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Halo
by Bethany Joy Lenz

I never promised you a ray of light,
I never promised there'd be sunshine every day.
I'll give you everything I have,
The good, the bad.

Why do you put me on a pedestal?
I'm so up high that I can't see the ground below.
So help me down, you've got it wrong,
I don't belong there.

One thing is clear, I wear a halo,
I wear a halo when you look at me.
But standing from here, you wouldn't say so,
You wouldn't say so if you were me.
And I, I just want to love you,
I just want to love you.

I always said that I would make mistakes,
I'm only human, and that's my saving grace.
I fall as hard as I try, so don't be blinded.
See me as I really am,
I'm flawed sometimes, I even said.
So pull me from that pedestal,
I don't belong there.

One thing is clear, I wear a halo,
I wear a halo when you look at me.
But standing from here, you wouldn't say so,
You wouldn't say so if you were me.
And I, I just want to love you,
I just want to love you.

A hey-hey-hey-halo

Name: Lauren Elle Santini
Nicknames: Lola, Lo, Elle, L, Tini
Parents: Gregory Santini (father), Elisabeth Santini (mother), Elaire Santini (sister, younger)
Age: 20
Location: Providence, Rhode Island (Canon) // Los Angeles, California (AU)
Occupation: Student, Drama Major, Minor in English; Part-time job as a waitress at a local Bennigan's
Backstory: Lauren was born in Sedona, Arizona on February 22nd, 1986. She spent her entire life there with her mother and father, and four years later, a litter sister, Elaire. It was from Elaire she got her nickname of "Lo". Her parents had called her Lola since infancy, but in her toddler-speak, Elaire had trouble with the double L sound, and simply chose to call her sister "Lo". As she grew up, her friends gave her variances, including simply "L", both her first initial, and a play on her middle name, and "Tini", the last part of her last name. A few kids in high school made the standard martini or appletini jokes, and she laughed them off. Her teachers stuck to calling her by her given name, and even her parents had gravitated to calling her Lauren by then. Elaire still called her Lo, and even that had caught on among her inner circle of friends.

Her life was typical, in a majority of ways for the most part. She did the same stupid things that teenagers do. Shoplifting lipgloss when you have the money to pay for it, drinking when you're a decent four or five years under the legal age, sneaking out of her house, and pretty much defying rules she felt were made to be broken, but not simply for the sake of breaking them. She saw too many people go under for doing that very same thing, and no matter how many times she saw it, she never saw the point in it.

Things were far from perfect, but when you spend all day in school, surrounded by people who like you and pay attention to you, it's easy to pretend that the things that are waiting for you at home don't exist. Her parents weren't monsters, but they weren't parents either. She felt her father was practically a polygamist, because he was married to both her mother, and his job. Not to mention the bottle. She wasn't ever exactly sure how he kept up with all three, but he managed. Well, at least with his career, and his drinking. He let his marriage to her mother go to Hell, and she was fairly certain she'd never forgive him for that. Especially because her mother was one of those stupid women who had decided to give up her whole entire life for some good-looking, rich man, to marry him and raise his children and clean his house and be his wife. And when she ceased to be necessary in that last capacity, her whole entire life was swallowed into a vaccuum of meaningless despair. She showered maybe once a week, and got out of bed even less. As far as Lauren could tell, her dad never cheated on her mom, even when she got gross and just completely hit rock bottom. But he didn't really give a damn either, and she blamed him for not doing anything about it. It's not like she or Elaire could have their mother committed. He was just too busy working, and chasing all his hard work away with gin and tonic and his own self satisfaction.

No one complained though. They say that ignorance is bliss, and silence is even better. Her parents had their own escapes, Elaire was finding hers through cheerleading and being an overachiever that would have made the average parent of any given middle school child proud, and Lauren found hers with her group of friends. They were kind of a mix of different crowds, considering their school was such a large one, one that had been merged from different high schools onto an old college campus due to budgetary constraints. Lauren was the drama geek, along with her best friend Stella who she'd happened to know since forever. Or, in teenage-speak, since she was four years old. They had some overly cutesy how-we-met story, but the details were just a little blurred. It had something to do with pre-K, and a swingset. One of them was already on it, and the other one wanted on. There was some pushing involved, a grazed knee, a few tears. It seems that the best friendships in life are somehow forged out of some sort of initial conflict.

Others on campus jokingly referred to them as the Breakfast Club, because they were all so different, there were a couple of jocks, a couple of what you would call geeks, a couple of preppy types, the two drama girls, and even a couple of emo kids. Somehow, they all fit. Melded together by some secret pain they all seemed to share, and some understanding. They just got each other. High school wasn't some hierachy to them. It was about surviving their parents, their first relationships, getting into colleges, experiencing the things that they wanted to, without having to pay for it... too much. There was no clubhouse, no secret meeting place or handshake, but as escapes went, finding their way to each other always made for the best one possible.

Drama, angst, tumult, it all happened. But there was always a grain of salt to swallow it with, or a rock to hold on to when one of them was slipping, and their head was just about to go under water.

They just didn't know that one of them was about to literally slip beneath the surface, and not come back still breathing.

It was a weekend in the Fall, supposedly the last warm one of their Senior year. They decided to spend it in some cabins up at a lake near some canyons where half of them went to summer camp as kids. It was just the usual, playing CD's on Drake's truck's system, drinking the alcohol they'd paid some starving college kid Stella had batted her eyes at to buy for them, playing Truth or Dare with the same old truths and dares that always happened and always got the same reactions. By Saturday night, the girls were bored, and the booze was dry when Stella decided they should take the small boat of Owen's across the lake to where some older kids were partying to see if they could either crash or mooch some alcohol. If nothing else, the cars were parked over there, in a parking lot next to the ranger's station where they felt the cars were less likely to get stolen or trashed or eaten by a bear. They could always make the twenty minute trip into town and see what they could score. It was almost midnight, but Stella was confident there would be something. Stella was always confident. No one else felt like going. Strip poker was in full swing, and being down to almost nothing, and also being her best friend, Lauren volunteered to be co-captain of the U.S.S. Owen's Little Motorboat.

The girls never made it across the lake.

In the morning, the boat was found, stalled, in the middle of the lake. Nearby, almost at the shore, Lauren's unconscious body was found tangled face up in a fallen tree branch, the only thing that apparently kept her from drowning. Later that day, Stella's drowned body was found, a few miles down the shore. She had been carried by the current and eventually trapped in some thick reeds. When Lauren awoke in the hospital later that afternoon, she had no memory of the events of the previous night. She couldn't even remember anything since leaving Sedona for the lake. The doctors diagnosed her with short-term memory loss, induced by trauma, and predicted the events would come back to her eventually. She had suffered head trauma, though the doctors could only speculate as to how it had happened. Had she fallen out of the boat and hit her head on the side? Was there an altercation between she and Stella before they both hit the water? Did she hit her head on the fallen tree that incidentally saved her life? The best they could do was treat the injury, and recommend therapy for her grief and for the amnesia and trauma. Meanwhile, the Sedona and Arizona state police began an investigation into the death of Stella Grey.

After months of investigation, they found nothing. Neither of the parties on either campsite had heard anything, nor had anyone seen anything out on the water. No one was really looking, plus, it was dark, and the girls were in the middle of the lake, from what the forensics team could surmise from the boat's location. There had been some suspicion of Lauren, whose memory never returned, but it seemed that she had been almost destined to die that night too, and couldn't have faked her own unconsciousness and that degree of head trauma with any guarantee that she would survive or that anyone would find her in time, or that the branch would hold. The death was ruled an accident. But no one really cared what the police thought. Something had happened up on that lake. They could feel it. Even Lauren could feel it, but what she didn't know and couldn't feel was whether or not she had anything to do with it. She believed in her own innocence. She loved Stella, and she couldn't imagine ever fighting with her, outside of their occasional rifts over ruined clothes or dibs on boys. Nothing she would ever hurt her over. Nothing she would ever kill her for. But by all accounts, she was the only person there. Yet, she wasn't supposed to survive that night either.

Or was that an accident too?

Lauren remained in Sedona, outcasted by the suspicions cast upon her. The controversy woke her mother from her self inflicted sleep, and she fought hard for her daughter. Even her father tried to put down the bottle, and clear Lauren's name. He was a lawyer afterall, which is probably why so many of her rights were protected in the first place. But after she graduated and the police cleared her, and there was nothing left to conceivably fight for, her parents gave up, and went back to their real selves. It took the death of her best friend to shake them, but apparently nothing could change them.

She tried to go to college there in Arizona, but she couldn't escape her own infamy. Her own sister turned against her, forced to live in the shadow of it. So two years later, when her great aunt died and left her old Victorian house in Providence, Lauren, having been the only one to make the trek out to visit the old woman every summer and help her clean the spacious beachfront place in Newport, and do her linens, and read Salinger and Kerouac to her when cataracts took her eyesight, took it as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Providence, Rhode Island was a far, far cry from Sedona, there was no painted desert, no canyons, and she missed that. She missed the desert where you could clearly see every single star the sky owned, for miles and miles and they shot across the sky and fell nightly. It was her grace. Now, she had the beach.

She wears a black ribbon around her wrist. A thin, tiny black ribbon that one of her many therapists told her might help her remember. She wears she won't untie it until the day she does.

This is the part of the story where she gets to start over. Or so she thinks.

As Uncle Remus said; "You can't run from trouble, there ain't no place that far."

But maybe there's far enough just to be saved.

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Note: There are two versions of Lauren. One for Lyrical Muses and a novel I am writing. This version is what I consider the canon version of my character. She is a normal human being who is completely original, has no affiliation with any fandom whatsoever, and is completely part of a world of my own creation. Canon!Lauren is a student at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. The other version of her, which I again repeat, is not affiliated with TM in any way, shape, or form, is for the game Sad And Free, and the community Fandom Muses, which places her as an OC vampire Slayer. There's little difference in her backstory, except that instead of going to Maine, she inherits a condo in Los Angeles and runs away to there instead. In SAF, Kennedy finds her one night, kicking ass and taking names. In FM, I'm sure something awesome will be figured out as far as bring her into the fold, but I want to explore the Slayer side of her in challenges as well as the novellezation side I'm creating so that I have tons and tons of character development for her. This version of her attends UCLA and lives in Los Angeles.

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Copyright Notice: Lauren Santini, her storyline, the characters included in her storyline, and all works contained in this journal and posted to other places from this journal are part of a novel in progress, and are all copyright of myself. None of them may be used or copied in any way without my express permission. Each time I write something or do something with Lauren's character, including even her challenges or RP, and this backstory, I upload it to a nifty site that time and date stamps it, should any issues of ownership/authorship ever arise. Basically? Mine. All mine. I wouldn't go playing with your OC, don't play with mine.

Disclaimer: Obviously, this is fiction. Any likeness to real people, alive or dead, is strictly coincidental. Furthermore, this is a fictional character, i.e. Lauren is not really Sophia Bush, she's just the face I put with her character. I do not claim to be or play the actress.

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