spades.

— BASICS

name: sutton jane hodson. age / d.o.b.: twenty six — december fifth gender, pronouns & sexuality: cisfemale — she/her — unlabeled. hometown: manhattan, new york city, new york. affiliation: media. job position: culture columnist at vogue. education: bachelors of law with an associates in english from yale university. relationship status: single. children: zero. positive traits: quick witted, resilient, friendly, loyal, ambitious. negative traits: cut-throat, distrusting, aloof, manipulative, spiteful.

— BIOGRAPHY

TW: sexual assault implications & manipulative family.

❝ to see you come of age  . . . ❞

Maybe it is fate or destiny or maybe it truly is pure irony from the universe when you spend your entire childhood gazing at a poster in your father’s office that says: ❝ corruption wins not more than honesty. Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace to silence envious tongues ❞ . a Shakespeare quote. And from henry viii—- very original. 

Childhood is supposed to mean running through the neighborhood until the moon rises. It is supposed to be being pushed up into a tree by the neighborhood children and having them run to get your dad when you get stuck. Childhood isn’t what you had. Your Dad did not get the message of the quote . . . obviously.

You spend your childhood in office buildings. Learning what kind of carpet feels the best on your bare feet and how to build a house out of index cards. You spend your childhood with your older brother and you admire him, he is everything that you are not. He is the wildfire, where you are the forest. He always had a certain je ne sais quoi about him that you never had and no matter how many times you dreamed of being him, but you always woke up yourself — boring sutton. 

Running to mother and father, you cry and scream about being more like him. They tut you on the head and say  ❝ you’re special at other things . . . ❞ . Well, being special at other things does not cut it. So, you spend your summers between debutante lessons and mimicking your brother. You watch everything he does and wears. You emulate him in everything you do as a child.But 

Childhood is where you learn about expectations. Your brother is the first born of the first born of a first born eight times over. He will be passed the family torch. He will be expected to get his fancy degree and find a beautiful wife and have a strapping son. Your brother will be expected to continue a life of influence and power.

You will be expected to marry a rich man with a good social status. If he’s a little older, that’s fine— he won’t be as interested in truly loving you. You will smile and accept whatever they give you. You will be the picture perfect darling that the world wants you to be.

❝ it’s alarming honestly— how charming she can be . . . ❞

sexual assault implication tw! 

academics and you get along splendidly and you excel in everything that you put your mind to. Your professors rave on your reports back home that they expect amazing and wonderful things from you in your lifetime. They scream cries of happiness to the heavens that they got another phenomenal hodson. Intelligence & ambition and you just make sense— you wonder why your mother and father barely praise you. You know your dad is busy with whatever he does at capitol hill and your mother is running a law firm but still . . . They say nothing. You finish essays the day they are assigned, you make time for your studies and extracurriculars, you charm the people at those stuffy galas you're made to go to . . .

you’re only seventeen. 

you make your core groups of friends— the school bunch that tends to ride in the same rich family circle and that group of kids from the public school down the street who smoke cigarettes and kiss each other on the mouth. You learn very quickly that your  ❝ uncle ❞  force feeding you champagne at a party isn’t the same as taking a shot of peach schnapps with jake ryan. You learn there’s a big difference between the ways that Jake and your ❝ uncle ❞ touch you in a dark corner of a party. You learn that you can exchange kisses for getting high for free . . .

You’re only seventeen. 

But, at your core— you are a hodson. They will never see you slip or falter. When you tell your mother what happened, she tuts you on the head again and leaves you in your room. No one says anything to you or does anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Instead, your family takes you to the next event and they keep you at their side. Your father introduces to another family friend and his son— he’s a senior and studying economics at yale and even better, he’s single. You crawl out of your skin at the implications. You’re only seventeen and your dad wants to marry you off. By the time you’re twenty one you’ll be a spinster in his eyes. You tell your brother that you have cramps and leave early. You spend the ride home trying to tell him that you don’t want this life anymore. You want to shoot bottom shelf vodka with jake ryan and sleep in motel 6’s on a beach vacation. You tell your older brother that you can’t keep up with what the family wants. You bare it all to him. He says nothing.

You are desperate to lean on your brother, but he’s not leaning back . . .

When it’s time for college applications to go in, you have two options: study law at Yale or study economics at Yale. Your parents don’t give you a choice in the matter so you major in law and minor in english. You spend hours pouring yourself into your laptop and you write and write and write until your eyes turn red. You keep up your law courses but what your parents do not know is that you join the Yale daily news and slowly and then all at once fall in love with journalism. It starts when they send out a call for a general reporting assignment to recap a guest speaker. You accept it before you finish the email. You continue accepting assignments until you're more involved in the Yale daily news than you are in your major. You make your way into having your own desk in the tiny office that you get to call home with these people. You decorate the small space with a tiny lady justice statue. You make the promise to yourself then and there that you will do whatever it takes to make this your career. 

You have long forgotten about Jake Ryan from high school and you learn that the moves that you learned to get what you want from high school boys work the same on college boys. There would be plenty of other students that would have slammed you for flirting a little with the water polo captain to get access to the locker room but if you could tell your dad about this aspiration— he'd be proud of you.But you don’t tell your parents about this talent because if you did, they would pull you out of Yale as quickly as they could. Your father hates journalists and to find out that his own daughter was a traitor would kill him. So, when you land your first internship at the New York Post, you don’t say a word. You tell your parents that you’re doing a summer session of mock trial so they don’t ask why you aren’t at home on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. When your mentor at the post lists you as a co author on a spotlight piece you helped him research, you ask him to change it to say S. Hobson. 

He asks why and all you can do is shrug. You watch your older brother get married that summer. His wife is gorgeous with her blonde hair and blue eyes. She is a vision in white at the plaza that hot august day. you‘re sure that you are the only person that notices when your brother slips into the bathroom with a brunette and comes back with his boutonniere gone. It’s the first time in your life that you truly start to hate your family. 

❝ i know who you pretend i am . . . ❞

The summer you graduate from Yale should be a summer of celebrations. You shake hands with your daily news friends and promise to read every article they will publish— if they get hired somewhere goes unsaid. You wish your study group farewell and promise to continue wine night in your new apartment in the city. You smile one last time at that boy you may have had a crush on that whole year, but you never said anything. You leave Yale behind a changed woman and with one last puff of a cigarette in the quad, you leave the ivy covered brick for the final time. You say goodbye to New Haven, Connecticut for the final time.

That first week of summer is all smiles and laughter. You go on a holiday with your college friends  to the Hamptons and drink cheap wine and get really, really drunk for the first time in your life, but it’s bittersweet. You don’t tell your friends about the job offer from vogue sitting in your inbox. You don’t tell your friends that when you finally got back to your parents loft for the first time in years that you saw your dad with another woman and when you told your mom that he was cheating all she said was ❝ marriage is hard, sutton. You’ll find out soon enough ❞ . You’re barreling into adulthood. 

The path is laid clear for you by your mother and father. Now that you have your degree, you’ll need to get ready to take the LSAT and then apply to Harvard law in the spring. Once you pass the test and get started, you will start working for your mom as her assistant and start getting some early mentorship in law. You’ve been home for two months and you’re barely 22 but they’ve set you up with a Vanderbilt for Friday. When you lay your head down that Wednesday night, you dread Thursday morning  . . . 

But when you wake up that morning, you sleepily tumble into the family room and your mother is crying and your father looks angry. It doesn’t make sense and just when you’re about to ask what happened, your father tosses an article written in the post. An expose piece on your father, Alastor Hodson. The author’s name does not go unnoticed. You flip through pages and pages airing every dirty little secret about the Hodson family name. The mistresses your father had, the mistress your brother has, the truth of how the family assets came to be. It sends shockwaves throughout the family. Your brother tells you in no uncertain terms that he’s leaving to London. He’s leaving today. He’s taking his pregnant wife and he’s leaving. He’s leaving. you don’t say a word. You don’t cry, you don’t beg. You just nod and grab your brother one last time and hold him as tightly as you can. You don’t hate your family at this moment, you hate the circumstances. 

Your father is screaming at the top of his lungs to his associates and your mother is crafting the perfect menacing cease and desist letter to the journalist that ran the story. No one tells you that when your sibling leaves you behind to deal with the mess he’s a part of he takes a piece of you with him. In a flash, your dream of working at vogue hands in the balance. Your father and mother look at you and the wheels turn in their heads. The answer to the problem is you. 

You need to get married— fast! The social circles they run in and the general public will forget all about scandal if there is a proposal from a well off man with a reputation to fix yours. A Kennedy type. That is who they need for you. A Kennedy. It’ll have to be a fall wedding because you look best in deeper colors and you’ll need to have children quickly with how the Kennedy family is and the whole dying thing.

Everything is flying past you like lightning and all you can feel bubbling in your chest is a scream so that is what you do. You scream. You scream until everything around you suspends in time. Your parents stare at you in embarrassment. Ladies don’t have outbursts.The last thing you remember before running out of their loft in the middle of manhattan is your mother asking if you are really going to wear that out.

❝ redemption lies plainly in truth . . . ❞

It was Ovid who recorded the story of icarus. The boy with wax wings who flew too close to the sun and no one heard him splash into the sea. It was Homer who recorded that at the core of the conflict of the Trojan war was one man’s greed left unchecked. Walking the streets of Manhattan that day, you felt like Achilles when he basically told Agamemnon to go fuck himself. That day you felt like Achilles when he marched alone on the battlefield and screamed for Hector to come out and show his face.That day you felt like achilles. 

You happily accept your position at vogue that day. Starting Monday next week, you’re gonna be an executive assistant for the culture editor. That day you suffer through the whispers on the subway car of the article that was posted today. That day you finally decide that you are in charge of your life. Your mother and father can not say anything to you anymore and they will no longer have a say in the life that you want to live.

When you finally return to the loft that night, you tell your parents that you won’t be going to Harvard in the spring, you will not be a lawyer like they want for you, that you accepted a job at Vogue and that you will move out when you finally have the funds. All they can do is nod. You’re fairly sure that your dad is going to cut you off from the family money before you go to bed that night but you don’t care. 

When you lay down in bed that night you swear to yourself that you will never be your father. You won’t fall into the trap of corruption because it truly does not win more than honesty. Even though you will distance yourself as much as you can from the Hodson name, you will never truly be free from it so you will do what you have to. 

you are not icarus. you are not achilles. 

you are clytemnestra. 

also you’re still going on the date friday . . . it’s a free dinner, why not?

iiii. wanted connections

It was you!

— This character was the one who wrote the expose article or tv show that exposed her father and the family alike. This character and Sutton would a thousand percent not get along. This character would probably view Sutton's efforts of being an honest journalist as disingenuous and would believe that she is playing good to lift her family’s reputation again. Sutton would be incredibly hostile towards this character and would waver on her morales to try and find some dirt on them to try to leak to the press. 

Dirty secret

— Despite being disgusted by the actions of her father and brother when it came to cheating on their spouses with mistresses, Sutton finds herself in a sticky situation. This character does not have to be married, but this character and sutton would definitely be fucking around with each other and this character would be keeping it a secret and telling sutton to not tell anyone about what they are doing with each other.

GOOD OLD BUDDIES AND PALS

— These characters are the solid group of friends that Sutton has carried through all her time at college and could not imagine experiencing life without. These would be the people that she went to the hamptons with and imagines growing old with these people, this is her little chosen family. 

Sources say . . .

— this character would be a funnel of relevant information to Sutton so she can prove to her bosses that she is a competent writer who can write a hard hitting story and not just summarize facts of events. This character can be anyone in the group as long as they have a reason to know information. This character would be someone that Sutton would try and keep as safe as possible so she does not lose her source.

Is this a bribe?

— this character would try to bribe Sutton to write a column that was in favor of something that is against her personal morals. Everyone has a price and this character would be determined to find it and would use whatever they can to scare Sutton into taking the deal. Sutton would be very conflicted between her desire to be truthful and her bank account. 

We don’t have to call it a date, if you don’t want to!

— this would be your very standard run of the mill ship inclined plot. This would be a plot I would rather plot out instead of throwing in bullet points. 

I think I may have gotten you in trouble . . . 

— This character at some point had come to sutton for help with either money or wanting to give her information for her to leak— she didn’t realize that maybe meeting at the starbucks in fidi was not that smartest idea and now this character is facing ramifications from her mistake in not being discreet enough. Sutton obviously feels awful but what can you do right! Right!?