Leila Sharpe is eighteen and is a freshman who is attending Los Angeles University. She looks just like Arden Cho and is taken.
“You spend half of your life trying to fall behind You’re using your headphones to drown out your mind It was so easy and the words so sweet You can’t remember, you try to move your feet”
Story:
Leila was born Yoo-Jin Son, the biological daughter of a nineteen year old who wasn’t in a place in her life that she could properly raise a child. She was quickly formerly adopted by the Sharpes, an arrangement that had been worked out in the months leading up to her birth, and she left the hospital with the name Leila Yoo-Jin Sharpe. Her father left before she was old enough to remember him, but her mother always insisted that it was for the best. She lived happily with her mom and soon an older brother, who was adopted under different circumstances than she had been, in Oakland just outside of San Francisco.
One day, when Leila was eight, her brother insisted on stopping by the comic book shop on their way home from school. Not wanting to be late to her acting lessons, she decided to walk home by herself. She didn’t think much of the man waiting outside her apartment building until he asked if she was Leila, and said that her mom was held up at work and asked him to take Leila to her lesson. He clearly knew intimate details he couldn’t have known unless he had actually talked to her mom, Leila figured, so she got in his car. He was taking a route her mom didn’t usually take, a longer route. She told him she was going to be late to her lesson. The rest after that was a chaotic blur, as she came to understand that going to acting class was the least of her worries, because she was being taken far away from Oakland and everyone she knew. Her father was kidnapping her.
The next three months should have been horrible, but it was kind of fun. She got to travel to several different states and lived in a cute little motor home. Sure, she couldn’t go out in public and on the rare chance she did see someone other than her father he forced her to go by a different name, but she looked at every opportunity to go out as a chance to play a character and work on her improv skills. Besides, at least when she was with her dad she didn’t have to go to school. He wasn’t the abusive jerk her mom had always claimed he was. Her dad was insanely nice, and if anything her mom was the one who was awful for turning her against him.
They were almost out of money. Living while trying not to be found by the police, her dad couldn’t really hold down a job. Desperate for cash, he asked Leila if he could use the money her mom had set aside for her college fund so far and she quickly agreed. It was a risky move, and one that got them caught. Before she knew what was happening, Leila was being reunited with her mother at a police station. But she didn’t want to go back to Oakland. She missed her friends, and she had tried and failed to contact her brother several times, but her dad had fed her a ton of lies about her mother during the forced separation from her family. Leila’s mother tried everything to rebuild their bond, including involving specialists, but the young girl wasn’t interested in letting anyone help. Not even her brother could convince her to let her mom back in. Things got even worse when her mom decided to move the entire family to Connecticut and, soon after getting there, fell in love with another woman. Leila didn’t care that her mom was gay or bi or whatever, just that she liked someone after everything that had happened with Leila’s dad, and she didn’t understand why that upset her when she didn’t consider what had happened kidnapping.
While shutting her mom and now her mom’s girlfriend out, Leila wasn’t doing much better with other people. It wasn’t that she treated them badly, but she didn’t know how to handle them. Subconsciously, she knew what her dad had done was bad. She still had nightmares about the way she had been taken and being trapped in the RV. And although her dad wasn’t a stranger, not technically, he had felt like that when he had taken her. But it was worse, because she should have trusted him. Silently, she began struggling with that almost as soon as she came home. But instead of dealing with it, she fell back on her safety net. Her brother wasn’t coping well with what had happened to his family either, and had grown insanely protective of his sister. So once she was reunited with her brother and her mom, she stuck to her brother’s side like glue. He made her feel safe and he felt much more comfortable knowing she was around. Their unhealthy way of dealing with the trauma worked, in their minds, and so they never saw a reason to change things. All their mom saw was that they were really close.
With Leila wanting to be an actress and her brother loving all things animation, they decided they would go to college in the same city. He was a year older than her and New York City was about an hour commute from where they lived, which meant he was only a short train ride away if she ever needed him during her senior year of high school. Asher got accepted into a great program, and Leila had a group of friends in the drama club and was doing a good job handling social situations without him. When she got pulled out of class and sat down in the principal’s office with her drama instructor, she was worried she had done something wrong. She never expected to be told her brother had been killed in a hit and run accident.
Asher was the one thing still connecting Leila to her family and so she has been genuinely trying with her mom since he died. They’re not exactly close, but Leila has been helping out around the house and trying to be there while she goes through her grief. It was awhile before Leila herself was ready to go back to school. But even despite her developing relationship with her mom, she can’t bring herself to stay in New York for college. Once Leila got into the swing of things, she applied to schools in California and was accepted to Los Angeles University. After graduation, she said her goodbyes and returned to the state she had spent more than half her life in. For the first time in her life, she is on her own and she can’t help but compare it to the three weeks she spent living in the RV. She can’t help but be both terrified and excited about what her college years have in store.
Connection to Clara:
Leila saw Clara at a bus stop just off campus - she was the last one to see the seventeen year old the night she disappeared.
Due to her own past with kidnapping, this case has brought up a lot of different feelings for her.
Personality:
[✔] Energetic, focused, creative
[✖] Shy, awkward, scared