Something Else
Posts tagged polyvore
Woo-hoo, got another Polyvore RP!
Morgana Lafayette
Song: “Gunpowder and Lead” by Miranda Lambert
“Don’t you move you son of a b*tch, or praise Jesus, I will fill you with so much wood your own mama wouldn’t recognize you!” Looking back on it, I could have made a better choice of words, but if all my years in pageants have taught me anything, it’s that it’s always better to be dramatic. Unfortunately, those words are the last thing I remember before waking up in a hospital with Professor Frances at my side, telling the doctors and nurses that I’d been hit by a bus. Busses don’t usually leave bite marks, but Professor Frances is very good at explaining things away.
So I got sent home for a month, back to Lebanon, Texas, back to the old trailer park with Mama, Bud, and Austen. Mama had me when she was sixteen. My daddy skipped town when he found out Mama was pregnant, and she ain’t heard from him since. When I was five, Mama met Bud, and a year later they had my baby brother, Austen. He’s fourteen now and is just starting high school. He’s small, blonde, and I suspected at the time, gay (which he later confirmed), not exactly the type of boy who gets treated real well at Lebanon High School. I was real nervous about leaving him while I went all the way to Cambridge, but he told me he’d survive, and that Mama had sacrificed too much trying to make sure that we made it in the world for me to stay planted here in Lebanon like a weed.
The thing about the Lafayette women is that while we may be dirt poor west Texas trailer trash with bad reputations, we are proud. Ain’t nothing that we let hold us down. Mama wanted me to have every opportunity that she never had, so as soon as I was old enough to hold my head up, she was signing me up for the best opportunity-maker that she knew: pageants. People always act horrified when they hear stories of spray tans, fake nails, fake hair and flippers. They mutter things about child abuse. If it weren’t for every penny and very sequin that Mama put into making me a pageant queen, I never would have been named Miss Texas, and I never would have gotten a scholarship to go to Texas State. More importantly, because of pageants, I ain’t afraid of nothing.
In college, I decided I wanted to study women’s history. Like Sojourner Truth once said, it took a woman to turn this world upside down, and it’ll take a woman to set it right. I thought eventually, I’d go on to law school or something. I wanted to do something useful. Things changed when Professor Gerald Frances came over all the way from England to teach a genealogy course. I decided to sign up, thinking it’d be easy. Mama’s a genealogical whiz. She can not only name which great-granddaddies and their brothers were soldiers for the Confederacy, she will tell you which regiment they were in and which battles they fought in. We can follow our bloodline all the way back to the French Huguenots. But Professor Frances gave me something different: research my daddy’s side of the family. I knew my daddy’s name, but I’d never so much as spoken a word to him. But, I don’t give up that easy. I began digging around in record departments. Names kept changing: Hilson, Hellson, Hellsing. I went backwards to England, and then to Holland, finally finding the original name, Van Hellsing. I turned the final assignment in to Professor Frances, smiling and saying, “Wouldn’cha know it, one of my great-granddaddies was a professor at Cambridge, too. I guess I got good blood, don’t I?” The next day, a note appeared in my mailbox, asking me to meet Professor Frances in his office at midnight. I wondered why he’d want to meet me at midnight, but I guessed that he was a very busy man and maybe it was the only hour he could meet me. Nonetheless, I packed my .44 into my purse. When I arrived there, he said that a society known only as The Historians were offering me a scholarship to Cambridge. I called Mama as soon as I left, not caring that it was the middle of the night. Five days later, I was packed up, on a flight to England.
As soon as I arrived, I was expected to have dinner with The Historians. I put on a nice dress, did my hair up, and expected an evening of discussing family histories. Instead, I got vampires and Count Dracula. They told me they wanted me to join them in keeping the forces of darkness at bay. I replied, “I’ve been slaying my competition since I was a baby, slaying vampires should be easy.”
When a Lafayette woman sets herself to doing something, she sets herself full force. I became the best slayer there was because for me, there is no other option but being the best. I’ve staked more vamps than any other of the young girls, and I kept at it up until a month ago. I don’t know what went wrong. Nothing had ever gone wrong for me before. I just thank Jesus that Professor Frances was able to save me. In the end, I only left the hospital with my arm in a cast. I felt completely fine, but Professor Frances still insisted on sending me home to recuperate. I told everyone that I was showing off a talent routine when I slipped and busted my arm. Nobody’s any the wiser. But here, away from the action, I find that I’m paranoid. I wake up in the middle of the night and hear noises at the front door. Bud says it’s just a possum making a nest under the porch, but even after shining a flashlight into the possum’s snarling white teeth, I still can’t set myself at ease. I need to get back into the fight. I’m ready for it.
