#acup: lacey

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♬ Full Name: Lacey Renee Mikhailov ♪  FC: Abigail Cowen ♫ Alternate FCs: Odette Annable, Alexis Knapp, Casadee Pope, Bella Thorne ♪ Age/Birthday: 23 / October 30, 1995 ♫ Occupation: Baker at Snickerdoodle’s Bakery, cheerleader for April’s Showers ♪ Hometown: Sandusky, OH ♫ Personality: generous, stubborn, guarded, sheltered, ambitious

Take one part warm Ohio summer nights spent chasing fireflies through wide open feels, two parts Sunday church services, three parts abandonment issues, and one part good, traditional Russian cooking, and you have the recipe for Lacey Mikhailov’s childhood. While she won’t go into too many details if asked about it, she likes to tell people that her youth was everything she could’ve hoped for, and to an extent that’s true. Would she have liked to have a mother who was present rather than someone who spent every opportunity away from home? She absolutely would have. But when Brenda Mikhailov got pregnant young by a man she met in a fit of passion one night, it laid the groundwork for what would be Lacey’s life spent with her grandfather as her source of emotional and physical support.

There was never an official discussion about Ilya raising Lacey full-time; it just sort of gradually happened. Brenda asked him to babysit for a day and it ended up being the whole weekend. She said she would take Lacey to her doctor’s appointment, and then call up Ilya last minute to say she couldn’t and he would have to. By the time Lacey started school, it was automatically assumed that her grandfather would be the one to sign her up and take her to her first day, something he did with a giant smile and about three dozen photos snapped and added to a scrapbook that’s still sitting on Lacey’s bookshelf to this day. When Brenda told Ilya that she wanted to “see the world” and move out of state later that year, there wasn’t even a question on if Lacey would be going with her or not. Brenda packed her bags and gave her daughter and father a hug, and then drove off without seemingly any second thought.

Despite growing up outside of the traditional nuclear family unit, Lacey didn’t want for anything. She never knew Brenda as her mother, so her loss didn’t sting much during childhood. Ilya wouldn’t let it. Instead, he would spend their time after he got off of work and she got home from school in the kitchen, showing Lacey how to sift flour and press dough to her heart’s content. Back in Russia, he’d been a baker by trade, and watching his granddaughter fall in love with it was nothing short of beautiful. Lacey always insisted on making homemade treats for her school’s Halloween and Christmas parties, and that’s when she came to love the expression on people’s faces when they first tried her creations.

When she as in middle school, her aunt Dory moved in to give Ilya a hand raising Lacey, and the three of them became a family that was thick as thieves. Ilya and Dory were at every science fair, church program, and poorly-played volleyball match of Lacey’s life and she couldn’t imagine it any other way. Last she heard, her mother had settled somewhere in Washington where she married and had three replacement kids whom Lacey has never met. She doesn’t even know if her step-father or half-siblings know she exists, but she tries not to think about it too much. If you ask her, she drew the best lot in life. She would express to her Aunt Dory (not her grandfather, never her grandfather — the last thing she would want is for him to think he was anything less than amazing) about how it hurt to think about her biological mother not wanting her, something that is still painful to think about even now that Lacey has grown. Dory would assure her that it was entirely Brenda’s loss, but that has never completely dulled the ache.

Losing Ilya was painful, but not entirely unexpected. Lacey was in her junior year of college at the time, earning an obligatory business degree in the hopes of one day opening her own bakery. Saying good-bye to the person who taught her everything she knew definitely left her feeling lost, and she wound up taking the following semester off of school because she simply didn’t have the capacity to give it the focus it deserved. To this day four years later, she still doesn’t really know what compelled her to go to New York in the first place. She’d talked it over with her family and friends, idly wondering if maybe a change of scenery would do her some good, and before she knew it her and her aunt were looking at flights for the East Coast.

It was originally meant to just be a vacation for the two of them, to help set a new pace now that her and Dory were learning to cope. But it’s like as soon as the plane touched down in the city, Lacey felt at home. They were only there for a week and a half, hitting up the city’s tourist traps as well as tracking down some little hole-in-the-wall places. Still, within the span of a few days after returning home to Sandusky, Lacey told her aunt she wanted to move out there for real. By the end of the year, Lacey found herself settling into the city, feeling both terrified and unbelievably proud all at once. Her grandfather had always told her to never hold herself back and being inNew York felt like the ultimate testament to that.

She finished up her last year of classes online and earned herself a degree in business, and was able to soon find a job at a bakery that her and her aunt had stopped by during her first visit. Currently, Lacey’s biggest source of pride has come from introducing a few recipes taught to her by he grandfather into the small business, which now offers a select range of Russian desserts courtesy of her. The next step is to actually invest in her own business, the same goal she’s had since she was little. Lacey’s vision board is filled with photos and inspiration to keep her focused on that goal, and every last bit of money goes into an account to help her get her feet off the ground.

Pets: Two cats with her, plus two more living with her aunt back in Ohio. The little babes in Ohio (Peanut Butter, or PB, and Jelly) were much too attached with her aunt’s dog and Lacey couldn’t bear to separate them. She adopted Eva and Zsa Zsa shortly after she moved to NYC. Zsa Zsa is definitely the more rambunctious of the two and likes to hide in places to spook Lacey (and now her roommates). Good luck opening a cabinet to not find her sitting in there. Eva is much more relaxed and introverted and likes to camp out on Lacey’s pillow, but she’ll wander out to ask for pets every so often.

♬ April’s Growers

Lacey has an entire lifetime’s worth of love to give and was raised knowing the importance of giving back, so she recently signed up to join April’s little committee. She makes sure to give her fellow members nothing but support, but she does struggle when it comes to voicing her own ideas. She’s working on it though, and the more comfortable she becomes in the group, she hopes to be able to give it her all without hesitation.

♪ Jemma Sterling

Coming from a small city, Lace way underestimated how much she’d be able to live by herself in New York. She was able to rent a room from a nice little Russian couple in Brighton Beach for a while, but ultimately decided to move closer to work and ended up finding a roommate in Jemma. She is… more than a bit intimidated by how open and free Jemma is with herself, and she’s seen more of her naked than she ever planned on, but Lacey can appreciate how to-the-point and amusing her roomie is.

♬ April’s Showers Cheerleaders

Lacey loves spreading positivity and showering people with support, so when she first became aware of the little cheering squad for the soccer team, she jumped right in to join. She enjoys all the other ladies, and despite knowing almost nothing about sports, she’s trying to at least get to know them better and have them teach her the ins and outs of soccer.