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( CONTENT WARNINGfor a suicide attempt, depression, and mind control that results in someone being forced to commit suicide )
ROWAN ELIZABETH CARTWRIGHT was born December 17, 1992, to Evelyn Cartwright and Joseph "Joey" Cartwright. She has lived in Mystic Falls, Virginia, and was raised alongside Elena Gilbert, Bonnie Bennett, and Caroline Forbes since she was old enough to remember, their parents all being friends. Matt Donovan and Tyler Lockwood eventually joined their childhood friend group, but it was always the girls that was seen together the most, closer than sisters for the most part. They would often do everything together. Sleepovers, school supplies shopping, trick-or-treating.
It was when they were all in middle school, around eleven and twelve years old, that things started to shift. It was small at first. Miniature fights between Caroline and Elena about wanting to use the same nail polish, one of them being shoved to the side whenever they were playing dress up and the others wanted first chance at the mirror. Elena started keeping a diary, and thus revealed less and less of her secrets, until the other girls got diaries too, trying to follow Elena's lead. Then the interest in boys came. Caroline was the first to start gushing over boys, mainly pop stars in magazines but sometimes boys in their grade. Bonnie was second, and Elena was last. Rowan ended up being the odd one out, because she didn't see what her friends saw when looking at boys. She didn't see cute smiles or endearing messy hair. She just saw regular boys. They were the same as they always were, and Rowan didn't understand why she wasn't feeling the same way. Eventually, she started faking it, watching what her friends did and how they reacted and repeating their actions with enough confidence to be believed.
She was fourteen, a freshman in high school, when she realized that the smiles, the hair, dimples in cheeks—they were all things she noticed in girls, not in boys. Rowan pulled away slightly from her friends after that, going over and over it in her head until she felt nothing but panic. When she reached back out to her friends, she doubled down on the boy talk. If Caroline liked a boy, Rowan liked him, too. If Bonnie liked a boy, Rowan would fawn over him and agree with Bonnie until the other girl was beaming. And if Elena liked a boy...well, she didn't much like the boys Elena liked. So when Elena started dating Matt Donovan in tenth grade, Rowan became nasty, mean in a way that Caroline copied and Bonnie and Elena grimaced but laughed at, not taking it too seriously. All four of them joined the cheerleading squad that year, and that combined with Elena's status as Matt's girlfriend shot them up into the social hierarchy at the school. They all became different versions of a popular girl, stereotypical almost in their behavior. Elena was the nice girl type, Bonnie the good girl type, Caroline the queen bee type—and Rowan became the mean girl, harsh where Bonnie and Elena were kind, cruel where Caroline was passive aggressive. It was a good way, in Rowan's mind, to keep herself safe. Her secret safe.
It was the spring before eleventh grade, their junior year, that Rowan started struggling with depressive episodes. She didn't know what they were at first, and didn't voice her problems until she impulsively took a handful of pills at one of Tyler's parties. She had only wanted to dull the pain and numbness she was in, but she'd been drunk, and not thinking. She woke up in the hospital on a 71-hour watch; they thought she had attempted suicide, and whatever Tyler had said to the 911 dispatchers and doctors had confirmed it. Her parents shoved her into therapy after that, and her therapist gave her medications to treat her depression. It was during her long recovery that Elena Gilbert and her parents' car ran off Wickery Bridge, and Elena's parents died as a result. Rowan barely managed to be at the funeral before her parents sent her back to the treatment center, and so she wasn't available to Elena as much as she would've liked. By the time Elena came back for the start of junior year, their friend group was fractured, and Rowan was as distant as ever.
