Chloe Cornett was born to businessman Charles, and his wife Laura in the late fall of 1983. An older brother preceded her, and a younger sister followed a few years later. As the middle child, Chloe was sort of "left out". Not that she wanted for anything, but her brother Bobby as the oldest child did everything first, and her sister Mellie was the baby. Thus, she was pretty much left to her own devices.
At the age of five, she began to pick up on unheard things. For instance, while at the shopping mall with her mother, she heard one of the cashiers thinking of taking money from the till. Upon telling her mother this, she got an odd look and ignored for making up stories. It only got worse from there. By the time she was six, she could hear whatever her brother and sister were up to. She knew before it happened, that Mellie was going to jump into the river near their house to play, and was able to avoid an unfortunate event.
Once school began, things got a bit more difficult. Several times she was accused of cheating on tests, because she would receive perfect marks for them. Not her fault she could hear the answers clear as day in her mind. She would be forced to retake the tests, and upon getting perfect scores again the teachers would concede that she was just a bright young woman.
The troubles started around the age of thirteen. The "voices" that she had heard for the last eight years or so came to an overwhelming breaking point. It was suddenly like there were more and more of them, and she just couldn't turn them off. Her thoughts were no longer her own, neither were her emotions. When her sister fell off her bike and scraped her knee, it was Chloe who cried out first as she didn't have to get over the shock of the injury before knowing it hurt. When her parents would argue, she could hear the underlying causes. She could hear the neighbors thinking about what to get their children for Christmas, the mailman's dirty thoughts, her best friend's plans for using their friendship to get to her brother.
It came to the point that just before her fourteenth birthday, Chloe was institutionalized at the Green Oaks Psychiatric Hospital, since all she could do was sit in a corner and rock back and forth with her hands over her ears.
It took a year for her to teach herself how to clear the voices out of her mind. Through a heavy regimen of medication, and a lot of concentration, she could keep it in check. When she was allowed to go home, it was with the promise that she keep the medication up and return at a minimum of once a month for followup psychiatric examinations.
During high school, she kept to herself. It was much easier that way, to keep the voices out. To keep them from putting her back in that place. She would sit at the very back of the classrooms, avoid having a lab partner in her science classes, and spend the majority of her free time in the library as it was the one place most other students avoided. When she graduated, she told her parents she had no intentions of going to college, and instead took a job at the Dallas Public Library.
It has been four years since she left high school. Chloe has made her way up to Librarian that the DPL now, and while it doesn't have the greatest pay, it's a job where she's not got so many heads to contend with. The medicine still seems to be working to keep her brain in check, and she seems happy — if not a little dull sometimes.
