VII: The Life He Left Behind Angelo Espinosa was born and raised along two siblings by his single mother, Estella, in a lower-income neighborhood in Los Angeles. By the time he could question it, he was also smart enough to know not to ask about where his father had gone to. Eduardo was gone and that was that. Although barely making ends meet, Estella managed to raise Angelo completely divorced from the problems that plagued the other youngsters of the neighborhood, and it wasn't until the boy fell in love that the threat of gangs, and joining them, finally loomed over the Espinosas. As it were, Estella didn't approve of her son's girlfriend, Tores, her cousin Lupo and their friend Gordo, all of which were 'flying colors' at the time. Angelo tried to convince Tores to quit that life, but just as Angelo acquiesced to his mother's pressure and avoided Tores around the older woman, Tores' was part of that lifestyle due to her own family and could not easily escape it. Things would change forever one fateful night when the four friends were cruising in Tores' car. Having decided to make peace with the rival gang, Tores crossed the border into their territory. Lupo and Gordo, however, had other plans, proceeding to pull out their guns and open fire. Angelo tried to reach for Lupo's gun but due to the mounting stress his grip was extremely compromised, his body reacting in chaotic fashion as his X-Gene activated, the trauma and fatigue causing Angelo to pass out. By the time he woke up, the car was on fire and some thief was reaching for his wallet. Lupo and Tores were nowhere to be found, Gordo and two rival gangbangers were dead and Angelo had a gun in his hands. He barely made it out of the car before it exploded, with the pickpocket being caught in the blast instead. With the unfortunate thief being in possession of Angelo's wallet he was later presumed dead by the police, and Angelo didn't clear up this misunderstanding, assuming Tores had a hand in shooting the two rival gang members dead. Trying to avoid any action to incriminate her, Angelo instead kept the gun as a reminder of that terrible night, and for the next few months he wandered alone. In the meanwhile his mutation worsened, and by the time he found himself knocking at the gates of the Snow Valley Academy Angelo had grown six feet of extra skin that hung loose on his body, giving him a garish and inhuman appearance. VIII: Leading the Blind Life in Snow Valley was something Angelo had to adapt to, hiding in plain sight of his teammates. Truth was that even among other mutants, the young man had to deal with the simple fact that his mutation was nothing impressive and extremely compromising in a physical sense. His peers, people like Monet, Paige, the Stepford Sisters, Thomas and Jubes all had more impressive powers and did not pay so dearly for them, looks-wise. His seniors, the Hellions, were even more impressive and no less perfect. Angelo's solution, however, was the same as it had always been: to tough it out, and smile. He had gone too far to quit now, and so he endured his own moments of insecurity to find in the Snow Valley students a new family. As he came to realize, most of them had a hard time adapting to their environment in their own ways, and Angelo found himself becoming the glue that kept them together. Even when things got dark, and they watched from the rec room as Apocalypse invaded Manhattan, Angelo managed to keep tempers in check. His tenacity and ability to connect with his team mates was something that did not go unnoticed, however, and as Tessa begun to design the Generation X roster, Angelo was one of her first picks. IX: Growing Into His Skin The Magistrate attack on the New Mutants-Hellions graduation in Westchester kicked off the year and forced Tessa's hand in creating the Generation X as White Queen recovered from the fight. Without the Hellions themselves and with Emma out of it, Snow Valley was too vulnerable and Angelo and his peers were drafted to form the Generation X, finally. There was, however, a small problem: they were absolutely terrible at it, and Angelo could see it. Be it due to insecurity, arrogance, standoffishness, immaturity, or a number of other factors, the Generation X was doomed from the start as they failed to launch time and again in the Danger Grotto of the Massachusetts academy. The petty arguments were frequent and the gambits for leadership or pranks kept setting the team back, which was where Angelo came in. Night after night, day after day, Angelo would pick one of his friends and talk to them, spend a day by their side and try to help them out. He wasn't really aware this had been the reason Tessa had picked him, but Skin played his part perfectly, and slowly the group begun to come together, just in time to face some of the most harrowing challenges in their lives. What seemed to be out of nowhere, the Massachusetts academy was stormed by the Black Queen of the Hellfire Club, Emplate and Blackheart. In theory that shouldn't have been a fight at all, and Angelo knew it from taking a quick look at how powerful their opposition was. However, backed against the wall, the Generation X fought to its fullest potential, and that included Angelo. During the fight, as he engaged the sinister Emplate, Skin's mutation developed further as the cannibal sunk his prehensile hand-tongue deep inside the Los Angeles native. Growing in size, density and strength, Angelo finally let go of his own reservations about his own powers and let loose, an euphoric feeling that allowed him to contribute to the fight in expressive fashion, even if the Generation X was defeated in victory: by the time they drove back their enemies, Synch's life had been claimed. They had lost their brother. X: The Family You Choose Angelo had developed his powers beyond what he ever thought possible. They had saved the school. They had come together as a team, as a family, and yet Thomas' death hung heavy over his head. He could not forget it. He could not unsee it. The fight mutants had attacked and killed mutants bore too much of a resemblance to his own life in Los Angeles, and the senselessness of it all hit him hard. He hid these feelings well, but after a brief talk with Emma and Tessa, he left the group as they transfered the remaining students to Westchester. For a while, Angelo just drifted, trying to understand what he was supposed to do, but after the Genoshan Genocide he realized he had to do something about his conflicting emotions. To return to his friends, his family, he had to find closure of his past, and so he returned to where he started. As it turned out, Tores had believed Angelo to be the killer of the rival gang members in that fateful night, showing she had not been responsible for them in the first place as well. Angelo learned that Tores was also a mutant, whose powers manifested that night, setting the car on fire. Armed with that knowledge, it became clear that, with both of them being unconscious, it had been Lupo that decided to shoot the gang members and arrange it so Angelo received the blame for it. Despite Tores insistance that Angelo don't do it, the young man decided to confront Lupo, only to find that the neighborhood had changed from his time there. Lupo was not in his usual spots, but at church with the other Purifiers, meditating on the divine providence that had been the massacre in Genosha. Much to his dismay, Angelo saw his own mother among them, and as he and Tores listened where they would not be seen, he heard Estella give her son, her angel, an eulogy, stating she was happy her sweet son had passed before he could see how the Devil had made the world around them with his spawn. Far from a pleasant experience, the revelations he had that day instead reaffirmed to Angelo of his place among his peers, the hurt inside something difficult to bear but in some fashion extremely freeing. He could now leave his life behind, and so he did, extending Tores an invitation to follow if she so desired, and joining the rest of the Generation X in the Xavier Habitat for Higher Learning.