❝ HOW DO I KNOW WHAT’S REAL WHEN I DON’T EVEN TRUST MYSELF ❞
STATS:
Name: Cassia Salas
Age: 31
Face Claim: Priscilla Quintana
Occupation: Paramedic
Neighborhood: Wrightsville Beach
Gender & Preferred Pronouns: Cis female & she/her
BIOGRAPHY:
trigger warnings: drug use, underage drinking, parental neglect
Every now and then the cosmos aligned just right and a soul was born into a name that proved fate to be something real. Cassia was born to Lara and Alejandro Salas, a couple who had married right out of high school and were going nowhere fast. The two couldn’t seem to figure out adult life and how to live efficiently; money was often squandered too quickly, often as soon as it hit their pockets or bank account so that they could enjoy young adulthood, forgetting they had a young child who needed proper attention and consistent care. Cas or Cassie as most called her, spent much of her time in the care of a neighbor while her parents worked and then burned through their paychecks. A latchkey kid was what she would soon become, finding she had personality traits all too similar to her parents — addictive like her father and hedonistic like her mother. Alejandro had a gambling habit, known locally as a bit of a card shark that would occasionally take a trip to large cities to hit up bigger games and bigger jackpots. Her mother, Lara, was into anything that made her feel good; whether that was dabbling in drugs and drink or getting in a fast car with a man that wasn’t her high school sweetheart turned husband, she was game for it.
It was two weeks before Cassia’s fourteenth birthday when her father never returned home from a weekend rounders trip up in New Jersey. Missing persons reports were filed and investigations eventually went cold after a month of not so hard looking around. Apparently Alejandro had a reputation in Jersey City and Atlantic City which caused the police to tell Cassia and her mother to expect the worst — he was no doubt gone and not meant to be found. Of course the young teen was devastated by the disappearance and permanent loss, though perhaps not so much as she could have been given the lack of depth to her connection with her parents. They had always been somewhat distant and absent, loving but too invested in themselves rather than creating a wholesome family like much of her friends and classmates at school had. Instead of grieving heavily, Cassia opted for fantasy, imagining that her dad was some explorer or an archaeologist working on a dig in some foreign and far away land. She did it because even then Cassia had the thoughts that there had to be more to life than this.
Coping well wasn’t something her mother did when it came to the loss of Alejandro. It surprised Cassia, she had believed they pretty much lived separate and distant lives. Given that she was the only parent now to put food on the table and provide for Cassia, Lara stepped up and cleaned up her act a bit. Nothing was given up in entirety, things simply slowed and didn’t happen as often. The absenteeism of boundaries and structure in her life set Cassia on a crash course for destruction and ruin for her own life, as it seemed every time life led to a fork in the road she always took the path less traveled — always made the wrong choice and went the wrong direction. It seemed she was determined to learn things the hard way, through mistakes and major fuckups. She wasn’t yet fifteen when she gave into experimenting with drugs, and like her mother — anything that got her heart racing. But Cassia always seemed to get caught or into more than she could handle.
After getting caught drag racing cars, it was determined by the state that she wouldn’t be able to drive a car legally until she was eighteen. Despite it being an ‘oh shit’ moment and quite the wrench in her youth, the minor brush with the law couldn’t set her straight. No, she continued to make bad decisions. At seventeen, Cas was expelled from high school for drug possession and if her own vices weren’t bad enough, the young brunette’s attractiveness also turned out to be a problem. She knew how to use her pretty green eyes, sun kissed skin, and sweet talk coming from glistening rosy lips to get just about anything she wanted from someone. Usually it was for a fix or a drink, older men always being the best targets — no matter her goals and dreams in life, Cassia just couldn’t seem to get it right. Holding down a job was laughable, giving up on her own hedonistic indulgences generally always turned out to be too big of a sacrifice, so Cassia went on bouncing through life one or more problems at a time.
The town just seemed to get smaller and smaller, too many people knew her and not in a way that would have Cassia holding her head high when sober. Her mother long gave up on her so the official freedom of eighteen sent the girl to the beach, finding Wilmington to be cozy and a fresh start. She managed to get her GED and enrolled in college, though again, a normal social structure and schedule was too hard to maintain and it took longer than the average for Cassia to earn an associate’s of arts in art — one of her dreams being a painter. It was during her time in college that the Salas began to pull out of society’s labeled boxes. College was also a time where dating a woman opened up to her and just another avenue of life she walked down the path of. Men and women were fun to entertain on the art scene. For some time, she was hardly around, traveling with other artists led her to adventures she wouldn’t soon forget. Such as the trip in New Orleans where she got mugged, or the sex party she somehow ended up at while in Los Angeles — the paths were never clear how she got from one place to the next but it sure as hell wasn’t the rational part of her brain that made the decisions.
Eventually when back in Wilmington, her addictions got her in trouble once again and with the threat of jail time looming over her head, Cassia yet again made a one sided pact with God that if he helped her out of the mess she would go clean and straight. The lesson would have been to take the consequences, sell out her dealer and do a little time then work to live life responsibly. She was beginning to edge near thirty and still hadn’t really begun living properly, something that had festered under the surface and nagged at her in the back of her mind. The DEA had another plan for her, one she stupidly took, and that was no jail time if she worked as an informant. What she didn’t expect was that she would find such a kindred spirit and someone she felt the need to help and take care of but also a man she would fall crazily in love with. Partly, she would tell herself that it was the drugs and the partying she did with him but Cassia had gotten very good at lying to herself. Eventually being between a rock and a hard place, she cracked, the pressure from the DEA and the love she had for the dealer sent her running away. She fed the DEA some fairly useless information and made up the rest, keeping all of the dealer’s secrets before leaving town for a couple of months.
It was one thing to break her own heart over and over again in life, it was another to have someone else’s heart in your hands and to take advantage and hurt someone you loved. Her new vow was to get her shit together, to finally live life as a real adult in the world should. When she came back home, Cassia put herself back into college while working as a waitress to barely make ends meet. She had all the credits needed already to meet the educational requirements as a paramedic, she needed course specific classes and training. When it came to it, Cassia actually surprised herself that she was good at it. She filled out her degree and earned an associates in paramedicine. For someone always on the go and needing such a constant state of stimulus, working in emergency and trauma care was a good fit, but it also was quite a bump in income going from waitressing to EMT and paramedic. With the means to do so she was able to move from her roommate situation downtown to her own place in Wrightsville Beach. Still without a clue what life is all about or how to navigate it, Cassia at least and finally had something going right and well for herself.
