S022 - Dick, Marian [DECEASED]

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Name: Marian Dick
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12th
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Singing in the school choir (contralto), watching horror movies, hanging out with her friends, working at A Walk in the Bark, attending glassmaking workshops at the Salem Community College

Appearance: Marian is a short (5’0”) and overweight (140 pounds) teenage girl. Her weight is distributed around her upper body, giving her an upside-down triangle shape. While her torso is stocky, her limbs are short and her articulations are knobby.

Marian has droopy blue eyes with short eyelashes, and with small milia on her eyelids. Her nose is prominent and wide, with a clear wave and lowered tip due to a fracture as a child. She is of Italian and East European descent. Her skin tans easily and it is littered with freckles. She has severe acne on her nose, her forehead and her chin. Her lips are thin and wide, almost matching the length of her square jaw. She often covers her acne up with makeup. She prefers a natural look, preferring nude and neutral colours. She has no piercings other than on her ears, which are adorned with small silver hoops.

She has a round face with a deep widow’s peak. Her hair is dirty blonde, reaching below her breasts. Her hair is usually up in a ponytail to keep it out of her face. While her hair is usually wavy, it becomes progressively frizzier as the day passes, much to her dismay.

Marian’s clothing style can be best described as modest and unflattering. Marian often wears baggy clothes that cover her entire body, making her appear larger than she is. She prefers wearing neutral colours in the range of grays.

On the day of the abduction, Marian was wearing a Christmas sweater from the lost and found after spilling her drink on herself. She was still wearing her gray jogging pants, but now with large, brown stains on her thighs. She was wearing her mother’s comfortable, gray nursing shoes with black socks.

Biography: Richard Dick, a freelancing pianist, and Anita Dick, a lounge singer, were an on-and-off couple for several years before having their sole and only child, Marian, after a failure of Anita’s birth control. Despite their same last name, they never married, and regularly meet with other partners for sex while they were both working as nightlife entertainers in Boston. Anita, after announcing her pregnancy to Richard, moved to Salem, Massachusetts, to live with her parents until she gave birth to Marian at the hospital.

After Marian’s birth, Richard stayed in Boston while Anita continued to live with her parents in Salem to take a break from performances as she recovered. The two parents agreed on raising the child together, letting Marian move between her parent’s home, usually staying the weekend with her father and the week with her mother. They often had to supplement their income with tutoring sessions in either singing or piano. Sometimes, Anita would take up proofreading gigs or even take surveys online as a job to do from home while she cared for Marian.

Marian's childhood was marked by three things: her mother’s gigs, her father’s attempts to avoid socialization, and the constant moving between the two homes. After a sabbatical year from performance, her mother started to sing again in bars and hotels. When Anita couldn’t afford a babysitter and when Richard was busy, Anita would sometimes take her daughter to her gigs. Due to her young age, she does not remember these experiences spent in the green room, but her mother often brings up the gratuities she received when people noticed her daughter. Her father tried to do the opposite by keeping her far away from his gigs. Being a sickly child since birth, he took advantage of Marian’s vomiting issue and often blamed her to avoid showing up at parties and meeting up with people like his family. When he did show up to social events, he would bring his daughter along, wait for her to get sick, and then go home. Marian’s cyclic vomiting syndrome was diagnosed around that time after the concerns of his family. While the cause is unknown, it was noted that she mainly got sick after meals, days before the upcoming events, and when she was emotionally distressed. After a set of minor changes in her life like the size of her food portions and reassurance, she got progressively better. Finally, the constant moving between her two parents, usually based on their schedule, affected Marian negatively. She felt like she was dumped on whoever was around for babysitting, and largely felt like a burden to her parents. They kept her occupied with television and toys, but Marian still felt, and feels, like they could have done more.

Marian was a straight B student in elementary school, with A’s in the arts and a C in physical education. Her parents did try to get her to pay more attention in certain classes and to take physical education seriously, but Marian’s intellect and mental health issues relating to food stopped her from achieving higher grades. Her third-grade teacher, Miss Bennett, picked up on her issues. She often spent periods with Marian whenever she could, to ensure she was eating and could keep up with the schoolwork. In the years after her third grade and until she graduated from elementary school, Miss Bennett continued to hover over Marian, keeping tabs on her to make sure she could keep up. Socially, Marian was thriving. She had many friends and often had them over for sleepovers at her mother’s home in Salem, and sometimes for the weekend at her father’s in Boston. Between elementary school and middle school, Anita announced to her daughter that Richard would be moving in with them because they were going steady. Marian was deeply ecstatic.

At the start of middle school, Marian was terribly bored because of her fixed routine. She applied and tried out for the school choir despite no prior training in singing other than with her mother, and she managed to get in as a contralto. Her school choir experience has been a net positive for her, making many friends. Her mother was particularly pleased with seeing her daughter join the school choir, as she was a musician herself. Anita often helped her daughter with songs and singing techniques, making her an excellent performer. While there was some enjoyment to be found from singing, she quickly realized that the reason she stayed was because she made friends with the other singers. If it wasn't for them, Marian would have most likely dropped choir to find a new hobby. She also found joy in making her mother happy, enjoying the time she spent with her.

As her friend group expanded, she started to slowly grow into her own person. Hanging out with her friends became very important to her and she dearly holds on to them. The majority of her hobbies changed as her friend circle grew and changed. While she isn’t herself interested in these things, she will nonetheless attend their activities like after-school activities or sports competitions.

After she graduated from middle school, Marian entered the John Endecott Memorial Academy. She tried out for the school choir and got in. She was alongside her friends from middle school and made new friends there. She originally wanted to join more clubs, but then she reconsidered when she realized she’d have to put more on her plate. So, she chose to limit her after-school activity to focus on her friends and her schoolwork.

Marian’s friends are the most important aspect of her life. She unconditionally loves them and wants them to unconditionally love her in return. She spends most of her time with them after-school when she isn’t doing homework or at the choir. She was introduced to horror movies with them, and she was pleasantly surprised by her reactions. Marian originally thought that she would hate them, but she found herself entranced in the world of horror because of the artistry. Marian watches movies while browsing her phone to see how it was made, often finding herself to be surprised by the techniques used. She is now a self-described horror fan. Her favourite subgenre is cosmic horror as she enjoys being reminded of her mortality. Her favourite horror movie has to be Unfriended: Dark Web. She started smoking weed irregularly during that time, being more of a social smoker than anything else. She does enjoy the buzz, but it isn’t something she seeks out.

Her parents were, however, less enthused with Marian’s after-school habits. They often found her strange, as she wasn’t going to many parties or skipping classes. They expected her to behave as they acted in high school, and so they assumed she was hiding something from them. As they tried to dig deeper into Marian’s hobbies and interests, they realized that their daughter wasn’t like them as teenagers and even quite average all things considered. Other than Marian smoking weed, which both her parents don’t care about, she is a dutiful daughter who does her chores and her homework and always comes back before her curfew.

During the pandemic and the following quarantine, Marian started to thrive. She deeply enjoyed staying at home and doing her classes from there, and while she did miss her friends, she often talked to them on chat services and the phone. She spent most of her time studying, watching movies, and sometimes helping her parents.

However, for her parents the pandemic was quite upsetting due to the majority of their gigs being cancelled. Financially, it was also a deeply stressful time. Marian’s mother, Anita, became increasingly more anxious and started to pick fights with Richard until they broke up. Richard started to work at 7/11 during the day to avoid Anita while she worked doing several work-from-home gigs like proofreading. However, since they were living together and couldn’t afford to move out, they had to live together which led to them getting back together and then breaking up again. Marian, as the spectator of this drama, was deeply distraught. Marian started spending more and more time in her bedroom, trying to avoid her parents.

The conflicts tampered down as the quarantine ended, and when she noticed her parents going back to their usual selves, Marian managed to calm herself down a bit. They still fight, more than most couples, and it's often about petty things like milk turning or who should pay the bill for takeout. These fights still make Marian upset, no matter how small the actual conflict is. Simply the fact that they are fighting about something still makes her upset. Finally able to get out of the house, she found a job at a pet store, A Walk in the Bark, as a cashier. While the pay is meagre and her hours are often cut and changed, Marian enjoys the work. Originally, she didn’t think she’d enjoy it, but Marian’s friendships with her coworkers and the usual clients have been a positive note in her post-pandemic life.

Wanting to do something with her income, Marian started looking into potential art avenues. After talking to her art teacher, Ms. Bethany Prince, she was given a list of potential things to look at, and she ultimately picked glassmaking, specifically glass blowing. She was interested in the difficulty of the craft, and the vibrant creations of the artists. She picked it because she wanted to experience that difficulty first-hand to see if she could surmount it, and also keep the trinkets she made. Bethany was ecstatic at this, and she’s been following the progress of Marian’s art. While she is essentially a dabbler and breaks her pieces more often than not, she deeply enjoys the craft. She currently makes small pieces, making flowers and animals, and often gifts them to her friends and family. She has become quite dexterous from her practice. She is interested in expanding her craft toward stained glass, but she wants to get around perfecting glass blowing before doing something else.

Marian is relatively happy with her life after the pandemic. She enjoys going to school, going to choir, hanging out with her friends, and working on her art. Marian enjoys her modest life. She still sometimes seeks out thrills by smoking weed with her friends or watching horror movies. Marian continues to visit the glass working workshops at the Salem Community College, sometimes with her mother or Ms. Bethany.

Personality-wise, Marian is still growing. While she does tend to shut herself in while she is upset, she does want to be near people at her lowest. Despite her generally upbeat behaviour, she sometimes hits a slump and disappears from her social circle for a couple of days. She spends most of her time sulking in her room, sometimes missing days of school, before going back as if nothing happened. She tries to not worry her friends about her bouts of depression, but sometimes her struggles overcome her. She prefers to not talk about her problems and what troubles her, and this often leads her to withdraw herself. One of her sources of bouts of depression is her relationship with her parents. While she knows they love her, and she thinks she loves them, she is often hurt by their behaviour, especially because she blows their fights out of proportion. She is very affected when her parents fight one another, and feels physically sick when it happens. Whenever her parents are fighting, even if now it's rarely as serious as before, she often shuts down and avoids social interactions for a certain time. They are aware of this, and while they try to make it up to her, she would just want them to apologize for making her upset but they never do it on their own. She has to reach out to them for them to make amends, and she finds herself wishing they’d take the initiative. Her parents do try to help, letting her recover at home after calling the school. Marian wants her parents to acknowledge her feelings, and that even small conflicts makes her very upset because, for her, they feel major.

After graduating from high school, she plans to go to community college to get an associate’s degree in glass art while working at A Walk in the Bark. She isn’t sure what to do after her associate’s, but she knows she will most likely continue with a bachelor’s in fine art.

Advantages: Marian is a dexterous and patient girl, able to focus on tasks for a long amount of time without losing her concentration. She is also known to be cheerful and optimistic despite her bouts of depression and she is a generally likable person to be around.
Disadvantages: Marian tends to shut herself in when she is stressed or when there’s conflict, leading to her being unresponsive to her surroundings. This could easily lead to a situation where she is taken advantage of. She is also out of shape because of her sedentary life.

Designated Number: Student No. 022

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Designated Weapon: Trident dagger

Conclusion: Didn't we just- oh, no, they are different weapons. Huh. Well, chubby sad-sack church girls are exactly the kind of people who usually end up putting knives like that to good use. - Veronica Rai