The Yorkward family owns a small restaurant, the Charisma, in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Tracy Yorkward's father (and Madison's grandfather), Vivien Yorkward, was the founder of the establishment, and its ownership has passed down among the men of the family since, with Madison being the current owner. It is a profitable establishment despite its size, allowing the family to indulge in a fairly comfortable lifestyle. The family home is built atop and behind the restaurant proper.
Ashleigh is the only son of Madison Yorkward and Artemisia Felan; by blood he is three-quarters Hispanic, though his appearance belies it. He is the latest generation in a long family tradition of bestowing (nearly) sexually ambiguous names, which is not, in his views, much of a blessing. As a child—in fact, nearly from birth—he was teased by his peers for his "girly" name, something which bore heavily down on his self-esteem. Though healthy, lithe, and quick at a run, Ash was gangly from a young age and not very muscular, earning him the teasing nickname "Ashleigh Awkward." Ashleigh chose to combat his low self esteem—and his bullies—through violence, both verbal and physical. He preferred shouting matches over scuffles, and was quick to run should things get too heated. The bigger and older boys labeled him both a coward and a weakling for this, though his teachers praised him for at least attempting to keep things to words rather than fists. It was not Ash's intention to be a "teacher's pet," though this ended up being the relative result anyway through his early education. This only earned further contempt from Ash's classmates—and smugness on his part, since the teachers would frequently believe his side of events in conflict situations, whether or not he was actually telling the truth.
It was in junior high that Ashleigh grew to truly hate school. There were two reasons for this, each as hateful in his eyes as the other. One, Ash's grades were generally abysmal. He excelled in Art and did quite well in English, and his speed and limber frame aided him in Physical Education, but all other subjects were nearly impossible for him to grasp. His difficulty with numeric figures was so great that any classes involving numbers—the dates of history, calculations of science, and measurements of technical studies—were hellish for him. The second reason was the idiocy of the girls his age. Every one of them were as bad as his nagging grandmother or as sickeningly sweet as his doting mother, or worse than both. He hated every one of them, and saw no difference between those that taunted him and those few who flirted.
Ashleigh was thirteen and in the eighth grade, having barely passed in his studies to that point, when he decided he had had enough. After failing to convince his mother to allow him to stay home for a third day running, Ashleigh reached the end of his tether in gym class. He missed a return in volleyball, and one of his teammates, a Dan Michaels, taunted him with the old "Ashleigh Awkward" nickname. Ash immediately turned and swung, catching the other boy in the jaw and sending him tumbling backward into another classmate. Ashleigh was suspended. His mother, rather than punish him, withdrew him immediately from the school and set to trying to find him a private academy.
Ash was eventually enrolled in the Browning School, an all-male establishment not far from the Yorkward home. Before he was accepted, however, it was advised that the boy see a counselor, citing the reasons behind his removal from his previous school. Ash remained tight-lipped and angry, furious with his mother for attempting to force him into a uniformed, all-boys school. The counselor referred the boy to a psychologist, who eventually got Ashleigh to admit his frustrations with his schoolwork. Ash was discovered to have dyscalculia, a math-and-number-based learning difficulty or disability related to dyslexia. It was suggested that, with help and remedial courses, Ashleigh could work to overcome parts of this disability, and that in the meantime his schedule for the coming year could be adjusted to better accommodate his difficulties.
At first, Ash was resentful of the suggestion that he was less than capable of learning on the same curve as other boys his age. When he discovered the benefits of the schedule accommodations, however—including fewer math courses and an increase in the arts, to which he had always had an affinity—he began to research and work on overcoming his dyscalculia. Greater functions and more complicated equations continued to elude him, larger numbers remained unintelligible, and he never did properly learn to read an analog clock without serious concentration, but he was at least able to reach a basic understanding on the level of pre-algebra by the time he finished high school, skipping true algebraic classes altogether, though he did manage to scrape through plane geometry.
High school as a whole was much more enjoyable for Ash than junior high had been. Rules were stricter, which bothered him so far as his own doings were concerned, but it kept him from being bullied so much as he had been in public school. It was during these four years that he continued to develop his interest in art, briefly joined the track team (though he quit after one trimester for the sole reason of not wanting to waste his time at after-school practice), and developed a few other key interests.
As Browning was an all-boys school, Ash was free from having to put up with the inane antics of teenage girls, one thing for which he was always deeply thankful, even during his resentment of the private school itself. Without the distraction of girls either flirting with or taunting him, Ash began to notice something beyond simply relief at their absence. While the other boys in his class were talking about this or that girl from this place or that, Ash found himself having similar thoughts to the subjects of discussion—about his classmates. Gym class became an almost uncomfortable affair, as Ash strained himself in not eyeing up the other boys. He was caught only once, in the tenth grade, and slugged for it, earning Ash a black eye and earning the other boy—Jerold Mason, violent by record—a bruised jaw and an expulsion. While some of the boys believed that Ashleigh had been looking, and were disgusted by it, others were simply impressed that Ash had taken a hard hit from such a stocky boy as the other was, and managed to stand up and hit back.
Though Ash had, in fact, hit back, he was not expelled as the other boy was. When Ash and Jerold were called into the dean's office for questioning following the incident, Jerold immediately accused Ashleigh of "eyeing him up." Embarrassed and looking for an out, Ash dug quickly back into his memory to try to find another explanation. The memory of the incident was clear as crystal and sharp as a knife, and in retrospect he noticed, as though anew and in photographic image, an enameled red handle protruding from the pocket of the trousers Jerold had been removing at the time. Instantly Ash claimed to have seen that in the first place, for it to be the reason for the eyeing, and proclaimed that he only hit back for fear of being knifed if he didn't knock Jerold away from him. As it happened, the red handle had indeed been to a Swiss army knife, and it was for this that Jerold was expelled, while a secretly flabbergasted Ashleigh was let off with a warning for his strike (and, a query as to whether he was alright following such a potentially traumatizing experience).
The mutant could only marvel at his fortune, and wonder how on earth he'd dug that perfect picture out of his head. Later, at home, looking back on the rest of his memories, he found his recent ones to be just as crystalline clear as that one, and discovered that while his older ones had faded in level of detail—past a certain point (puberty, which he hit not long after being enrolled at Browning), he didn't seem to be missing so much as a minute visually, except for the breaks in which he had slept. Only the visual parts of his memory were so acute—the other senses associated tended to fade just as normally as any memory, so that certain visuals were returned tasteless, odorless and silent—but it was still a new and surprising discovery.
There were two boys whom Ash trusted enough to divulge this secret to: a tall black boy by the name of Darick Richards, and a heavily muscled young man called Ramsey Winston, both of whom Ash had met as members of the track team. Neither believed him, of course, demanding that the other boy prove it. Ash immediately told both of them what exactly they'd each been wearing the first time he met either of them, what each of them had ordered for lunch for the past week, and in which order Darick had stuffed his books into his bag after the last class they'd had together. Both boys were surprised, but still suspicious and doubting. A sort of "moment of truth" came one day after school. The three of them were lounging in Darick's living room, while his parents were out. As happens with teenage boys, chatting turned to joking, turned to verbal jabbing, turned to roughhousing. The culmination came when Ramsey, with Ashleigh in headlock, staggered the both of them sideways into one of the room's bookshelves. Books tumbled to the floor, and Darick instantly panicked. His father had a meticulous (and altogether unintelligible) order for his books, and should even one be put back out of place, he would notice—and all three boys would be in serious trouble. Judging on spine width, cover color, and text color alone, Ash managed to get all of the books—a good hundred of them—back on the shelf in proper order. Mister Richards never so much as mentioned one being wobbled out of place. After this, Darick and Ramsey were pretty much convinced of the validity of Ash's claims.
The only real disappointment Ash held in his newfound power was that it didn't grant him any substantial help in his studies—though it aided him greatly in his visual art courses, and though he could perfectly remember the shapes and symbols on a sheet of formulas or exactly visualize the positions of the hands of a clock in his more recent memories, he was no more able to properly interpret them than before he'd discovered his power's existence. He struggled through his studies still, begging help from his friends as well as various tutors to make it through his math and science courses.
One of these tutors seemed to be more interested in Ash than in tutoring him, intrigued by the rumors of what had gotten Jerold Mason kicked out, which were still circulating a year and a half later. The boy, Simon Temple, one year older than Ash and his two friends, began stopping the trio in the hallway "just to talk," moving to get in line for lunch at the same time, asking to join the three after school. Ash, Darick and Ramsey indulged the other boy; Simon was doing no harm, he wasn't as annoying as he could be, and he was a lot bigger than all three of them. Eventually, Simon invited Ash to "do something after school" while Darick and Ramsey were in track practice. Again, Ashleigh indulged the other boy. It was only when the two were alone in the boy's home that Simon confessed an attraction to Ashleigh. Ash, more than anything, was surprised at himself for not being very surprised at the confession, nor altogether averse to the notion. The two began seeing each other semi-romantically, and, before long, sexually. The relationship ended on an amiable and expected parting-of-ways after the school year ended, as the newly-graduated Simon went across country to attend summer college courses. Though that was Ash's only steady relationship during his high school years, he did entertain more than a few other sexual encounters in his senior year. And while his relationship with Simon allowed Ashleigh to call himself openly gay at school, he knew better than to mention his "sexual deviance" to his Catholic family.
Through his successes in studio art, English and his foreign language choice, Spanish (which he knew fluently from his home life regardless), Ash was able to scrape a grade ranking just above the middle of his class in his senior year. Though he expressed an interest in art school, his parents refused to pay for tuition to any such institution, on the grounds that "artists can't make real money in the real world," and "don't make any real contribution to society." Eventually, and with some frustration, Ashleigh ended up simply applying to the same college as Ramsey and Darick—Columbia University. Currently, he is in his sophomore year at the school as an undeclared studio art major. He continues to live with his family during breaks and on multiple random occasions throughout the year, though he does share an apartment with Ramsey and Darick not far from the university.
