Ronnie

Sophronia—who only ever answers to Ronnie—is twelve years old, but carries herself with the stoic stillness of someone much older. She’s caught in that awkward, gangly phase of early adolescence, all sharp angles and not quite enough meat on her bones. Her breasts are just starting to bud - poking out of her otherwise-flat chest and feeling all tender and sensitive, all of a sudden, along with the first sprouting of pubic and underarm hair. Her frame is wiry and slight, a testament to a life where calories were earned, not given. She stands a little hunched, a defensive posture that makes her worn, faded t-shirt and too-short jeans look even more ill-fitting. Her hair is blonde - the color of ditchwater, chopped unevenly just below her jawline in a way that suggests it was done with kitchen shears and no mirror. Her face is pale and freckled, dominated by a pair of watchful, wary hazel eyes that miss nothing. A thin, white scar slices through her left eyebrow, a relic of a fall from a creek bank when she was seven. Her hands are calloused and her fingernails are perpetually rimmed with dirt that no amount of city soap seems to remove, a silent story of a girl who knows how to gut a fish, set a snare, and dig for roots.

Ronnie’s defining trait is a profound, almost feral self-reliance, born from a childhood of parental neglect. On the surface, she is quiet to the point of being mute, answering direct questions with a nod, a shrug, or the barest minimum of words. This silence is her armor, a defense mechanism to observe and assess threats before revealing anything of herself. Her major quirk is a constant need to have a small piece of wood and a pocketknife in her possession; she whittles obsessively, not to create art, but to keep her hands busy and her mind focused, shaving off slivers of wood like she’s shaving off her own anxiety. She values loyalty fiercely but offers it to no one, believing deep down that depending on anyone is a fool’s game. Her primary insecurity is her thick Ozark drawl and her patchwork education, which makes her feel stupid and backward in this new world of sidewalks and schools. When under pressure, she doesn’t cry or lash out; she simply shuts down, her face becoming an impassive mask while her mind races, plotting an escape. One might see her silently watching the squirrels in a city park, her expression blank, but inside she’s calculating trajectories, noting their escape routes, and assessing them as a potential food source—a routine mental exercise from a life that is now gone.

Ronnie was raised in a dilapidated single-wide trailer deep in an Ozark holler, where the nearest paved road was a ten-mile walk. Her father was a ghost in her life, appearing just long enough to drink up any money before disappearing again for months. Her mother, her uncle’s older sister, was a kind but broken woman, worn down by poverty and illness, who loved Ronnie but lacked the strength to protect her. The most formative experience of Ronnie’s life was the winter her mother fell sick with pneumonia. At ten years old, with her father gone, Ronnie took over completely. She set traps for rabbits, shot squirrels with a rusty .22 rifle, and kept the wood stove burning for weeks, caring for her mother until a neighbor finally found them. That winter forged her into someone who trusts only her own two hands. Her mother never fully recovered, leading to the eventual intervention of child services. The memory of her own desperate competence and the ultimate failure to "fix" things is a wound that still echoes in her refusal to ask for help.

Ronnie’s driving goal is brutally simple: survive. She needs to understand the rules of this strange new environment and her even stranger new guardian to avoid being sent somewhere worse, like a group home—a place she imagines is a concrete cage. Her deepest fear is not of her uncle, but of the vulnerability that comes with hope. A part of her, buried so deep she can barely feel it, yearns for the stability and care she’s never known, but her mind screams that it’s a trap. This creates a powerful inner conflict: every small kindness from her uncle is met with intense suspicion. Her desire to finally be a child is at war with the hardened survivalist she was forced to become. She is currently motivated by observation, trying to piece together the puzzle of her uncle's life to see where, or if, she fits, all while keeping her figurative bug-out bag packed and ready.

Another character from a short story, 'Ronnie' is a 'hillbilly' transplant into an urban environment and on top of that huge life-change, she's just starting to develop physically, and has NO idea how to cope with budding breasts, BO, underarm and pubic hair, and all the turmoil of emotions that accompany this most interesting and difficult time!