SPARROW, Nora Jane

[NORA SPARROW]

NORA

WHO ARE YOU?
NAME: Nora Jane Sparrow
BIRTHDAY/AGE: February 24th 1991; 20 years old
GENDER: Female
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual
OCCUPATION: Student
FACE CLAIM: Karen Gillan


WHAT YOU ARE
SPECIES: Human.
ALLIANCE: Good.


YOUR SUCCESS
LIKES:
- Books
- Painting
- Rain
- Baking
- Animals
-School
DISLIKES:
- Cruel people
- Being startled
- Crowds
- Buses
- Math
- Sewing
STRENGTHS:
- Intelligence
- Endurance
- Honesty
- Kindness
WEAKNESSES:
- Naive
- Shy
- Self-conscious
- Meek
- Prone to anxiety attacks
FEARS:
- The outside world
- Being alone forever
GOALS:
- To find some self-confidence
- To make a friend


TELL ME YOUR PAST
MOTHER: Elizabeth Sparrow; Deceased
FATHER: Unknown
OTHER: Charlotte Sparrow; Aunt / Legal Guardian; Deceased
PLACE OF BIRTH: Santa Barbara, California
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Meadow Heights, Massachusetts
HISTORY:
On the evening of February 24th, 1991, Nora Jane Sparrow was brought into the world by a single woman who was unprepared for motherhood. Elizabeth Sparrow was a sorry soul, twenty-two and broke, with no idea who the father of her baby was. Miss Sparrow did the best she could at parenthood. She always found work, even if that work wasn’t exactly legal, and she always found someone trustworthy to take care of her baby whenever she was gone. Elizabeth loved Nora more than anything she’d ever loved in her life. But Nora would never know any of this. One frigid December morning, in 1993, Elizabeth Sparrow was found dead in her apartment, her small body beaten and broken on the floor. One of her ‘clients’ handy work, guessed the local police. The victim’s two year old daughter was shipped off to the care of her maiden aunt and only living relative, Charlotte Sparrow.

Charlotte Sparrow lived alone in a grand and gloomy house in Meadow Heights, Massachusetts. She had no husband or children, and wanted it that way. Nora was an unwanted burden on Charlotte, a fact that she always made clear to the girl. Charlotte liked to say things like this to Nora, to keep her meek and compliant. She would tell the girl she was lucky she had an aunt, for surely no adoptive parents would want her. Who would ever want a homely and simple child, like Nora? Claiming health problems and supported by a compliant family physician, Charlotte was able to keep Nora out of public schools, home schooling the child herself. She was cold woman, stubborn and unforgiving. In all her life, Nora never feared any more than she feared her Aunt Charlotte.

But throughout her childhood, Nora always listened to her aunt, always believed her declarations of the cruelties of the world and of men, and of lies people would tell. She always believed that no other family could ever want her. She always believed that her aunt, while frightening, took care of her to the best of her abilities; that by keeping her out of school she was protecting her from being hurt by others; that by telling her that she was plain and unlovable, she was keeping her from getting her hopes up of one day having a family of her own; that by keeping her closed off from the world, she was keeping her safe.

It was only in her later teen years that she began to question if Aunt Charlotte was right about everything. She wondered if the world was really so awful. From what she’d read, it didn’t seem all bad. Of course, she never made these suspicions apparent. That would only lead to one of Aunt Charlotte’s lectures. It was easier to accept this life of safe solitude.

In 2010, a year ago, Charlotte Sparrow died of heart failure, leaving her entire estate to her niece Nora. Alone and free for the first time in her nineteen years of life, Nora was unprepared and overwhelmed by the shock of it all. Overcome by a spirit of rebellion, Nora decided she’d make a list of all the things she’d ever wanted to do that Aunt Charlotte would have disapproved of. The first was to remodel the house. She cleared out all of her aunt’s furniture, save the pieces she was very fond of, and repainted the once dark walls to lighter colours.

The redecoration didn’t have the effect on Nora she thought it would. While the newer environment lessened the still haunting repression of her aunt, the brunt of it continued to weigh down on Nora, and it took her another year to do the next thing on her list: enrol in college. Between Aunt Charlotte’s disapproval of friends and television, the greatest pleasures Nora had were to read and to learn. Formal education always felt like an unrealistic fantasy to her when she was growing up, and she decided that at twenty years of age, it was about time one of her dreams came true.


BEHIND THAT MASK
NAME/ALIAS: Lily
RP EXPERIENCE: Five years, on and off
FROM THE RULES: Read them. Didn’t see anything there.
OTHER CHARACTERS: N/A
RP EXAMPLE:

Nora felt haunted. Sitting with her knees gathered up to her chest, propped up by the pillows on her four-poster bed, Nora frowned as she gazed across her bedroom. It had been almost a year since Aunt Charlotte had died, a year since she’d taken a brush and splashed the once dark walls of her room with pale yellow paint and replaced the thick curtains that once hung over her window with thin white blinds. The transformation was stunning, brightening the room to such a degree that Nora often felt uplifted just by walking into it.

But today she felt none of that jubilance or peace and that was because she had reached an unpleasant realization when she walked into her room that night; the realization that while her room, and the rest of the house for that matter, had been transformed since her aunts death, she had not. She still lived much like how she had while Aunt Charlotte had stalked those halls. All of those goals she’d had, all of the promises she’d made to herself to go out into the world and makes friends, to have a life rather than just exist as she had all her life, none of them had come to pass. She was still alone. She was still cripplingly shy. She still couldn’t venture much farther than two blocks from her house without being overwhelmed by an anxiety attack. She was the same sad, pathetic Nora Sparrow she had always been, and she hated it.

She wanted to hate her aunt, hate her desperately and passionately, but she couldn’t work up the nerve. Aunt Charlotte had been a sorry person, like herself. She couldn’t hate her for that. All she could do was think of something she had once told her.

“You are a mouse,” Aunt Charlotte had said. Nora had not heard her aunt enter her room, and the sudden statement had startled her so much that the book she had been reading drop right out of her hands. “You see, Nora,” her aunt had continued, a note of condescension in her voice. “There are two kinds of people in this world: mice and cats. Now cats, they can stalk around any place they like, bold and brash and prideful. Mice, on the other hand, are quiet and passive, and safest and happiest when they are in their homes. Now there is nothing wrong with being a mouse. I’m one myself. But there’s one thing every mouse must know: if it journeys too far from its house, it will be devoured by a cat.” And with that Aunt Charlotte left Nora’s room.

Nora had never questioned this story. She was a mouse, and in a world ruled by cats it was best to stay where she was. But today, seated unsettled in her bed, Nora did question it. What if the world wasn’t so black and white, wasn’t all mice and cats?

Hesitantly, Nora reached for her bedside table and pulled open the drawer. Inside was a pamphlet for Meadow Heights Community College. Biting her lower lip, she picked up the folded paper.

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[RAINEE]

ACCEPTED
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