Clara was born second in a middle-class family. Her father is a pharmacists, her mother is a high school art teacher and she has an elder brother. The family originally came from France, and lived long in New Orleans where they thrived as pharmacists and scholars - or herbalists and witches, depending the age and who did you ask.
Her life was average, she grew like hundreds of others in her neighbourhood, except the summers, when she spent weeks down at her grandma, learning old stories and wandering on the dark streets. She loved the monsters and witches in every medium and Halloween was her favorite time - and not just because her birthday was on that day.
She was thirteen when her powers first manifested, when during a Halloween round a hobo jumped on her and her friends as they went through a park. Clara always had a big mouth and that enraged the drunk man who then turned physically agressive. That was when the swarm came, at first it seemed that from behind Clara, from under the bushes but the other girls later sweared that the bugs crawled out from under her clothes... That gossip cost many friends and the good reputation, she became the school's witch. After a few months of fruitless fight - and another incident with the janitor - she took up the mantle and became harsh, big mouthed, somewhat scary... and a bit lonely too.
She lived the life of the school's freaks, even had a few buddies, but no real friends for the next few years, until the supervillain attacks happened in the summer of 84. Then her parents decided to search for a safer environment, and that was when her grandma suggested that she knew someone, who might help. At the end of the summer, she enrolled into the Xavier Institute, under the recommendation of Gambit and Storm.