Post by VIVIAN IRIS HAMPTON-YORKE on Aug 29, 2013 16:34:05 GMT -8
| [atrb=style,width: 420px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/0478144b9f16c95a37367d1aca56b45c/tumblr_mkfax8tDxp1s97ldco1_500.png); padding: 5px, bTable] VIVIAN I. HAMPTON-YORKE 19 | HETEROSEXUAL | UNEMPLOYED | COLLEGE STUDENT | TROIAN BELLISARIO THE INTERVIEW HELLO. THANKS FOR COMING IN TODAY. SHALL WE START WITH YOUR NAME? “We might as well.” Vivian agrees, taking her seat. She stalls a moment, crossing one leg over the other and smoothing her skirt flat across her thigh, then glances back up. She hefts a sigh to indicate her displeasure at the inconvenience of the interview, then settles back, folding her hands daintily in her lap. “My name is Vivian Iris Hampton-Yorke. Technically, the second, as my mother would be Vivian Hampton-Yorke the first. But no one ever bothers to add ‘the second’ after girl’s names – have you ever noticed that?” She slides a long, elegant finger along the length of her jaw, tilting her head mock-contemplatively, before letting the hand drop back to her lap. “It’s almost as though we live in a patriarchal society where women and their titles are valued less than men or something. Strange.” She hesitates a moment now, judging the expression on the interviewer’s face, before letting out a brief sharp laugh. “What’s that look for? The almost unbearable pretension? Well, yes, it’s a fairly ostentatious name. Any time you hear a double-barrel surname like that you know what kind of person you’re dealing with. I’m getting married in the spring and I’m thinking of keeping my name. I might add Zach’s to it as well. Make it a triple barrel. Vivian Iris Hampton-Yorke-Eldridge. What do you think? Too much?” There’s a slight spark of amusement in her eyes that suggests she is deliberately poking fun – at herself, at her name, at the very echelon of society to which that name and her bearing immediately suggests she belongs to. THAT'S A NICE NAME. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING? That spark of amusement flares briefly, flickering into a full blown mischievous grin. That’s a nice name? Oh, the poor love. She sounds sincere. Was it so hard to tell that Viv was joking, or is she just an overly polite simpleton? “Thank you,” she replies anyway, a touch heavy on the sarcasm. “How kind. I’m sure yours is lovely too –” She waves a dismissive hand. “Whatever it is.” She’s unsure if the woman told her name when she came in or not, but if she did, she’s forgotten it. Vivian isn’t one to hold insignificant details in her head. “For a living, I’m a professional heiress. That may come as a surprise –” She cocks a slender eyebrow, then raises her hands and indicates herself in an expansive sweeping gesture. Everything about her screams a lot of wealth and no work experience. Manicured hands; the clean, pretty silk of her dress (picked out by her mother, because even at the age of nineteen, Vivian is not trusted to dress herself correctly); hair fixed just so. Her well groomed appearance suggests she has no other priorities, and endless amounts of time and resources to devote to it. “Or it might not.” She finishes, with a slight shrug. “I also go to college. I’m majoring in Women’s Studies, with a minor in Philosophy. Yes, I am, in fact, going for the most useless degree of all time, but if it were up to me I wouldn’t be in college at all, so…” It was something her parents wanted. Demanded, in fact. Viv might have actually wanted to go or taken it more seriously if they’d allowed her to spread her wings and head off to somewhere with a little freedom, but they were insistent on Bowdoin so that she could continue to live at home and remain under thumb. She laughs airily after a moment, returning back to her gentle deconstruction of the spoilt rich girl façade because the stifling of her potential is far too painful a topic. “Besides, when am I ever going to need it? Girls like me don’t work. Hadn’t you heard?” INTERESTING. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN? “Fun?” She rolls her eyes. “What’s that?” Vivian rarely has time for fun. Her days are rigidly planned, filled from dawn to dusk with activities pre-approved by her parents. There’s her college classes and her library sessions, and in between studying for her degree, she has to contend with the music tutors and the etiquette coach and – above all else – her ballet. Ballet is not something she’s expected to pursue seriously, but nor is it some fun relaxing hobby. She started dancing at the same time most children were learning to toddle, forced into it by her mother – who by all accounts was living her own frustrated dreams precariously through her child. After years and years of intensive practice, of recitals and competitions and learning from the best, Vivian is exceptionally competent – but that is all that can be said for her. She is technically as proficient as some of the best, but her movements are always so soulless and mechanical that she will never inspire anybody with her dancing. Viv’s hobbies aren’t fun for her. She finds no joy in dancing, and similarly no joy in the flute or singing or elocution lessons or the books on women’s theory and philosophy that she ought to be devouring. There is only one thing that Viv willingly does for fun – and that is not much a what, as it is a who. Her hobby is Luca. Her one source of joy is Luca. But he’s so secret it almost gives her a little thrill just to think his name, so needless to say she won’t be spilling the beans to this woman at any point in their pointless little interview. WOULD YOU SAY THOSE ACTIVITIES REFLECT WHO YOU ARE? “What activities?” She demands, rolling her eyes. She didn’t tell the stupid bitch anything about her ‘activities’. “Or are you just filling in the blanks – making assumptions? You wouldn’t be the first.” Well, that’s true enough. People always think they know girls like Viv. Spoilt, bratty, demanding, shallow. They take one look at her and they think they know that much. Perhaps for some filthy rich little girls like her, these assumptions are a great injustice. For Vivian, they’re pretty much accurate. You can’t judge a book by its cover, or so they say, but you can get a pretty good idea on what the novel’s about just from a glance. Viv is exactly those things. She has been spoilt rotten her entire life to the point where she does not know how to value things that are intangible or without monetary value, and her puddle-shallow outlook has given her a certain tendency to just… assume things and take things and ask for things she hasn’t quite earnt. Vivian is full of her own importance, but in her oh so humble opinion, she’s not arrogant without cause. She is a clever girl, naturally talented at most things she turns her hand to, with enough wit to dazzle and charm to manipulate those around her to bend to her will. Is it conceited to dismiss her considerable gifts and pretend as though she isn’t self-aware enough to know what she’s good at? “You know, I think I’ll just let you make up your own mind. You seem smart enough –” Her lip curls slightly, evidently doubting the statement. “– so I’ll let you figure out who I am.” And that, of course, is Viv all over too. Despite an abundance of self-confidence, she is still a defensive nineteen year old girl, unable to take even the slightest criticism with any grace or to want to even bother to empathise with the people around her. The youthful curse of not being quite as clever as she thinks she is just yet is both her greatest weakness and her greatest strength. Determined and ambitious, she has a tendency to overreach herself at times, to fall flat on her face in pursuit of the things she isn’t brave or independent enough to really succeed in owning just yet. But it’s in these vulnerable moments of fresh failure that she’s at her kindest and most sympathetic. When she falters, Vivian is human, and when she is feeling especially human, she’s not so bad or silver tongued or dismissive as she usually is. There’s a part of her, just a tiny sliver of personality, that is generous. Not sincere, not sweet – she is never those things – but certainly sympathetic to others. To see this every once in a while is about as endearing as Vivian is ever willing to make herself to most people, but for her few real friends, it seems to be enough. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that all of this is totally irrelevant when she’s in her own house. Vivian leaves her personality at the door each and every time she comes home. Around her parents, she is unrecognisable. Quiet, well mannered, perfectly obedient in every single way. Maybe that’s the reason for her audacity, her occasional cruelness, in the outside world. She is so suffocated and worn down around her parents, so devoid of who she actually is, that uncontrollable bursts of personality have a way of bubbling up to the surface and making her sharp and intentionally difficult to handle. She is who she is because she was made that way. Despite the strength of her personality, she is little more than the product of her environment and the expectations of others. Now, she flicks a dismissive, entitled hand at the interviewer, bored of the introspection. “Next question.” A COOL CAT LIKE YOU MUST HAVE A TON OF SUITORS FLOCKING TO YOU, HUH? She cocks an eyebrow. “And what century is this?” Suitors make this sound like Edwardian England. Cool Cat is more Woodstock. Neither phrase is exactly evocative enough to make her want to respond with any great enthusiasm. “Whatever, never mind. I’m engaged, like I said. We’re getting married early next year. He’s a very good man.” That much… is true. Viv is very much inclined to despise her fiancé due to the fact that he is of her parents choosing and not hers and because she so thoroughly belongs to somebody else, but despite her natural inclination to hate him out of spite, she doesn’t. She can’t. The truth is she and Zach have known each other all their lives. They… share a family tree, though thankfully not any blood. They’re step-cousins, but he is more like the big brother that she never had. There is nothing romantic there for her. Nothing. The thought of kissing him makes her skin crawl. The thought of their wedding night makes her nauseated. But that is far in the future, for now. And when the time comes, she’s sure she’ll be able to lie back and think of England, as it were. Because yes, despite the fact that it would be like marrying her brother and despite the fact that she has somebody else she’d rather be with, she plans to go through with it. Why wouldn’t she? She’s perfectly poised to have everything she wants, if she just grits her teeth and bears it. Her lover, Luca, is a very fine boyfriend but he doesn’t have the money or the social standing or the education and career to give her what she wants from life. She’ll marry Zach to secure her financial future, and she will keep Luca on the side. She will be a kept woman with a kept man to entertain her. Won’t that be deliciously, selfishly entertaining? It’s immoral, part of her knows that, but she has to figure that she has been immorally forced into doing something that she doesn’t want to do in the first place. Where is the harm in making the best of it, even if doing so is at other people’s expenses? She looks up at the expectant interviewer, who is watching, apparently wanting more detail. “What? Do you want an invitation? Dream on. Next question.” COOL BEANS. THEY SAY YOUR FAMILY SHAPES WHO YOU ARE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOURS? “Well, that’s opening a can of worms, isn’t it? Don’t you know never to ask for the family skeletons?” She yawns rather deliberately. “My parents are Vivian Hampton-Yorke and William Yorke. They’re English. I am not, as you may have noticed by the lack of accent. They’re descendants of some Duchess or Countess or maybe even Princess, though I doubt that last one. They’re something or other. They have titles and money, anyway.” A casual little shrug rolls off her shoulders. “Daddy invests, so we keep the fortune up. Mother has a passing familiarity with and occasional employment in the fashion industry. She designed her own label or something. It didn’t do so well. More’s the pity.” She doesn’t sound very sympathetic, perhaps even a touch amused by her mother’s failings. Understandable, perhaps, given the relationship between them. Vivian doesn’t see much of her father and when she does, she is always the perfect little angel and he the doting but emotionally absent daddy. Her mother, on the other hand, is domineering and insufferable. She chooses everything for Vivian from what she eats and how she dresses to what she does in her spare time and who she’ll be friends with. Naturally, it was her idea to arrange the engagement between her daughter and her precious stepbrother’s son. Viv has never overly liked the woman, but since then, she has quietly, silently hated her. “I don’t have any siblings.” She shifts uncomfortably in her chair, unused to being sat still for such a long period of time without having to rush somewhere or do something. She lifts her arms to give a not-quite satisfying stretch, arching her spine in the process, and then – frowning ever so slightly – settles back into her seat. “Well, not strictly true, I suppose. Not to be macabre, but I have a trio of stillborn brothers. My parents desperately wanted a son. Alas, it was not to be. I was the only one strong enough to tough it outside of my mother’s poisonous uterus. And Joshua, Benjamin and Matthew –” She ticks off each name on her fingers. “ – are nothing more than little headstones beneath the rosebush at the end of the garden.” She stifles another yawn. “Tragic, really.” More so for her parents than herself. Viv wouldn’t have been well suited to having siblings – being altogether too demanding of attention and things by herself, let alone having to share with others. But yes, it is the great tragedy of her parents’ existences that her mother never managed to pop out a living boy. An heir. Her parents live in some old fashioned universe where Vivian’s gender apparently makes her frivolous and silly and inappropriate to inherit the estate and the titles and the fortune. That’s most of the reason why they betrothed her to her darling cousin Zach – whose own parents lost their own fortune through some mishap or another, and who stands to inherit nothing himself. Keeping it within the family means everybody wins. Except Vivian and Zachary, of course. AND YOUR LIFE? TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PAST. I'M EAGER TO HEAR. Eager to hear. Viv is unsure whether she detects sarcasm or not, and so eyes the woman with wary dislike for a moment, before giving her head a quick dismissive shake. “Fine. If we have to. I was born. My parents’ fourth and only successful attempt at a living heir – but whoops, I came out the wrong gender and fucked everything up.” She gives a sarcastic, sugary sweet smile, enjoying the juxtaposition of her words and her expression. “Originally I was born in Kensington. England. I don’t remember it, we moved to the states when I was three months old. We lived in New York for a while, so Daddy could play with his investments, and then mother got tired of it and wanted to move out of the city. They chose Brunswick, because it was near to my step-uncle and god-awful aunt and darling cousin Zach. I was five. I don’t remember anything before this town. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it. Sometimes I’m not even sure if there’s a world outside of Brunswick at all.” She rolls her eyes to diminish the sincerity of her statements. These are genuine worries that flit across her mind when she is trying night after unsuccessful night to soothe her troubled conscience to sleep. The thought that she will remain trapped here, in this town, in her parents’ house, firmly held under her mother’s domineering thumb for the rest of her life is… upsetting. The house staff can vouch for the number of nights they hear her sobbing through her locked bedroom door – so afraid, so weak in her most private moments. Vivian is an anxious, depressive wreck in the middle of the night when there is no one there to bear witness to it. But only then. Her fears seem silly and petty and pointless in the daylight. She’s quite able to express them with mild sarcasm, as if they’re not real at all, without even batting an eye. “My childhood was a childhood. It was fine, I suppose.” She adds, doing her very best to sound bored. The thing she remembers most about her childhood is ballet. Ballet this, ballet that, ballet all the time. When it became clear her mother would never have another child, one of the spare bedrooms was turned into a studio for her. She remembers endless hours trapped in that mirrored box, watching dozens of copies of herself making the same movements, again and again. Bar work until the bar held imprints of her tiny grasping hands. Working en pointe until the muscles all the way up her legs seized up, until her toes were gnarled and bleeding, her feet disfigured. Until she could hardly walk – only dance. Dance, or hobble and limp and drag herself from place to place. After ballet, what she remembers most are the tutors – the etiquette coach who would smack her knuckles with a ruler when she spoke in contractions, the flautist who would grind her teeth whenever Vivian played an imperfect note, the private teacher who made her recite things endlessly and would bark orders at her when she least expected it: presidents, states, continents, currencies, your seven times table, recite them now and don’t be lazy about it. “When I was eleven, my parents sent me to an all girls school. Boarding school. Upstate.” It was the first and last time she was ever let out of their sight, out of this town. Boarding school, while it lasted, was fun. Vivian’s first taste of freedom drove her wild. She stopped dancing and playing the flute and reciting lists, and she spoke in contractions whenever she pleased. “I got expelled seven months later. Somebody smuggled vodka into my dorm room and started a little party.” She gives an over-innocent blink. Her mouth twists into a tight little smirk, obviously still pleased with the actions of her eleven year old self. Her parents wouldn’t believe it – not their precious, quiet, well-behaved Vivian. They came and picked her up in the middle of the night, stole her away when no one could see, and she was once more confined back to the house. “They home schooled me again after that.” Squashed and repressed and stifled with a vengeance. She scarcely left the house for the next three years, too busy being relentlessly moulded back into the precocious good girl of her pre-adolescence. But then she hit high school age. Her father thought it might be best to get her socialised. He wanted to send her off to another boarding school, a stricter one, but her mother wouldn’t hear of letting her out of sight. “Until high school. I was allowed to go to Brunswick High. I suppose they figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble if I was only down the street.” Another slight bat of her eyelashes suggests this didn’t quite work out. It didn’t. Freedom from the house that served as her prison, from her restrictive parents, has always done things to Vivian. Made her unable to control herself. But by virtue of the three years since the boarding school incident, she’d gotten smarter. Vivian acted as she pleased outside the house. Every morning when she walked out that front door, she shrugged off her obedient persona and became a bossy, bitchy snob to amuse herself. High school was fun. Other kids to toy with and antagonise made life so much more entertaining than just being shut up all alone in her mirrored studio with only her own reflections for company. But, she was smarter about it. Not so obvious. Her detention record was always spotless. She was nothing but a model student – debate club president, honour roll, lacrosse captain. Vivian still got in plenty of trouble. She just no longer got caught. As far as she was concerned, she might as well let her parents think that they crushed the spirit out of her, so long as doing so kept the peace. Which it did. Everything was going alone rather nicely, in fact, until her senior year. That was when her mother put her foot down on the fact that a) Vivian had to go to college, and b) she had to do it at Bowdoin. Vivian, having learnt a long time ago not to argue with the woman, grit her teeth and obeyed. And then, from bad to worse… “Zach proposed just after my high school graduation.” He did. Just after. She was still wearing the cap and gown, still clutching her diploma, when he got down on one knee. She’d been too stunned to know what to do, but one quick look at her parents, the tight affirmation on their faces, and she’d known what they wanted her to do. What she’d have to do, if she wanted to avoid the inevitable fight. “I accepted,” she says, around a sigh. “I started college in the fall. I don’t know. The rest, as they say, is history.” What about a secret? Everyone has a secret. Vivian gives a light, sarcastic laugh. “Oh no, not me. Haven’t you been listening? I’m a good girl.” She sweeps a dramatic hand against her heart. “Oh, my reputation. It would never weather a scandal. A secret could lead me to ruin.” Which, of course, isn’t to say that she doesn’t have any. Many. Take your pick, she’s full of them. If you were to pick her up and shake her, secrets would fall out in droves. She’s done many a thing she’s not proud of or been forthcoming about. Breaking little pointless laws, minor infractions against human decency, that kind of thing. She has her double life – half the time her parents’ well behaved little show pet, and the other half a spoilt havoc-seeking bitch missile. But most of all she has her affair. She enjoys thinking about it more than she should. Luca. Her lover. It’s delightfully inappropriate. It is the best kind of revenge against the life and the marriage she’s been forced into. And probably, though she would never admit it – certainly not to her lover himself – he is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. The one good, real thing. But the fact that her affair might mean something, might be anything more than frivolous and casual, is buried down so deep beneath stubborn denial that it’s practically a secret from herself. ALRIGHT. TIME'S ALMOST UP. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAMS. QUICK! “‘Quick’? Excuse me, but you can go and fuck yourself. Don’t you tell me what to do or how fast to do it.” Viv snaps, back on the defensive. Switching from playful to hostile in a heartbeat. She doesn’t take orders from uppity little strangers who’ve been demanding information from her all morning. “Besides, my dreams are none of your business.” All her dreams end one way. With her getting the hell out of Brunswick and finding something meaningful to do with her life. But those are silly fantasies. Her reality is that she will stay here, marry Zach, mess around with Luca, pop out babies and become her mother. It’s inevitable. That’s what happens to girls like Vivian. They always become their mothers in the end. Maybe that’s why she hates the bitch so much. AND THAT'S A WRAP. IT WAS NICE GETTING TO KNOW YOU. Vivian exhales slowly, raising her eyebrows. There is something wrong with this peppy woman. There is something very wrong with her. She shakes her head, rising elegantly from her chair, and answers with a sarcastic little bob of her head, “It was a veritable joy.” She is only too glad to escape. BEHIND THE MASK PUN | 20 | GMT | DESTINY | DON'T MAKE ME LIST  |
