A close friend of her mother's wound up being the one to take Nora in; the paperwork for guardianship was sorted out shortly after Nora's second birthday. Nora's not exactly sure how much of a burden she was to this woman, but she knows that it must not have been easy to be career military and suddenly be saddled with a toddler. They moved around a lot when she was young, from one strange home to the next until they all blurred into the same base and the same cruel children and the same old messes she'd inevitably find herself in. She couldn't tell you the names of all the places she lived during those years no matter how much she wanted to.
Before too long it became apparent that their arrangement just wasn't going to work. Nora kept finding herself getting in fights with other kids her age to the point where she'd been expelled from schools in the area twice. It was getting to be too much for her mother's friend to juggle both Nora and her work and an ultimatum was set: behave or face the consequences. Neither of them entirely expected to work out in Nora's favor and it was barely a month into her newest school year that she was expelled again for beating the crap out of a boy in her grade who was trying to talk shit about her dead parents.
Nora found herself enrolled in a fairly strict preparatory academy in Maui where her mother's friend was stationed at the time. She railed against the system at first, ready to lash at anyone who challenged her, but she found it easier to tame her temper with the firm boundaries they set around her. The school opened her eyes to new ways to channel that internal rage and set her on a course to improve her academic scores at the same time.
She found that physical activity helped to keep her hands from curling into fists. A friend introduced her to comic books and video games and they wasted days playing and reading and discussing everything and anything. She got into hiking and archery, discovered her love for biology, and instead of being kicked out of school she found herself excelling. She still had trouble making friends, but it was progress where before she'd been circling the drain to a meager future.
It took throwing herself into university life to really begin to find herself. Learning came easily and the more she read the more she wanted to know. Biology opened the doorway to genetics and genetics led her through to immunogenetics and it felt right to follow that path of study. She finished up her first year at the university in Hilo, on the big island, with high marks across the board and moved back to Maui for the summer. She got a job to help save up some money for the next semester but when it came time to register for classes she found herself putting it off again and again until it was too late. It wasn't that she wasn't interested, it just felt wrong to leave Maui behind. So as the school year started she kept working, kept saving, and waiting for things to make sense again.
