S080 - Emerson, Kyle "K." [DECEASED]

#1

Name: Kyle "K." Emerson
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Badminton, marching band, playing Clarinet, theater tech, public transportation design, going on night walks, watching movies, independent filmmaking, browsing the internet, tape collecting, people watching, watching unsecured surveillance cameras online

Appearance: Kyle "K." Emerson is a young white male who is five foot eight inches tall and weighs one hundred thirty two pounds. He has green eyes, which tend to be bloodshot from a lack of sleep due to clinical insomnia. He also has dark circles under his eyes for this same reason. K.'s face is marked with acne scars on his cheeks and forehead. He has a lean build, with some muscle definition from conditioning for various sports and athletic activities, though his profile is skinny. His skin is pale white, apart from a farmer's tan earned during the summer Marching Band training camp, and burns easily in too much sun. He has messy dark brown curly hair, usually purposefully styled to look messy with pomade. His hair is still overall short in length, although a lack of maintenance means that occasionally K has to move his hair out of his eyes, and that his hair is growing unevenly. K. has a low pitched, scratchy voice, and tends to mumble unless reminded to speak up. He has a square jawline, and tends to grind his teeth, which he keeps obsessively clean, brushing upwards of four times a day.

K. tends to wear baggy, dark colored clothing, and athletic sneakers or, if the weather calls for it, water-resistant boots. His ears are pierced, and he occasionally wears plain monochrome stud earrings, usually black. He tries to keep clean-shaven, but often lets three or four days elapse between shaving, leaving patchy facial hair and the faint outline of a mustache on his face at worst. On the day of the abduction, K. Emerson was wearing a black Levi's field coat over a maroon retro style Boston Crusaders Drum & Bugle Corps sweatshirt, a gray cotton t-shirt, black Adidas sweatpants with long thermal pants underneath, white shin height socks, waterproof Sorel brand black snow boots, a loosely fitting blue opal pendant necklace affixed with a gold chain, and two black square shaped stud earrings.

Biography: Kyle Emerson was born on August 31st, 2003 at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Some time later, after careful monitoring due to his mother's relatively old age at the time of pregnancy, he was deemed healthy and brought home with his mother Josephine and father Morton to their residence in the western suburbs of Cambridge, Massachusetts. K. grew up in a two story single family house in the second empire design, where he lived until the age of fourteen. His father also grew up in this house and inherited it from his own father, who inherited it from his father before him. Both parents were employed at nearby Harvard University as tenured professors, Morton in the field of Classical Philosophy, and Josephine as a professor of Modern Literature. K.'s older sister, Bonnie Emerson, was ten years old on the day when he was born. As Kyle began to talk, he had difficulty pronouncing his own name, so Bonnie started to refer to him as "K." for short, which was easier for him to say. To this day, K. still goes by this nickname.

After K. was done breastfeeding, his parents hired a live-in nanny to take care of K. so that they could go back to work. Tragically, Morton was struck and killed in a hit and run accident while crossing the street on his way to work when K. was three years old. K. mostly did not understand what had happened at the time; his father had been a part of his life, and his absence was felt as a grave loss, but he had often been distant and absorbed in his work, a presence around the house that K. had not made many memories with. K. was able to understand that his mother and sister were devastated, however, and for the next few years, K. was often in the care of visiting relatives from his father and mother's sides of the family, due to his mother's inability to care for him alone and their newfound lack of ability to pay for the nanny. She continued her professorship at the university after a small sabbatical to raise K. until he was old enough to go to school.

K. attended elementary school and middle school through the end of sixth grade in the Cambridge Public School system, and led a generally unremarkable childhood, apart from intermittent enrollment in physical and occupational therapy as correctives for his bad posture and sloppy handwriting, respectively. K. began to stay late at an after school program while he waited for his mother or sister to pick him up later in the evening. In the third grade, K.'s mother attempted to resign her professorship at the university, but, due to growing concerns about her mental state expressed by several other faculty members in her department, she was kept on the university payroll in an informal capacity. K. was grateful at first that his mother would be spending more time at home, but was frustrated by her seeming lack of will to parent K. or take an interest in his life beyond what was necessary to keep him fed, clothed, and in school. Growing up, K.'s favorite classes were English and music, and during the fifth grade he decided to learn the Clarinet, as it was the most similar to the Recorder which he had learned in class during the previous year.

While K. was in the sixth grade, his mother had a mental breakdown during which she attempted to assault K. with a kitchen knife, verbally blaming him for the downturn her life had taken in the past decade, and was subsequently institutionalized. As K.'s father's extended family had largely moved out of New England in the intervening time since Morton's passing, and K.'s mother's family was split between those who shunned her for perceived slights brought on by prior mental health episodes and those too young, old, or otherwise indisposed to take care of children, K.'s sister Bonnie, who had finished law school the previous year, applied for guardianship after K.'s mother was deemed mentally unfit to parent. As there were no other family members who applied for custody, this request was approved. At the end of the school year, K. moved in with his sister, after a period during which Bonnie split her time between the family house in Cambridge and her apartment in Salem while looking for a buyer for the house in order to earn money to put away for K.'s future. With him, he took his parent's collection of cassette tapes, VHS tapes, CDs and DVDs, which have formed the basis of his taste in music and film. Because of this, K. tends to prefer media with a retro aesthetic, with a particular fondness for the eighties. He continues to collect various tapes to this day, as well as other vintage media on obsolete formats.

In the immediate aftermath of his mother's mental breakdown, during which K. himself was physically unharmed, K. began to internalize his mother's comments and to interpret himself as an omen of bad luck for his family. He began to feel ashamed of himself and to spend long hours awake at night mentally criticizing himself and his perceived failings. At first, he projected these feelings onto his sister, shunning her attempts at showing more care for K. than his mother had by asking about his wellbeing. K. would, at these times, insist on his own mental stability, not wanting to suffer a similar fate to his mother or to draw a similar breakdown out of Bonnie. Gradually, K. began to warm to the fact that Bonnie did, in fact, care for him, and opened up with her about what he had internalized from his mother's episode. Bonnie made sure to verbally reassure him that he was not to blame for his father's death or mother's hospitalization. Since taking charge of K., Bonnie changed her original plans to be a criminal defense lawyer and instead entered the field of business law, perceiving the field as more stable and higher paying. She works as an attorney at a corporate law firm in Boston.

He was enrolled in the Salem public school system, where he quickly found himself an outcast, his arrival anticipated by rumors about his mother's mental break. He found a friend soon in Clover-Wilkinson Crowheart, another outcast, during a music camp that Bonnie signed him up for in an effort to keep him out of the house. Their friendship continued at school as well. Over time, K. and Clover would come to share much of the same taste in music and films. K.'s preferences tend to lead him towards horror movies, as well as, broadly, independent, arthouse, and foreign cinema. K. has often stated his intentions to make a film starring all of his friends at some point, but has never sprung for it, citing funding and scheduling errors and a lack of inspiration as his main reasons for not going ahead with making the film yet.

K. continued to practice the clarinet after leaving Cambridge. Despite the lower funding put into Salem's musical programs in comparison, K. found that there was one advantage to going to school in Salem; namely, the schools had enough field space to have marching bands. He joined the marching band in middle school, at first just to have something to do after school and to get more physical exercise. K. soon realized that he enjoyed the more theatrical performance element of marching band, and began to find his own motivations for performing. One consequence of this was an ill-fated attempt at joining the school theater program, out of a belief that it might also appeal to him in the same way, as an actor. After a humiliating audition experience, K. found an open call for stagehands and discovered that, when it came to the indoor stage at least, he felt much more comfortable behind the scenes than in front of the crowd.

During his eighth grade year, K. began to experience thoughts of self-harm and suicidal ideation. As a form of self punishment for perceived personal failures, he began to hurt himself in private. After his sister caught him in the middle of hurting himself, she took him to the hospital, where it was recommended that he spend some time at an adolescent in-patient program. After a week he was discharged, prescribed anti-depressants, and assigned to once a week meetings with a social worker. The effect of these meetings was effectively positive, leading to the remittance of K's urges to self-harm. He remained on anti-depressants until his junior year of high school, and stopped seeing a therapist during the summer before his senior year of his own volition, partly because he felt that he had gained all that there was to gain from the experience, and partly because his therapist was going on maternity leave and the timing felt right that he should stop.

One condition that K. was unable to lose through therapy was his insomnia, which developed a year before the rest of his mental health conditions. K. finds it difficult to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time without the aid of high doses of melatonin or other sleep medication. This is proven to be the only medical treatment with any effect on the condition thus far. In high school, K. started to go on walks through his neighborhood at night when he was unable to sleep, eventually finding that if he was physically tired, he occasionally could net himself an hour or even two hours of extra sleep. Though increasingly inconsistent with helping him sleep, K. continues to go on night walks around Salem when the weather permits.

In high school, K. was introduced to Clover's group of friends with Medea Parth, including June Madison, Laci York, Peyton Hoffman, and Savanna Adkins. This became his consistent, steady friend group for the duration of his time in high school, and outside of some acquaintances from class and members of his section in marching band, these are his only close friends. K. has been on occasion dragged to parties thrown by his classmates, and tends to stay out of trouble, finding a corner from which to observe the function. Bonnie advised K. to keep up his physical activity in the winter, and to that end K. joined the high school badminton club in freshman year. He plays recreationally, as the school does not field an official badminton team, and considers himself fairly adequately skilled, practicing only when he feels like it or when the time comes for a club meet. Bonnie also suggested that K. get a part time job, and by the end of freshman year K. had a regular shift during the evening hours at a local 7-Eleven.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, K. began to obsessively stay home during the day, prizing the nighttime timing of his convenience store work shift and orienting his schedule almost entirely around nocturnal living. In this period of time, he began to indulge in escapist notions by watching live streams of busy city squares, pedestrian crossings, train stops and airport landings, via live streams and unsecured camera feeds. Even after the end of the pandemic, K. has continued to monitor several of his favorite feeds, dedicating an entire computer monitor to a mosaic of various cameras from around the world. He also spends over thirty hours a week on the computer, often through the night into the early morning, and uses VPNs as well as polarized screen protectors applied to several of his monitors to shield his activities online. He pushed his boss at work to let him work later in the night, when he was more awake. K.'s boss, largely ignorant of Massachusetts labor laws, consented to this, letting K. work until as late as two in the morning on some nights.

K. hides his nocturnal activities from his sister. He wears headphones while on his computer late at night and uses the window of his bedroom when leaving or coming back from night walks or late night shifts at work. To K.'s knowledge, Bonnie is unaware of his insomnia and nighttime proclivities. However, Bonnie has harbored private suspicions that K. might be hiding something from her, though she is unsure what. Through indirect lines of questioning about his mental health, she has determined that he is not doing anything particularly harmful to his health, and has resigned herself to letting him keep this secret until before he graduates high school, when she plans to finally confront him about it. She rationalizes his occasional display of tiredness or fatigue as a result of his packed school schedule, recalling with nostalgia her own high school years and tendency to stay up late working on school projects or chatting with friends online.

Partially as a consequence of his live stream viewing habits and partly due to his walking habits, K. has made a hobby out of studying public transportation; K. often reads about the public transit systems of other cities and how Boston's might compare. He often wishes that the buses and trains would run more often from Salem into Boston, and that service would continue until later at night, to allow him to walk at night in the city. In his spare time, he works on a paper map of a speculative expanded MBTA system for the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area set several decades into the future.

In his senior year of high school, the position of section leader for the clarinets passed from an upperclassman down to K., who accepted the role reluctantly, but at the urging of his section. K. tries to make time to listen to the concerns of underclassmen, remembering some of the less than pleasant teasing and borderline hazing he experienced as a freshman and feeling a break from those in other sections who have decided to carry on those traditions. K. is aware that he is not the most skilled clarinet player or marcher in the band, let alone the section, but tries his best to help those having difficulties by applying lessons from his own experience in band. In addition to marching band, K. also plays in the school concert band as the fourth chair Clarinet.

In social situations, K. tends to feel and act as if his presence is annoying, assuming himself to be a burden on others, and he is constantly worried about oversharing or taking up too much space in the conversation. He tends to go off on tangents about his interests that he cuts short before he gets to the point due to this fear. He also has a tendency to disengage with more serious conversations out of a belief that others will believe that he is foolish, or naïve, or wasting their time. When unsure, K. remains silent, leaving him with a track record for being indecisive and flaky.

At present, K. has decent grades, earning a 'B' average in his classes. His weak areas are math and science. He is currently planning to apply to several state schools, officially undeclared, but intending on enrolling in a film or communications program. Bonnie has often encouraged K. to use some of the money that she earned from selling the house to buy a camera and start shooting video for a portfolio to apply to film school, but to date K. has rejected this offer. He has expressed on occasion an impulse to take a gap year, or even to not go to college at all, and instead continuing to work nights at the convenience store while he continues to watch more movies, which he justifies as research for an eventual independent film project starring his friends.

K.'s present relationship with his extended family is strained, as he feels that they largely abandoned himself and his sister after his mother's institutionalization. Josephine remains an in-patient at a mental facility. K. has only gone to see her once since the incident, at which time K.'s mother refused to speak with or see him, which lead to K. verbally disowning his mother while alone in the car with Bonnie. K. is on good terms with his sister, and thinks that she has done a better job raising him than either of his parents, additionally crediting her with knowing when to stay out of his way and when something is worth bringing up and having a conversation about.

Advantages: K. has experience occupying a leadership role in a group and, if motivated by others, can be effective at managing the needs and wellbeing of several people. He has good physical stamina from marching, and can speed up into a sprint quickly, a skill honed in badminton. K. has experience walking out late at night in various states of weather, and is comfortable being active in the dark and late at night.
Disadvantages: K. is an insomniac, and an incredibly light sleeper, susceptible to the effects of sleep deprivation if stressful conditions make him unable to sleep. He finds it hard to communicate with others, and is prone to taking comments personally and subsequently isolating himself. K. is also clinically depressed, which presents several problems for his motivation to survive in the face of life or death situations.

Designated Number: Student No. 080

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Designated Weapon: Spiked mace

Conclusion: Just in case you need some extra balls, we gave you one - Cecily Lacoste