#francesca garneau.

NAME: Francesca “Frankie” Garneau.

AGE: 30.

BIRTHDAY: November 16th, 1989.

PRONOUNS: She/Her.

GENDER: Cis woman.

BIRTHPLACE: Seattle, Washington.

OCCUPATION: Artist.

GODLY PARENT: Aphrodite.

FACECLAIM: Zoe Kravitz. 

BIOGRAPHY.

drug mention tw, alcohol mention tw, death tw, car crash tw, drunk driving tw.

Frankie remembered a small fraction of what her life was like before the other shoe dropped and the world as she knew it changed forever. It was a little hazy around the edges, the more she tried to recall. But she was eternally grateful for the bit that stayed fixed in a memory, tucked away safely from the otherworldly. The memory was a singular, delicate thread that kept what remained of her heart intact. To her, back then, life was perfect.

Her father was the first one to ever call her Frankie, and the name stuck for the rest of her life. Dashawn Garneau became a father by accident, finding himself alone with a newborn baby girl that had his eyes and his last name. It forced him to grow up, and whatever dreams he had of chasing the new music scene sweeping through Seattle died at the sound of Francesca Grace Garneau’s first cry into the new, strange world.

She was a beautiful, beautiful baby, in a way that went beyond the general cuteness. People were in awe of her, and Dashawn felt a certain pride in knowing that he wasn’t a total fuck up after all, that he was capable of creating an angel who was entirely his own. And in the time that they both grew up together, their bond became indestructible.

Was it the best environment for a child? Probably not, but she was safe and happy, that’s all that mattered. For a short while, that is. By the time she reached the age of five, she watched backstage with massive headphones sliding down her ears as her dad’s band played onstage at a local bar. Dashawn’s aspirations had changed, but music was still his second love, only bumped down the list after the birth of Frankie. And if it took a village to raise a child, her village was full of  tatted and pierced musicians and their significant others who always smelled of cigarettes.

It was the only way she’d ever known.

The majority of the people in her young life only had a high school diploma, if that. When her struggles in the classroom became a recurring issue, it was waved off as no big deal. To them, Frankie was a dyslexic busy body who wasn’t good at school. It wasn’t the end of the world. After all, Frankie was a smart, independent, beautiful girl who brought out the inner beauty of those who had the fortune of knowing her. She would figure it out like they all had.

But things were different for Frankie. The older she got, the stranger things became. What once could be written off as silly, childish imagination began to draw concern from her teachers, from her little village, from her father. Seemingly out of nowhere, every word she ever learned suddenly had a French counterpart that flowed with a fluency that seemed impossible. The doodles in her notebooks were perfect, ancient Greek symbols. The worst of it, she was seeing things.

Things that weren’t human.

People with one eye that centered their foreheads. Men who were covered in fur and capped in hooves from the waist down. And they became even more pronounced in her dreams. Other monsters stormed her unconscious mind, their danger feeling tangible. But she also dreamed of a gorgeous woman, more beautiful than any woman she had ever seen, who would come to rescue her.

She learned to keep her vivid dreams to herself, instead filling the pages of her sketchbook of what she couldn’t comprehend. No one would believe her if she told them the monsters in her dreams were real. It was a lot easier to put it all out on paper. Paper wasn’t judgmental.

And even then, she couldn’t have loved her life more. She had a cool dad, and she was different from other kids.

It was at the age of twelve, Frankie realized just how different she truly was.

Walking her short distance from the bus stop to her house at the end of the street, Frankie unlocked the front door to hear the sound of her father’s voice traveling from the kitchen, accompanied by a woman’s. She dropped her backpack on the floor as she went to see who made a stop by their house that day since visitors weren’t uncommon. When the woman turned to look at her, Frankie froze.

It was the woman in her dreams, the one she’d been trying to perfect the features of in her sketchbook. Her beautiful, high cheekbone. Her full lips. Her crown of coily hair cascading down her back. Her light complexion that matched Frankie’s. The irresistible twinkle in her eye.

Frankie, awestruck, looked from the woman to her father who sat next to her at their little kitchen table. She saw the man she’d known her entire life in a completely different light, the expression he held was foreign for his face. He was nervous.

Her name, it turned out, was Aphrodite. She was the mother that was always missing from the picture, yet Frankie never craved or missed. Her mother was there, a total stranger. And she felt nothing. No anger. No resentment. Nothing. Just as the woman was to her…nothing.

But Aphrodite, in their brief meeting, made her feel understood. She knew of the monsters from Frankie’s dreams in great detail. When she spoke French, Frankie replied to her in French with perfect clarity. And everything about her life that didn’t seem to make sense suddenly did. Everything would make sense, Aphrodite reassured her. She reassured Frankie that she wasn’t alone, that there were kids just like her at a camp just for them.

The more Aphrodite talked, the more Frankie was suddenly interested in going, until a few days later Frankie was saying goodbye to her father in a way that felt a little too final. They hugged, and Dashawn clung to his daughter as if it would be for the last time. With a few things packed, and with her mother guiding her, she left for New York.

Camp Half-Blood was much, much more different than Aphrodite explained. In some ways, it was worse. Homesickness struck quick and lingered in the pit of her stomach, never fully going away. Her new half siblings did nothing to cure it. Nothing about them or that place felt like home to her.

She didn’t look anything like her half siblings, and they constantly reminded her of that. They had long, beautiful silky hair in various shades of blonde and degrees of brunette. Their eyes ranged from blue, to green, to light brown, to hazel. Frankie’s melanin went beyond a sunkissed tan. Her hair was curled in tight coils that seemed to defy gravity. Her eyes were dark, rich. Frankie, she found out, was a product of Aphrodite’s rebellious phase, who had a taste for musicians.

In the house of beauty, they made her feel like the ugly duckling.

Frankie didn’t fit into the walls that were created for her, and she hated it. She found comfort in kids from other cabins who made her time a little less lonely. She held them close until she could go home again, her real home, for periods of time that felt entirely too short. She owed everything to those friends, but there was only so much she could do to dilute the envy she felt.

She never had any real desire to go on any quest or to fight, per say. She was envious of the ones who lived up to their demigod reputations of dying young. She craved it, that way, her death wouldn’t be any sort of real tragedy, but rather an expected casualty. It would make everything so much easier.

But life was a cruel joke, and Frankie continued living, continued counting her days until she finally aged out of camp. With her new life, a gift they called it, she was free. She wouldn’t end up in New Greece like the rest of them, no. First, she would go home to Seattle to see her father and their makeshift family. And then, she was going to see what the world had to offer.

That’s how Frankie ended up in Texas and in love. Real, genuine love. If anyone could tell the difference, she was the one, and there was no one like Evan.

In her time in the real world with nothing life threatening on her trail, she learned that mortal men were something of monsters themselves. Simply put, they were gross. She could read through them as if they were made of glass, but never Evan. He was different, wonderfully, refreshingly different.

He was the love of her life, her missing piece and other half, and she was his.

The Frankie he knew was different from the Frankie that was. She was happy, filled to the brim with joy, and everyday she thanked the gods for not letting her die when she begged night after night. For Evan was the very thing that made life worth living. The Frankie that Evan loved was the Frankie who loved herself.

The tattoos that stained her skin were mostly done while drunk or high, and she wore each of them with pride, because they made her feel beautiful in her own right that had nothing to do with Aphrodite. She loved a good time and had a way of getting the party started no matter where they went. She had a laugh that filled up a room, and before you knew it, you were laughing right along with her.

It was shortly after Evan’s birthday and their first year together when he proposed the idea. Not right now, but one day. And Frankie knew exactly what he meant, and she never wanted anything more.

What neither of them knew at the time was that Evan’s birthday a few weeks earlier would be his last. A drunk driver hit Evan head on one night, killing him instantly, and their eventual forever came to an end before it had even started.

It was less than six months after Evan’s death when Frankie returned to New York, making her final move to New Greece. She needed something stable, familiar, and Seattle simple wasn’t that anymore.

Not that it mattered, nothing was right anymore.

Frankie turned to her art, as she was accustomed to doing. She turned her pain into art for others to consume instead of letting that very pain consume her. She closed up her heart, using whatever ability her mother gave her to play with the emotions of men who got stuck in her web when she didn’t know what to do with her own emotions.

She turned into a person she never hoped to come. She was her mother’s daughter. No drink, no drug, no party, no distraction would ever allow her to forget that. Just as she’d never forgive her mother for the life she gave her, for the love of her life she took away.