{Philosophy | Ben Folds Five}

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Name: Reid Putnam
Nicknames: Putty, Reider Rabbit, Rabbit, Bunny (in ascending order of intimacy)
Age: 18 | Gender: Male
Sexuality: Homosexual | Homoromantic
Ethnicity: UK Mutt

{ Penny on a Train Track | Ben Kweller}

Appearance:
The first thing people tend to note about Reid is his height. At 5’7”, he’s definitely on the shorter side, and has been for most of his life. It does have the effect of making him appear just a little more built than he actually is, and he’s actually sort of buff. Not packed with muscles or anything, but he’s got a developed chest and pretty nice arms for a guy who hasn’t been a jock since he wrestled in middle school.

His height also enhances the fact that he looks young. He’s one of those guys who will just always be carded, and new teachers frequently assume that he’s two years below his actual grade. Being short is something he can cope with pretty easily, but being treated like a youngster just because he looks like one will quickly get on his nerves.

His hair is dark brown, a few inches long at the top and shorter on the sides, and usually styled into artful disarray. His hazel eyes are friendly and intelligent, and he has one of those killer smiles that just lights up his whole face and threatens to swallow up his ears. In the past couple years, girls and guys alike have begun to take notice of how square his jawline and strong his chin are getting. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s above-average in the looks department, though, and certainly doesn’t behave as if he were.

Growing up poor he never had to exert much thought on wardrobe, and even though he has some income now, he has other priorities. Most of his clothes come from thrift stores, and his fashion sense is… well, interesting. Almost all of his jeans are ripped to hell and designed on with marker. He has a penchant for finding weird t-shirts, or using a screen-printing kit to make his own with absurd and often counter cultural slogans. He’s fond of hats and accessories, usually the gaudier the better.


Secret:
When Reid was 15, his younger brother Ollie died accidentally while he was supposed to be watching him. To make matters worse, Reid had snuck off to meet an older man he’d befriended on the internet while it happened. When he found Ollie missing from where he’d left him, he searched the woods and found him broken at the bottom of a small ravine. He freaked out and slammed a rock into his head repeatedly enough to concuss, then claimed that a man had attacked him and kidnapped Ollie. His body wasn’t found until well after nightfall, and everyone accepted the lie he’d spun.

{ Wicked Little Town – Tommy Gnosis Version | Hedwig and the Angry Inch}

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Personality:
Reid is a sweetheart, or at least, he was before his brother died. The sort of guy who laughed easily, who built people up rather than putting them down, who didn’t seem to hold a grudge against those who tried to put him down. A little zany and off-the-wall sometimes, but always well-meaning. Elements of that sweetness remain, but they’re hard to reach, buried under three years of guilt and self-loathing. Elements of that goofy sweetness remain, but they can be hard to reach, often giving way to anger or exasperation in short order.

Reid’s family probably vies for the title of poorest in town. Throughout middle school and the early parts of high school, he definitely got flak for his Walmart-chic fashion and the fact that he was on the free lunch program. Rather than become wrapped up in the materialism he couldn’t participate in, Reid elected to reject it outright.

He started doing whatever the hell he wanted, and it sort of worked out for him. Nobody else in school could pull off a day-glo yellow hat, a fish-net t-shirt under a yellow tank top, and jeans that exposed more flesh than most shorts, but somehow he made it work, and on a shoe-string budged at that. He ended up becoming an individual long before most of his peers got the memo, and sort of, kind of, somehow ended up being just a little cool for it… even if he was still a huge dork. That individualism was what allowed him to come out of the closet freshman year and not really give a shit what people had to say about it.

His individuality took a bit of a darker streak after Ollie died. The brighter colors started to fade out of his wardrobe rotation. The slogans he Sharpied onto his shirts were bleaker, almost confrontational. Reid is angry almost all the time. There’s so much self-hatred that it’s started boiling out lately and splashing onto others. More than a few friends have started giving him a wide berth, doing their best to make allowances- after all, his brother died on his watch- but also just starting to drift away. He received a lot of sympathy, but that was only fuel for the fire of his self-loathing. Everyone keeps telling him it wasn’t his fault, but he knows for a fact it was.

He’s pretty intelligent, but mostly in practical ways. He has to study hard to pass tests and memorize information, but he’s great at solving puzzles. He’s also a whiz with most handy work, from painting to dry-walling to fixing electronics. Even before he was old enough to get a proper job, he took to doing odd jobs around his neighborhood for whatever people could afford to pay him, and then once he was old enough, he actually started working for contractors around town, and even started a small side business repairing his peers smart phones- mostly cracked screen replacement, but he’s capable of diagnosing and fixing a host of common problems.

His penchant for fixing things extends to people, too. At least people who aren’t himself. He was the only thing that kept his mom together in the year following Ollie’s death, and even grown-ups around town remarked on how strong he was (which only exacerbated Reid’s feelings of guilt). The term “old-soul” gets thrown around a lot in reference to him, and even on his darkest days, he can’t help but want to help others. It’s one of the few things that makes him feel like he isn’t the world’s biggest piece of shit.

Of note, ever since he told the lie about him and his brother being attacked in order to cover over his own negligence, lying has come a lot easier. Honest to a fault before the accident, he now finds himself more and more taking the easy little lie, usually to avoid social situations that he no longer has a taste for. Usually just little white lies, but they seem to be getting bigger and bigger, and applies to more and more trivial situations.

Things got a little better over senior year. He seems to be returning, little by little, to his old self. He’s still moody though, and still lashes out at times or seems incredibly distant at others. Still, he’s trying, and it’s obvious that he’s trying.

Talents:
Mr. Fix It – Reid has an affinity for fixing everything from consumer electronics to plumbing. He’s never had any formal training, but seems competent enough with a wide variety of tools and procedures.

Tech Savvy – He’s pretty good with a computer. Not a hacker or anything, but he has enough programming under his belt to do most normal things and a few cool things as well, like disguise IPs or recover files from a hard drive.

Rough and Tumble – Reid has some experience with wrestling, and is pretty strong. He also has a freakish tolerance for pain (as evidenced by that one time he gave himself a concussion by repeatedly slamming a large rock into his own head).


Weaknesses:
Rat in a Cage – Reid has a lot of self-directed anger, and tends to project. Once it starts to seep out, it’s very difficult for him to regain control, and things like logic or reason tend to go out the window when he’s in such a state.

Stoner – Reid is very stoned virtually all the time, leading to somewhat impaired judgment and dulled reaction times.

Pathological – Ever since he lied about the circumstances of his brother’s death, Reid has been finding it hard to tell the truth. Sometimes he lies about things that don’t even matter.

Fears:
That he’ll be stuck in Ravenwood forever; that his mom will find out the truth

{ Car | Built to Spill}

History:
Reid’s dad was a loser. He and Reid’s mom married young, due to Reid’s conception, but he fucked off so early on that Reid doesn’t even remember him. His mom had dropped out of school to raise him on her own, waitressing and bartending at various restaurants around town. She had a lot of boyfriends, a constant stream of them, it seemed, and when Reid was five, one of them knocked her up and then promptly took off, leaving them in even more dire financial straits than they already had been.

For coming from a broken home, Reid was a remarkably well-adjusted kid. He had a sense of responsibility from an early age, and an entrepreneurial bent as well. He got a paper route when he was nine, and turned over most of the money to his mom. In middle school, he began doing all sorts of odd jobs. Parents of friends would take pity on him, offering him ten bucks to mow their lawn or clean their pools. He got Dummies Guides from the library and taught himself the rudiments of a number of home repair and improvement methods, then started offering those services as well.

They were a happy family. Even with Reid helping out, they didn’t have much, but they ate dinner together every Sunday, and played games, and watched TV. His mother eventually stopped dating, having decided that her sons didn’t need the sort of men she tended to attract in their lives.

He had plenty of friends. He went out for the wrestling team, even though he was never very good, he had fun for a while… that is until puberty reared its head. Sweaty grappling with other guys was a pretty quick path to realizing that he was gay, and the resulting lust started to be a little too much for him to contend with, so he quit the team. He came out early in his freshman year of high school, defying most of his peers’ ideas of what a gay kid looked like.

Most of his money went to his mom and brother, but he did get himself a computer, and paid for internet every month. Ostensibly it was for him to keep up with schoolwork, but he got pretty into video games, particularly World of Warcraft. It was through that game that he met Max. Max was in his guild, and nineteen, and really helped Reid work through a lot of the issues surrounding his sexual orientation. They moved on from chatting online to texting, and traded some pictures- innocent at first, but then more and more graphic as time went on. Max kept urging Reid to meet him, and finally, during the summer between freshman and sophomore year, Reid agreed.

It was a warm Saturday, and he casually strolled through the kitchen and announced he was heading to the park. He was. That’s where they were going to meet. His mom told him he should take his younger brother, Ollie, and all of Reid’s attempts to beg off were summarily denied. He set off to liaise with an older man he’d met on the internet with his kid brother in tow, and immediately texted Max to try to cancel. Max insisted it would be fine though. Ollie could take care of himself for a little while, couldn’t he? Teenage lust overrode his good sense, and Reid agreed that they could leave him alone for a little while.

He dropped Ollie off on a bench near the path into the woods. He’d gotten the kid a second-hand Nintendo DS for his last birthday, and Ollie barely even seemed to notice when Reid said he was going to go meet a friend, and Ollie should stay put, and that he’d only be gone for a little while. With that, he headed off down the path.

Max was waiting in the appointed clearing. Max was also at least a decade older than he’d claimed, and at least a decade older than when his pictures had been taken. He made all the customary excuses, and even though every instinct Reid had was telling him to get out of there, he couldn’t deny that Max had been a good friend to him, had helped him wrestle with his identity issues. It became more and more clear that Max wanted more than friendship, though, and Reid finally caved in. They fooled around, and it was extremely unsatisfying, and as soon as he’d finished, Reid said he had to go get his brother. He’d been gone for a lot longer than he’d planned, and he felt disgusting, and just wanted to go home and forget it had ever happened.

His heart began to hammer in his chest when he emerged from the woods. Ollie was nowhere to be seen. He sprinted around the park, but couldn’t find him. He figured that Ollie must have gone into the woods to look for him, and started searching there.

It was nearly two hours before he found him. His kid brother, who’d always looked up to him, was lying at the bottom of a steep precipice. One of his arms was bent at a sickeningly wrong angle, and he wasn’t moving. Reid felt like he was going to be sick as he scrabbled down, and he almost was when he realized that Ollie wasn’t breathing. He was dead.

In his panic, Reid latched onto an idea. He went back out into the woods, and found a large, heavy rock. He lifted the rock and brought it down on the back of his head. It hurt, but it was hard to do what he was intending to do. He brought it down again, and again, until he could feel blood freely flowing down the back of his neck. He staggered out of the woods, truly daze, and told the story he’d concocted to the first adult he encountered.
He’d tell that story so many times over the course of the next days and weeks that the lies became effortless. He and Ollie had been cutting through the woods to get home. Reid thought he heard something, but when he looked, no one was there. Then he’d definitely heard something, and caught just a glimpse of a man in a gray sweatshirt before something hard and heavy slammed into his skull. He’d lost consciousness, and when he’d woken up, his cell phone was gone (he’d tossed it about ten feet from where Ollie lay once he had his plan formed), and so were Ollie and whomever had attacked them.

Almost every cop in town showed up, and news vans too. A search began immediately, and not too long after nightfall, Ollie’s body was found. Their mother was screaming, wailing, keening. Reid cooperated. He worked with a police sketch artist, he invented tiny details that they asked for. It was all anyone talked about for nearly two weeks, and parents were loath to let their kids outside until the media furor finally died down, as it inevitably had to with no suspect.

Reid could hardly believe it had worked. At first he was elated to escape blame, but gradually, the guilt began to mount. It was little things, like seeing his mother burst into tears out of the blue, or the way that his teachers let him skip school work after “his ordeal” that really magnified how awful he felt. He considered telling the truth dozens of times, but by then it was too late. Everyone but he and his mom and moved on, so what good would it even do? That conviction was strengthened when, somehow, his mom started to get better. There was no way he could dredge up Ollie’s death, not when she was finally able to get on with her life.

That sympathy bore out for the rest of the school year. His plummeting grades were forgiven, he got to miss classes to see a counselor, and even other kids were really nice to him. By the time the anniversary of Ollie’s death came around, he was having a hard time coping with how he was supposed to behave. He was angry all the time, and began lashing out at friends. He lost clients over trivial disagreements. He started smoking a lot of pot, and started meeting guys from apps like Grindr and Scruff. Some of them were older than Max, even, but Reid didn’t care. He let them do what they wanted. When things like that were happening, he was able to get outside of himself, and that was what he needed then.

Junior year, his grades tanked. The individuality that teachers formerly praised was turned against them. He started to talk back, to act out, and frequently his rage got the best of him and he was sent to the principal’s office, or even home from school. He was stoned most of the time, but even that wasn’t helping with how mad he was all the time.

Things got a little better the next summer. One of the guys he’d met online liked him enough to batter through his defenses, and they dated for a couple months. Reid wasn’t exactly emotionally available, so it didn’t work out, but it did make him realize that there was a chance for some semblance of a normal life for him. There had been moments of the relationship that felt good, moments that he hadn’t felt like he deserved to die. It was enough to allude to a future, and Reid realized that he only had one school year to get his back on track.

He had to work hard just to graduate, considering how many classes he’d failed the prior year. He did so while holding down two part-time jobs and still doing a slew of odd jobs, because he knew that he’d tanked any slim hopes he’d had of getting scholarships. Somehow, he managed to scrape by and get his diploma, and he even got accepted to a state school. He realized that getting away was the solution. He had to get out of the house where he’d watched Ollie grow up. Maybe then he’d be able to put it all behind him.

{ I Wish I Had an Evil Twin | The Magnetic Fields}

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Other:
Player: Throne
Face Claim: Josh Hutcherson
Hex Code: #392b60