Name: Stephen Lacas
Age: 19
City: Madison, Wisconsin
Occupation: Works in college dining services as a cashier during the week, and works off campus during the weekends at a local CD/record store
Trauma trigger: car accident
Languages: English, was studying Irish Gaelic
Skills: athletic [plays baseball in college], hand-eye coordination and fast reflexes [skateboards], typically physically resilient in way of injury, well able to hide his emotional state of being, expansive memory for “useless” facts, street smart, verbally persuasive, sociable and good with people
Weaknesses: doesn’t prioritize self-care, smokes cigarettes, heavy drinker, memory deficits [from the crash and from the booze] and has trouble learning new things, severe depression, anxiety and panic attacks, self harm, migraines, and flaky attention span
“Short” bio: Stephen started out as a curious child, but his curiosity only ever led to injury due to the fact that he’s reasonably clumsy. Throughout most of his childhood he was under the keen watch of his parents and older brother. They were always nervous about sending him to public school because he was never quite “book smart”, but he could walk himself home from school without incident. Between his only somewhat acceptable grades, spotty attention, and constant need for bandaids it was a miracle that he even made it to high school. Up to this point in his life, he’d never exactly thought highly of himself, and he took the immense lack of motivation toward his studies as typical teenage laziness. That is, until his parents divorced. They’d been fighting for a while, but he never figured it’d get so bad until one day his mother left, took the dog and his older brother with them. As part of the settlement, his father got to keep the apartment and the youngest child so long as she could take the pets, the eldest, and most of the furnishings. It was an uneven deal.
Stephen’s dad had always suspected that something was off, but he’d never been brave enough to admit that he got stuck with the defective child. Three therapists and a few doctor’s visits later it became apparent that there was plenty that needed to be taken care of. It was hell living with anxiety on top of the depression because he panicked about everything but never once had the energy to do anything about it. The therapy sessions revealed that he’d been this way for years under the radar, and it never really showed its ugly head until the denial faded and he actually started to open up. Piles of antidepressants only ever made him feel numb so he stopped taking them on a whim, and curbed the disorders with cigarettes, even though he was under age, and razor blades.
By the time he was shipped off to college, his father was convinced that he was “better”, but he never knew the truth. Freshman year was a mash of skipped classes, grade alert warnings in the email he never checked, far too much moonshine, too much money spent on cigarettes and far too little hours to cover much of the damage, and the constant paranoia that one day his dad would figure everything out seeing as his mom never really talked to him anymore and his brother went across the country for his studies. On his way home from a party, more than a little buzzed, he was hit by a drunk driver. If it weren’t for the fact that the driver was drunk, speeding, and bolting through a crosswalk, it was likely that Stephen would have been charged for an underage drinking ticket and he would have to pay for the damage to the car. However, several broken bones and a severe concussion left him very much different than he was before.
