Nathan Lovegrove

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Name: Nathan Charles Lovegrove
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: Cochise High School
Hobbies and Interests: Ballet, comics, yoga, walking and playing with his dog

Appearance: Nathan is sturdily built, standing at 5' 9" and weighing around 177 pounds. Most of his weight is muscle, and his legs are especially toned. He has a light olive skin tone and has semi-regular breakouts of acne, particularly on his forehead. His oval face is framed by curly auburn hair, with heavily-lidded gray eyes and a slightly oversized, hawk-like nose. His eyebrows are thick and he occasionally has a bit of stubble on his chin when he forgets to shave. He carries himself with a very straight posture and moves carefully, a habit drilled into him by years of ballet training.

Nathan dresses casually with a bit of a preppy style, favoring light-colored polo shirts and sweaters, blue jeans and tennis shoes with good ankle support. The only jewelry he wears regularly are a gold-plated wristwatch and a faded, frayed "wish bracelet", gifts from his parents and sister, respectively.

Biography: Nathan is the oldest child of Cody and Charlotte Lovegrove, born on October 19, 1996. His sister, Michelle, is three years younger and is currently a freshman at Cochise High. Nathan's disposition has always been calm, with a tendency to be easily distracted and occupied, and he was easily satisfied with whatever attention his parents could afford him. This made his early childhood relatively easy on Cody and Charlotte, who worked as a security guard and a physician's assistant, respectively, and who were often called in to work at odd hours.

When Michelle was born, she proved to be a much more demanding baby than Nathan had been, easily upset and often taking a long time to calm down. More often than not, Nathan had to entertain himself by playing alone or with the neighbors while his parents attended to his baby sister, fostering an early sense of independence from his parents.

Both Nathan and Michelle were enrolled in dance at an early age by their mother, who had danced during her childhood and hoped to instill her love of the art in her children as well. While both of them showed a talent for dance, they took to different styles; Nathan thrived in the disciplined environment of ballet, while Michelle excelled in the more energetic classes for jazz and tap dance. Nathan has currently been dancing for about ten years and is in the men's advanced class at the local dance and gymnastics academy.

Nathan worked best in highly structured environments in school as well, as he was easily distracted and unfocused without someone to monitor him and a concrete task to occupy him. He was a diligent worker, but he began to fall behind his classmates, especially as he progressed through elementary school and reading and writing became more central in the classroom. Mastering them was a slow and frustrating process, and Nathan's schoolwork went unfinished with increasing frequency until his parents decided to have him tested for a learning disability, on the school's recommendation. They determined that Nathan had dyslexia, and he began receiving tutoring to help improve his language skills in the fourth grade.

Though he improved with help, reading still frequently felt like a hassle to Nathan and he was drawn to more visual forms of entertainment such as watching TV or getting his dad to read the newspaper comics to him. A longtime fan of comics, Cody was happy to oblige and also lent Nathan some comics that he had enjoyed as a child and which were light on reading. Nathan found comics to be an enjoyable alternative to fully text-based reading and started bringing them to school so that he could have something to look at during free time that wouldn't frustrate him. As he got older, he also began to browse webcomics, especially enjoying the slice-of-life or gag-per-day variety, which were typically light on or completely free of text.

As Nathan moved from elementary to middle school, Charlotte began having to take time off from work in order to care for her aging mother, Clarisse. This resulted in Cody taking extra shifts to make up for the time that Charlotte was having to be away from her job, and marked the beginning of the family's current financial strain and tension between Nathan's parents. Cody thought that it would be best to have Clarisse moved into a nursing home, as she was suffering from the early stages of dementia and would not be able to safely live on her own much longer; Charlotte, who had been an only child and was particularly close to her mother, was very resistant to this idea and quick to anger whenever it was brought up. She insisted that they had enough space in their home and cited the fact that Clarisse was Nathan and Michelle's only living grandparent as reason to move her in with the family. Cody held out, hoping that as Charlotte saw how Clarisse's deteriorating health made caring for her more and more demanding, she would give in and agree to a nursing home, but Charlotte remained firm.

In addition to the disagreements over what to do about Clarisse's living situation, Nathan and Michelle had been feeling the negative effects of the tension between their parents and their increased time away from home. Michelle in particular began acting out at school and with friends, feeling neglected by her parents and wanting their attention back on her as it had been in her early childhood years. Nathan tried to help remedy the situation by spending more time with Michelle so that the both of them wouldn't feel as ignored, and one good thing that did come out of those turbulent few years was the strong bond that the siblings formed as a result of being each other's main familial company.

The summer before Nathan entered high school, Cody finally gave in to Charlotte's insistence and they moved Clarisse into their house. This did temporarily ease the strain between them, but concerns about the family's finances quickly surfaced instead. Caring for Clarisse meant that someone had to be with her most of the day, and Cody and Charlotte's irregular working hours led them to hire a day nurse for her, relying on Nathan and Michelle to answer her needs at night if neither of their parents was available. The two of them did their best, but Clarisse's frustration at no longer being able to care for herself and her advancing dementia often led her to criticize and snap at her nurse and family when she was lucid. This was another cause of tension between Cody and Charlotte, as he felt it was especially unfair for the kids to be subject to their grandmother's lashing out.

The tensions in the Lovegrove home remained fairly constant throughout Nathan's high school years. He sought out various methods of stress release aside from dance, including meditation and yoga, which he and Michelle tried together. While neither stuck with meditation, Nathan found yoga to be a good way to unwind after a long day as well as a way to improve his flexibility and balance. He has begun including it in his daily routine, typically spending thirty minutes to an hour doing yoga each evening, or longer if he feels that he needs to loosen up more.

Last year, Nathan approached his parents about getting Michelle some sort of pet  for her birthday, thinking that it would brighten up their home and give Michelle something to focus positive attention on. Cody was for it, despite the expenses involved, since Michelle's behavioral troubles frequently worried him. However, Charlotte was unwilling to introduce a new responsibility to the household, considering vet fees and other costs of caring for a pet on top of their already-strained finances. She told Nathan that if he was able to obtain a job and save up, she would allow him to adopt a pet at a later time. This was where Cody put his foot down; he felt that Nathan and Michelle had taken the brunt of the family's troubles over the past few years and saw Charlotte's refusal to allow them this when it was her insistence that they care for her mother as extremely selfish. For the first time in their marriage, he went behind her back and took Nathan and Michelle to a local animal shelter noted for having a quick, non-intensive adoption process to get a dog. He reasoned that if the dog was already in the house and had his shots and registration taken care of, Charlotte would just have to deal with it. Together, the siblings picked out a lively lab mix named Titan, whom both of them quickly grew to adore. When Charlotte found out what Cody had done without her input, it led to the bitterest fight the two of them had ever had, with Charlotte adamant that she would get rid of the dog if it caused any kind of trouble in the house or if the kids neglected their responsibilities in caring for it in any way.

The deepening of the rift between Nathan's parents, along with a new coolness between Charlotte and her children, made things deeply uncomfortable in the Lovegrove home for some time. Nathan felt guilty that he had set the events that caused it into motion and distanced himself more from both of his parents from then on, unwilling to be the catalyst for another fight. Michelle felt personally attacked by Charlotte's reaction to their adoption of Titan and the insinuation that she would neglect him. Motivated by a mix of spite and fear that their mother would make good on her promise to get rid of him, she stepped up and put in a surprising amount of effort in taking care of Titan mostly on her own. She frequently takes him out for walks or runs, and Nathan sometimes joins her. Every few weeks, they set aside time to spend a full afternoon playing with Titan in the park. Being able to get out of the house more often and focus her care on something has had a noticeable improvement in Michelle's overall demeanor, as Nathan had hoped it would.

In school, Nathan is more reserved than at home. He is not particularly open about his interests with anyone besides his good friends, having put up with no small amount of teasing and jokes about his sexuality over the years due to his dancing. Among his friends, he often acts as a mediator due to his generally calm and laidback nature and his patience in dealing with rambunctious people. He is friendly and polite most of the time, but tries to focus more on schoolwork than socializing since his dyslexia necessitates that he spend more time on it than some of his peers. He receives peer tutoring regularly, and spends most of his free time at school taking care of homework, finding it less stressful to work on at school than at home. Thanks to his hard work, his grades are mostly high B's and a few A's, though he has never grown to enjoy reading for leisure aside from comics. He has a fondness for hands-on subjects such as PE and the physical sciences over other subjects in school, with English being his least favorite class thanks to lingering frustration with the amount and density of reading involved, especially reading aloud in class. With his time divided between schoolwork and other activities, he sometimes finds it difficult to make time for his friends outside of school, which has led some of them to think of him as socially flaky or unreliable. Despite his various methods of relaxing, he is almost constantly stressed due to pressure at school and the strain at home of his parents' failing marriage, their financial issues, and their responsibilities in caring for his grandmother.

Lately, Nathan has been looking into more advanced dance academies, wishing to attend one after graduation. He has often been told that his calm demeanor and willingness to mediate and work with people would make him a good teacher, and he wants to become a certified dance instructor and work with kids.

Advantages: Nathan is fit and athletic, and is quite strong and agile. He is good at keeping a level head under pressure and mediating between bickering parties. He has gotten very used to coping with stress in reasonable ways, and is a determined and hard worker when he sets his mind to something.
Disadvantages: Nathan lacks the deeper connections that some of his friends have with each other due to constantly having to arrange his time around schoolwork and his family, which has led some people to consider him unreliable and could hurt his chances to make allies. His dyslexia makes him easily distracted, and he has a hard time focusing on tasks outside of a structured, supervised environment.