsibilities and schoolwork, leaving little time for her own enjoyment. This was a regularity in Calista’s life for the next three to four years, until Sarah eventually courted a new boyfriend, Ian Morris, who would help out around the house and take some of the responsibility off of Calista’s shoulders. While Calista does have a few responsibilities with taking care of Celeste and Cody, she no longer bears the full brunt of it. Also, while she regained the personal time that could have leant itself to taking sports back up, she had lost the fleeting passion she once had for it and never sought to start them back up again.

While she didn’t miss being one of the core carers for her siblings, the sudden sharing of this responsibility meant that she had a lot more free time than she was used to, and as such she began to go out with her friends a lot more. This initially began as simply hanging out after school at one of their less chaotic places, but eventually upgraded into loitering in the park after dark, and eventually attending parties where she barely knew half of the people. When she was 15 years old she had her first alcoholic drink at one of these parties, a large mouthful of cheap boxed white wine, and though she was initially disgusted, she liked how the alcohol made her feel afterwards. She attended several of these parties and had enough alcohol to get sick at all of them, and was eventually found out by her mother, who chewed her out for being a bad example for her brother and sister. Calista tried to argue that she deserved the freedom to do what she wanted, but Sarah wouldn’t budge and refused to let her attend any more parties. However, over time Calista managed to negotiate Sarah down to letting her party if she got a job, to which Sarah was quick to hire her as a weekend trainee at the salon she worked at.

Working at her mother’s salon was tedious, mostly delegated to, at most, sweeping and retrieving things for the beauticians, but the fact she got paid was rewarding to her. Working there also had the added benefit of Calista beginning to care more about her own looks and skin. Initially too busy and too apathetic to dress herself up, worry about makeup, or prevent acne outbreaks, Calista learned from her mother’s work what someone could do with a simple skin regime and light layer of makeup. She began to take better care of herself and started becoming interested in her mother’s work, which in turn helped her become more confident in how she looked, a problem Calista had had since she became a teenager due to the frequency of her acne and skin problems.

Working at her mother’s salon resulted in mother and daughter becoming closer, and the slight extra income meant that the Carpenters had more time to spend together as a family, as well as Ian, and they often went on trips to places around the county, occasionally further. Calista had not traveled much as a child, spending the vast majority of her time in Bellington, so trips beyond the village were a new experience for her. She began to frequent these trips as often as she could, and over time began to grow a sense of wanderlust, wanting to travel beyond the borders of her country. However, the state of the world aligned with the UK’s strict screening procedures and her own relative poverty meant that it would likely never come to pass, although Calista never stopped hoping. She keeps a board in her room posted with pictures of overseas locales untouched by the warmongering United States, printed off at school or taken from old magazines, and one day hopes to visit all of them, however unlikely a goal.

Calista’s family is fairly right-leaning, frequent consumers of tabloid press and other such publications. As a working class lower-middle income bracket family, they believe that the left-wing political parties are snobbish and stuck-up, and out of touch with families like themselves. Sarah has fairly hardline views on non-white immigrants entering the country, believing them to be sponges on the system and taking benefits away from hard working citizens who were born in the country, and a lot of her views bled into Calista’s views. While not outwardly bigoted, Calista tends to parrot a lot of her mother’s thoughts without question, and also tends to use a lot of coded language when discussing sensitive topics, language she’s been taught from near birth. Her friends also tend to share a lot of the same thoughts, and as such she's never really challenged on them to any meaningful extent.

Calista today is an impulsive, argumentative but caring girl who likes to enjoy herself on occasion. She cares a lot for her siblings to the point that she tends to put aside her own plans if it means helping them out, even though she doesn’t maintain the same level of responsibility for them she did when she was younger. She also has a good relationship with Ian due to being a father figure in her life, even if he's not her real father. While she attends Saint Editha Academy on her A-levels, subjects such as geography and history, this is only so she has options moving forward in life, as she currently doesn’t intend to attend university. Once she finishes school, she intends to start training as a full-time trainee beauty therapist, just like her mother started out, and developing her skills in that area to make that her career.

Advantages: Calista is a fairly empathetic and caring individual, which could easily allow her to gain allies in a tense situation where people may be looking for help or care. While she does not live in poverty, she and her family live only slightly above the poverty line, meaning Calista has far more experience surviving on very little than most of her classmates.
Disadvantages: Calista is fairly impulsive, which means she rarely thinks twice before jumping into otherwise precarious situations, and as such could lead her straight into danger. This, combined with her right-wing views, also mean that it’s entirely possible she could alienate the wrong person at the wrong time.