[ elle fanning & she/her / cis-woman‷ watch out , alma olive putnam has crash-landed into roswell !! they look twenty-two years old and celebrate their birthday on may 26th. they are from west pawlet, vermont, reside in moonbeam gardens and are currently working as archivist at the local library. one thing you should know about them is she’s an exceptionally talented dancer who managed to secure a place at julliard, but an injury meant she had to give it up‷. she reminds me of scrubbing a wine stain from a peter pan collar, the sound of heels clacking on a marble floor, a smile like the sharpened edge of a knife. ( muse tag. also a muse tag. pinterest. playlist. long ass google doc. )
basics.
FULL NAME: alma olive putnam
NICKNAME(S): she doesn’t do nicknames but at school, she was simply ‘putnam’.
BIRTHDAY: may 26th, gemini.
AGE: twenty-five.
HOMETOWN: bandera, texas. also lived in west pawlet, vermont for a bit. her mom is in the army so they travelled around quite a bit when she was a kid.
BIRTHPLACE: bandera, texas.
RELIGION: raised extremely christian, but dabbles in wicca and sees religion as more of a buffet that you should be able to pick and choose bits from. alma feels pressure to keep up the good christian girl act, especially to strangers and acquaintances, because her uncle is the local pastor — but sometimes it feels like she’s living a double-life.
family.
MOTHER: edie putnam, née calhoun ( 48 )
FATHER: todd abraham putnam ( 54 )
GRANDPARENTS: cameron putnam, ceila putnam ( fraternal grandparents ), arthur calhoun, clara calhoun ( maternal grandparents ).
AUNT(S): martha watson (todd’s sister), renée putnam (ray’s wife).
UNCLE(S): ray putnam (todd’s younger brother), noah calhoun (edie’s younger brother), pastor ralph calhoun ( edie’s older brother ), reverend benjamin ‘benji’ watson ( martha’s husband ).
SIBLING(S): abraham ‘abe’ josiah putnam ( born 1991, died 1994 )
COUSIN(S): darla watson, mary-beth watson, benjamin watson jr. ( martha and benji’s children ), cathy rose putnam, toby john putnam ( ray and renée’s children )
PET(S): a black cat called nyx who follows her everywhere like a shadow and whom she claims is her familiar. the family own a farm so they have tonnes of animals but alma doesn’t count those as pets considering most of them will be butchered and sold. her father has names for them, but alma finds it easier to not think of them as having individual identities.
trigger warnings: internalised homophobia, religion, death, animal cruelty.
family (cont.)
— she was born to new money (though they’ll claim they’re old money) in vermont in a big old farmhouse. they spent a few years living in bandera, texas. she lived on a military base for a bit when her mom was working as a linguist for the army, and then the family moved to roswell where other putnam relatives have been living since the 1920s.
— alma has quite a few cousins in roswell. they’re one of the more religious families. her uncle is reverend calhoun, pastor at the local church, her father owns a dairy farm on the outskirts of roswell, and he was also the investor who helped tomas buy the puhlman ranch when the previous owners retired. her aunt is a member of the council and run’s the local charter of the women’s institute. there a family with their fingers in a lot of influential pies.
— a few generations back, her grandfather, a german immigrant was a ranch hand who ended up marrying the farm owners daughter. for the last two generations, the men from alma’s family have owned the farm rather than worked on it, handled finances, kept the books and stocks, and do very little of the dirty work. they provide employment to a lot of blue collar workers in the form of manual labour. the putnam family farm is a big supplier in the meat industry across new mexico. they have a competition with puhlman ranch and some of the other local farms for “the biggest hog this side of the dexter” every summer.
— alma’s father, todd putnam, a morally bankrupt and emotionally distant yet somehow genuinely warm man who only ever refers to alma as ‘petal’, earns his living through managing the farm as well as the various other ranches he has stocks in (such as the puhlman ranch). he treats it like monopoly, just going around putting his little green house on everything.
— her college-educated mother, edie putnam, is a deeply-southern alcoholic journalist ( more of a gossip columnist tbh ). she used to work as a linguist in the army, but she found moving the family around too stressful. she now has a fortnightly column about quaint farm life, and the joys of being a family-led business, despite the fact that she rarely walks down to the farm, she’s never milked a cow and doesn’t like getting her hands dirty.
— edie can usually be found on the veranda of their moonbeam gardens townhouse drinking a bloody mary despite it being two in the afternoon. her licence was suspended when alma was in the fourth grade for drunk driving, which is also about the time she stopped working for the army and they moved to the family farm in roswell.
— both of alma’s parents had large personalities, so alma’s never really been shy around adults, even as a kid she’d speak to them in a forthright, confident manner, and because she was always surrounded by adults, she’s always seemed a bit wise beyond her years. growing up, she didn’t have any siblings. the only competition was the ghost of a brother who died of asphyxiation in a slurry pit before she was born.
appearance.
— 👁👄👁 — this cat. — has the air of someone who is very aware of the fact that they are beautiful. holds herself (all five feet and eight inches) with the kind of poise that only a person who’s never really faced any opposition has. — her most defining feature is probably her wide-set eyes. as a child she was often bullied for them and told they made her look fish-like, but this never really offended alma in the way it was intended. she’d simply state that at least she didn’t have the brain of a fish, or perhaps talk about the fact that fish are one of the finest ecosystems on god’s green earth. — her hair is usually a bright peroxide blonde. naturally, her hair colour is more of a honey blonde. the putnams are that entirely-blonde family with a threatening aura. as a teenager, alma dyed her hair black for several years. she was very morbid and wrote visceral poetry about the wolves eating her heart and shit (tumblrinas let me hear u holler i’m not a girl i’m a storm with skin), but dying her hair was the closest she got to having an emo phase. she still goes through phases of dying it dark brown occasionally, but mostly it’s blonde. — alma’s naturally quite pale. she doesn’t tan easy in the sun, and is usually slathered head-to-toe in sunblock before setting outside. she’s had it drilled into her from a young age that ‘good skin is everything’ and her skincare routine is like some crazy ten-step cassie howard style event. — she has several small scars from various sporting endeavours (most of them from field hockey) and one long but barely visible scar down the back of her left leg from an operation she had to insert metal plates into her leg after stress fractures caused by ballet. — she has a black cat tattoo on her left wrist, an ode to her cat nyx, which someone stick-and-poked on her at a house party when she was a teenager. she thinks it’s kind of tacky now, but she’ll never remove it because at the time, when she was asked what would still be meaningful and important to her in twenty years, the only thing she could think of ( other than a ballet shoe — lame ) was her cat.
style.
— aesthetics tag. — alma’s aesthetic is very timeless. strangers in the future could look at a photo of her and not really know whether it was taken in 1980s or the 1960s. everything she wears is very delicate. she loves slip dresses, and corsets over blouses, and lacy things. she’ll wear white fishnet stockings but never black, she associates them too much with the grunge movement. she’s very audrey horne in both the way she dresses and her vibe. it’s kind of witch meets thrift store haute couture. she’s a big fan of layering. you’ll rarely see her without a coat, unless it’s summer, because you can always take a coat off if you get too hot but you can’t add an extra layer if you didn’t bring one. — her make-up is very twiggy inspired. she tends to go big on the eyes and big on the lips, though not always at the same time. she’s a big fan of 60s graphic eyeliner. she loves a red lip, and feels naked without one, but will sometimes opt for a gentle nude lip instead. she’s not a fan of contour or bronzer, but will occasionally use blusher. her eyebrows are always pristine. — her clothing style is like…. vintage thrift store but make it preppy. berets and cute hats, neck scarves, large fluffy cardigans or like those leathery jackets with big suede fringes on them, 70s mini skirts and knee-high boots. quite often she’ll be in sports kit, maybe a cute tennis skirt. on the rare occasion when she’s feeling casual she’ll wear a nico / velvet underground t-shirt with a pair of mom jeans and converse, but otherwise, the library is her catwalk. — jewellery wise, she sticks to silver. it goes better with her pale skin-tone, plus it’s more classic and less flashy than gold. she’ll usually have a small silver cross around her neck, worn mostly out of habit. she loves layering multiple delicate little rings. she’s a big fan of fun earrings with a threatening aura, like dagger earrings, little scissors, or laser-cut anatomical hearts. — she’s rarely in trousers, unless they’re flared bellbottoms or part of a power suit. usually its a long floor-kissing swishy skirt, or a mini-skirt paired with knee-high socks or thigh-high boots. — staples in her wardrobe include knee high socks, pleated skirts, silk slip dresses, pussy-bow collars, camel wool coats. alma definitely has big horse girl energy that folk can probably smell a mile off.
friends.
— ok first of all, alma is this video and also the ‘i’m not here to make friends’ trope — having a mother in the army meant moving around quite a bit and changing school frequently. her attitude growing up was like why bother getting to know people if everyone is temporary.
— up until high school, alma didn’t really have any friends. other kids thought of her as an oddball, a grown-up in an eleven-year-old’s body, and she thought of them as immature and beneath her. rather than sleepovers, bike rides, and making mud pies, alma put her time instead into bettering herself, learning to speak several languages, learning the clarinet, practising ballet, horse-riding. she was a child who always had to have an activity or project on the go, or she would become listless and nightmarish for the carousel of au pairs and nannies hired to care for her.
— in high school, she had more friends, but they were mostly made out of convenience. friends came in the form of study group members, fellow ‘gifted and talented’ students the teachers were pushing towards ivy league in the hope that someone would make it out of roswell with prospects that amounted to more than just slowly rotting to death at the cracker barrel or searching for aliens that likely didn’t exist.
— while she tends to be rooted in reality rather than fantasy, she definitely made up a few friends along the years. ‘they don’t go to our school’ and ‘they live in a different state now’ were common phrases when alma would elaborately describe the best friends who existed only inside her head.
— she keeps her circle small. she would rather have people think her boring than know too much about her. alma definitely tries to be an enigma. she wants to be mysterious and unreadable because that’s what books have taught her makes women desirable and interesting and cool. very amy dunne in the way she expertly reinvents herself to suit her audience, when she wants to impress. i imagine she’d have a very small circle of close friends who she has incredibly deep bonds with and can share an intellectual philosophical conversation with. she’s still coming to terms with the fact that she’s Not Straight, dealing with internalised homophobia, and also her family are super christian.
— i imagine she may have very sapphic bonds with some of her close female friends that she really struggles to figure out. would love to get some of those going, so jotting that down as WC
living situation.
— apart from the three years she spent in new york, alma has lived in roswell since she was eleven years old. her family live in moonbeam gardens, but own a ranch on the outskirts of town where there is also a farmhouse that they occasionally let out as an air b&b for extra income. don’t be surprised if alma just disappears and fucks off to live in the farmhouse for a bit. it’s been there longer than the town itself. her great-grandfather began working as a manual labourer there in the 1920s when he immigrated from germany. along the way, he impressed some people, was promoted to manager of the farmhands, and his son ended up marrying the daughter of the man who owned the ranch. the putnams took over the ranch in the 1940s and have owned it ever since.
— growing up on a farm that specialised in meat rather than crops meant that alma saw a lot of death growing up, which is probably the reason why she’s pretty fucked up and also the reason she’s vegan (which went down like a lead balloon on thanksgiving 2016 when alma announced to the entire church parish she would NOT be partaking in the ritual sacrifice of turkeys).
— she spent three years in new york studying classical civilisation at columbia. while there, she really grew into herself, and while she definitely romanticises the idea of living alone in a city, returning to a place where her family name held a kind of power and everyone knew her felt like the natural progression for alma.
— she still lives with her parents and has no desire to leave them right now because they pay for everything. new york was beautiful, and it was nice to feel anonymous for a while, but she likes her home comforts, not paying rent, having things provided for her by her parents. plus there’s thousands of girls like alma in new york. in roswell, she feels more like she has a concrete identity because who she is is so woven into the farm she grew up on.
— has an attic bedroom covered with posters of 90s hearthrobs, there are lava lamps and throw pillows and a four-poster bed she begged her father for until he eventually gave in. her favourite part of her room is the window, with a bench below it where she sits to read. she saw annie doing this in the movie, and was obsessed with the idea of having a window seat ever since.
— she’s not in any rush to leave roswell. she imagines herself growing old there, on a porch swing outside the farmhouse she’ll one day inherit with grandchildren around her ankles. she’d quite like to go back to university to do an MA in creative writing or literature, and possibly a doctorate.
work.
— alma works as an archivist at the local library. it mostly involves being in the library basement all day cataloguing and preserving collections of historical information. she’s read your census. she knows more about your family history than ‘who do you think you are’. alma is a scavenger of secrets. she devours texts like reading is going out of style and if there’s a rumour she’s the first to know it. the second is probably her mother, who will undoubtedly write about it in her column.
— the aspect of her job she likes the least is cataloguing alien shit. she’s often alma responsible for loaning the museum various artifacts embedded deep within roswell’s vibrant past.
— it’s a very solitary job, but it suits her just fine. it does mean she doesn’t see much sunlight as she’s usually in the basement of the library all day, maintaining the special collections of antique books.
— she also has a side hustle selling counterfeit art, which she operates mostly from the library’s archives in the basement because no one else really goes down there. her aunt and uncle in vermont deal in antiques and art, and from an internship with them when she was eighteen (and recovering from her ballet-related injury) she learned how to market and sell art, how to chemically restore art, and how to recognise originals in contrast to fakes.
— from this, alma began to produce counterfeit art and sell it off as the original work to the contacts she had made in her internship. it’s disloyal, but it’s powerful. her room is often scattered with half-finished copies of millais and rosetti.
education.
— i’d say alma was a model student, but she wasn’t. she got model grades, always straight a’s (thanks to tutors) but she was difficult to have in class. always that kid who asked the most annoying and specific questions which would sidetrack the whole class AND that bitch who would say “but miss, you forgot to collect our homework?” literally just to spite the classmates who hadn’t done it. yea she’s a bitch
— she’s incredibly intelligent but will only put in effort when she deems the cause worthy. she’s frustrating to teach, because she requires evidence, truth, in order to accept something as worthwhile. she plays devil’s advocate, but academically she’s brilliant. her ambition is like a cold, hard stone — rock solid and impossible to penetrate. it’s hers alone, no one else’s hand can force it.
— when she was seventeen, she successfully auditioned to study dance at julliard and got offered a place with a partially-funded scholarship. a few months later an injury left her unable to dance and she had to turn down her place. she’d fractured her tibia in six places and had to have metal plates put into her leg. she was told she would never dance again, but alma being alma did not take that news lightly. after two years of physiotherapy and practising ballet while laying down, she was finally strong enough to audition again, but the school did not grant her admission the second time because they thought it would be irresponsible considering she’d been advised by doctors not to continue to dance. she’s still super bitter about this.
— alma went to columbia university at age twenty and majored in classical civilisation. she can read ancient greek and latin, but she also speaks french and beginner’s italian. she studied classics cos she thinks it makes her sound smart, but actually doesn’t really care for latin and just loves learning about feckless hedonism and the festivals of bacchus and writing about how all women in myth are literally forgotten or abused for their bodies.
— at any given moment, she’ll have a book on her person. her love of literature is tied to her love of performance. performing comes naturally to alma. she’s always felt like she has to work a little harder to feel the way other people do ; like she’s constantly playing the role of alma. she can cry on cue, and often does so to get out of parking fines.
— on the stage, she’s played lysistrata, antigone, cleopatra. her performance of hamlet (the first woman to be cast in the role at columbia) was praised by new york theatre reviewers. she wrote a one woman play about forgotten female authors which she performed at the new york fringe theatre festival. she’s one of the finest actresses that columbia had seen and also the most impossible to work with. she’s difficult but there’s a level of genius to her uncompromising faith in herself and her own abilities.
aspirations.
— queue when i grow up by the pussycat dolls. truly though, she wants to be a socialite, take the art world by storm, maybe have her own column like her mum, maybe become miranda priestly from the devil wears prada.
— alma’s ambition is probably the most striking and prevalent thing about her. when she wants something, she will stop at nothing until she gets it. she’s broken up marriages before just to get someone she wants, before deciding she doesn’t want them any more.
— act like the flower but be the serpent under it. is a user. manipulative. leads people on. will throw another person under the bus to demonstrate her own intelligence and integrity. gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, honey.
— she will put everything else on hold for success, whether it’s academic success, financial success or sporting success. she lets things consume her with obsession. at university, getting the highest grades was all she could focus on. she loves the smell of libraries, the ancient smoke of learning, of feeling like old wine in a new bottle reincarnated from the bones of some old, dead witchy woman who invented a cure for cowpox or somethin.
— i think alma’s a person who is very dogmatic and uncompromising in her beliefs, so that could definitely rub some people up the wrong way, and i’d be keen to get a few enemy connections goin!
end notes.
— i’m genuinely so sorry that this ended up being the longest thing in the world??? literal novel what the fuck move over don quioxte.
— i love plots and would put loads of wanted ones here but this is already horrifically long and i’m getting eye-strain just looking at it so sorry if there’s mistakes or i’ve stopped typing half way through a sentence !! a few plots i’d love are secret (ex) girlfriend, some cousins, a study group or a group of like-minded academics, unlikely friends, enemies & frenemies, former boyfriend she used as a beard, someone who’s husband / wife she shagged and broke them up out of spite.
— THANK YOU if you’re still reading, NO PROBLEM if you don’t have time, just skim it, it’s ok, i love u and pls plot w me on discord i’m zendaya's second emmy nomination#8664 xoxox
