THE CHARACTER…
NAME: Rhea Prince
AGE: 27
BIRTHDAY: January 7th, 1993
GENDER/PRONOUNS: She/Her
BIRTHPLACE: Buffalo, NY
OCCUPATION: Aquarist at the Aquarium & Student at MCC
STAYED/LEFT/NEW: New to town
FACECLAIM: Medalion Rahimi
THEIR STORY…
Trigger Warnings: mentions of racism, drug abuse and suicide.
The streets aren’t kind to loners, so when it’s cold, and you’re hungry, you have to do what you can to survive. Nobody understood that better than Rhea Prince. But back then she was Rhea Mitchell, named so by the social workers that had taken her after they’d found her, seven weeks old, and crying her lungs out in a stroller in an alley somewhere in Buffalo. She’d never come to know the story of how or why she was left there, but would have it repeated to her that her screams could be heard for miles: she’d needed to be found, and made sure she would be. Rhea was a survivor from birth.
And life treated her as such, trusting she would always make it through to the other side, and putting her through the ringer. Nothing in Rhea’s life had ever come easy. Her adolescence was spent bouncing from foster home to foster home, put on and put back like a toy that had outgrown its purpose. By the time she was thirteen, she’d been all over New York, carted around like unwanted extras in a yard sale. No matter how low the price, no one wanted her. And by the time she was old enough to leave, she did. She realized the unlikeliness of any family worth being adopted into wanting a kid her age, and she’d seen enough of the alternative to know she didn’t want it. So, she went on the run. She walked from gas station to gas station until the soles of her sneakers were littered with holes to her polka-dotted socks. She hitch-hiked her way to the city, ditching the creeps whenever their hands wandered too far, and taking on the highways with nothing more than a phone, a charger, and her willpower. It wasn’t easy, that shit was hard, and it didn’t make her any stronger, it only made her more desperate. By the time she arrived in the city, the social workers had given up on her, overwhelmed with the hundreds of other kids who needed their help; who actually wanted it.
Rhea arrived in Manhattan with only twelve dollars on her, a bottle of gatorade, her phone on seventeen percent and a willingness to believe anyone who would offer her a place to sleep and any warm thing to eat. She met Merrick Gold days later, in a failed mugging. He recognized a spark in her, a desperation he’d been taught to seek. He brought her to his uncle, and she was inaugurated into their family. Starved for affection, she ate it all up without questions. The Gold’s put her through high-school, put clothes on her back and never put a hand on her. She was endlessly grateful to them. And when they asked her to run little errands for them, she jumped at the opportunity. Little by little, the errands grew from harmless little odd jobs, to petty theft, to, eventually, an act of grand larceny. And when the cops came crashing through on them, who was there to take the fall but Rhea? Sixteen then, with no lawyer but a DA on her side, she was told to play the part of the wayward “urban youth” ( a subtly-racist way of saying embrace stereotypes to survive ) to get a lighter sentence. With no other options, Rhea took the deal. She spent a year in juvenile detention, with 6 months on parole after.
The experience had changed her, made her more aware of her flaws. Made her realize no one could fill the hole inside her but herself; made her realize only she could complete her, and there was no one in the world worth doing the wrong thing for, not at the expense of herself and her freedom. At the age of twenty-two, after years of working retail and nanny-ing and dog-walking, Rhea had made barely enough to go to college for two semesters, trying for a degree in something that would get her a well-paying job. When the money ran out, she was given an offer: a good friend offered her thousands of dollars for a favor they claimed was tiny. Yeah, fucking right. Laundering money was never tiny. Rhea had learned from her mistakes. Putting her faith in the justice system, she called up her parole officer and turned her friend in. In the wake of this, she was ostracized, cast-aside, stalked and harassed daily for being a narc. Rhea knew she’d done the right thing, but the cost of it was so high. She spent months inside her apartment, barely leaving, barely eating, scared to exist beyond its walls.
Depression, fear, and isolation sank their claws into her. 23, and aimless, without a job, or a friend to turn to, she’d downed more than forty pills of Midol. Luckily for Rhea, her old parole officer checked up on her weekly, and had had an off feeling about her. He found her just in the nick of time, and helped save her life. He helped put her in a rehab facility for drug use and depression, ever the good guy. Along the way, he’d fallen for her. When she was released, he helped her find a new job, took her to change her last name, and let her stay with him. For years, she worked endlessly to save enough money to go to school. In the three years they were together, she’d completed two semesters of additional schooling. Still, she had two more years to go before she could graduate.
And then, like a miracle, life sent a gift her way. A strange email from a cousin she’d never known she had, living in a little town called Mystic, Connecticut. Rhea was bewildered. It had to be a scam right? But after tentative emails, phone-calls, Skype sessions and the proof provided by 23andMe, she had to admit it to herself: she had family. Family that wanted her to visit. Family that bought her a car, and helped her get a driver’s license. Family that wanted her to move to Mystic and pursue a degree she actually wanted, at no cost.
Initially, Rhea was pessimistic, sure it was too good to be true. But after visiting a handful of times, she believed it: this life was hers if she wanted it. And she did. God, she really did. After breaking up with Nick, her boyfriend, she was free to leave, and finally, finally, finally… begin again.
THEIR PERSONALITY…
+ tough, adaptable, hopeful
- closed-off, temperamental, traumatized
