BELMONTE, Annette Charlotte

[patricia4]

...Annette Charlotte Belmonte*
*All I wanna know is... where did all those atoms come from ?*

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...basics*

name Annette Belmonte
nickname Miss B.
age 68
gender Female
grade Not Applicable. Although she teaches grades 9 - 12
hometown Long Island, NY
sexuality Straight
personification The Grandmother from Little Red Riding Hood
face claim Julie Walters

...appearance*

hair color It was red, but, in her old age, has turned to grey.
eye color Brown
build Petite, though not extremely so.
height 5'4"
clothing style Annette loves sweaters. She is always wearing one, and, in the rare case that it is too hot, she wraps the sweater around her shoulders or stuffs it in her purse. You never know when a good sweater can come in handy. Aside from sweaters, Annette wears very polished looking clothes, if a bit outdated. Never jeans, she wears khaki or linen pants, and definitely not those horrendously tight skinny jeans she sees all of her students wearing. And her shirts are almost always collared, at least when she goes to school. Out of school sometimes she tries out a tank top or regular tee shirt... but for her, collared shirts and sweaters are the way to go.
distinctive traits When Annette goes to teach, she makes sure to always pin on one of her many sparkly brooches. They're all so cute, and the children must just love them! They've never said anything, but she just assumes they do. Really, who doesn't love a good rhinestone brooch shaped like a cow!?

...personal*

personality Annette is claustrophobic, so she never likes to be in small rooms or elevators or any small places like that. This has never posed many problems in her life, if only the memory of why she is that way. The closet she hid in for most of her childhood was not a pleasant place, but it was safe.

Because of all the people her father used to bring into her life when she was a child - people who stole and punched and yelled and killed themselves - Annette has a distrust for strangers. She never enjoys meeting someone for the first time, especially adults. Children have done nothing to harm her.

Having had an awful, abusive childhood, Annette feels like it's her job to protect everyone else from going through that too. She is always kind to the children, even if they are rude to her. Knowing how awful it feels to be ignored, she tries to get everyone to participate in class activities and discussions. And now that her father is out of the picture and she has a wonderful husband whom she trusts with her life, she is free to ask as many questions as she wants and enjoy life to its fullest. Annette has fun with everything. She looks at things and questions them, wonders about what could be done to improve them. Questions are fun and informative, so she asks a lot of them, and tries to answer any that are posed to her.
past {{As some people may have read, there was a fun, in depth, very thought out Past written here a while ago, but that was just taking waaay too long to write and i wanna start rp-ing with this charrie already! Eventually, i will finish writing her past, which will, by then, be like, a story... And i will put that here, or somewhere else.. and you can read it if you like xD }}

When Annette was born, her life seemed almost perfect. There was no hatred in her home, no stress, no ignorance. Or so it seemed. When Annette was ten, her mother died in childbirth. It was very abrupt, and Annette's father didn't even tell her about it until they went to pick up the baby. After her mother's death, her father quickly went from a loving, caring father to an alcoholic who spent all his money on drugs and going to the bar. The responsibility of taking care of the new baby, Carter, who had been born with severe Autism, fell upon Annette.

She tried her hardest to juggle schoolwork and housework and caring for her baby brother, but, after a year, she had fallen behind in school, and the house was a mess. It didn't help that her father was bringing home new friends from the bar every night. Annette couldn't stand them! They stole things, broke things, and her father never even said anything to them about it. Sometimes he woke Annette up in the middle of the night and pulled her downstairs to entertain his friends. She could sing, so she did, and tried to focus on breathing and only her voice, keeping her mind off the racous shouting and swearing coming from around the tiny kitchen table.

When her father did things like that, it confused her at first. He always yelled at her when she sang, when she did anything creative, so why was he demanding she sing for his friends? But she eventually realized that this was what happened when people were drunk and high on drugs. They did strange, stupid things. And she came to realize that most of the time, her father was intoxicated. In the short amount of time that he was at home, he stumbled around with a beer in his hand, mumbling to himself.

Some kids might have taken advantage of his uninvolvement, but Annette knew better. She knew that if she did something bad, or if she told someone about the situation, she would get beaten. Her father had become hateful of his children since his wife died in childbirth, but he hated Carter the most out of the two of them. Annette had to hide Carter from her father when he was home, and when his friends came over, Annette sat with Carter in the hall closet, trying to keep quiet.

One day, her father left and didn't come home. She acted normally at first, making dinner and doing her homework, taking care of Carter, who was, by then, almost two years old. It was about eight o'clock at night when she heard the knock on the door. When she heard it, she picked up her brother and cautiously walked into the front hallway. No one ever knocked on their door. When yelling came from outside, Annette hurried into the hall closet, carefully setting Carter down by the back wall on one of her jackets.

A man with a large dog came into the house and searched for several minutes, while Annette sat, frozen in fear, in the closet, praying to God that Carter wouldn't start crying and give away their presence. Things got more terrifying when the man produced a small shotgun out of the cabinet in the mudroom and pointed it at himself. Annette looked away, but she still heard the gunshot. Now there was a dead man and a dog in her house. What was she supposed to do?

After several hours of contemplation and waiting, Annette and Carter rushed out of the house, leaving everything behind, and started on the long walk to their grandmother's house. She knew the way, she'd gone there a lot with her mother before she died. The journey took them several hours, and they arrived there, sweating and crying, late the next night. Their grandmother welcomed them and listened while Annette, sobbing, told the story of what had happened since her mother's death.

Carter and Annette lived with their grandmother, and she became the primary caretaker of Carter. Annette could focus more on schoolwork; she wanted to get into a good college and make her life better. Carter was doing alright, but he didn't go to school. He stayed home with his grandmother all day, and she tried to teach him. Their grandmother was always very kind to them, never yelling or hitting, like their father had. And she always encouraged Annette to ask questions. "Asking questions makes you think about things in new ways" she always said.

Annette went off to college when she was eighteen, and left Carter at home with her grandmother. She came back to visit whenever she could - Christmas, Easter, Spring Break. It was great, having a family that loved her to come back to every few weeks. And then summer vacation came, and she took the train back home to her grandmother's house. But when she got there, something awful had happened.

Upon walking into the living room, Annette saw her father, whom she hadn't spoken to in years, standing over her grandmother's dead body, gun in hand. Carter was curled up on the couch, wailing and trying to get away, but her father pushed him back into the couch every time he moved. Annette tried to grab her brother and escape with him, but there was no way she could have beaten the gun. She was holding Carter's hand when the bullet pierced him in the side. It physically pained her when she felt his hand go limp and drop from hers. He was dead, and she couldn't grasp it. Her father just stood there, smiling at her, silently.

She wanted to smack him, grab the gun out of his hand and shoot her own father, get revenge on him for killing the two most important people in her life. But she knew that if she tried to do that he would shoot her, too. Was he going to shoot her anyway? But he didn't. He dropped the gun and turned to walk out the door, laughing hysterically. "Finally!" he yelled as he ran down the road.

Annette watched him through the window, willing him to fall into a ditch or hit a broken power line. And, apparently, her wishing worked. A truck sped around the corner and smacked straight into her father, who was stupidly standing in the middle of the road. She felt sick. Three people had just died. Three of her family members. It was awful.

She called the police and everything was arranged, the funerals, the burials. In the fall, Annette threw herself into ther tudies, working hard enough to graduate in the top half of her class and go on to become a preschool teacher. She loved teaching. It was great, being able to teach the children some of their first life lessons. But, although she was good at teaching, she didn't really teach them right.

The students all loved her, though. She worked at the same school for ten years, until she was thirty-three. The reason she stopped was because one of the students parents confronted her about her teaching. She'd only met with parents a couple of times in all her years of teaching, because she absolutely hated it. When the couple who came in to meet with her was rude and mean, Annette quit her job. She spent five years after that working odd jobs and never staying long in one workplace.

In one of her jobs a taxi driver in New York, she met a man who had been in her graduating class. She'd been somewhat friends with him before, and got to talking to him again. They became best friends and eventually got married. He encouraged her to go back to teaching, because she loved it so much and talked about her days as a pre school teacher all the time.

So Annette went to the local high school and applied for a job as a substitute. She started off slowly, working only a few days a month, but eventually became the regular, in-house substitute, and was working almost every day. She loved the students and the students loved her. This is where she has been for the past thirty years.
present Annette works as a substitute teacher at Baum Academy. She loves going to work and teaching the kids. They're all so much fun to be around. Of course, some of them are rowdy, obnoxious, rude... But she has ways of dealing with kids like that. "Kill 'em with kindness" she always says. When the children don't listen, she never yells at them, never hits them or anything awful like that. She just gives them a stern look and maybe a talking-to. And praise. Always praise. Now THAT is the way to get a child to open up to you.

And being a substitute has it's benefits, despite popular belief. As a substitute, she gets to see the real personalities of the children, not the act they put on every day for their teacher. Plus, she doesn't have to meet with parents. Because of some bad experiences with strangers in the past, Annette doesn't particularly enjoy meeting new people. Well, really just new adults. Children are fine - none of them have ever done anything to make her feel threatened or scared.

Because of her fear of meeting people, she avoids communicating with the teachers she is substituting for as much as possible. If she is confused about the lesson plan or who she is supposed to be substituting for, instead of phoning the office or the teacher, Annette just does her own thing. When the lesson is too boring, sometimes she just talks to the class. Not necessarily about anything they're supposed to be learning about, but she feels that it is good for them to hear what she has to say.

Annette likes to think of herself as something like a philosopher. She questions the values and beliefs of society and explains these theories to her students. But sometimes, when she is substituting for certain teachers she knows would confront her about straying from the lesson plan, she actually teaches the students. The only problem with this is sometimes she thinks she knows more than she really does, and what she doesn't know, she teaches anyway, just in case her theories about it are right. The children don't know if what they're learning isn't true, so what's the difference?
family
Mother - Noleen Belmonte - deceased
Father - Edwin "Ed" Belmonte - deceased
Grandmother - Rosemary Mulligan - deceased
Brother - Carter Belmonte - deceased
Husband - Peter Brady - alive (yay!)
likes
- - - Being around children
- - - Coming up with theories
- - - Asking questions
- - - Telling stories
- - - Singing
dislikes
- - - Small spaces (claustrophobia)
- - - Dogs
- - - Meeting new people
- - - Rudeness
- - - Alcohol and drugs
- - - Teasing
- - - Slackers
other notes none

...literature*

book title Little Red Riding Hood
backstory When the Wolf meets Little Red Riding Hood in the woods and asks her where she is going, she (stupidly) tells him that she is going to her grandmother's house. Since the Wolf wants to eat her, he beats her to the grandmother's house and eats the grandmother. The grandmother is in the wolf's stomach (apparently still alive) while the wolf tricks Little Red Riding Hood, who apparently needs glasses, or common sense or something, into believing that he is really her grandmother, and eats her too. Eventually, the grandmother is saved along with Little Red Riding Hood by a hunter, and they all live happily ever after. Except the wolf, who gets filled with rocks and falls down a well. The End.

...roleplayer*

name Patricia
age 15
gender Femaaaale
rp experience Uhh... a few months or something o3o
how you found ouac Becket and Monica enlightened me
rp sample Neta’s head snapped up when she heard Xerxes speak. He didn’t even acknowledge the awkward moment of before, when she had spontaneously hugged him. She was glad; it seemed like she had been being a bit overemotional. But it was disconcerting, hearing him talk. She had almost imagined that he would never speak, that they would forever communicate through the scrawl of a pen on paper. It felt a bit unnatural, now that he could speak too. She felt less at ease. Before she had almost felt as if they had something in common; she had never been able to communicate well with other people herself. She tried not to be disappointed – she should be happy for him that he was talking again, right? A bit downhearted, she tried to smile again. He was still the same person; it wasn’t as if he had changed his manner of thinking now that he could talk.

She thought back to what he had said. “You want to be real. You wish your friends could see the real colors, right?” She could almost laugh; he was assuming she actually had friends. It was kind of him, really, but she was reluctant to admit that nobody she knew was really, well… a friend, per se. Sure, she had acquaintances, she knew people, but she could never talk to them seriously.

“Well, I don’t really… have friends.” God, that sounded so pathetic. She chuckled, not because it was funny, but she just felt like she should let him know that she realized how stupid she sounded. “I mean, I just… yeah. I understand what you’re saying, though. I wish everyone would just realize that all those things that seem so important, they just… don’t matter. It’s like, whenever I try to talk to someone, they just manipulate the conversation so somehow the topic is related to how much they hate math, or how funny it is that some sophomore had never kissed a boy. It’s just… aggravating, you know? We need to think bigger, who even cares about silly little rumors and things like that?”

She had never said that to anyone before, never really expressed her feelings about the trivialities of teenagers. Now that she said it out loud, she realized that she was contradicting herself – well, her thoughts, really. She was ranting about the futility of worrying about things like appearances and rumors, yet she herself fretted about little things like that. She had spent so much of her high school career troubling over the impression she gave off, about how she could change her personality and appearance to make people accept her. But the pointlessness of it all was clear, now. Seeing Xerxes, seemingly confident in his crazy appearance, even though he hadn’t even been able to talk when she first met him, she was inspired. It was time to stop; Neta had always thought of herself as being above all the average high school frivolities, but now she was realizing that she had never been thinking out of the box, she had never really been any different from the rest of them. Even though how she acted on the outside and how she carried a conversation may have been different, her thoughts were the same. She was self-conscious and impressionable just like everyone else.

Blinking, she shook her head slightly. Wow. Things needed to change – it didn’t matter what other people thought, she had said it herself. Low self-esteem had been her burden to carry since the brink of her teenage years, but she needed to end that. She was finished with agonizing over what other people thought; that was their business, not hers. She needed to start over, to start doing what she wanted. No longer would her thoughts be filled with worries and aches about what other people thought of her, and this whole conversations had given her encouragement.

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