Alice's status of "outsider," along with its baggage of valuelessness hasn't come from nowhere. She did not have the radiated love of parents to keep her warm and worthy, implanting, early on, her ideas of worthlessness and unlovability. Spending her early life in a cold, neglectful, foster home, Alice learned that love wasn't coming for her, and that she wasn’t important.

It is said that trauma is not had only from harmful experiences, but in dealing with those experiences alone. In that way Alice's early childhood was very traumatic, and if that were the extent of her story it would still be enough to result in the shell-shocked, discombobulated persona we've seen, but her story does not end there. At a tender age, having enough abuse at home, and emboldened by negligent supervision, Alice escapes her foster care, and her known life.

In the more urban area of where Alice grew up there's a shanty called "Strangers Row." It’s a properly tragic home of young, abandoned bastards and juvenile delinquents, on the streets of the city. A place reminiscent of a life long since lost, like some open air, 19th century, vagrant tenement. 

The folklore of the place is that it started as a somewhere fathers would abandon their young sons, as it had some sort of vague, almost frontier style, structure for homeless youths. Structure  in the sense that it's the place where you expect to see them, and where they are expected to stay. 

Older vagabonds who aged out of living on Strangers Row attempt to watch over their young successors, but with very minimal intervention, as the philosophy of hoboism is that of an almost overly egalitarian sense of personal freedom extended to everyone born into, forced into, or voluntarily come to accept the lifestyle.

Strangers Row is an incredibly dangerous place to live, and historically there have hardly been any girls there, save for the runaway teen passing through, juvenile delinquents smoking pot with their "street friends," or teenage lovers eloping from under the thumb of their parents for a night. Given most of the population's innate instinct to nurture a helpless orphan girl, and the rest of the populations penchant for murdering or raping them, it's a surprise to no one why you never see little girls on Strangers Row.

She already felt like a monster, somebody on the outs, then on top of that through her teachers - neglect and abuse – she has a core feeling of brokenness instilled in her. She's scared of being a product of her environment. She comes from a cold place, and she doesn't want to be like these people, because she knows how much it hurt her to be around them. But she knows that inside her is the capability to be just as bad as the people around her. It’s what she knows of life.

She already knew what it's like to exist as nobody, to hide, in a home of neglect. She knew how to tolerate, pain, sadness, loneliness. Accompanying parental neglect, one must develop the instinct for self-preservation and the skill to protect oneself against dangers mental, emotional, and physical. The exact math on this time in Alice's life is foggy, but we assume that she lived on Strangers Row for a period of about two years in her pre-teens. She survived for two years.

This is the person Alice has been hiding, the person she's been rejecting from her life, the reason she hates herself, and the reason it hurts her so much to share herself with the world. All the things that drained Alice of life from such a young age, became the skills she honed, making her able to survive this time of her life. During this time on her own, feelings of brokenness and worthlessness multiply exponentially, and like an inescapable stench penetrate her soul. Her aura. The entire presence of her being.