History

Wallflower

Rachel was born on January 14, 1999. Her parents, Pamela and Jason, were young up-and-comers from successful Lakewood families. Pamela was the scion of the local banking dynasty, and Jason the son of a high profile attorney. By the time Rachel came along, Pamela had stepped away from the finance world, the position of general manager at Lakewood Community Bank going to Jason, while Pamela entered the more luxurious and, in some ways more cutthroat art world as an auctioneer.

Coming from such a successful background and growing up in such gilded surroundings, there were a lot of expectations heaped on Rachel from an early age…expectations she was all too aware of. As a girl, she was plain and chubby, which didn’t do her any favors on the schoolyard. Making matters worse, Rachel was nonconfrontational by nature: shy and reluctant to defend herself. It was a recipe for childhood hell.

Without outlets in the real world, Rachel found solace in constructed ones. She had a vast imagination and cultivated a love for storytelling, particularly through movies. By the time she started high school, she’d become quite the film buff and had even begun making her own movies using stop-motion animation and LEGO minifigures.

Blood and Water

Rachel’s artistic outlets weren’t a total antidote, however, and the transition to high school was hard on her. She attended her mother’s alma mater, St. Mary’s Academy for Young Women: an all-girls Catholic school on Lakewood’s waterfront. Rachel’s classmates were far from pious vestal virgins, and the cruelty that had dogged her since childhood only worsened.

Her sense of isolation deepened until, in February 2015, Rachel attempted to take her own life, locking herself in the bathroom and slitting her wrists. Her father found her before she could bleed out, saving her life. In the wake of her suicide attempt, Rachel was sent to a psychiatrist and put on antidepressants.

Audrey

Rachel attempted to get back on her feet after her brush with death, but the adjustment was difficult. In the months following her discharge from the hospital, she found that the only thing that brought her any joy was filmmaking. She began work on another stop-motion project, a zombie movie, intended to be a feature film.

Emboldened by her progress, Rachel tentatively shared some of her work on a message board for amateur filmmakers. One of her paltry comments was from Audrey Jensen, who remarked that Rachel mustn’t get out much.¹ Rachel found the comment more amusing than insulting and the two started talking, Rachel learning that Audrey lived in Lakewood too. That, indeed, she was the daughter of the local pastor, and attended the local “public option”, George Washington High School.

The girls got closer over the summer, bonding over their shared love of film, their conservative upbringings…and their sexualities. For Rachel, who’d never met another gay person, much less one her own age, Audrey was a revelation, a sort of confirmation that she wasn’t crazy.

Before long, Audrey and Rachel began dating, though they kept their relationship secret, wary of backlash from their families. As time went on, though, they became more emboldened…or at least, Audrey did, and Rachel was happy enough to follow.

On the afternoon of October 17, Audrey picked Rachel up in her car and took her to the Wren Lake Overlook where they kissed, unaware that they weren’t alone.

Tribulations of a Closeted Catholic Schoolgirl

The next evening, a candid video of Audrey and Rachel’s kiss was uploaded to YouTube and went locally viral, effectively forcing Audrey and Rachel out of the closet and leading to a slew of cruel homophobia from commentors. Rachel was mortified and dismayed, more so by the immediate reactions of her parents, who were shocked both at the humiliation and the revelation of Rachel’s sexuality.

Holed up in her room late at night, stuck between hearing her parents argue and scrolling through the video’s comments section, Rachel attempted to get in touch with Audrey, finally hearing back from her a little before midnight. Audrey had crashed a house party at Brooke Maddox’s lakefront mansion, intent on making an example of the people responsible for uploading the video, whose identities she’d immediately ascertained: GW High’s “in-crowd”, including Audrey’s longtime tormentor Nina Patterson and Audrey’s one-time closest friend Emma Duval.

Audrey was adamant that Nina had put up the video solely to target Audrey, and she expressed her regret Rachel was caught up in it now. She insisted that the time would come when they all got what they deserved.²

Just desserts were not in immediate evidence, however. The next day saw Rachel navigate a sea of cruel harassment from her peers. Her parents (read: her mother), looking for someone to blame, sought and secured a sit-down with the principal, Sr. Alice-Marie, to determine what had happened, what was to be done, and who would face consequences.

Needless to say, Rachel was not thrilled with this arrangement, but she could brook no protest. After school, she found herself sandwiched between her parents in the principal’s office as Alice-Marie pledged to work together with the administration of GW High to find the person responsible for Rachel’s humiliation.³

Isolated and miserable after this display, Rachel sought commiseration from Audrey, texting her later that evening, though she never replied.⁴

Appearances

Rachel was a short young woman. Bullied for residual “baby fat” since she was a child, she was ultimately not over-chubby. She had a fair complexion, marred with acne scars that brought her no end of grief from her cruel peers. Her eyes were brown. She had straight hair that could pass for light brown or dark blonde.

Wardrobe

At school, Rachel wore the St. Mary’s uniform: a blue and white checked skirt and a jumper.⁵

Personality

Rachel was mousy and introverted. Wary of confrontation, she was more comfortable letting peoples’ cruelty bounce off her than sticking up herself, believing things would go easier that way. While this might come off to some as cowardly, she had a remarkable toughness she was hardly aware of herself.

Skills

Filmmaker: Rachel was an amateur filmmaker, and was particularly proficient in the painstaking subgenre of stop-motion animation.⁶

Development

Rachel was the last canon Scream the TV Series character to be claimed in the 2015 Season 1 AU. She was portrayed by ThePlotMurderer, the latest person to join the forum’s, just before the end of the game’s first “episode”. Rachel’s long absence prior to this altered aspects of the game’s story, with the kissing video that was the TV series’ inciting incident being downplayed to the point it was unclear if it had even happened, or if Audrey had a girlfriend at all.

Once Rachel was claimed, groundwork was laid for a love triangle between Audrey, Rachel, and OC Amanda Steele, who had been fashioned as a potential love interest for Audrey. Rachel and Amanda’s chance meeting near the end of “Episode 2” was one of the last scenes written before the game went defunct.

Rachel’s death in the second episode of the TV series was accepted as canon by all subsequent forums. Rachel was adapted into the first volume of The Story so Far in 2019, which saw her outlive her canon counterpart by the equivalent of six episodes/chapters, the most of any Season 1 victim.

When the original Story so Far Appendix was compiled in 2020/21, Rachel’s birthdate was given as January 14th, 2000, with the assumption she was about a year younger than Audrey and a freshman at the time of her death. This detail was never presented anywhere in the text and, by the time of The Story‘s redux in 2025, she was aged up a year to be more in line with Audrey and the other characters.

Other Interpretations

Scream the TV Series

Rachel’s relationship to the broader canvas in the TV series is undefined but present. While she is presented as a complete stranger to the GW High kids in the Season 1 AU and the SRU more broadly, in the pilot episode of the series, Noah refers to Rachel as the “Catholic school film geek”, indicating he, at least, was already aware of her and she may have been part of his (admittedly pretty anemic) friend group with Audrey.

Trivia

Rachel’s phone lock screen was a picture of her and Audrey at the Wren Lake Overlook, taken a few weeks before the kissing video was filmed.⁷

Rachel was a film buff. Her favorite genre was horror films, particularly the zombie films of George Romero, which inspired her stop-motion film. She also was fond of the Italian giallo subgenre. Besides Romero, her favorite filmmakers includes Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini.⁸

Rachel shares her faceclaim, Sosie Bacon, with dreamy songwriter Joanie Higgs in Big Trouble in Little Lakewood: 1969.

Gallery

1. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 6 ↩︎
2. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 10 ↩︎
3. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 27 ↩︎
4. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 30 ↩︎
5. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 27 ↩︎
6. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 6 ↩︎
7. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 10 ↩︎
8. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 24 ↩︎