Name: Diana van Meer
Age: 19
Gender: Female
Nationality: American
Place of Birth: American Embassy (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
Occupation: Parapsy student / Instagram model
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual, with a bi-curious streak
Instagram followers: 12K 15K 15.7K

Description: Diana is a sultry, tall blonde (5ft 10in) with blue-green eyes. She’s in great shape from practicing a variety of sports; at first because she was supposed to as part of her PerfectDaughter schedule, and later because she needed to burn off the frustration. Her mother's genes also help. She has improbably full breasts considering her slender frame.

Recently she had her navel pierced. Since then, she wears a lot of crop tops to show off the turquoise oval piercing, often paired with short denim shorts to make the most of the summer while it lasts. She has brought way too many clothes to Black Oak. Being a tall girl, it took her a lot of time to build up the confidence to try high heels, so now she wears them as a mark of pride.

After spending most of her life moving around the world, Diana’s English has lost any American accent and now sounds mostly international, with a bit of a Brit acquired in the last two years.

The outer self: Diana used to be an overachieving student, always saying the right thing and playing her part in the family performance, just like her parents taught her. She was clever, pretty and well-mannered, and since she was a child she had one job - to be the image of a perfect daughter of the perfect American family. Her dad's career depended on it, and Diana played her role flawlessly… until she snapped.

The “new Diana” is lippy, sassy and sexed-up. Her attitude alienated the few friends she had made in London, but she’s a bit beyond caring. Moving around so much has taken a heavy toll on her – and while she can be nice and charming if/when she tries, lately she just can’t see the point anymore. She has lost too many friends (and a couple of boyfriends) to her father’s career... but perhaps this chance of scenery will change that.

The inner self: Her new persona is not as fake as the previous one, but neither is it the full truth. Her sass conceals a great deal of insecurities – about her body (especially her height), about her accent, about being from nowhere and part of no community. Deep inside she’s very lonely, bad at dealing with that, and terrible at asking for help.

Desires and hopes: She's mostly focused on "her modeling career" now, but she longs to feel part of something, some group; she's also scared of getting invested in people only to lose them later… again.

Fears and dislikes: Spiders, rejection, “ending up like mum and dad”; classical music (mum insisted she studied violin), ballet (same), winter, British food.

Languages: French, Spanish, some German.

Sports: Tennis and horse riding (at her mother's insistence), volleyball (one of the few sports where being tall was an asset) and swimming (good for her back problems).

Weaknesses:
*Very vain, she finds it hard to resist flattery of any kind.

*Easily baited, just you tell her she can’t do X…

*Addictive personality, she has relying too much on drinking, partying and social media to drown her sorrows.

*She doesn't fully control her telepathy - sometimes she inadvertently "sends" thoughts that were meant to be private. That has led to some embarrassing situations.

History: Diana is the youngest daughter of the careerist American diplomat Richard van Meer and his trophy wife, former Miss Vermont Alyssa van Meer. Her siblings Liberty (27, fashion designer) and Richard Jr (24, studying at Cambridge) are just as obnoxiously WASP as she used to be.

Diana was born abroad and has been to America only a handful of times, as her father moved around to different countries, from Saudi Arabia to Russia to France; lately Spain and now Britain. For the last three years he has been the American ambassador to the UK, so Diana spent those years in London.

She used to be a compliant, easy-going teen; now she’s a difficult young adult. Repeatedly cut off from any friends she managed to make, she has grown rebellious and contrarian. That last move (from the Madrid embassy to London) was the last straw. She gave up on her studies, not for lack of aptitude, but to spite her father, and fell into a lifestyle of partying and not giving a damn. Even so, her family managed to leverage their elite contacts to get her into Cambridge. The quaint old university town felt like a prison to Diana, who made every effort to get kicked out of it on her first year.

That caused a massive row with her family, but Diana has other plans. She had started using social media to keep in touch with the many friends she had lost to her father's career, but lately her social media use had developed into more of a compulsion. Enjoying the attention and Likes it gets her, her only substitute for the friends she doesn't have in real life, she decided she was going to be an Instagram model instead of getting a degree. Naturally her family was horrified with the way she wanted to “waste her intellectual potential in a world of vain posturing".

The row ended with the ambassador enrolling his wayward daughter at Black Oak. It had the benefit of being a small uni in a discreet backwater, where she (hopefully) couldn't run as wild as in London... and (crucially) her antics wouldn't catch the attention of the British tabloids (and become an embarrassment that tarnished the ambassador's career). As payback, Diana chose Parapsychology – it was the least “scientific and respectable” degree she could find, calculated to piss off mum and dad. But perhaps she’s in for a little surprise…

Psychic ability: Telepathy, which first manifested when she was 17. Since it was the beginning of her rebel phase, her parents assumed she was just “lying for attention” when she claimed she could talk into people’s minds. For some reason it never worked for them, further convincing them it was just a fake. She stopped talking about her telepathy after the umpteenth visit to a psychologist, deciding it was better to pretend she had been lying all along and keep her power to herself.

Currently at the ball, wearing a vampire costume.