character sketch 1: charlotte sullivan
First character sketch! These’ll be me getting to know the characters, more or less; some of them will involve me dicking around with dialogue and pieces of their pasts, etc. Some of them will probably be straight exposition. I’ll probably do a few of them for each main character; I’ve realized I’m a character-driven writer, so I’ll be building plot around these people, as opposed to the other way around. ANYTHING WITHIN THESE SKETCHES IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Some of what’s within these sketches may end up in the novel verbatim! Yaaaaay no idea what I’m doing, lalalala.
That said! This is Charlotte Sullivan, our heroine. If this was a movie, I’d cast her as Lizzy Caplan, to give y’all an approximate image of what she looks like. She’s 24 at the start of the story proper, hates her first name and goes by “Char” almost exclusively, and works at a local TV news station. If anyone has worked in TV news, PLEASE contact me; I’d love to ask you some questions in the name of research.
Charlotte Sullivan grows up the kind of girl who finds mysteries in attics where there aren’t any; Charlotte Sullivan grows up the kind of girl who could find a history in a grain of sand. When she’s eleven, she and her brother Jason learn to burn hours on family road-trips spinning tales about the people in the cars that drive by, huddled together in the backseat. Jason’s only eight that first year, and he doesn’t do much more than laugh while whispers the untold truths hidden in the bumper sticker on a passing Saab; by the time she’s sixteen, he’s thirteen, and it’s a more communal process.
“Hey, what about that one,” Jason whispers one night. It’s nearly one in the morning, and their father is passed out in the passenger seat; they’re somewhere near the Illinois border, and their mother’s grip on the steering wheel is white-knuckled. She’s listening to talk radio to keep herself awake, and Charlotte and Jason both know better than to bother her.
“What,” Charlotte whispers back, “the Ford? Looks like a family, mom and two kids—”
“Yeah, but those kids don’t look anything like each other,” Jason says. Charlotte bites her lip against pointing out the obvious; her dark hair clashes with his sandy blonde, and no one ever believes they’re siblings. “So maybe friends, then?”
“On their way back from a birthday party,” Charlotte decides, and Jason grins at her, egging her on. “The one who’s asleep—it was his birthday. He ate so much cake he threw up all over the Chuck-E-Cheese—”
“Do they have Chuck-E-Cheese in…uh. Whatever state we’re in right now?”
“Illinois,” Charlotte says, “and yes, totally. They have Chuck-E-Cheese everywhere, dummy, that’s what makes them so insidious.”
“Insidious?”
“Evil.”
“Chuck-E-Cheese isn’t evil, Char,” Jason says, rolling his eyes at her. “You used to like Chuck-E-Cheese.”
“I pretended to like it so you wouldn’t feel bad about having your birthday parties there,” Charlotte corrects, and narrows her eyes at his outraged face. “Oh, what. You were like seven, okay, I had to spare your tender feelings.”
“Whatever,” Jason says, and nods back at the window. “So that one threw up at the birthday party—the other one’s awake, though. Still thinking about it? Like, reliving the glory or something?”
“Or worried about Pukes McGee,” Charlotte says. “I mean, look at the mom, she’s all tense—aww, shit, they’re getting off at the exit.”
“Charlotte,” their mother says, “language, please? And you guys need to get some sleep; we’re driving all day tomorrow, you’ll have plenty of time to talk then.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Charlotte says, but she’s not sorry, not really; Jason grins at her from his side of the car, already curling around the pillow he’d brought with him. There’s a Star Wars pillowcase on it, and she knows that he’s catching shit at school, over-bright and under-athletic, the kind of nerd everybody like to pick on. It’s worth a little trouble to make him grin like that.
“Night, Char,” he whispers.
“Night, Jay,” she mouths back, and digs her Walkman out of her bag.
—-
Char Sullivan is the kind of woman who doesn’t believe in fairy tales; Char Sullivan is the kind of woman who says that romance is dead. She doesn’t actually think that, but it seems like the smarter option, presentation-wise—it’s hard enough to get people to take her seriously as it is, she doesn’t need to go telling them that she cries every time she watches The Notebook.
Which is a terrible movie, obviously. That’s the worst part about the whole thing—it’s terrible. She knows it’s terrible. Every time she watches it she means to laugh at how ridiculous the dialogue is, and then she gets sucked in instead.
Char Sullivan is also the kind of woman who has trouble thinking of herself as such. At 24, she’s still pretty sure the word that applies is “girl,” for all she’d bitch at anyone who called her that.
She has habits, though, because she’s the kind of woman who needs them. She’s got a schedule, because a childhood spent skipping around the country, an adolescence marked with loss, has left her hungry for order. She’s not the most organized person in the world, Char—in fact she’s met the most organized person in the world, who a) is her boss and b) would be so appalled at the comparison that Char doesn’t like to think about it—but she’s got her routines, and she more or less sticks to them.
Char’s not the kind of woman who manages to work the gym into her routine. She is the kind of woman who lies about that.
The current contents of her refrigerator are as follows: one (1) box of leftover moo goo gai pan; four (4) cans of Jolt energy drink; seventeen (17) varieties of mustard; two (2) apples.
“Char, what the hell,” Jason says, crouching low to peer inside. “Seriously, what the hell, are you planning the mustard revolution? Is this a give-me-stone-ground-or-give-me-death situation?”
“I haven’t had time to go to the store,” Char snaps, narrowing her eyes. “Also, go fuck yourself.”
“Okay, look, maybe you should quit your job.”
“Because I don’t have—”
“Anything but mustard and energy drinks in your fridge? Yeah,” Jason says, and rolls his eyes. Char is….ridiculously glad he’s moved into town, actually, even if she’d been the strongest voice of dissent towards his graduate-early-get-a-PhD-teach-forever plan. He’s going to end up living in a cardboard box, but at least it’ll be a local cardboard box.
“I like my job,” Char tells him. It’s only kind of a lie. “It’s…interesting. And the pay’s not bad, and I like my coworkers.”
That’s not kind of a lie; Char hates pretty much everybody she works with, barring a few exceptions. The most notable of these exceptions is Cooper Wilson, the morning news anchor, who is gorgeous and brilliant and has absolutely no idea Char’s alive. He’s also, according to rumor and the way he tends to scream for coffee at commercials, more than a bit of a dick, but whatever. She knows harboring a thing for him is unwise at best and flat-out stupid at worst, but it gets her through the day, so fine.
“You are a terrible liar,” says Jason.
“At least I have a job,” says Char, sing-song, which more or less shuts Jason up.
—
When Char is sixteen, her mother crashes the family car on a roadtrip at three in the morning. Her father is killed instantly; her mother is thrown clear through the windshield. Char and Jason are in the backseat asleep, and she wakes up to the sensation of metal hitting asphalt. Her headphones are still over her ears, and her door is crushed in; Jason’s door is pressed against the road, rendered useless.
They tell her it was adrenaline, later, that allowed her to kick an exit route into the wreck and drag Jason clear. They tell her it was adrenaline, and with her father’s blood still flecked up her arm, she believes it.
When Char is twenty, she is grabbed by a stranger at on her way back to her dorm. He’s taller than her, a hand on her wrist, another over her mouth, and she’s all too aware of what’s about to happen; when she tries to scream, nothing comes out, and when she tries to think, her mind is fuzzy and blank.
She tells herself it was adrenaline, later, that landed him flat on his back in that alley, one arm broken. She tells herself it was adrenaline, and with his touch still lingering sharp and unwanted on her wrist, she almost believes it.
When Char is twenty four, the lightbulb blows out in her kitchen. She’s too short to reach it herself, and she wonders if she’s got a ladder anywhere around the apartment, if she’s going to have to call the super. It’s 3AM and she has to be at work in less than an hour, and she’s not quite awake enough to do more than glare up at the fixture in frustration, wondering how she’s going to find the cereal in the dark.
She tries to tell herself that it’s adrenaline, the way she’s suddenly floating up towards the ceiling, crashing down to earth the moment she realizes what’s happening. It is not convincing. At all.
