[hider=Anna Lou][center][img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/019d7fc4-0e4f-74cf-b013-2fcd533400cb.webp[/img]
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[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Faceclaim: Antonia Gentry // Color Code: #4DBDB5[/b][/color][/sub]
[color=4DBDB5]_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Full Name:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Anna Lou Caudill[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Nickname(s):[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Annie (family only) 
Lou (what most regulars at Husker's call her)[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Age:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Twenty-seven // Pisces // March 3rd[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Gender:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Female[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Sexuality:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Bisexual[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Occupation:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Waitress and occasional bartender at Husker's, picking up whatever shifts need covering[/indent]

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Place of Residence:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]14 Shady Hills Lane (her parents' trailer)[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Family and Close Connections:[/b][/color][/sub] 
[indent][list][*]Dennis Caudill, father, 54, formerly employed at Parton's Lumber Company for nineteen years. He's quiet and not much of a complainer. Takes the bus to the Dollar General now for the few shifts they'll give him and doesn't say much about how that feels. Anna Lou gets her conflict aversion from him. 
 
[*]Lorraine Caudill, mother, 52, works part-time at Lou's Diner. She's warm though also a little worn down.  Has never once said she wishes Anna Lou had left. Has also never once said she's glad she stayed.
 
[*]Dallas King, acquaintance, 22, waitress at Lou's Diner. Anna Lou has known her as the younger girl who's always been behind that counter, a familiar face more than a friend. They've had approximately forty identical pleasant exchanges over the years that have never quite tipped into anything real, and neither of them has seemed to mind. Lorraine mentions her occasionally in an offhand way, and Anna Lou has absorbed a vague impression of her life without ever having sought it out (something about a relationship that didn't work out and a difficult few months). She didn't ask for details, and Lorraine didn't offer them. 
 
[*]Elsie Woods, acquaintance, 24, works at the Dollar General and the smoke shop. Their fathers both put in years at Parton's Lumber, which gives them a shared history they've never really discussed. More recently, Dennis picking up shifts at the Dollar General has put Anna Lou in Elsie's orbit with some regularity, such as whenever she stops in to drop off her dad's lunch or to check on him without making it obvious that's what she's doing. Elsie has never commented on this, which Anna Lou appreciates more than she's let on. Their exchanges are brief and pleasant and occasionally almost tip into something more, the kind of conversation that keeps almost starting and then doesn't. Anna Lou suspects there's more to her than the Dollar General uniform suggests. She hasn't been wrong about that kind of thing before. She also hasn't done anything about it, but that's hardly unusual.
 
[*]Mollie McIntyre, regular, 27, manager at Smoker's Paradise. Five years of Friday nights and the occasional slow Tuesday have made Mollie one of those Huskers fixtures Anna Lou knows by drink order and by mood. She's the kind of person who takes up space without apologizing for it, loud in the way that makes a quiet bar feel suddenly alive, and Anna Lou has always found that quality somewhere between exhausting and a little enviable. She heard the gossip when Mollie first arrived(everyone did) and set it aside because five minutes of watching Mollie and Kent together told her more than five months of town speculation ever could. She knows about Kent's passing, of course. The news arrived the way bad news always does here: through someone else's mouth in someone else's conversation. Mollie hasn't been in for about six months, probably because of it, and Anna Lou hasn't checked in with her about it because, well, it's none of her business, right? What was she supposed to do? Suddenly visit her at her home?
 
[*]Liz Fulton, former colleague, 35, stay-at-home wife. Liz was bartending at Husker's long before Anna Lou started picking up shifts there. She showed Anna Lou the ropes behind the bar, and Anna Lou absorbed more from watching her than from anything she was explicitly taught. She still catches herself doing this thing Liz used to do — not asking someone what's wrong, just making sure their glass stays full — and has never quite decided whether that counts as learning something or just picking up a habit. They weren't close, exactly; coworkers with all the warmth and limitations that implies. But Anna Lou did hear about the loss secondhand, and she thought about calling. She didn't, of course, and the longer she didn't, the harder it became to justify doing it at all. She's heard Liz is pregnant again, or thinks she has. She hopes it's going well. She hasn't asked.
 
[*]Delia Carter-Reid, neighbour, 20, currently unemployed. Next door at 13 Shady Hills means Anna Lou has known Delia's face longer than she's known much else about her. There's a seven-year gap between them that felt enormous when they were younger. Anna Lou occasionally watched her as a kid when Peta was in a bind, and options were thin, and it was enough to know what Delia looked like when she was about to do something she shouldn't, which was most of the time. That expression hasn't changed much with age. 

Despite all of that, these days, Anna Lou and Delia exist in each other's periphery the way neighbours do, with an occasional exchange about the weather or something insignificant that doesn't quite become an actual conversation. Still, Anna Lou worries about her in a low-level, background way. She tried, once, to bring something up. It was a small thing, or maybe it wasn't; the specifics have blurred. What she does remember is that it hadn't gone all that well, and Anna Lou, whose instinct has always been to smooth rather than pry, let it go. She hasn't tried again. But she does look. She notices when Delia wears the same hoodie four days in a row. She notes the comings and goings at odd hours. And once, three streets over, while walking Gerald (don't ask), she saw something spray-painted on a wall, a tag that she didn't quite understand. She stopped. She stared. And she thought, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, that she recognized the handwriting.
 
[*]Elias Petterson, a familiar face, 28, high school English teacher. Anna Lou and Elias graduated the same year and from the same school. They were friendly at best with each other, that much she might be able to recall, and what has happened in the decade after is much harder to summarize. Pines Holler is small, yes. You cannot drive from one end to the other without passing someone you recognize. But it is surprising, Anna Lou has found, how easily you can lose track of someone who isn't in your immediate orbit, especially when you are busy keeping your head down in your own.[/list]
[/indent] 

[center][h2][color=4DBDB5][img]https://64.media.tumblr.com/e15c8a781c0f68f64fe50b7e4bb8d50f/22f04e5ac52bf8b0-41/s400x600/40e9aa585c332c16a6d430d606506c6b070f13a4.gifv[/img][/color][/h2][/center]

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Appearance:[/b][/color][/sub]
[list][*][color=4DBDB5]Height:[/color] Five feet, four inches
[*][color=4DBDB5]Hair:[/color] Dark brown, natural texture somewhere between wavy and loosely coiled depending on the weather, usually pulled back for shifts and left loose on her days off
[*][color=4DBDB5]Eyes:[/color] Dark brown
[*][color=4DBDB5]Body Type:[/color] Soft and slight
[*][color=4DBDB5]Clothing Style:[/color] Off-shift she gravitates toward worn flannels, faded band tees from artists she actually listens to, jeans that have seen better days, and the occasional thrifted dress she tells herself she'll wear more often. 
[*][color=4DBDB5]Body Markings:[/color] A small constellation of freckles across her nose and cheeks. One set of lobe piercings, usually plain gold studs, because she keeps losing the nicer ones. 
[/list]

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Personality:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Anna Lou possesses the kind of warmth that makes a room feel incrementally cozier the moment she enters it. Were you to voice this observation aloud, however, she would likely demur out of embarrassment. She is, by constitution and by choice, a deeply interested person: attentive to others, adept at listening, and quick to offer a laugh that sounds as natural as a reflex. At Husker's, she knows most of her regulars by the small, telling details of their lives, like their go-to order or the names of their pets. People gravitate to her like moths to a flame, and she likes them back, though always with that careful buffer she maintains between herself and the world.

That buffer is the part Anna Lou never discusses. Not with her mother, not with her oldest friends, and certainly not with the affable, uncomplicated men who occasionally ask her for a drink after her shift. On the surface, she appears ever-present; below that surface, a small but stubborn distance persists. It is not dishonesty that drives this, as she would never deliberately mislead anyone. Rather, it is a hard-won instinct for self-preservation, cultivated through a thousand minor, unmemorable moments. When conflict arises, her first impulse is to apologize and to soothe. Only later, in the late hours of the night, staring at the water-stained ceiling of her room, does she allow herself to sort out what she actually feels.

She is not unhappy. Instead, Anna Lou lives in a murky land of contentment and its discontents. She loves Pines Holler with a bone-deep loyalty, and she loves her parents. She does not regret staying, not entirely, and certainly not in any language she lets herself articulate aloud. But sometimes, in the lull between the early afternoon crowd and the dinner rush, or while wiping down the same sticky counter she has wiped down a thousand times, she feels a strange tug, and she catches herself wondering what her life might have looked like if she had pushed on her desires a little harder. [/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]History:[/b][/color][/sub]
[indent]Anna Lou was born and raised in Pines Holler, the only child of Dennis and Lorraine Caudill. She grew up in the same single-wide trailer she still sleeps in, a modest home with a squeaky porch step and a kitchen window that catches the morning sun. She went to the same school everyone went to, knew everyone's business, and had her own known in return. It wasn't a hard childhood, not in any dramatic sense at least. Her parents were steady and kind; they worked hard and meant well, and even as a kid, she understood that kind of decency was something worth being grateful for. 

In school, Anna Lou was a decent student, which suited her just fine. She had friends, went to parties, and stayed out of trouble because she didn't need it. So, the dream of leaving was never a huge, specific thing. It was more like a direction she kept meaning to walk in. At seventeen, she applied to a handful of schools and got into two of them, including a state school two hours away. At the time, that distance felt reasonable: far enough to taste independence, close enough to drive home if the world felt tilted. She was going to study something—communications, maybe, or education; she hadn't quite decided. But then Dennis threw out his back, and the timing seemed wrong. She deferred for a year. The year turned into two. And by the time her father was back on his feet, the momentum had dissipated. 

Now she is twenty-seven, and she still tells herself she'll figure it out. She's not dead, after all. But the figuring-out keeps getting postponed for the same reasons it always has. Meanwhile, Parton's has closed its doors for good. Her father picks up whatever shifts the Dollar General will give him, his work boots heavier than they used to be. The cost of living also went up three hundred dollars overnight, a sudden pinch that turned every grocery trip into a calculation in her head before she gets to the register. Anna Lou looks at the window she always assumed was still open—the window marked someday, eventually, when things settle—and from where she's standing now, it seems to have changed. The glass is still there, but the light coming through it looks different. Smaller. More like a mirror.[/indent] 

[sub][color=4DBDB5][b]Extra Facts // Headcannons:[/b][/color][/sub]
[list][*]Anna Lou harbours deeply ambivalent feelings about the corporate expansion creeping toward Pines Holler. Part of her understands the appeal of change, but another part of her is frightened. She has not decided what she thinks. She is not sure she wants to.
[*]Music is her constant companion. She listens at work, on her walk from the trailer to the car, while falling asleep with one earbud in, so Gerald can't chew the cord. Her taste is eclectic: Dolly Parton sits beside Hozier; older R&B that Lorraine used to play in the kitchen (Aretha, Al Green, the occasional Anita Baker) rubs shoulders with the occasional embarrassing pop song.
[*]She makes very good biscuits, which she learned from Lorraine, who learned from her own mother, and the recipe has never been written down because it doesn't need to be. Sometimes Anna Lou brings a batch to Husker's and leaves them at the bar without announcement, wrapped in a clean dish towel. They vanish within the hour. No one asks who made them. No one has to.
[*]There is also Gerald. Gerald is a very old, very stubborn cat. He was supposed to be temporary. A neighbour found him as a stray, half-starved and hissing, and Anna Lou agreed to “hold onto him for a few days.” That was eleven years ago. Gerald now rules the trailer with a kind of reticent tyranny, knocking things off counters for sport and sleeping directly in the center of her pillow. She has never loved anything quite so irritating. She suspects the feeling is mutual, which only deepens the bond.
[*]When things feel heavy, such as when the cost of living rises again, or her father comes home from Dollar General too tired to eat, or the corporate expansion makes another land purchase she reads about, Anna Lou steps onto the back porch of the trailer and smokes a cigarette. Just one. Sometimes two. She tells herself she's going to stop. She has told herself this for eight years.[/list][/hider]