Jasper Rourke

[Brackie]

Name: Jasper William Rourke
Gender: Male
Age: Eighteen [18]
Grade: Senior [12th]
School: Aurora High School
Hobbies and Interests: Football, Wrestling, Gym, Partying, Industrial Arts Club, Gay-Straight Alliance

Appearance: If one was to ask around the bullied crowd at Aurora High, the one word that people would associate with Jasper is "scary" – he stands at 6'3", 210lb, a lot of this weight being muscle in his upper body, although he still has considerable strength and build in his lower body as well. His face is what some would call sullen, with a strong jawline and cheekbones underlying a larger than average nose, a pair of hazel eyes and thicker-than-average eyebrows. His hair is dark brown in colour and falls to the back of his neck in length. His lips are somewhat thin, and not many people have ever seen them smiling - it's a rare occasion when he does smile outside his family or preferred group of friends.

Jasper does not have any tattoos, lasting scars or piercings anywhere on his body – there's the occasional bruise from football or wrestling, which he usually covers up with an extra piece of clothing if it's on any of his limbs or something visible on his normal set of clothing. Speaking of which, his usual clothing attire consists of plain sleeveless tops of any colour with denims and whatever running shoes he fancies.

Biography: Jasper was born an only child to Sienna and Jordan Rourke in Seattle, Washington in the maternity ward of Northwest Hospital on September 15th, 1993. Sienna was a Survival Expert who worked for the United States Army for ten years until retiring from that line of work two years before Jasper's birth. When he arrived, she become a stay-at-home mother, while Jordan was and is to this day a Bank Manager for the Seattle Bank. An avid sports fan and previous linebacker for his high school football team, Jordan raised his son on an upbringing of enthusiasm for NFL, which in turn helped him become a very active child, since he was always outside and tossing the football with his dad or playing with similarly-minded neighborhood kids.

However, this had an unintended drawback that would not reveal itself until he started Elementary School. Thanks to his exposure to football at an early age, he was a competitive child that would often get into fights at school and end up in the principal's office a lot more than his fellow students. After his father signed him up for Pee Wee football when he was seven, however, he started channeling his competitive nature into the sport rather than his school life. He would still occasionally get into scuffles or fights with older students, but far less than before he played football.

Over the next few years, due to a combination of well-known athletic prowess and making friends with the right people, he would worm his way into the popular crowd at school. While he was not a very book-smart kid, he was definitely people smart, thanks to developing great social skills at an early age with the kids in his neighbourhood. The physical fighting would gradually ease down, since he quickly found out nobody likes a guy who beats up on everyone who looks at him wrong, but he soon shifted his focus and formed it into a hobby – picking on the kids who weren't quite as popular as he made himself, or those with hobbies one would consider "nerdy" or "geeky", since by his logic they weren't popular or well-liked so nobody would care, plus a few of them just plain annoyed him with their habits.

As he progressed further into school life, he eventually got onto his middle-school football team and dropped out of Pee Wee, since he felt he had outgrown it and would do better competing amongst his peers. He found the best position on the field for him was the fullback, since it involved a lot of blocking, which meant a lot of tackling the other players. It was around this time he picked up a liking for wrestling – not "fake" professional wrestling as he occasionally saw on TV. It was not as strong as his passion for football, but he liked being part of a sports team, so he joined the school team and remained a member throughout his school life.

As Jasper got older, the demands of the sports and school got tougher, and he was required to put on a lot of muscle if he wanted to keep up with the best of them in the high school football and wrestling teams. He was a big kid in both height and weight, especially so when he first joined up, and as such it wasn't a problem at first, but soon he found himself adopting a gym routine to put on the muscle. Ever since he turned fourteen, it has been a difficult and arduous process, but he managed to put on a lot of muscle to keep up with some of the guys in the grades above him. He was not the biggest guy on the team, far from it, but he could at least keep up with the seniors while he was in eleventh grade thanks to the years of effort.

While Jasper was by no means an angel of mercy in his younger years, as he got older and the circle of friends grew more mature he became an abrasive person to hang around with. Not many people outside of his friend circle liked him; he had a nice dry sense of humour around his close friends, but if he thought you were beneath him and he treated you as such you only knew him as a jerk. Not only that, his abrasive nature only magnified his competitive nature – Jasper hates being shown up or outdone at anything he is good at. His ego is usually fully inflated, and because of this, he will not let anyone tell him he's not the best. He's well and truly a team player despite this, he'll always look out for whatever team he's a part of, but sometimes his inflated opinion of himself gets to his head.

Despite such an outward and abrasive nature, he's almost never been in trouble with his parents. Sienna quietly disapproved of the way he bullied some of the students at school, but Jordan had no problem with his son being part of the high school process in such a manner. Jordan himself was bullied as a child, and saw it as something that helped toughen him up later in life, so he had no objection to his son's practices. Jasper was glad he did not have parental disapproval in this instance, since his parents mean the world to him. He's highly respectful of the people who brought him up, since they're among the only people in the world who love him for who he is, and as such he's fairly close with his father.

Around the start of freshman year, he was finally invited to his first high school party, and it was an experience he never forgot. One of the richer kids' parents were out of town for the week, so hundreds of teens attended a Friday Night Party at one of the largest houses Jasper had ever seen. Over the course of the night and early morning, Jasper got drunk for the first time from several drinking games, stoned from experimenting with marijuana for the first time in one of the downstairs bathrooms, and lost his virginity to a willing, able, and easily impressed sophomore girl who he never met again. It was quite possibly one of the best nights of Jasper's life, and ever since he has subconsciously tried to replicate that night by attending every party he could possibly attend within reason – if he had schoolwork overdue, or had to skip football or wrestling practice to be there, he wasn't going. This was both a combination of common sense and a strict set of rules Jordan had put in place the moment Jasper turned fifteen.

However, during this very same year of school, something started happening that he could not explain or particularly understand. Feelings had started to come up inside of him, sexual feelings for people that didn't feel right or sit well with him. Ever since he lost his virginity at the party in freshman year he had started dating more girls in his grade that were attracted to footballers such as himself. But he soon came to realize that the feelings he was feeling for these girls weren't the same kinds he'd heard from his father when he talked about how he met Sienna, or the same ones his friends would describe when talking about conquests or romances with other girls. In fact, by the time he was 16 he came to realize that he had no sexual feelings for the girls he'd dated. On the contrary, these sexual feelings of attraction and such were almost the same that he felt around guys, and even though it took a while he slowly came to the grips that he was in fact not attracted to girls at all, but rather guys.

This personal revelation sent Jasper into an emotional tailspin. He'd always been able to recognize when a guy was attractive, but he didn't realize this was due to his attraction to them. He began to question every decision he'd made in his life – did he only like football because it involved being around guys? Same with wrestling? Did his father know? Had he only wanted Jasper to be a footballer in the hopes that he would grow out of it? He even began to question whether the girl he lost his virginity to was actually a girl, since he was drunk and stoned and he could barely remember what she looked like, only that it happened. He sank into a funk, where he lost almost all of his enthusiasm for everything he was into at that time. People, especially his friends and parents, were concerned that something was wrong, but he would always tell them he was fine. In actuality, Jasper couldn't wrap his head around the fact that most of his future plans in life – meet the woman of his dreams, get married, have children, raise a family – were more than likely never going to happen. Even in Seattle, one of the most liberal cities in the United States, he doubted his chances of achieving his dream.

The worst part of all this was that he had no-one to share it with, no-one to help him through. He couldn't bear to tell his father, not many of his friends that he would tell intricate personal stuff to would be particularly enthusiastic about it, and for a while he was under the personal belief he could never show his face at wrestling or football again. But all he could do was deal with it on his own.

And that's what he did – he shouldered the personal burden and moved on with his life. For the next few years, he stayed on his sporting teams, he kept steady in his classes, and he kept on dating girls in his grade and the grade below his, and everything was just the same as it had ever been. He even took up shop class and the industrial arts, simply to have something to fall back on if the future he planned with football in it didn't pan out. Everything was just the same as it always had been in the years before, but tougher, more difficult, and with more responsibility on his shoulders, considering he was soon to be a senior. However, one more devastating event was to come.

In the last few weeks of his Junior year, a girl he regularly picked on decided to try and get even with him. She stole his mobile phone, and instead of finding something incriminating or embarrassing, she found his phone's internet usage history. Jasper's household was a one-computer household, since he hadn't particularly cared for getting his own, so he was forced to use his mobile phone for looking up the things a teenage boy looks up when he has alone time and internet. Seeing an opportunity she couldn't resist, since she was a very vindictive person, she posted the contents of his mobile history online for everyone he knew to see. It wasn't the most conclusive proof, simply a video on Youtube under an anonymous account with no evidence as to who the perpetrator was, showing that it was Jasper Rourke's phone and that gay pornography had been viewed on that phone, but it was all that was needed for the rumours to start. The video was quickly flagged and removed from the website once it became clear what the content and intent of the video was, but by then the word had already spread (being the age of social networking, word always spread quickly at high school). That news being that Jasper Rourke, fullback for the Aurora high school football team, member of the Aurora school wrestling team, and bully to most of the unpopular students, liked guys.

It was the worst possible way the news could have been broken, and the next day of school was one of the most humiliating of his life. Everyone knew now, several of his so-called friends abandoned him that day, and even worse, his parents found out not from him but from hearing a family friend talk about it at the grocery store with the parent of another student at Aurora. Jasper was close to having a nervous breakdown, and the only way he could deal with the news being broken was to essentially run away from home. The moment that first day of school out of the closet was over, he drove straight home, ignored everything his mother asked him, packed a small bag of clothing and drove out of Seattle for the week. He left his mother a message saying he needed some time alone.

He stayed with his Aunt Bianca, Sienna's sister and the only family member he could stand outside of his parents for the time being, who lived in the Olympic Mountains with her boyfriend Chad and two children Teagan and Esme. It was there he took the time away from everyone to rethink his life. He called his parents to tell them what he was doing, and they would talk at the end of the week just so they would not be worried. Jasper held Bianca in high regard because she was open-minded - Teagan, her fourteen-year-old daughter had recently come out to her as lesbian, so she knew what he was going through to an extent. She took the time to help him go through what was wrong with his life so far. He found out most of his so-called friends that wouldn't even give him the time of day once the secret was out weren't really friends at all, and his parents had reacted way better than he had imagined. They were worried for him rather than angry at him for the secret. Most importantly of all, she helped him realize that there was really nothing different about him before he was outed - he was still the same guy, same interests, same sports, same attitude, same everything. Nothing needed to change unless he wanted it to.

Once he came back, rather than use what had just happened as an excuse for his actions, he accepted the reality of how he had essentially run out on his classes, his teammates and his responsibility for that week, and let his parents ground him for the next few weeks. He had a talk with his mother and father during this time about his sexuality, and although his father seemed to take it badly while he was away from home (according to Sienna at least), he was in no way ashamed or embarrassed with his son, since they were flesh and blood. They spoke to the school principal and several of his teachers about excusing his absence from class, although his coach was not especially pleased at his disappearance. Jasper knew the same could be said for some of his friends, but their disapproval didn't matter much to him  - at times during the summer vacation he wanted to go out and party wherever the party was, maybe even see about apologizing to his team and seeing who out of them were not the nicest or the most understanding of people who would drop any pretense of a friendship, but that could wait until after the break. He only spoke to his friends using Facebook for the majority of summer vacation.

People who expected a revolutionary change in Jasper by the time he came back for his senior year were sorely mistaken. He had barely changed, unfortunately for them – he was still a jerk to people who weren't his friends, he still picked on nerds, geeks and strange kids who just needed to be bullied in his eyes, and he was still a footballer and wrestler and intended to stay that way until he graduated. There were a few little changes, however – he occasionally attended meetings of the Aurora Gay-Straight Alliance, since he was well aware of the volume of times he had called little kids in lower grades a "faggot" or some nastier variation thereof, and felt the tiniest twinge of guilt about that aspect. He was not really an outspoken member who had many ideas about the Seattle gay community or even any real opinions on anything they talked about; he just paid lip service because he felt like it sometimes.

Jasper remains friends with usually anyone in the popular or semi-popular crowd who can stand his abrasive personality. He has softened up enough over the years to at least try to speak to someone he considers beneath him, but it is not a regular occurrence. His grades are the bare minimum he needs to stay on the sports team, since he does not really care about getting good grades or being outstanding in subjects he's not particularly interested in. The only subject he wants to excel in is Industrial Arts, where he knows he can do better than the rest of the students in said class. He still enjoys a good party over an hour of shop class any day though.

Advantages: Jasper's a big guy, bigger than the majority of his classmates in both weight and height, and could easily overpower anyone smaller than him. He's also strong, in shape, can run long distances for long periods, and knows from his wrestling training how to subdue attackers in close combat.
Disadvantages: Jasper will be hard pressed to find anyone who can stand him enough to put up with him in a situation like SOTF; most of his friends can only handle being with such an abrasive personality in small doses. He has ticked off and bullied many people in his time at Aurora, and there would more than likely be plenty of people willing to take revenge. Jasper is also extremely confident in his own abilities, which could put him in dangerous situations more easily.