[cis woman and she/her] Welcome to Aurora Bay, [WREN HARLOW]! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like [OLIVIA COOKE]. You must be the [TWENTY-EIGHT] year old [ATTENDANT AT TIDAL WAVE MUSIC SHOP]. Word is you’re [HELPFUL] but can also be a bit [SARCASTIC] and your favorite song is [I’M NOT OKAY (I PROMISE) - MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE]. I also heard you’ll be staying in [OCEAN CREST APARTMENTS]. I’m sure you’ll love it!
tw: underage drugs/drinking,
Wren’s life had never been easy. From the moment she was born it came with hurdles. Her mother was young and scared and within a day of giving birth she left the newborn at a nunnery in New York, leaving no name or note, just a blanket wrapped safely around her. Left with no other option, the nuns there took care of the baby for a few days, the women naming her after the little birds that often nested within the edges of the building- wrens, and giving her the last name of the one who’d found her. They all all doted on her, took care of her, but sadly, they couldn’t keep her forever, and so she was given over to the state- where no one ever decided to adopt baby Wren.
She didn’t care though. From a young age, Wren realized one thing- something that’s kept her alive all these years: you can’t depend on anybody but yourself. Nobody wanted her, so why should she want them either? So she kept to herself, kept quiet. Nobody could bother you if they didn’t even realize you were there- it particularly helped as she bounced from home to home, all the other personalities so much louder than her own. Wren did decent in her ‘schoolwork’ though and she liked to read and liked music- really liked music, so much so that she was often found in the music rooms at whatever school she was in at the time, plucking curiously at guitar strings and tapping piano keys.
It wasn’t until she started entering her teen years that she started to feel more resentment though- and a lot of heartache and a lot of anger. Why was it that no one wanted to adopt her? Why didn’t her own parents want her? What had she done wrong? What was wrong with her? She was seventeen when she ran away from her current foster home, all the pent up heartbreak and frustration making exploding out of her.
Wren bounced around from place to place, renting nights at shoddy motels or crashing on couches of people she met in bars or clubs she was too young to be in but no one seemed to care. Again- she blended into the background, kept a low profile. No one seemed to care that she was too young to be drinking or smoking or doing things that someone her age shouldn’t be.
Once she was eighteen, Wren didn’t have to worry about being picked up by the cops or anything, and by the time she was twenty-one she’d settled in Boston, still bouncing around from place to place until finally managing to get herself a shitty little apartment. But still, it was good, and she’d done it on her own. She had a job as a waitress and did open mic nights on weekends, saving enough money to finally buy herself a guitar (she’d been renting them prior or swapping favors to use them) and for a while, again, things were good.
It wasn’t until she was twenty-two though that that heartache and anger began to really perk up again. People her age were graduating college, were getting married and having babies. And here she was--utterly and completely alone, using sex and drugs and drinking and music as her only real escapes in life. So it was then that Wren began her research, trying to figure out who she really was and where she came from--who she came from. It took her years of searching too, scouring the internet and online records. She found the nunnery she’d been left at and decided to follow the trail, packing up what little she owned and moving to New York, but it left her at a dead end. Months later in a last-ditch effort, Wren did one of those stupid DNA mail tests, not thinking she’d get anything from it--so when she instead actually did get a match, she was shocked.
Her birth mother was in California, working in a little clothing boutique. She wasn’t bad but...she definitely didn’t seem like she wanted to reconnect. Her mother did give her the name of her father though, and a last-known address just outside of some hoity-toity expensive beach town a few hours south. The man was shocked when Wren showed up, to say the least. He was married, had children of his own, was a politician in Los Angeles. And he wanted nothing to do with her. So much so that he offered her a hefty amount of money to never even come around again.
Angry (and heartbroken again) Wren took the money because fuck him and she went to that ritzy beach town not too far away, the money allowing her a few nights stay in some swanky hotel before she got herself an apartment there. She was only going to stay for a few days, just enough to get her bearings and figure shit out. But Wren’s been there for a few months now- getting herself a job at the record store and busking on the boardwalk for extra cash on the weekends. And all the while she’s done it alone, because again, fuck everybody else. The only person she could depend on and the only person she needed, was herself.
