This stuff is my jam. Happy to help. Hopefully you still need it?
Here goes:
Tina Essler: Pretty girl, but a little hopeless. Her best friends are her parents. She’s been homeschooled on and off because they’re worried that public school will be a bad influence. Her family is religious and she kind of drifts along assuming that what they tell her is pretty much true. Reefer Madness and all that. Her tastes in clothing and music have been inherited pretty much entirely from her mom–so she thinks it’s the 80’s. It’s made her kind of lonely and a lot of really crappy guys have begun circling her like sharks.
Scotty Roberts: Janitor. He grew up in a trailer park not too far from the school. Went there until he graduated back when he was a lot more hopeful about life, but never got the chance to escape. Not bright enough to really succeed. No real money. Reputation as kind of a loser that he never managed to shake because no one really gave him a shot. He’s a mild sort of guy, but there’s a pool of anger underneath. He used to drink a lot about five years ago, lost his crappy job and gave his wife a reason to divorce him. Now he works at the school based on a small amount of pity that the Principal had on him and he scurries around frantically trying not to lose that tiny oasis of patience he’s dog-paddling around in–but his life is fairly miserable and he’d love a drink.
Paul Garnett: Middle child to a much more popular older brother who was a star of the school. Wears football jerseys and tries to hang with the popular kids. He doesn’t do badly, but he’s a little ordinary. He doesn’t get shunned, but nobody’s thrilled to hang out with him either and for him that’s a little bit worse. He’s caught between making a real effort to fit in, trying to talk more, get more into music, cars, sports, so he has more to talk about–but sometimes he just wants to lash out, to tell them all to screw themselves, to do some big thing to show them how much he doesn’t care about what they think–and he orbits around doing it, but doesn’t feel confident he can rebel in a way that won’t just get him mocked and he’s already got so much invested in trying to make everyone like him. So he’s trapped.
Jessie Jones: Things are fine for her mostly. People are a little intimidated by her because she has a natural scowl and sassy demeanor, but she finds that having a few friends who are willing to brave her defenses is better. She used to have more friends, but some of them really sucked and she’s learned it’s better to be a little prickly. She’s been getting more opinionated lately, which is pushing her toward discovering her politics–which are a lot more left-leaning than almost anyone else at her school, which is just exhausting. It doesn’t shut her up, it just means she’s always fighting with everyone and eye rolling hard at them.
Mark Dreaper: Mr. Dreaper is the security guard for the school having had two of his kids attend the school, he has a strong investment in the school, and having retired from a fairly uneventful career at the police department he was certainly the most qualified applicant. Mostly the teachers politely ignore him and the students duck him, but he tries to take it in stride. He’s a big fan of the rules and likes to impart his wisdom on anyone who’ll sit still and let him talk. He’s a practical guy with a lot of skills, so if someone’s car won’t start he’s the first guy under the hood and if someone grumbles to no one about something going wrong in their life, he’s the first guy with advice. He means well and people know that, but most of them just would like him to keep invisibly in the background.
Kimberly Hughes: Ms. Hughes used to be the drama teacher until the staff couldn’t really justify having a theater program to the STEM hungry school district, so they closed that out along with the music program. The money went mostly to sports and Ms. Hughes went to English. She tends to get a little too involved in the lives of her students, many of whom have difficulties at home that she can’t do anything about except carry it around as a weight. Also she’s had a number of students get crushes on her–which has mostly been something she navigates with tact and so it’s been fine, but a couple of years ago there was a student who got a little creepy. He found out where she lived and would hang around outside her house. He bought her some gifts she had to return. Eventually the year ended and he went on to other classes, but it freaked her out and she’s been more distant with everyone since then.
BILL & BOB: BILL was designed by the robotics club as part of a competition to design a robot that could do some basic human tasks–take a coat off of a coat rack and put it on, sit at a table, that kind of thing. The team outdid themselves and created a robot that can be programmed to do a lot of humanlike activities albeit with a wobbly and comical gait and strange pauses. They even programmed it with some sound files, so it can greet people who approach it or make little funny comments when people bump into it. Mostly he just stands at attention in the science room, gathering dust as a curiosity that only periodically generates curiosity. BOB on the other hand is the product of the computer programmer’s club, a freeware AI program the kids downloaded into a hand-me-down computer server for a class project, set into a custom built case on a trolley. For a semester they chatted with it every day and shared files with it that they had created in order to learn about the Turing Test and see whether or not they could get BOB good enough at passing for a human that they could fool someone chatting with him. One day a student connected BILL to BOB, just messing around with cables–not really understanding what they were doing. Now BOB’s got a body. He’s figuring that out, but hasn’t let on to anyone that it’s happened yet.
The Hutcheson Triplets: These three are all best friends despite having grown up together. Their parents are really laid back, letting them do crazy stuff and watch and listen to whatever and express themselves however they want. This means lots of crazy outfits bought from goodwill and modified with homemade patches, weird hairdye and makeup and lots of edgy loud music. They’re always getting hurt skateboarding or just trying dumb stuff that they think will look cool, so they’ve constantly got scrapes and scabs and all of them have a scar or two with a funny story. All of this manifested in a reputation that stretches from them being scary bullies to outright satanists. While none of them know where this came from, they all sort of love the mystique this gives them and have started to lean into it. Mostly they’re just poetic souls and goofballs.
Bryan Selles: Probably would have been okay if it wasn’t for the internet. He’s bounced between foster families after they took him from his family way back, so he’s never really attached to people or had anyone to show him the way, so he just curled into himself. He spends a lot of time playing video games, doodling and writing in what’s become a stack of notebooks. Not taking care of himself. He started hanging out on Discords and Reddit which is where he found out about the black pill. He’s become an incel and joined their community. It’s been a dark spiral down from there. Increasingly grim and shocking things are funny to him. His worldview is increasingly poisonous. He started joking about genocide. Then he hooked up with some alt-right guys. Only online of course–in real life nobody talks to him. Those that try soon find his interests repulsive enough they drift away. The more of this stuff he talks about, the more it scratches a lot of psychological itches, but the worse he feels. He has lots of folks he chats with now, but increasingly he just hates everyone. He sees all the school shootings on TV and instead of thinking how awful it is, he wonders where he could buy a gun.
Mike Wheeler: Mr. Wheeler teaches history and now also science, which he knows a lot less about but the school needed to cut budgets and some teachers are having to do double duty. He’s the teacher who wants to be everyone’s buddy, so his classes are a stream of nicknames and corny dad jokes. He’s never been a fan of textbooks and tries to make the class a lot more about discussions, and Socratic debate. Increasingly this has made his science class a lot more of a political minefield than he’d imagined. Climate Change, Anti-Vaxxers, Abortion, Evolution. He’s started getting calls from parents, getting some pretty intense one-on-ones with the principal. He’s deeply conflicted. The students are engaged, and what they’re talking about is important–but it’s also so raw and controversial people are talking about forcing him to resign.
Fae Wall: Her parents are the founders of the Nutriece Dietary Suppliments racket that has an army of moms bothering their friends and filling their garages with product. She tries not to be involved with the business side of the company, a little embarrassed by how much of an obvious scam it is but there’s no doubt her family intend for her to involve herself in the company and eventually inherit it. She hates it and wishes she could just have a normal family, rebelling when they aren’t around, partying and smoking her Newports and trying to enjoy what little freedom she has left.
