Awaiting Tomorrow

Diana is a middle-aged university literature professor. She is happily married to Matthew, whom she has a 14-year-old child, Mariette, with. While a loving and attentive mother, Diana tends to be a bit strict and puts pressure on Mariette in order to draw out her best. She comes from a big family, almost all of which (with the exception of her brother) went into academia.

Matthew is a middle-aged university professor of music. He is happily married to Diana, whom he has a 14-year-old child, Marriette, with. He is often more lax than Diana in his approach to Mariette, and serves as a go-between when the two of them when they get into an argument. He loves playing group and board games, and enjoys an occasional dad joke (probably a bit too much). He was a pianist prodigy as a child, and was the national US champion at one point, which led to him studying at Julliard.

At 14 years old, though often fighting outbursts of teenage angst, Mariette is kind-hearted and ambitious. She puts a lot of pressure on herself to succeed both at school and in music, which led to her being briefly hospitalized a year before our story takes place. Her father’s daughter, Mariette loves silly jokes and memes despite pretending not to. Mariette wants to attend Juilliard and make her parents proud, but struggles with coming to terms that she does not want to compete anymore.

Tara is a 22-year-old theater student with only one exam left to graduate. From the outside, she seems to be unreasonably anxious about facing the professor, Lawson. Tara is quick to anger, but equally quick to calm down. When she isn’t studying, Tara plays the guitar, and dreams of starring in a Broadway show. Her best friend, Luca, often visits her apartment and tries to cheer her up (with varying degrees of success).

Luca is a 22-year-old, leather jacket-wearing, tattoo-having young man. He dropped out of film school after completing his first year, having taken professor Lawson’s class in the first semester (before Tara did). He is insecure over not having a well-paying job and trying to enter a female-dominated field as a way to kickstart his career. Despite having dropped out, he has a flair for the theatrics. He adores Tara and is willing to go to extreme distances to make her laugh.

Slavoljub is a Balkan immigrant in his late 30s that came to The States in his youth. Slav is now a pediatrician specializing in children’s heart problems. He is the closest to his older sister, Kate, whose children he is helping raise. He is well-versed in English, but sometimes uses outdated phrases mixed with modern slang due to having learned from fantasy books as well as interactions with others. As our story begins, he is packing to move to Chicago to work on a new research project.

An 86-year-old grandpa, Ebaneezer is a devout Republican who likes to critique everyone even slightly different from him. Before moving to Austin from rural Texas, he lost his wife and son to the Marfan Syndrome (a hereditary disease that is manageable today, but used to pose a threat in extreme cases), and he raised her nephew that eventually moved away to Spain. He loves children, and tones his bitterness down for them.