Selby Lynne Carlisle

NAME: Selby Lynne Carlisle
AGE: 19
SEX: F
BIRTHDAY: September 28, 1990
FAMILY RESIDENCE: Her mother’s family home where Selby prefers to live when school is out is located in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Carlisles also keep a well-appointed town home in Georgetown near Washington, D.C.
APPEARANCE: Selby is 5’ 6” tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. A competitive swimmer, she has a trim and toned figure. She dresses a bit more conservatively than other girls, but not out of modesty. Selby prefers classic mix-and-match wardrobe choices that don’t require much thought when she needs to change quickly between school, sports and personal time. She only wears jewelry on dates or for special occasions because she is afraid of misplacing her favorite pieces in the bustle of daily life. Selby never seems happy with her hair and is constantly experimenting with different styles. She has no tattoos and her only piercings are on her earlobes.
OCCUPATION: soon-to-be sophomore student, competitive swimmer, aspiring sculptor
CAMPUS ACTIVITIES: Selby is a member of Ainsworth’s swim team. Her best event is the 50m backstroke and she is a valuable teammate to have in a relay race. She is a good rider, and while she has not joined the equestrian team, she is a supportive spectator. Selby participated in sorority recruitment and accepted a bid from Delta Psi Nu. Upon initiation, she was given the line name of “Varia,” short for Mniotilta varia, the bird commonly known as the Black and White Warbler. Her DPN sisters bestowed that name upon her because of her strong, assertive personality, a match for this bird that is the most aggressive of its kin. Selby’s acceptance into the arts sorority DPN was facilitated by her achievements in abstract sculpture. Her mediums include fired clay, silicone-cast hydrocal, and resin. She has won several lower awards in respected competitions and hopes to secure an internship with the National Sculpture Society in her junior or senior year.
HOUSING: Selby resides in suite #106 of the Delta Psi Nu sorority house.
STRENGTHS: Responsible, Resourceful, Creative, Out-Going, Independent
WEAKNESSES: Unforgiving, Judgmental, Blunt, Vain, Xenophobic
WEIRD QUIRKS: She is terribly self conscious about her hair, which she thinks is a disaster due to all the time it spends soaking in swimming pools. In reality, her hair is fine, but if anyone makes the slightest remark about it Selby reacts defensively, often calling out another’s faults much more cruelly. Her dresser is a cluttered mess of different hair products. She hates unexpected noises, even to the point of always keeping her phone’s ringtone silenced. Selby loves traditional holidays. She always decorates her room for Christmas, Halloween, Valentines, 4th of July, etc. and enthusiastically supports any school event on such a theme.
PERSONALITY: Selby is an open person who will give anyone a chance. Therefore, she makes friends easily but discards people just as quickly if she judges they have betrayed her in some way. If she had a motto, it might be: “It’s not me, it’s you!” Her independent nature allows her to ignore some of the social consequences of being so rigid. Being an only child, she doesn’t need a clique to lean on, although she loves nothing more than being part of a gang that lives up to her standards, even if today’s members of that group might be banished by her tomorrow. She is much more tolerant of her Delta Psi Nu sisterhood than the student body at large, however. Selby is truly attracted to the “sisterhood for life” aspect of a sorority, and tries to love the girls in her house as siblings she never had. It’s not easy for her. Her reputation at school is fairly good, although many of the urban and New England elite joke privately about Selby’s “southern drama.” A few call her Scarlett behind her back. Socially, Selby prefers to join in activities that involve physical fun in the outdoors. White water rafting is far more likely to entice her participation than a weekend at a spa. She does enjoy trips to art galleries and, oddly for a girl of her class, tours of industrial facilities. Selby is more likely to be caught watching “How It’s Made” than “Project Runway.” Like everyone, she has her dark moments. If she hasn’t heard from her parents in weeks, she sometimes subconsciously acts up to get adult attention from the faculty. And some of the “slights” she perceives from others are completely in her head.
HISTORY: Selby was named for her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Selby (King). Her grandmother’s side of the family has an old Virginia lineage stretching back to colonial days. Selby’s mother Elizabeth King met Selby’s father West Carlisle while both were students at Georgetown. They married soon after graduation but their careers kept them busy for more than a decade before they took time out for children. Selby was thus born to older parents with many other commitments. She is an only child. West Carlisle’s family of Baltimore was as well-connected as the Selbys and Kings, and after a short but impressive run as a lobbyist he was appointed as a coordinator for matters relating to several foreign embassies. Most of his time is spent in the elite political circles of Washington, D.C., while his wife runs her own corporation in Fairfax, Virginia. Elizabeth Carlisle excelled as an intellectual property attorney during the dot com boom of the 1990s, but has since moved into one of the newest and most profitable uses of information technology. She runs Carlisle Analytics, a data mining firm that not only adds millions to the family fortune, but through its data aggregation is privy to many of the financial and behavioral secrets of the wealthy and influential. Elizabeth and West are good parents to Selby, offering her all the opportunities that their money and positions can provide. They love their daughter, but are a bit detached from her day to day problems. Selby’s normal environment has been that of a boarding school since a very young age, making her transition to Ainsworth natural and smooth. Selby’s experiences have been typical for a girl of her background. The only “failure” in her history was a disastrous foreign exchange student experience in high school. She went overseas and was assigned to a German family that she absolutely despised. Selby made things so unpleasant for them that they demanded she be reassigned or sent home. This incident has made her very America-centric and not the least bit interested in joining her peers in European ski trips or summers in Capri. Her attitude has also created a rift with her father, due to his heavy involvement with foreign dignitaries through his embassy connections.Her first year at Ainsworth was fantastic, as far as she could tell. Sometimes she felt like she was missing something going on behind the scenes, but she shrugged off any unsettling suspicions and focused on her own business. Selby does best in classes that stress memorization or use of formulas. She hates writing essays, participating in meaningless group projects, or other time-consuming busywork. Consequently, her favorite classes tend to fall in the math and sciences, disciplines which pertain quite well to her sculpting. She has dated several boys in her class, but nothing steady resulted. She hopes that once she shakes off the Freshman stigma she will have a shot at catching the eye of an upperclassman.
EXTRA: Selby doesn’t know it, but her mother has become addicted to snooping on the rich and famous through the data mining resources at Carlisle Analytics. This could mean trouble for Selby should Elizabeth’s spying spread to students or faculty at Ainsworth.