Michael Goldstein

[Applesintime]

Name: Michael Goldstein
Gender: Male
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: Southwest Red Rock High School
Hobbies and Interests: Baseball, running, medicine, volunteering, politics

Appearance: Michael stands at 5 '10 and weighs around 145 pounds, with a lean and slightly muscular build thanks to his exercise. He is Caucasian, with a slight tan from spending time outdoors. His arms and legs are covered with small scratches and scrapes built up from his time playing baseball.

His arms and legs are both lightly toned. He has a round face, with thin, arched eyebrows, brown eyes, a Roman nose and thin lips. His ears are large and close to his head. Michael has black hair, cut short with a fringe that covers his forehead.

Michael generally tends to wear a mixture of polo shirts and t-shirts paired with chinos, jeans or shorts, aiming for a mixture of fashion and comfort in the Vegas weather, though sometimes he wears an Aviators jersey to represent his favourite team. If the sun is especially bad, he’ll pair this with a hat to keep it out of his eyes and sometimes a jacket to protect himself from sunburn. Michael generally avoids dark colours, thinking that they will be hotter than lighter colours in the sun.

On the day of the abduction, Michael was wearing a light blue polo shirt with grey buttons, white chinos, red and blue sneakers and a Las Vegas Aviators baseball cap with the team’s logo. On his right wrist he was wearing a Fitbit with a white band.

Biography: Michael Goldstein was born in Las Vegas on the 3rd of March, 2007, to Benjamin and Rhea Goldstein. Benjamin and Rhea were both veterans — Rhea had been a helicopter mechanic in the Navy, while Benjamin served as an Army lawyer. They met at an Nevadan event for Jewish veterans in 2000 and quickly fell in love, marrying a year later and having Michael’s older brother David in 2002. A few years later, they decided they wanted another kid for David to play with, and Michael came soon after.

Michael’s parents both had comfortable jobs. Continuing their careers outside the armed forces, Benjamin was a lawyer and Rhea was a mechanic for a helicopter tour agency, so they were able to bring their sons up in a comfortable middle-class life, settling down in Meadowbrook.
His early childhood was idyllic, his fondest memories being of time spent playing with his brother or going to visit his grandfather Noah, who lived at a local care home.

Michael and David would often try to play baseball together, inspired by the players they saw on the TV. Benjamin was a big fan of baseball and encouraged his children to share his passion in the sport. Without any Major League teams in the area, they rooted for the local team, the Las Vegas 51s, with this fandom continuing into the present day.. The two were also enrolled into Little League baseball, their parents wanting to get them out of the house and doing some exercise. While getting to play in an organised team was fun, Michael still enjoyed the sessions with his brother the most.

Michael and David have always had a close relationship, supporting and confiding in each other. While they don’t get to talk often due to David’s deployment in South Korea and the differing time zones, it’s always a highlight of Michael’s week whenever their schedules line up and they can call, where they’ll gripe about how their week has gone, talk about sports and the news and just generally unwind.

Entering elementary school, Michael was a middle-of-the-pack student, being a fast learner but not really paying enough attention or thought to anything other than baseball. He wanted to become a professional player when he was older, and thought that his grades wouldn’t really matter. This changed in third grade, after his grandfather had a knee replacement surgery. Michael had seen how he struggled to get around with a cane prior to the surgery, and to watch how his movement had recovered was something that amazed him. Noah told him that if he wanted to be a doctor and help people like that, he had to do well at school, and his grades picked up soon after.

This conflicted a little with Benjamin’s idea for his children, which was to pursue a career in the armed forces like he had. On his side of the family, there was a military tradition stretching back over a hundred years and he was keen to keep this tradition going with his own children, nudging them into thinking about becoming a soldier whenever possible. While David was more forthcoming to the idea, Michael was unsure about it, even with his dad noting that there were doctors in the army too. He liked seeing his dad happy, so he went along with it anyway.

Going into middle school, Michael’s position solidified into that of not wanting to join. The thought of possibly having to hurt other people, even if that wasn’t necessarily what he would be doing, wasn’t appealing to him when he could just work as a regular doctor and not have to deal with that possibility. Gradually, he found that the constant poking by his father to join the army now started to irritate him and built up resentment, especially when it wasn’t a career path he was considering at all.

As a result, he started to spend more time with his grandfather, which eventually turned into volunteering to help out at the care home and spend time with the people there once he was old enough to do so. Michael finds it interesting to talk to the other residents at the care home, hearing their stories and getting advice and tips from them and their experience, as well as being able to spend time with Noah. Additionally, he thinks that volunteer work will help bolster his applications to medical school, especially as he intends to pursue a speciality that often works with the elderly.

During middle school, Michael slowly began to push back against the expectations placed on him by his father, culminating in a long, vitriolic and heated argument in the last year of middle school, where they argued about the toxic expectations of his father, Michael not wanting to follow the family traditions and how he couldn’t force him to join the army when his heart was set on medical school. With the heated words and insults involved, this argument was the final straw for Michael, who from then on has made an active effort to avoid his father and the house whenever possible.

Compared to the toxic relationship he has with his father, Michael has a much better relationship with his mother, who wasn’t as pushy about his future and privately encouraged him to follow his dream if that’s what he wanted to do. However, as she never spoke up in his favour when his father was badgering him about it, he still feels a little annoyed at her only showing support when it doesn’t impact the relationship she has with her husband. As a result, he is a little cagey about confiding fully in her.

Nowadays, his relationship with his father has mended, although not entirely. Michael doesn’t try to entirely avoid him anymore and things aren’t as tense as when the argument was fresh, but there’s still a lingering sense of disappointment that manifests in their conversations that makes Michael wary of anything meaningful.

Entering high school, Michael intended to find a club or sports that would give him an excuse to stay out of his house and keep him fit, which led him to the baseball club. After a period of getting reacclimated with the sport — having not played it since when he was in elementary — and trying to figure out what position best suited him now, he eventually settled on the shortstop position and joined the junior varsity team, having worked his way up to being a starter in senior year. He’s a serviceable player, although he is better at catching than he is at hitting.

Around this time, he also took up running after realising that he was starting to run out of stamina before the end of baseball games and wanting to try and improve on that. While he initially started off at the gym, Michael found that he preferred running outside, particularly in the early morning or late at night. The solitude and lack of people around lets him destress and relax, starting or ending the day on a positive note, and he also finds spending some time outside without having an explicit destination fun, as he generally just runs in whatever direction he feels like.

This helped establish his social status in Red Rock, which has settled as someone not quite in the popular crowd, but not quite outside it. Most of his friends base comes from fellow Jews, the baseball team or others with high grades, although he does have friends falling outside those categories. His romantic life has been less successful, although Michael would chalk this up to not really making much of an effort in the first place. Still, he sometimes can’t help but want someone else to connect with.

In terms of grades, Michael is a high scorer, mostly As some and Bs. His top classes tend to be ones that are based around science or being hands-on, with his favourite class being Biology due to its relevance to his planned career. He is in a number of AP classes, with the goal of getting a better understanding of the subjects and also some credits for college. Outside of classes, he also engages in some study groups with like minded peers.

After leaving high school, Michael intends to go to medical school with the ultimate goal of going into the field of orthopedics, stemming from the memory of how a knee replacement had helped his grandfather regain his mobility and independence as a child. Given the current political situation in the US, he is considering going overseas for his education if possible, but he’s unsure as to how feasible this is and also worries that an overseas degree may not be accepted in the American medical system. Another way Michael’s interest in medicine has manifested is in him taking first aid classes, thinking that it’ll be useful if anyone has a medical emergency in public or if someone gets hurt during a baseball game.

Politically, Michael identifies as a liberal, and has become more outspoken about his views in the past year. He is wary of Canon’s rhetoric about migrants and the people he surrounds himself with, heavily disliking him and the Republican Party as a whole, but is also wary of the more left-wing side of the Democrats due to them being what he views as at best, unconcerned with Jewish perspectives and overly willing to promote misinformation and extremists purely because of their political stances. This has led to him having some arguments with fellow students over differing views, although nothing overly heated. During the election, Michael phonebanked for the D’Cruz campaign and was heartbroken when she lost.

Michael was raised in a Conservative Jewish household, but like the rest of his family he is not overly religious, only attending synagogue during religious holidays and not engaging much outside of that— although he will try to eat kosher if possible, finding it an easy way to connect with his religion. He finds the idea of an omnipotent being watching over him and something after death existing comforting, but generally does not think much about the theological side of Judaism.

Advantages: Michael is a physically fit person from a combination of his running and position on the baseball team. He also has some knowledge of first aid.
Disadvantages: Michael can be very stubborn, refusing to back down regardless of the current situation if he believes he’s right. His views on violence are borderline pacifist, and he is unlikely to use violence against anyone unless he has no other option.