What are challenges sticky has faced

Sticky (Travis Reichard), the main character, is a seventeen-year old white kid from a troubled background who s bounced from one foster home to another because of his anti-social behavior. Lanky, and with cropped raisin-brown hair, Sticky is the son of an absent father and a woman named Baby, who turns tricks to help support her only child, Sticky is so named because of his love for eating cupcakes as a child—he finds out as a teenager that his real name is Travis Reichard. When he is six, he is abused by one of Baby's boyfriends and is severely traumatized not long afterwards when she slashes her wrists in their bathtub. As a result, Sticky bottles up his feelings and develops a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which compels him to repeat motor actions like tying his shoelaces or counting money over and over again. This is traceable to the time when he witnessed Baby's suicide: the police find him rocking back and forth, back and forth as his way of easing the tremendous psychological pain he is undergoing. He keeps his feelings bottled up for the next ten years. Though Sticky does poorly in his schoolwork, and has attitude problems, his great passion is to be a professional basketball player, which he indulges at the seedy, down-at-the-heels public gymnasium called Lincoln Rec, populated by homeless losers and street denizens as well as men whose only glory is playing pick-up basketball. Outside of the hoops courts at Lincoln Rec, Sticky's one inspiration is his sixteen-year-old girl friend, Anh-thu.