elizabeth (lizzie) baker, 24, would-be-peach-queen
don’t fucking talk to her about the last peach pageant.
literally, do not, or she’ll stick a sharp pencil into your hand.
she’s a secretary so she’s extremely good at sharpening pencils.
do you know how fucked up and awful to be raised your entire life for something and for that thing to get completely and totally fucked up? lizzie does.
baker girls are good for one thing and one thing only — winning pageants. her auntie was a winner, and her auntie’s auntie, and her auntie’s auntie; you get it. when david baker married a girl from out of town and had a baby they named lizzie, no one expected lizzie to follow in her aunties’ footsteps. she wasn’t the right sort of baker, not the right sort of girl to win a beauty pageant in miriam’s well.
lizzie set about proving them all wrong. she did her best in everything. best in class, valedictorian, yearbook leader, head cheerleader, prom organizer. it was never about being the best, though, for nana baker. it was about being the peach queen. in 2018, it was her cousin annie’s turn, and when they placed that big ole’ crown on top of her blonde hair, lizzie could picture herself in it. soon, it would be her turn.
and then it all went wrong. lizzie got big curly extensions for the 2020 pageant, desperate to look every inch the southern belle, and even that didn’t do the trick. because of one brooks lyle, and his insistence on ruining everything that was good about the peach pageant. when he tried to come at her, she came right back at him, and what ensued was the worst chaos miriam’s well’s ever seen in a public forum.
the ban wasn’t even the worst part (okay, it was pretty bad). it was finding out that her mom, her mama, her best friend in the whole freaking world, didn’t think lizzie could win the pageant on her own. that she had to bribe the judges for lizzie to even have a shot at winning, because of course lizzie wasn’t good enough on her own. you know the college admissions scandal, and how some of those parents swapped out their kids’ SAT scores to make their kids think they got into college on their own but really they had someone else take the tests? lizzie was one of those kids, except instead of college, her mom tried to buy her into winning a pageant crown.
she can’t even really blame her mama for it. neither one of them’s ever really been treated like family by half of the bakers. the peach crown was their way in, their golden ticket to the acceptance that they craved. now, lizzie’s got nothing but a lifetime ban and a fractured relationship with the mom she loves.
in the past year, she’s tried to figure herself out beyond Pageant Queen, and hasn’t got much luck. she got her septum pierced, moved into a shitty apartment, quit her job at the financial advisor’s office and got one at the family doctor’s instead, and tried to give herself a stick-and-poke ankle tattoo.
she’s still fuming. still lost. deep down, still wants to be queen.
baker cousins who treat her like a black sheep. maybe even annie baker, who would be 26+ since she won peach queen in 2018?
former high school classmates who see their valedictorian / prom queen’s lost her crown. especially people she ignored who are now the only people that are actually being nice to her.
patients at the doctor’s office whose files she reads and yeah she knows your secrets.
a roommate or two in a shitty two-bedroom plus den apartment with broken air conditioning and a random cat that just showed up one day and never left (his name is pushkin).
other people from the peach queen pageant subplot please! let her kill brooks lyle!
tbh anything she is wide open!