Franklin. Fucking Franklin. F-Town. Anyway you say it, spell it, hear it, mouth it, spit it, it sounds the same. To the Gallagherās, it always sounded like home. They were never very well-to-do. Just didnāt happen for them. The Gallagher family had never left Tennessee and probably never would. A family raising their children with the moral compasses of diehard Christians among the flocks of Christians of TN, ārepent and serve penance,ā āalert the church eldersā and all that. Something went wrong when they started having childrenāthat is, their daughters were quickly too smart for their own good. Shrader, Dolly, and Camella (call her āCammie,ā please). Three girls, all blonde, all strong personalities, all too big for the confinements of small town life. Shrader grew up as the athletic of the family, and the writer. This balanced well with Dollyās interest in music and Cammieās talkative tendencies. The eldest Gallagher loved sport, and she loved readingāmost of both was basketball and that e. e. cummings guy. In her spare moments she either had a basketball or a book in her hands. She had a few friends. There was that boy from the football team, Terry, who liked to discuss poetry behind the Burger King. And Alfred, she gave the math quiz answers to him. Mario would play one-on-one with her in the church parking lot anytime she wanted. It was a good childhood, until she started to lose faith in the God her parents so dutifully constructed for them.
It started mostly at night, when she would come home from practice and find her house filled with strangers. Tall men, fat women, big-headed blacks and skinny-ass whites. āLiving in the outskirts of town, Shay,ā her father would say, swirling the whiskey around in his glass and huffing a breath of the smoking bud between his fingers, āmakes you realize some things.ā What things? she would ask. He would reply, āThat no matter what you try, aināt nobody come to save your ass.ā He was a reverend. Well, used to be. When Momma started showing bruises on her face was when Shrader knew their lives together were changing. The tables, chairs, floor would be littered in liquor bottles and loose change by morning. She would lock her sisters up in their rooms and wait it out until daylight. At night, when it would get bad, men would pull her aside and ask her what she was doing there. Say they saw her picture in the paper, and why was a famous basketball player in a place like that? Sheād reply that she lived there. Then they would leave her alone. Cammie was too little to realize when their father had gone and didnāt come back, and Shrader hasnāt brought it up.
Shrader stuck to her studies and basketball and made it through high school with flying colors. She was a tristate record, scoring over 20 points in under 7 minutes in her freshman semifinal game. Her writing was published in the school newspaper each semester. And she used the money from her two jobs at the diner and the paper to pay for notebooks for herself, new clothes for her sisters. Her athletic prowess earned her a scholarship to the only college she knew she could afford to go toāthe one on the other end of town. So she took it. Basketball, the newspaper, and her family. What else could she want?
Personality Traits & Key Details:
ā¢ Maternal
ā¢ Stubborn
ā¢ Loyal
ā>Ā Shrader is heterosexual, and she is a virgin.
ā> Shrader is a reflective extrovert, who likes to joke around but knows how to drop into serious conversation. Her sisters are the most important things in her life, and anybody who threatens the system theyāve got going better watch out, because the tomboyish, motherly wrath of Shrader is a force to be reckoned with.
ā> She has no intention of leaving Franklin without her sisters, and plans to raise them until theyāre both 18. This has forced her to be strong against following in her drunken motherās footsteps, though sometimes she finds herself tempted when the goings get tough.
Connections:
- OPEN -
izzy806
prguitarman
stormborns
romaincrisis
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear
