Melissa Angelicchio

[Megami*]

Name: Melissa Angelicchio
Gender: Female
Age: Seventeen [17]
Grade: Senior [12th]
School: Aurora High School
Hobbies and Interests: Gaming, MMO-RPGs, Anime, Online Roleplaying, Academics, Socializing, Exercise

Appearance: Melissa stands at 5'2 1/2 and weighs around 135 pounds, putting her in roughly a size six.  Coming from mixed Italian and German ancestry, Melissa takes heavily after her father's side in appearance, and has olive-colored skin and dark chocolate colored hair that hangs down to the center of her back.  It is highlighted in dark undertones with very sparse light brown highlights.  Her bangs are grown out, and her hair is parted to the side, so they come down to cover part of her forehead in a curtain-cut style.  Naturally, her hair a mess of curls, but Melissa flat irons it straight every morning.  During mornings where she doesn't have time to straighten it, it's common for her to braid it, or throw it up in a messy bun.  Melissa's eyes are large and hazel -- green with bright gold flecks near the iris, and are always accented by black liquid eyeliner and thick mascara.  Some days, Melissa opts to go for a full on smokey-eye look, but more commonly, she simply opts for eyeliner and mascara, with a bit of foundation and clear lip gloss.  Her eyebrows, also dark brown in color, are arched and plucked thin, and her facial features are soft.  Her nose is small and straight, and her lips are small and thinner than she would prefer.  Her teeth are white and straight from two years of braces.  Her ears are best described as 'average', and she has two piercings on the lobe of each ear.  In terms of attire, Melissa is very casual, mostly adorning dark-colored t-shirts and jeans to school.  She tends to avoid skin-tight clothing, as she suffers from self-image issues regarding her weight, and feels like she looks much heavier than she actually is.  This was caused from the obesity she suffered from throughout adolescence.  Overall, she's a cute girl with a very girl-next-doorish charm to her, although she isn't the drop-dead beauty that some of her other classmates are.

Biography: Melissa Lynn Angelicchio was born August 18th, 1994, to Robert Angelicchio and Sherri (Anderson) Angelicchio in Redmond, Washington.  For two years after Melissa was born, her parents marriage deteriorated and crumbled, the added strain of a new baby placing more hardship on a young couple already strapped for cash and living beyond their means.  This wasn't helped by Robert's youthful partying, or Sherri's tantrums resulting from getting off work only to come home to a fussing baby, tons of housework, and a husband running out the door.

When Melissa was two, her parents split.  Her father kept the house, which was rental property owned by his parents, while her mother moved back in with her family.  There was no bitter court battle between the two, and things were settled civilly.  Robert was granted custody of Melissa every other weekend and on every other holiday, while she was to live with Sherri for the remainder of the time.  It didn't take either of her parents long to move on with their lives, and when Melissa was five, her father re-married a woman named Dawna, who lived in an apartment down the street from him.

Sherri had also re-married -- this time, to a man her parents grossly disapproved of.  Sherri moved out, but Melissa stayed, and for several years after this, lived in the primary care of her grandparents.  Her weekend visits to her father's house continued, much to Melissa's own dismay.  The woman he had married was a hateful, bitter woman who couldn't stand the idea of Robert having a child with someone other than herself.  This was ironic, given the fact that she also had a child from a previous marriage (roughly the same age as Melissa) that she had lost custody of.  Dawna was cold toward Melissa, and never acted like much of a mother figure.

She insisted on Melissa calling her "mom", all the while making belittling comments about the little girl's weight, clothing, and anything that she did.  Weekends became hell for Melissa because of her step-mother, and she began to dread visiting her father, to the point that she cried every Friday night when Robert would show up to pick her up for the weekend.  This behavior concerned Melissa's grandparents, who informed Sherri of the on-goings.  This was enough to bring Sherri back into the picture, fists swinging, and it led to several verbal altercations between herself and Dawna.

This continued for two full years, and when Melissa turned seven, her father -- at the insistence of Dawna -- took Sherri to court in an attempt to gain custody of their daughter.  It was evident, even to Robert's family, that Dawna had orchestrated the custody battle in order to get Robert out of paying child support -- which was already being garnished from his wages for his failure to pay.  This didn't turn out in her favor, however, and the court case was open and shut.  It didn't take much to convince the presiding judge that Melissa didn't want to live with her father.  The little girl voluntarily told the judge about all the verbal abuse she had suffered from Dawna, and the emotional toll it had taken on her.

Not only did Robert and Dawna lose their custody battle, but in light of Melissa's words and Dawna's prior ruling as an unfit parent, they also lost rights to see Melissa on weekends.

This was a sigh of relief for young Melissa, who had grown to despise Dawna and, by association, her father.  Life was relatively uneventful for several years after that, although now, Melissa faced a new problem.  She had always been a pudgy child, but during the emotional trauma Dawna had inflicted on her, she had turned to sweets and junk food as a coping mechanism.  Despite the stress having been relieved, Melissa continued this habit, and continued packing on pounds.

Her grandmother was an unwitting enabler to this behavior, and was of the opinion that "a fat child is a happy child".  She never saw Melissa as overweight or unhealthy.  She just saw a little girl who had been through a rocky childhood finding enjoyment in sweets.  Melissa also found herself immersed in console games.  She loved games like Kingdom Hearts, the Final Fantasy series, Tomb Raider, and many others, and she played them all.

Throughout adolescence, she excelled in school and was a very bright student.  However, she had no drive or initiative to go out and play, or socialize with friends.  She had a small, very close circle of friends throughout grade school, but her grandparents lived far enough outside of town that she was unable to walk to their houses, and it was a bit of trouble for their parents to bring them to hers.  Because of this, she spent most of her time outside of school simply playing video games.  The lack of exercise only served as a catalyst to her weight gain, and she continued to balloon up to unhealthy levels.

It was during 8th grade when Melissa finally realized what she had done to herself.  She was thirteen at the time, and had a huge crush on a freshman boy in her class named Christian.  She had always been sort of 'backward' in school, and was incredibly nervous around boys.  Because of this, one of her best friends -- a girl named Kristine -- took the initiative and asked Christian out on behalf of Melissa.  His response was a simple, "Ew, no," and that statement crushed the tween.  It finally occurred to her that someone who, at the time, was 4'9" and 140 pounds was not "healthy".  They were not "pretty".  In fact, they were obesely overweight.

All the comments Dawna had made throughout her childhood about how fat she was came rushing back to her, and for the rest of 8th grade, she could do nothing about it but wallow in self pity.  During this time, her grades declined from high A's to low B's and C's, she lost interest in doing things with friends at all, and she did nothing after school but sit in her room.  Realizing something was terribly wrong, her grandparents once again called her mother in, and Sherri set up appointments with a dietician for Melissa.

During the summer before her freshman year, Melissa started exercising and eating properly.  She enrolled in basketball her freshman year of high school, and although she only played one season before realizing she didn't like the sport, she realized that she was going to have to do at least some form of exercise to rid herself of the extra weight.  She begged her grandparents to buy her a treadmill, telling them that she was embarrassed to go out and walk by herself because she 'felt like people stared at her'.

A year later, she had dropped a substantial portion of her weight.

Right before beginning her sophomore year of high school, Melissa's mother stepped back into the picture.  She and Melissa's grandfather had had a large falling-out, and now Sherri wanted Melissa to move back in with her.  Melissa refused, but had little choice in the matter, with Sherri as the custodial parent.  Not only that, but Sherri announced she was moving out of Redmond, to Seattle.  Bitter at being forced away from her grandparents and out of the same school as her friends, the next few years led to a very strained relationship between Melissa and her mother.

The two moved into a nice apartment in Seattle, and her mother took a job as a public notary.  For a long time, Melissa never questioned how her mother could afford an apartment that should have been beyond their means -- mostly because for the past several years, Melissa's mother had been known for having flings with several different men.  During the time that Melissa had lived with her grandparents, Sherri had been remarried four times.  She had been divorced when the two moved into Seattle, but it came as no surprise at all to Melissa when her mother's boss showed up at their door for dinner one evening.

He was a nice man, and went out of his way to help Melissa, but she never grew close to him, seeing him as only another passing fling of her mother's.  Even in present day, Jacques Bouchard is still in the picture -- paying their rent, helping buy groceries, shelling out for Melissa's prom and graduation needs -- but Melissa can't help but wonder how much longer it will last.  He's been asking Sherri to move in with him for nearly a year now, and she continues to refuse, telling him she'll only move in with him if he buys her a new house.  It's blatantly obvious to everyone involved that Sherri simply uses Jacques for his money, and Melissa can't help but wonder how he tolerates it, or why he puts up with it.

Her time at Aurora High School has been uneventful.  She maintains high grades in school and is constantly making the honor roll.  This has been a trend since her sophomore year.  She has also grown out of her 'backward' nature, for the most part.  Sophomore year was the hardest for Melissa, and it took her quite a while to adjust to the much larger high school.  Throughout half the school year, she remained very quiet and distant from her classmates, gaining her a reputation of being stuck up and snobby by some of them.

During the second half of her sophomore year, she finally started to make friends.  Her amicable nature made her easy to get along with, and once she finally started making friends, she managed to make more and more.  By the start of her junior year, she had risen drastically in popularity, and was generally well-liked around school.  She had also shed even more weight, and found herself being scoped out and talked to by her fellow classmates.  This was a new experience for Melissa, and she enjoyed the attention.

However, the new attention she was gaining also came with its own set of disadvantages.  Melissa quickly found that she had a very hard time telling people no, or doing things she thought might displease them.  This, combined with her agreeable nature, let to a lot of misunderstandings and bad blood between some of the boys she went out with.  She had a hard time telling boys she wasn't interested, and an even harder time doing it if they had been friends previously.  Her solution to this was to ignore the situation until it went away, and she found herself with several ruined friendships because of it.

Despite the fact that she has trouble telling people no, Melissa has pretty high moral standards when it comes to relationships.  She's very heavily involved in Academics -- scoring particularly high in English and History.  This, combined with her mother's rocky history, has instilled in Melissa a desire not to be like her mother.  She wants to go to college, get away from Seattle, and make something of herself after high school.  This drive has made her draw a firm line when it comes to relationships, and for the most part, her relationships have remained mostly platonic.  She has little interest in long-term relationships, and has a somewhat jaded opinion of high school relationships -- having realized early on that the likelihood of things working out long-term was very slim.  This has actually benefited her in that she has been able to stay on good terms, and even stay friends with, most of her previous boyfriends.

Even though she's found herself quite popular at Aurora High School, Melissa still retains her gamer girl ways -- except now, she does it in secret.  She won't hesitate to grab a controller and decimate a few guy friends at Halo or Guitar Hero, but would swear she's never played before in her life if they asked.  She found herself heavily involved in MMO-RPGs during her sophomore year, and is an avid World of Warcraft player, although she would never admit it to anyone for fear that she would be mocked or shunned for it.  She invests a lot of time in it, to the point that she'll make up excuses not to go hang out with friends on 'raid nights'.  She's also found a love of anime in recent years, and has a large collection of DVDs of various anime genres.  She adores fantasy in all its forms, and has found a hobby in writing stories under an online alias and roleplaying on forums.  While she'll openly admit to being an "anime geek", she's quite secretive about her writing, and is embarrassed to let real-life friends or family read anything she's written.

One thing she won't forsake for video games is her exercise routines, and she is still an avid walker.  She has also taken to various other exercise regimens to help stay in shape, and has done various stints with Pilates, Yoga, and a few other programs, although she rarely sticks to them for long.  Because she worries about her weight, she doesn't eat much junk food, or much in general.  She also avoids alcohol and other illegal substances like the plague for fear of winding up with a 'beer gut'.  She's sort of a goody-goody in this regard, and although she has no problem with people around her doing it, she never partakes in any sort of experimentation with drugs.  In fact, the smell of marijuana makes her ill.

Melissa hasn't given much thought to what she wants to do after high school.  Because of her scholastic achievements, she's almost guaranteed some sort of scholarship.  She briefly brought up wanting to wait a year before starting college, but her mother immediately shot the idea down, and has been persistent about her daughter attending college immediately after graduating.  This has been a cause of clashing between the two, and is just something else that has thrown strain on their shaky relationship.

Advantages: Melissa's in some kind of decent physical shape from cardio, but she's hardly athletic.  Her largest advantage is her sweet personality.  She's well-liked and easy to get along with, so fitting in with groups shouldn't be much of an issue.  She's loyal and caring, and will do everything in her power to protect people she is close to.
Disadvantages: Melissa's aim-to-please attitude might be her undoing.  She's afraid to speak out against people, and she doesn't like to get on others' bad sides.  She has trouble discerning people who are trustworthy, and probably wouldn't speak out against another student even if they did something questionable.  She's also gullible and takes people at their word, so she isn't a hard person to deceive.