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FIVE UNWILLING CHAPERONE
( APRIL 'O4 )
THE THING with Paul Lahote?
He liked that no one really had a clue who he was. To someone else, someone dumber, this might be a problem. He didn't mean it like, if someone hears his name they'd be confused as to who he was, but no, people do know him. They know his name; plus, got years of being a bad bet for the general public to have an opinion or two about him. They see John Lahote's wayward son with Valeria Camacho's eyes and witness the form of what a twisted sort of love can create and a rez this small writes him off for a future he doesn't even think about having. But this isn't at all what he means about being unknown — he doesn't mean it in some poetic way either. It's all literal. He is very aware about the type of way people in school whisper about him as he passes by with his friends. They cower or gawk or avert their eyes and it's not usually more one than the other but they all tend to coincide quite a bit. Paul thoroughly enjoys being something to stay away from almost as much as he likes being overlooked; he's never so lucky being the latter. In all his recollections as a kid, being those two give you the upper hand in every corner of life.
With that, Paul also doesn't care for complexity.
For him, shit is better left being straightforward. He hates liars almost as much as he loathes broken promises and the feel of pity from someone who doesn't know him. If Paul was made less self-aware — he probably wouldn't chalk those traits up to some residual damage given to him by his self proclaimed 'free-spirited' mother and the deadbeat currently in jail who everyone calls his father...
There are some though, not many, but some, who don't seem to give into the rumors about him. One of them is Old Man Fuller. Moses Fuller didn't heed the advice given to him by the rest of the steel-spine elders when Paul was just twelve, fresh off losing his big sister, his parents near their breaking points, and angry at the world without a will to live beyond seeing himself destroy someone like he had been. Since Native kids tend to be fostered off by their own people first, the question of where Paul would be placed was up in the air, seeing as John Lahote had no living family amongst the Quileute tribe. His grandmother, Marion, was a Uley by blood, sister to Gregory Uley, but married Hiram Lahote — but Gregory's son Joshua was as reliable as his second-cousin, leaving his own son and wife struggling to make ends meet, so that situation was out of the question.
