THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: Alis Tan Age: Twenty Class Year: Junior Position: Goalkeeper, #29 Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: Death, mental illness, drug use, suicide attempt
Death hung over her, walked one step behind her. That was what happened, when the person you were closest to in the entire world was taken from you so suddenly. She’d say that having her twin sister ripped away felt like she’d forever be only half of a whole—but that didn’t seem quite right: Evelyn had taken a piece of Alis with her when she went, and so she would always be even less. But before that it was just Alis and Evie and their mom in a two-bedroom apartment, the three of them scraping out a life for themselves. Alis and Evie were technically identical, but anyone who knew them never seemed to have that much difficulty telling them apart: Evie could always be found on the Exy court, while Alis was always more likely to have her nose in a book; Alis was the brains, and Evie was the brawn—and, sometimes, with how outspoken and brazen she was, she seemed like the heart, too, the glue that held their small family together.
And when she died—suddenly, unexpectedly, collapsing in their living room after school one day—it was just Alis there. Alis, paralyzed with fear; Alis, calling 911 with shaking hands; Alis, wondering if she’d already waited too long, if it was already too late. And maybe it was, or maybe a little extra time wouldn’t have made a difference—but either way Evie was dead, and at only thirteen years old. They said that the most common cause of sudden death in teenagers was a heart defect, even if it was previously undetected. Afterwards, they tested and tested Alis, but found nothing wrong with her. She thought that she was supposed to be relieved, but mostly just felt like the recipient of some cosmic luck she hadn’t done anything to deserve.
With Evie gone so young, all of her hopes and dreams—all of the things she would never accomplish, like playing Class I Exy, like being a USC Trojan—seemed so stark. With Evie gone, all that was good about her loomed so large, and made it hard for Alis, left behind, to see what was good about herself. She wanted to be everything, thinking that if she just spread herself thin enough to cover all the cracks her sister left behind, then somehow everything would be okay, would be better. Maybe it would be better for everyone if she were a little bit more like Evie, and a little bit less like herself. And there was an image that played in her head every time she tried to go to sleep, every time she closed her eyes: her sister, falling so suddenly to the ground; her sister, still and lifeless even before the ambulances showed up. She wanted to exorcise it from herself, remember Evie the way she was in life instead of in death, and Evie was at her strongest and her most vibrant on the Exy court, standing fearless and prepared in goal.
The first time she tried out for her school’s Exy team, trying to fill her missing sister’s spot, she couldn’t block a single thing, and they laughed her off the court. But she wasn’t about to let that stop her: she spent hours every day with her sister’s old racquet in her hands, bouncing balls off of brick walls, only stopping when it was too dark for her to see the ball—and sometimes, not even then, going for as long as she could, trying to go by sound. It wasn’t like she was sleeping, anyway.
She made it to high school, and made it onto the Exy team—and despite the importance she’d placed on it, found that it didn’t change a thing. Her mother liked coming to her games, though, said that she liked to see her so determined, so focused. She had lost so much and worked so hard, and it seemed to bring her so much comfort to think that she had lost one daughter but had the other still intact—Alis didn’t know how to tell her that she was anything but, didn’t know how to tell her that she couldn’t sleep without the pills that she bought off a classmate, that her sister’s death was a nightmare that she lived over and over again. That, when her sister looked just like her, she couldn’t always be sure whose death she was imagining. How that had stopped seeming as scary as it should.
Everyone had always called her the more timid twin, but when nothing seemed to matter, her apathy and numbness became something more like recklessness: playing Exy like she didn’t fear pain or injury; pounding back shots with her teammates at the parties they weren’t supposed to have; mixing it all with the pills she kept hidden in the back of her dresser drawer when she finally crept home for the night—and, when it came down to it, feeling nothing about any of it. There wasn’t a breaking point, or maybe she’d just kept limping on past it too long for there to seem like there was. When asked about it, she could never say whether or not it was intentional—she didn’t think it was, thought maybe it was just inevitable with the way she was living, how little care she showed for herself. This time it was her mother’s turn to find one of the Tan girls barely breathing—but this time, no one died.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
And when she couldn’t hide it anymore, there was nothing to do but say it all out loud: the insomnia, the nightmares, the numbness, the way that she felt like her mother had always related more to Evie and didn’t know how to talk to Alis with her gone. And at the bottom of that well, she found a name to put that all she’d been trying to conceal—post-traumatic stress—and a better path forward. But she didn’t leave it all behind: she went back to playing Exy. She couldn’t be sure if she was playing for the right reasons, but her skill on the court had been hard-won, and she couldn’t help but want something to come out of all those late nights she spent practicing, when it felt like an Exy racquet was the only thing standing in between her and an even worse form of self-destruction.
Thinking about her future was something that felt new and strange to Alis, and even when she tried, it never seemed to come together. But she knew that she’d never imagined that Exy would be a part of it, that it would lead to something good for her—and so she was just as surprised as anyone else when Coach Wymack recruited her to the Foxes during her senior year of high school. College had seemed too expensive and out of reach for her, and while she felt certain that Exy wouldn’t be a part of her life after she got her degree, she wasn’t going to let that stop her from signing the contract, from using Exy as her step forward into something else—whatever that something else would end up being. And though she’d like to think of herself as too practical for such things, part of her couldn’t help but see it as a sign. It wasn’t the Trojans, and it wasn’t Evelyn, but it was still the Tan name on the back of a Class I jersey, and that had to count for something, had to mean that she’d done something right by her sister’s memory. And that maybe, after doing that, she’ll finally be able to put her sister to rest, and to find some measure of peace.
ALIS TAN is portrayed by JESSICA HENWICK and is TAKEN