The youngest of the four is also the tallest, and the group has never stopped finding that funny. Lena is 20, the baby of the band, and stands over all of them, which means every protective older-sister instinct in the group gets aimed upward. She is the sweet one, the one everybody babies whether she wants it or not, and she mostly lets them, because being adored is not the worst job in a band.
The Name
Her real name is Lena. Lacy is a nickname she earned before she could spell it.
As a little girl she refused to leave the house in anything that did not have lace on it somewhere, a collar, a trim, a pair of socks, and she would dig through drawers until she found some. Her family started calling her Lacy as a joke and the joke never ended. It turned out to be less a nickname than a prediction, because the girl who demanded lace at five grew into the girl you will read about below. Evangeline is the half she chose later, when the music needed a full name to stand behind. She picked it because people kept describing her paintings with the same word, angelic, and she figured if the work was going to get called that anyway, the name might as well agree.
Alameda
Lena grew up in Alameda, the island town across the water from Oakland, Irish blood on both sides, all dark curls, freckles, and green eyes. Alameda is a town of old Victorian houses and one of the biggest antique fairs on the West Coast, and both of those facts ended up shaping her completely. She spent her childhood wandering rows of vintage stalls with whatever money she had, coming home with old fabric, old frames, old dresses nobody wanted, and a growing certainty that the past was simply better dressed than the present.
The Painter
She studies painting and illustration at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and it is not a phase or a fallback. Lena has been drawing since she could hold anything that made a mark, and the work she makes now leans hard toward the thing she loves most, Renaissance painting, the soft light, the drapery, the faces that look like they know something. Her illustration work pulls those centuries-old instincts into modern frames, and the mix is unmistakably hers. She shares her work on her personal page, which for now is private.
The same obsession runs her closet. Lena's signature look is Renaissance fashion modernized, gauzy flowing dresses, most often in lavender, worn to class, to shows, to the grocery store, everywhere. It is not a costume she puts on for photographs. It is what she actually wears, the five-year-old with the lace socks fully grown and fully committed. Between the paintings and the wardrobe, she is the most visually complete person any of her friends know, a girl who figured out her whole aesthetic early and never saw a reason to leave it.
She works a job alongside school, and like the rest of the group, she keeps that part of her life to herself.
The Group
Lena met Catherine at the Academy of Art, and the two have been close ever since, the painter and the designer trading eyes on each other's work. Sammi is one of her best friends outside the family thread that runs through the rest of the group. When Lia started pulling everyone together to sing, Lena was the easiest yes in the room. She had the softest voice and the least fear about using it.
The Voice
In the band she is the light against Dahlia's dark. Her singing voice is the cute one, soft and bubbly and higher up the register, the sound of the youngest member being exactly who she is. She plays guitar too, and between the voice, the strings, the paintings, and the dresses, Lena is the group's whole gentle department, single-handedly.
The girls keep their full names to themselves, and we think that is exactly how it should be.
