Elle and Hugo

Eleanor

She is eighteen years old. Her hair is long, brunette, and straight. When down it would reach to the middle of her back, but she never wears it down. She only wears it in a tight pony-tail on the top of her head. Her eyes are a deep, dark blue like the ocean. Her face is hard, her chin and cheekbones at sharp angles. Her small nose and soft lips help round out her face and soften the dimensions of it. Her face is clear and smooth, and her skin is fair. A small amount of freckles dot her nose, scars left over from many light sunburns. When her face is relaxed, her expression is always determined, like she is prepared for anything.

Her body is slender from running. Her style is very simple. She wears light-wash jeans everyday and a simple white or black, cropped t-shirt. On her feet she wears white ankle-cropped socks and black Converse sneakers that have held together longer than they were made to. On her left wrist she wears a simple, black watch that runs exactly two minutes fast. Finally, everyday she wears a very simple necklace. It has a silver chain and the charm is a feather. The feather doesn't hang off the chain vertically, though. It connects both sides of the chain, hanging horizontally. She never takes this necklace off, not even to sleep or to shower.

She's a tough cookie. Her personality is rigid and sarcastic. She doesn't take crap from anyone and when people act stupid she makes it very clear to them. To be honest, she really doesn't like people all that much in general. She isn't prideful, but she is very aware of the fact that she is far more intelligent than the average person. Because she is so logical and calculated, it makes it hard for her to connect to people on an emotional level. This is also an issue when it comes to trust. She overthinks everything and tends to notice the worst in people which makes it hard for her to trust new people in any situation. However, when she does finally open up and trust someone, she is loyal almost to a fault. She would do everything in her power to protect the other person. This is partially because she still doesn't trust the people she cares about to make smart decisions, but she also doesn't want anything bad to happen to the other person.

A lot of her trust issues stem from her family life as a child. First of all, she is an only child so she gets full attention from her parents, Michael and Caroline (Carol) Cartwright. When she was in elementary school, her parents realized how gifted she was. They enrolled her in a gifted school where the expectations were very high all the way through high school. They'd work her and work her until she was worn down everyday. She always had high stress levels, so she ran whenever she needed to calm down.

Because she spent so much time doing schoolwork, she didn't interact with many people besides her parents and her professors. She definitely didn't spend much time with kids her own age because all of her classmates in the special school were just as intense as she was. This made her resent her parents quite a bit, specifically her mother who pushed her the most. This is because her mother grew up rather poor and generally unprivileged. She didn't get to go to college and she just wanted her daughter to have the opportunity for success that she didn't have. However, her mother didn't realize that sometimes she would be a bit too aggressive with her love because she was 1: living vicariously through her daughter and 2: was afraid of what would happen if her daughter failed and ended up like her.

Her father also wanted what was best for his daughter, but he also realized that she was a human with limits and desires other than academics. This is the parent she would go to when she was overwhelmed because she never learned how to process her emotions. To her, emotions are bad and should be hidden from other people. Unfortunately, her father passed away the fall of her senior year of high school. This launched her into a deep depression as she no longer had an outlet for emotions that she trusted. She certainly couldn't talk to her mother about anything.