Post by Lottii on Feb 15, 2011 20:15:45 GMT
PLAYBY: Meaghan Martin
FULL NAME: Katie Vaden
NICKNAMES: Katie
AGE: 16 years
GENDER: Female
ETHNICITY: White British
STUDENT OR STAFF: Student, Part-time Groom.
HALL: Ashton
PERSONALITY: Katie is painfully shy. Her speech is often slurred and difficult to understand by those who don't know her extremely well, so she uses sign language to communicate. Being born deaf, she's never known anything else and that makes it impossible for her to know how her own speech sounds, she has to rely on making the same shapes with her lips as she observes others doing. She is remarkably good at lip-reading though, so as long as she can see someone's face whilst they are talking to her, she understands everything.
She tends to hide herself away in books and homework rather than go out and be sociable. Katie avoids large crowds as she tends to feel very isolated when people are talking all around her. Her twin brother, Jack is her security blanket as such, and she is rarely seen without him in public. He translates things into sign language for her if she cannot see the speaker, or when she is having a bad day and just reverts to sign language only. Jack is the only one who can always understand what she is saying when she speaks out loud and they have an amazingly close bond.
Her animals are her saviour, and she will surround herself with creatures that cannot judge her. Throughout school she was frequently the bully's victim of choice, especially during the rare times Jack wasn't around. The physical bullying she suffered for years at the hands of bullies and her grandfather has left her locked up in her own frightened shell where she is terrified of people.
BACKGROUND: Katie was born with her twin brother Jack in a small town in the north of England. She was born deaf for an unknown reason, but it did not affect her brother. The first few years of her life were relatively normal. The twins were raised by a single mother - their dad having done a runner before they were born. However their mother was suffering from severe postnatal depression and was too frightened of having her babies taken away from her to seek help. When she started to become a danger to herself and others, it was finally noticed by a health visitor, and she was taken into hospital so she couldn't harm herself. The twins, who were toddlers by this time, went to live with their mother's father, a man who they had never met before and their mother hated.
A move to Wales was hard on the two young children, not helped by having to suddenly be taken away from the only adult they had ever really known and find themselves living with a grumpy old man who possessed no patience whatsoever. He raised the children harshly, having no time for either of them and not bothering to learn to communicate with Katie. This was when Jack started to become the major support for the girl, and Jack relied on her too. Jack tried to keep his sister out of trouble, translating any of the strict instructions they had to follow to keep the house and children perfectly in order. But their grandfather had been raised in a different era, and believed the only way to discipline bad behaviour was with a fist.
By the time the children were seven, they were expected to spend after school time and weekends working on the horse farm their grandfather owned. Katie fell in love with the animals, but Jack regarded them as another means of punishment. A young groom working on the farm taught and helped Katie ride over the next five years or so, and she was the only person the twins could class as a true friend. School was little different to the home situation, Jack ended up spending his time translating for Katie and therefore getting in trouble for falling behind, and Katie, not wanting Jack to cause trouble for her brother, would frequently refuse to do the work so that Jack could do his. Bullies adored their easy targets, and the children hated school as much as their home lives.
Now, at sixteen, the twins are leaving for the college, hoping to make a fresh start away from their strictly controlled childhood.
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