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xxxxxK.C.'s life has been staggeringly normal, in most respects. The younger of two children born in Jersey to a pair of doctors (her father a dentist, her mother an oncologist), her parents had planned to have one more child but changed their minds when K.C.'s developmental delays ended up taking up too much of their time and energy to balance careers plus one more kid. Diagnosed with mild autism in elementary school, K.C. excelled in some subjects but was at a loss in others; frequent classroom outbursts and trouble with interactions with the other children, too, led her parents to switch her in third grade to a private school where she could get more of the focused attention she needed.
xxxxxAfter the move to private school she did much better in class, though still always had a struggle with social interactions. Still, life was pretty okay; she got along well with her older sister and had enough school-and-extracurricular interests to keep her occupied. When she was eleven her parents split up -- it was an amicable break, and her father moved to the Upper West Side, where she and her sister still saw him frequently. She moved from one private school to another for high school. The adjustment was difficult for her, never good with change, and it was further complicated by the onset of her mutation in her first year. It took a while for anyone to figure out what was going on with her -- her usual tics and idiosyncracies were becoming pronounced, her outbursts and upset more frequent, her attention scattered in school, and at first they just assumed it all had to do with her rather expected difficulties adjusting to her new school.
xxxxxOnce they realized there was something else going on, her mother did her best to keep K.C.'s mutation quiet -- it was easier, possibly, than it would have been in other situations; people's own biases worked to assume that K.C. was just, well, crazy, which might have been more of a godsend than realizing the truth, given the prevailing attitudes towards mutants.
xxxxxUltimately, K.C. finished high school fine. Accepted into Columbia and due to start in the fall, she's just moved up into the city to live with her father for the summer to give her a chance to acclimatize to NYC before college starts.
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