THE WHO
HARD WORKING. LOVABLE. GRATEFUL. Reed Benjamin (Wallace) Graham
AGE. 28
BIRTHDAY. January 11th
OCCUPATION. Riding Instructor / Stable Hand at Flemming Stables
BIRTH PLACE. Unknown
NATIONALITY. Truthfully unknown, but if you ask Reed he’ll tell you African.
ORIENTATION. Heterosexual
PREMADE TITLE. N/A
PLAYBY. Jake Gyllenhaal
THE WHAT
HARD WORKING. Life has been no gravy train for Reed Graham. Every day of his life he’s had to work hard and just because he finally found his footing in the world doesn’t mean that he’s even begun to think about slowing down. Reed believes deeply that one gets only what one deserves and although some people who do nothing at all have all the money in the world doesn’t mean they aren’t getting what they deserve. The world isn’t just about money. It’s more about happiness and harmony and finding that in one’s life than it is about the monetary gain from hard work. So be it working hard at his job or working hard at his relationships with his family and friends, Reed always gives one hundred percent.
LOVABLE. An all around nice guy, Reed is kind of easy to fall in love with. Maybe not romantically, as he tends to block that part of his life off in fear of what happened to him as an infant happening to another child and another family despite the fact that he long since swore he’d never allow it, but in all other aspects. A gentlemen, he’s quick to help anyone who needs it and tries to give back double of what he receives. He does, however, have a few unlovable traits. Quite messy, Reed has a bad habit of not picking up after himself in his own home. He also finds a lot of things funny that really just aren’t to some people. Unlovable toilet humor, it’s a curse. It’s also not strange to find him defending his every move if it comes into question, if he needs to or not. It is quite annoying at times.
GRATEFUL. Reed’s been at the bottom rung and at the top so many different times that he’s grown a great appreciation for the things and people in his life. Grateful for his job, his family, his foster family, his friends, if Reed ever had a reason to give a speech he would probably go on forever and ever listing off all the people he would like to think for getting him where he is currently in life. Unfortunately, with gratefulness comes the tendency to play victim. But what person with the kind of childhood Reed was forced to have didn’t from time to time? Often he does it without knowing, and other times his childishness gets in the way and he’s simply doing it because he feels he is entitled to.
LIKES. Classic rock, horses, big families, jelly beans, crunch berries, Saturday afternoons, casual drinking, ramen noodles, strong coffee, long movies, summer days.
DISLIKES. Winter, closed records, tiny cars, snotty teenagers, over exaggerated situations, diapers - at any time, dumb girls, people who list sex as a “like” because it’s seriously obvious, Alfredo sauce, wooly neck beards.
THE WHY
BEST MEMORY. When Reed first arrived at the Flemmings he expected no more than to be treated like a typical foster kid. An addition to the family that was only temporary and never as important as the actual blood members. However, on his eighth birthday the Flemmings went to celebrate and at the restaurant they chose an old friend of the family’s showed up to say hello. That was the first time Mr. Flemming, or anyone for that matter, introduced him as “my son, Reed.” Even though he was never officially adopted into the Flemming family, he will always consider them to be part of his, even as it grows. From this moment in his past and forward.
WORST MEMORY. There is nothing quite like learning that you were unwanted, even if you knew it all along. Reed spent most of his life ignoring the fact that he didn’t know who his biological parents were. It was some time after high school when he was finally persuaded by a few friends to see if he could at least find out who they were. After six months of searching and making phone calls, Reed received a phone call from the facility he stayed at when he was first born. His biological mother had been contacted and she requested never to be contacted again and in the event that anyone tried she would take legal action. It was a huge hiccup in his life and is still a very sore spot.
Usually most people have some great story about how their parents met, fell in love and then started making babies. Unfortunately, Reed Graham does not have one of those stories. Instead he has a list of names on a do-not-contact list and four stand-in parental figures. A woman named Margaret Thatcher and a man named Scott Wallace had an accident. It resulted in a child that neither party wanted and with little to no discussion about what they should do the infant was put into the system and neither party thought twice about it (or at least made it seem so). A childcare facility in the London area would be home to the unnamed Wallace baby, who was given the name Reed Benjamin by a nun who spent her time in the infant ward at two weeks old, for the first year of his life. After that, he was sent from foster home to foster home.
There wasn’t any particular reason why he was not adopted as an infant. Most people just assumed that at the time he was in the facility the demand for adoption was low and too expensive for most people to afford and then he was lost in the system before a searching family could find him. Reed doesn’t really remember most of his early childhood homes, just that there were always a lot of kids and he was never alone - a blessing in disguise. When he was seven-almost-eight years old he was introduced to the Flemming family. Jonathon and Elizabeth and their daughter Sophie. They said they’d had foster children before him but at the time he came to them he was the only one. Sophie was only a year older than him and her presence made him comfortable. He had no idea that he would be spending the next seven or so years with them, not a typical amount of time for a foster child unless they are being adopted. He was just so hard to get rid of.
This wasn’t something that Reed necessarily minded. He had a steady home and was getting a proper education and above all else, the Flemmings had horses. Big, beautiful creatures that Reed was absolutely fascinated with. Of course, it wasn’t long before he was taught to ride and then he would spend long summers on horseback. It was magnificent. When he wasn’t pestering people working in the stables or riding horses he was tagging along behind Miss Sophie, always looking up to her and her group of friends. Surely at times he would get annoying but he always shrugged it off as part of his charm. The girl, after all, was the closest he ever had to a proper sibling and as a result of this tag-a-long nature of his he still considers her one of his best friends, his sister even.
At fifteen Mr. and Mrs. Flemming sat him down in their lounge room and broke the news that a couple, who lived in the city, had come to them. Alice and Michael Graham could not have children and even trying was a waste of time as both of them were already old enough to have, at very least, young grandchildren. They had expressed interest in adopting one of the Flemming’s older foster children. While he was both unsure and a bit depressed that he would be leaving the Flemming household he was ecstatic that he would finally have a family that would really be his (even if he would always consider the Flemmings to be part of his family).
It was after the adoption hearing that everything seemed to finally fit in Reed’s life. He changed his last name from Wallace to Graham, as Wallace never really seemed to fit or truthfully belong to him, and he finished high school. While he should have went on to college like the rest of his friends and even Sophie, Reed instead took up small jobs here and there before getting his own place and finally being offered a position at Flemming Stables, where he still works today, as a riding instructor.
THE HOW
RP SAMPLE.See Kennedy York.
I,
JESSE AM
TWENTY AND HAVE READ ALL THE REQUIRED INFORMATION. NOT TO MENTION THINK THIS SITE IS REALLY RAD. JUST SO YOU KNOW MY FAVOURITE THING IS
CHRIS COLFER‘S ADORABLENESS AND I FOUND WWB
WHILE I WAS HELPING TO MAKE IT.
