REECE STARLING ( RACHEL SENNOTT ) is a TWENTY-SIX year-old GUITAR TEACHER in STATEN ISLAND. They were brought under Richard’s care when they were only ELEVEN years old. They are known as THE MISCHIEVOUS because they are MIRTHFUL but also IRREVERENT.
tw: substance abuse/addiction, parental neglect/custody loss, death, domestic abuse
BASIC INFORMATION
Full Name: Theresa Rebecca Starling
Nickname(s): Reece
Date of Birth: December 7, 1979
Age: twenty-five
Occupation: guitar teacher & restaurant hostess
Current Residence: Staten Island
PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
Hair: brown, curly
Eyes: gray
Height: 5’2
Notable Features: Reece is rocking up to Richard’s funeral with a strip band-aid over her nose and a bruised eye :/
PERSONALITY & BEHAVIOR:
Strengths: amiable, outgoing, witty
Weaknesses: flippant, addictive, impulsive
Quirks: talks with her hands like a true italian, constantly fidgets with her jewelry
Vices: aside from her smoking habit—weed and cigarettes—Reece needs Monster Energy in an IV to make it through the day
INTEREST & HOBBIES:
Interests: astrology, music production, tabloid gossip, the 2005 music industry as a whole, the brad x angelina x jennifer love triangle, survivor, grey’s anatomy, gwen stefani
Hobbies: stand-up at the local open mics, songwriting, music mixing, bird-watching, parkour
Special Skills/Talents: music theory & a handful of instruments (mostly guitar)
BECOMING A WARD
Reece’s grandmother, Estie, was an old friend of Richard’s wife, Adelia, who she met in school; once they were all married—Adelia to Richard, of course, and Estie to her own husband, Charlie—I imagine they were “couple friends,” with double dates and so on. Estie got pregnant with Reece’s mom, Tess, a little less than a year before Adelia got pregnant with Winifred; the women probably talked about how they’d raise their daughters together. When Adelia passed in childbirth, though, Estie was heartbroken; Estie and her husband remained in contact with Richard, trying to be there for him and Winnifred if they needed anything. Winnifred and Tess spent their early years as friends. Shortly before Winnifred disappeared, Estie’s husband died of a heart attack; Estie and Richard came to lean on each other in this time—a widower trying to raise her daughter alone, and a man who had lost everything. They found comfort in each other. It wasn’t some torrid affair—they were just the only two people left living who could understand one another. They both felt guilty, as though they’d betrayed Adelia and Charlie, and the two grew apart. Tess, who never fully recovered from the sudden loss of her father and close friend in childhood, dropped out of high school later on, and developed a drinking problem which progressed to a drug addiction as she got older. At 24, Tess got pregnant with Reece; when Reece’s father, a fling at best, didn’t want anything to do with it, Tess moved to Chicago for a fresh start. Tess tried to raise Reece and get her life under control, but without proper help, Tess was never able to stay sober for long. When Reece was five, CPS got involved after Tess overdosed, and Reece was taken into the foster care system for a few months. Tess was able to get sober and get Reece back; the two moved back to Staten Island, where Estie was, and when Tess fell off the wagon again a year later, Reece moved in with Estie, who raised her for the next five years. This took place in the late eighties, when I imagine Estie and Richard would have caught up after all of that time had passed—perhaps Richard would have even met Reece once or twice at some gathering or another that he invited Estie to attend, although Reece and Richard didn’t know each other especially well until Estie, aged 63, died in a car accident in 1990, when Reece was only eleven. Aware that Reece had been in the sole care of his old friend, Richard stepped in to prevent Reece from having to enter the foster care system again.
LIFE AS A WARD
Reece arrived at the Woodrow House as a grieving eleven-year-old who had no idea how to deal with her pain aside from joking about it. The times she spent in her mom's care as a kid were often turbulent, and she'd kind of adapted to the unpredictability of her mom's moods by learning to be an entertainer—nobody can yell at you if they're too busy laughing, right? So, reece developed a real knack for levity and lifting spirits that she carried with her when her grandmother got custody while reece was 5, and again when her grandmother passed and she moved into Richard's care at age 11. Reece has never been good at dealing with the deep stuff, so it's always been hard to get her to be serious about anything. Growing up, I guess you could say she was kind of a troublemaker, but it all came from a kind of impulsive hedonism on Reece's part. it was less true rebellion for the sake of rebelling, and more a desire to do whatever would be the funnest/funniest, no matter the consequences. She has some trouble knowing when a joke has gone too far sometimes, because in her mind, the Joke—whatever that joke may be in the moment—is praxis. Reece more or less invented committing to the bit! She probably spent plenty of time trying to get the other wards to go along with her dumb bits or reckless schemes, too, and she's never been able to stand anyone who takes themselves too seriously. So, that's Reece: an eternal class clown, because laughter takes some of the sting out of the truth. Even the wards that are closest to Reece probably haven't had a lot of truly deep, serious conversations with Reece—at least ones that she participated in voluntarily. Reece spent a long time in and out of alcoholism treatment programs because she couldn't really take her own addiction seriously and see it for what it was; she started drinking young, probably around 13, and she immediately understood what her mother saw in it as an all-day activity. It didn't take long for Richard to recognize Reece's drinking as problematic—after all, thirteen is young to even be experimenting with alcohol, especially given Reece's family history—but it took years of short-lasting sober stints and casual backslides for Reece to understand that she wasn't just being young and dumb, and everyone was right to be worried: it's an illness, and it's not something that went away when she turned twenty-one, which is what she'd been hoping. an instance of alcohol poisoning on her 21st birthday, though, led to Reece getting placed in a more serious addiction rehabilitation program, and she had to drop out of school, but she did get sober at 21, at least for the time being.
AESTHETIC
vintage rings, snarled curls, smudged makeup, menthol marlboros, crushed energy drink cans in the bottom of a beat up purple vw bug, scrawled-on sheet music
Reece's wardrobe pretty much gives y2k laundry day. even though her outfits are usually pretty low-effort, she sort of always comes off as though she's wearing a costume. She oscilates drastically between slutty hi-femme clothes and absolute androgyny, and sometimes she blends the two at once. She wears rings, and her hair is almost always tied back.
EDUCATION
Reece absolutely wanted to be a private school girl, but not for any academic reason. She probably just thought it would be like the movies. Reece wasn’t especially focused when it came to her education, but she did well enough to get accepted to college, which she saw, on-and-off, as a place to party, mostly. She ended up dropping out in her junior year because her alcoholism had gotten out of control, and she needed to go to rehab; she never ended up getting her music degree.
EXTRACURRICULARS
Always inclined towards music, Reece cycled through a number of instruments growing up—piano was her first and longest instrument, encouraged by Richard, but Reece’s favorite was guitar (something she picked up at around 14), which she still plays today. She took singing lessons for a while when she first started taking piano, and she also learned some percussion. She probably learned a little saxophone and clarinet, too, so that she’d have experience with band instruments. When it was clear that music was a real passion of Reece’s, Richard set her up with someone who could teach her music theory, and her tutor helped her learn to write music of her own, which became Reece’s major focus during her high school years. For the first couple of years she was at the estate, I also think she probably took some acting lessons and did some local theater acting, since it was probably pretty obvious that Reece really liked being the center of attention and needed some outlet for that.
THEIR LIFE NOW
As stated before, Reece enrolled at NYU to get a degree in music—I'm thinking something related to digital music production, although Reece doesn't have the equipment to do much of that anymore—and she was sober on-and-off over the first few years, not really taking seriously the fact that she needed to stop drinking, but keeping it under wraps enough that things didn't come to a head until her 21st birthday. After being hospitalized with alcohol poisoning, Reece dropped out, got sober, got settled, and moved back to her hometown of Staten Island, where she job hopped for a while before becoming a guitar teacher. Nine months ago, Reece relapsed; she'd had a conversation with her mom, something she hadn't done since her mother lost custody, and it reopened a lot of old wounds Reece didn't know how to deal with; she felt really alone in Staten Island, and she didn't want to reach out to anybody, so she started drinking again, something she kept a secret for as long as she could. Of course, Richard eventually caught on, and he helped Reece to get sober again; the other wards will probably be vaugely aware that Reece is set to collect her 7-month chip in a couple of weeks. Another thing Reece kept a secret, albeit successfully, this time: she started dating a guy she met at an open mic night she preformed at (aspiring comic in new york lets goooo) five months ago, even though recently recovered addicts are generally supposed to hold off on dating anyone until they've been sober for at least a year, for the sake of stability in sobriety. The relationship was turbulent to start—he negged her comedy routine–but it was combative in a way that Reece found kind of... comfortable, maybe? It was passionate, kind of hot and heavy, and Reece moved in with him right away; however, the relationship very recently came to a head—what had always been a fiery relationship eventually progressed into Jack manipulating & mistreating Reece, including a few instances of physical abuse. So, Reece will be rocking up to the Woodrow House for the funeral with a black eye and a bandaged nose, less than a week off of a break-up, and in need of somewhere to live (she'd been planning on couch-surfing during the process of trying to get her old apartment back </3).
