Odessa Porter [District 4]

Odessa has a narrow build to her body, which is tall for her age and gender. At seventeen years old, Odessa stands at 5'8" tall and weighs 125 pounds, leading to her barely being over the BMI for underweight. There's a very soft look to all her features. Her face, pale skin flecked with freckles across the bridge of her nose, has a subtle point to the chin. There's an androgynous look to her face, with sunken cheeks and a narrow nose above pale, thin lips. Her eyes, a pale green in colour, are flecked with darker green and grey in a perfect almond shape. They're lined by thin eyelashes and barely-there pale brown eyebrows. Atop her head, cut sort and falling approximately to the level of her chin, falls a thin layer of pale brown hair, naturally highlighted and lowlighted by lighter and darker shades of the pale, woody colour. Flowing down her body, the thin young woman has prominent collar bones (almost too prominent) and a thin neck. Like her face, the rest of her body is dappled with a light spray of freckles. She's small chested and small-hipped, with minimal curves to her body. Being a runner, her abdomen and legs are fairly well toned, and she does her best to stay in shape.

Odessa has horrible self image, leading to her weight often changing - sometimes she'll decide she's too fat and drop 20 pounds, while other times she'll decide she's too skinny and gain all that weight (and maybe more) back. She often changes a lot of her look that she can - light make-up when she can, hair dye on the occasion that she finds some and wants it, cutting her hair, changing her clothes - it's all a regular event for her. She doesn't really know what she wants to look like most of the time, and that's visible in the way she can change day to day at times. Sometimes, like when she's stressed, she'll lose ten pounds just because she doesn't want to eat. It's a rather unhealthy cycle that she has found herself in.

To Odessa, her worst physical flaw is her teeth - she has a gap between her two front teeth that she thinks makes her look like a beaver, and she's very sensitive about smiling because of that. She also thinks that her nose looks horrible - the bridge is too narrow, her nostrils are too obvious. She doesn't have enough eyelashes to look pretty, or her lips are too thin - she's a big ball of finding issues with herself and ruining her own self esteem because of that. She hates her height: the average height for women was 5'5", the average for men is 5'8" or so if she remembers right, and she is not a man.

Odessa can be a bit zany at times, being the owner of a rather eclectic personality. She has a lot of issues with herself, ranging from instability to low self esteem followed with two different eating disorders, to general reckless behavior. Overall she's a good enough person at least in her eyes, but she often feels like she has no control over herself. Her emotions are unstable and unpredictable, often flying in a fury because of just the slightest provocation. This happens with her entire spectrum of emotions - happiness, sadness, anger. If one of Odessa's few friends is excited about something, she's super excited for them. If someone makers her anger, she gets in to an irrational bite-your-throat-out sort of rage that's often followed by feelings of regret for her behavior. She has an active temper, to say the least. She has very few friends, more a personal choice than anything, but for the few she does consider friends, Odessa would do anything. She'd fly to the moon and back for her friends if that was possible.

Odessa's instability leads to sensitivity. She's very alert of others, though she often reads facial expressions and verbal cues as more against her than they really are. She's most sensitive about herself, though. Odessa has almost no self esteem in her, resulting in a very low self image. She constantly changes her looks in an attempt to find something that properly suits her, and she's never comfortable with her body. If she's thin, she's too thin, and she's sure that people are remarking about it - should she gain weight then? Did she gain a couple pounds? Others think she's too fat, time to restrict again. New haircut, new outfit, new anything? Others are judging it and she's sure of it, and so she often avoids being around other people because of this irrational fear of judgement. She's also sensitive to any sort of criticism, and is under the belief that if she does anything wrong, she'll be a disappointment to those around her. She doesn't want to fail anyone around her, she doesn't want to be perceived as weak and above all, she doesn't want others to realize something's severally wrong with her a lot of the time and leave her. She'll do anything to be enough for someone, and it's obvious in her behavior. She molds herself around the person she cares most about, twisting every aspect of her to suit them in any way she can.

Relationships, social and romantic, are fairly hard for her. She loves people quite a bit, but she enters interpersonal relationships under the belief that they will one day leave her. She often has a "reject them before they reject me" mentality, which results in her distancing herself from people she cares about in an attempt to avoid being abandoned by them. She's often paranoid in this sense, as she's often sure that they're leaving. Even the slightest thing, like even walking a few steps away from her, can trigger one of these moments. This perceived abandonment is linked to her moods, of course. However, this abandonment, and the fear of rejection, leads to Odessa avoiding most interpersonal relationships. The constant stress and paranoia that having friends and lovers brings to her leaves her in a state of distress. During these times she often does things that would be considered "acting out" in teenagers in modern days. She becomes self destructive, doing things like drinking and doing anything that she can to get herself high. She's a victim of self harm, though she's proud to say that she's in remission for that right now. Her eating habits fall under this part, too, and she'll get in to fights if she's feeling desperate enough for some relief.

Though she doesn't realize it, she sees people in an almost black and white manner - they're perfect to her until they make a mistake, at which point in time she stops seeing the good in them. It's hard for Odessa, impossible basically, for her to see both the good and bad characteristics of a person at the same time. They're either good or they're bad, and that's it - there can't be a midground to her.

Odessa, the true Odessa hidden inside of this, is a quiet and reserved young woman who just has a little trouble. She likes summertime and the colour green, and her favourite place to visit is the beach. She loves to read poetry, even the bad stuff, and she loves to draw anything that comes in to her head. She appreciates children - she loves her two foster siblings more than anything in the whole world. Mice are her favourite animals - they're too cute - even though they're mostly pests. She likes music and art and laughing and the people she cares about. She wants to do something great with her life if she ever has the chance. She doesn't feel like she does, though, and Panem doesn't help this. She's terrified of the idea of the hunger games, and she's grateful that District 4 is a Career district. If she got reaped, she doesn't have the slightest clue what she'd do. She doesn't really understand what's going on with her head or why she acts like she does, and she looks down on herself because of that. She doesn't even see all of the things she does - she doesn't realize how she views people, or why some of her behaviors may be harmful. She just wants to be happy and have a good life, and she doesn't understand why she keeps holding herself back.

Odessa was the foster child of a young couple who once thought they were infertile. They took her in when she was seven, after two years already in the foster system, only to proceed to have a daughter three years later and a son three years after that. By that point in time, though, Odessa was more than a foster child - she was their daughter, and she was raised like that. Given that the age gab between Odessa and her siblings was large, ten years between her and Carla and thirteen years between her and Gabe, Odessa was too big for the sibling rivalry that eventually formed between her younger siblings. The young couple, James and Raleigh, went through the adoption process with Odessa when she was eleven, making her officially a Porter child. She loves the whole family more than anything - most of the time.

Odessa doesn't remember her mother nor her father, and she doesn't even consider them her parents. She decided years ago that if she ever met either of those who created her, she would want nothing to do with them, and she doesn't even want to know anything about them.

Her makers were sixteen year old Jenna Hastings and her lover of the drunken moment, a twenty-four year old named Samuel Canning. The last thing Jenna wanted was a kid, but she wasn't really given any choice in the matter. So, nine months after the fact and with Samuel long out of the picture, she popped out a baby girl. She wasn't a very good mother, and she didn't want to be one. She often left her daughter alone, deciding that if her mother cared about Odessa, she'd care for the kid while Jenna was out. When Odessa was a year old, Jenna turned eighteen and moved out of her mother's house in to a little apartment where she decided to raise the kid by herself. Instead, she began conditioning Odessa to her life - drinking, boys and the likes. She didn't do a good job at mothering.

Odessa was four when Jenna brought a man named Ronald in to her life. It was the first time she'd had a serious relationship in her life, and Jenna was sure she was in love. Ron moved in to her apartment with Odessa six months in to the relationship, and within the year everything went downhill. Ron became abusive - first to Jenna, and then later to a five year old Odessa. He'd yell at her and hit her and then, towards the very end, sneak in to her bed while she was falling asleep.

Odessa was saved from this situation by her grandmother, who saw the bruises on her daughter's arms and legs. Ron was handed over to the peacekeepers, and Odessa was taken from her mother after all the reports of Jenna's mothering were told. She proceeded to spent two years going between homes before she was given to the Porters, who she found solace in quite easily.

Odessa doesn't remember any of these times; in fact, she doesn't really remember anything from before the birth of Carla. Sometimes things come out in her nightmares and they terrify her, but she finds more solace in the fact that it's just a dream.

Growing up with the Porters was okay for Odessa. She was quiet almost the whole time, never really having a large amount of friends and preferring to spend time by herself with books and water and music. She always had a temper, and she was hard to handle at times, but she was an overall good child. She did good in school and she was respectful, for the most part, to those around her. She shuddered away every time she was forced to watch scenes from the hunger games, and she always did her best to please those closest to her.

She was thirteen when things started to change in her, though. She became even more withdrawn, became highly anxious and began having mood swings - typical teenager things, only it got worse than seen in most teenagers. By fourteen she was sneaking out at night and drinking with a new group of 'friends'. Her grades ins school began to drop and her emotions continued to get wilder. She discovered ways to soothe the paranoia and anxiety that came with her in causing harm to herself - snapping hair bands against her wrists, later taking blades from her razors. Depression struck her. She was growing, and at her final height of 5'8", Odessa weighed 105 pounds. By fifteen she was having sex regularly, often with people she didn't know or barely knew in spur of the moment decisions. She was often drunk during these encounters, and regretted them with incredible sorrow after the fact. She kept doing this though, as for a while it helped her out. During this year, her weight skyrocketed to the highest it had ever been, which wasn't much an achievement, at 135 lbs. Over the next couple years it plummeted and skyrocketed over and over again, as did the way her body looked. She entered whirlwind relationship after whirlwind relationship with them all ending one of two ways - in a fight (usually over next to nothing) or her leaving in anticipation of them not loving her. Friends became few and far between, and they received the blunt edge of her actions a lot of the time.

She always, always did her best to hide this from her siblings, though. She doesn't want them to think anything's wrong. More than she doesn't want to disappoint her parents, she doesn't want to disappoint her little siblings.

Currently, Odessa's in a rather neutral state. She's between relationships and starting to form what she hopes will become stable relationships with a couple potential friends. She's teaching her little siblings to swim and draw, she's teaching Gabe to spell and write. She's doing her best to survive right now, and she feels like she's doing a good job. She's currently at an okay weight, 125, though she's incredibly sensitive about it and feels like that's just a little too much, and she's going through her last year of school. She's hoping not to be reaped this year, either - she's done good over the last few years. She's also trying to figure out if there's anything that she really, really wants to do with her life before she's given some mandatory job at sea or something. She doesn't know how this adult thing works.

Either way, she doesn't feel ready for it. It's an impending doom, though.

Yeah. If you want me to change anything, let me know? What's wrong with her is borderline personality disorder with the same criteria as I have so I think I'll do an okay job of portraying that; if the potential drug use/alcohol/promiscuity/sh is an issue, I won't be playing out any of the acts IC or anything.

James Edward Porter; 47 years old
Raleigh Maria Edgewick-Porter; 44 years old
Carla Mae Porter; 7 years old
Gabriel Fabrio Porter; 4 years old