Laverne Falciander

[TheLeakyFaucet*]

Name: Laverne Falciander
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: Bayview Secondary School
Hobbies and Interests: Theatre, student government

Appearance: Laverne is relatively tall for a girl her age at 5'9 and is quite overweight at 345 pounds. There aren't many people who can say she is attractive. Her skin is oily like a wet napkin has just been pressed on it and her African-American face is covered in white-heads and acne scars. Her two front teeth are rather large and crooked, but braces that she got late in her youth have resulted in them straightening out slightly. Built almost like an egg, her face is round but heart-shaped under all of the fatness. Her face is usually covered in dry-looking black hair that she is uneven and wavy. If there is one positive characteristic about her appearance though, it is her piercing green eyes that stand out against her dark skin.

Biography: Laverne Falciander was born on May 12th, 1990 as the third child of Kendal Brady, an elementary school teacher, and Jonathan Falciander, a police officer. Although it was quite unhealthy for a young girl, one of the very first emotions that controlled Laverne was jealousy. While her two older sisters Amanda and Julie were thin and beautiful, the fatness of her face she'd had as an infant had never melted away and left her with a face that almost resembled a pig. She was ugly. She knew it and there was no point in denying it. To make matters even worse, being the youngest of three children had forced her into a childhood of hammy-down toys and used clothes. Never quite finding her one talent while her sisters seemed to have handfuls, she spent most of her time sitting in her room at night while the sounds of girls giggling came next door from her sisters' slumber parties. She would always be last. It seemed like a common fact.

Elementary school was rough, but Laverne managed to pull her way through. She latched onto a close circle of friends and spent most of her time at the local playground. Still, she always felt different from her peers. There was just that unsatisfying feeling that she would never be the same as them. Part of it was her weight, but the other part was that she just didn't seem to click. She wanted to play, but she couldn't.

There wasn't much time to relax anyway. Life was a daily competition at the Falciander home. Shuffling from activity to activity, Laverne never had the chance to relax. Her parents saw another child as another trophy. Without any opinion in the matter, she was signed up for every recreational sport that Bayview had to offer despite the fact that she was clumsy and unathletic. She pushed herself as hard as she could, but no matter what, she just couldn't succeed like her sisters. One of her worst memories was when she looked blindly into the air to catch a baseball and ended up running into a fence in front of a crowd of people. Her parents didn't seem to care though. All that mattered was their daughter achieving perfection. Upon arrival in middle school though, they did give up on sports and forced her into every club the school had to offer. A normal person would have cracked under the hectic schedule, but Laverne's desire to be better than everyone around her controlled her life. She sat in her family's trophy room after school, looking at all the awards that she never won. Realizing she would never find a place in athletics, she tried politics. Running for eighth grade class president seemed like a sure-fire way to achieve perfection. Although she did get what she wanted, it wasn't because of running a good campaign. The day before the election, a group of popular girl went to every flier in the school and pasted a picture of a pig over her chubby face. With the entire school seeing her as a joke, she won the election. At that point though, it had become the very last thing she wanted.

High school was far from an easy transition. Almost immeadidly, she was nicknamed, "Hurricane Laverne", due to her enormous weight causing everyone to clear out of the hallway when she walked by. The teasing she had to deal with on a daily basis was arduous. She'd just begun to adjust to life as an outcast during her freshman year when a new door was opened. The drama club. Deciding to join after her parent's insistence to join as many activities as possible, she was shocked that she'd actually found something she enjoyed. Along with that, she was good at it. Being on stage made it so she could put on a mask and be anyone she wanted. Her performance in the school production of Rent as the character Joanne ended up earning her an award: the only award she'd ever won in her entire life. Still, it looked strange sitting on the shelf beside the hundreds of trophies belonging to her sisters.

There wasn't much time for the theatre though. Her parents' pressure on her to do well made it so she was often up far past midnight studying. After all, anything besides one-hundred percent in the Falciander home was frowned upon. In her mother's words, "winners strived to do their best". At one point, she ended up having to let a callback play the lead role in a musical because she had to study for a math exam. Things were getting bad. And things had to be done.

Eventually, the pressure to do well became too much. Halfway through her junior year, Laverne experienced a complete mental breakdown. Despite the rise in her popularity and self-image from the drama club, she became overwhelm with the recurring feelings that she would never amount to anything. If anything, her sisters would. Several days before, her father had realized that the lock to the safe he kept his gun in was broken. She had watched her father say he had to buy a new lock and walk into the attic with the pistol. All she had to do was find it. I took roughly three hours of searching through the attic, but she finally found it buried in the center of an old matress. Bullets weren't hard to find. While her father did hide the gun, he didn't see any real reason to hide the bullets and always unloaded them and put them on the kitchen when he walked inside. Laverne then retrieved the bullets, walked to her room, sat down on her bed and shot herself in the mouth. Unfortunatley, she was extremely nervous and ended up trembling too much. Instead of firing the pistol upward toward her brain, she fired it downward. The bullet ended up shooting out through her jaw and she was left bleeding to death on her bedroom floor. By the time her parents found her and rushed her to the hospital, it seemed certain that she was at death's doors. But she wasn't. Shocking everyone, Laverne made a full recovery after jaw reconstruction in the emergency room and four months of physical therapy. She also went to cognitive behavioral therapy to boost her self-confidence. She often talked to various counselors and was kept under a watchful eye by her doctors, who prescribed her to various anti-depressants. After roughly five months, she returned to school just in time for her final year of high school.

Senior year was almost a new life for the girl everyone called, "Hurricane Laverne". After therapy had taught her to be content with who she was, Laverne decided that winning wasn't everything. Her parents had quickly decided to stop with the activities after her suicide attempt, but Laverne still decided to run for student government. To her shock, her political know-how and good speech ended up getting her the role as class treasurer. Keeping old friends from the drama club and making new ones in the student government, Laverne became much more liked by the student body. As a sign of accepting who she was, she even jokingly kept her nickname.

Still, if her suicide attempt had taught her one thing, it was that she needed to be perfect. Life was a competition. Sure, it was important to be happy with who she was, but the reason she had been to led to killing herself was because she was weak. There was no excuse to be weak whatsoever. The Falcianders were strong and proud. There could be no flaws. After all, there was no way she could ever bear being last again.

Advantages: Laverne understands competition well. Raised from birth with the idea that only the strongest survived, she's seen everything in life as a way of beating her sisters. Survival of the Fittest may be her way to show her entire family what she is really made of. Along with that, her experiences in the theatre department have made her an excellent actress capable of manipulating anyone.

Disadvantages: Far from athletic, Laverne can hardly walk a lap around the track during gym without getting heart burn. She's easily one of the least athletic students in Bayview and probably wouldn't even be able to run from an attacker if her life depended on it.