FULL NAME: Stella Ochoa-Castillo
GENDER & PRO-NOUNS: CisFale, she/her
DATE OF BIRTH: September 25th, 1988
PLACE OF BIRTH: Honolulu, Hawaii
OCCUPATION: Owner of La Galeria
Trigger Warnings: substance abuse, emotional abuse, crime
Stella was born on September 25th, 1988 in the Hawaii Kai neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawaii to Manolito and Helena Ochoa. The second of three children to come, Stella has an older brother and a younger sister, both of whom she loves more than anything in this world. Her older brother Diego, 36, and her younger sister Juni, 27, the gap in their ages hardly kept them from being a tight knit, loving family. Their parents, despite their busy jobs, included.
Stella’s mom, Helena, was a daytime actress in her prime, going on to dominate a couple of big movie roles before her career ultimately burned out when she made the transformation into house wife. Manny, her dad, kept a day job as a financial adviser with Navy background but moonlighted in laundering money with an organized crime group that operated within the chain of islands that Stella called home for her childhood years. Her father, a key player in both his official and unsavory businesses, knew that the affairs he involved himself in brought an element of danger into the lives of his family, but never expected he’d be snuffed out of his children’s lives so soon.
While her childhood years were filled with fun, sun, and all the privileges that being incredibly wealthy brought, tragedy struck when Stella was only eleven, both of her parents murdered in result of a mob hit that left her and her siblings with nothing. Despite the overflow of money their father had accumulated in his time running with the islands’ organized crime group, the investigation that followed the Ochoa parents’ deaths found evidence of embezzlement and money laundering on Manny’s part. With no other family on the island, the Ochoa siblings were shipped off to the mainland, where they were sent to spend the rest of their adolescent years with their paternal grandparents who, in turn, ended up hating the children more than they’d ever loathed their own son.
Stuck in a tiny, two bedroom cabin in Big Bear Lake, California with guardians who belittled everything they did, the Ochoa trio stuck together like glue, protecting each other from the emotional and mental abuse cast on them from the people meant to care for them. Already so far from the spoiled life they’d lived previously, the Ochoa children adjusted to their situation with some effort, the lot of them getting out as soon as they possibly could. Diego, after graduating from high school, made his way back to Hawaii. Stella, already starting down a self destructive path that included heavy drinking, drug use, and general partying, counted her blessings she made it into UCLA after graduating. Not willing to leave her baby sister behind with their terrible guardians, Stella helped Juni through her emancipation process, toted her younger sibling with her to Los Angeles, and found them a shared apartment on campus where Juni could live free of their grandparents reign until she finished high school and could enroll at UCLA as well.
It was in this on campus apartment that Stella met her husband-to-be, although they spent the first three years they lived together insisting they weren’t an item–despite the fact Stella spent nearly every night in Gabe’s bed. When she wasn’t waking up in a bathroom stall at one of her favorite gin joints, at least.
Her senior year of college, with her grades neglected due to her use of alcohol as a crutch and her friends and family unsure of what to do with or about her, a string of confusing occurrences (including sleeping with Gabe for the first time and a mysterious settlement from an old associate of her father’s) sent her on a drinking binge that found her in the hospital. Three days in a coma felt like nothing compared to the weeks of withdrawal and programs she was essentially forced into by her loved ones. Still, she persisted–working harder than she ever did in her life to ensure she’d be able to avoid relapsing and graduate on time.
Right out of UCLA, her fresh relationship brought her to San Francisco, following a job Gabe wasn’t able to turn down. They lived in the city for only two months before they were married. Five years forward, when Gabe’s tech start up sold in a substantial deal that led him immediately into another job in Alabama, Stella didn’t think twice before packing her things and making the journey down South. A year into living in Magnolia Springs and Stella decided to put some money into her interest in Photography and purchased a little Gallery in town to showcase her own, as well as local artists’ works.
Stella divvies her time up between work, Gabe, and the other obligations that come with being a business owner. With her sobriety still not quite to the ten year mark, every day is difficult, but Stella considers herself to be living her best life now. With no prospects at all when she was twenty three, her life feels like a fairytale now–and she’s honestly just waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under her again.
[ + ] Brilliant, Determined, Confident
[ - ] Aggressive, Reserved, Demanding
