THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: Arlo Booth Age: Twenty One Class Year: Senior Position: Striker, #11 Hometown: Bridgeport, Connecticut
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: drug mention, cancer mention
For as long as he could remember, it was Arlo and his father. His mother, or so the story went, stuck around just long enough to leave Arlo with his father, Maxwell, and then she was gone. No forwarding address, no phone number, no hint of her in the years that followed. And while Maxwell had girlfriends that came and went—but mostly went—through Arlo’s childhood, there was nothing that was constant except for Arlo and his father and the thin walls and peeling wallpaper of their cramped one bedroom apartment.
That, and the drugs: Maxwell Booth was one point in a distribution network that stretched across the entire East Coast. He received massive shipments from his mysterious superiors, and distributed them to dealers who pushed their product across the entire state. And Arlo, though uninvolved, wasn’t ignorant of his father’s work: his business was often run out of their apartment, when Arlo was at Exy practice or sent to the corner store and subtly encouraged to take the long way there and back.
Arlo was at practice the day his father was arrested, leaving the court afterward to find a police car waiting for him instead of his father. In the months that followed, Maxwell plead guilty to several felony drug offenses, and was sentenced to over a decade in federal prison. And with his father behind bars and a mother long gone, Arlo found himself thrust into foster care at the age of thirteen. He bounced around from home to home for a time, until he found one that stuck longer than the rest: the impossibly wealthy Masseys.
With a child lost too young to cancer, the Massey house suddenly seemed too small to its grief-stricken parents, and so they opened their doors to children in need, becoming one of the nicest foster homes that any child in Fairfield County could ever hope to live in. And, of course, they were keenly aware of that fact—as well as aware of how well their boundless generosity played out in the society pages, elevating them far above their less-saintly peers.
And in the midst of that revolving door of children, the child that they had left got lost. The foster children seemed so much easier: the bar was already set so low, all they had to do was be there when the foster children’s own parents were not. But their own son—he had expectations, he had memories of the family they once were, and his parents found it difficult to look at the son they had without remembering the one they lost. Theo Massey was a well of resentment hidden behind the same polite smile his parents had so perfected, and he made no secret of the fact that he preferred Exy to dinners with his parents and the five or so other kids he was forced to share them with.
Arlo knew Theo before they ever had bedrooms across the hall from each other: Arlo played Little League in gritty Bridgeport while Theo played for the much wealthier Greenwich team. They were both strikers, and Arlo would have said that they were rivals, he had certainly taken losing to Greenwich much harder than losing to anyone else. But when he moved into the Massey home they became teammates, and in the end it turned out he did have something to thank Theo for: their closeness in age and their mutual love of Exy made Arlo a natural companion for Theo, and their friendship led him to outlast all the other foster children that came and went from the Massey home.
But even though they lived in the same house and went to the same school and played the same position on the same team, Arlo never lost sight of the differences between them: Theo had a family, while Arlo was just a temporary lodger. Theo could hug his father, while Arlo had to wait for one of the Massey parents to have enough free time and be willing to drive him to see his father in federal prison. Theo had everything. And Arlo? He was only borrowing. When he turned eighteen, he’d be out of the foster system, and he’d only have what he could fight for, only what he could grab hold of with clawed hands.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
Why should he have expected anything different? They graduated high school together, and walking across the stage was the only time that Arlo could remember coming in first when it came to him and Theo, and that wasn’t on his own merits, just the simple truth of alphabetical order. Because, after graduation, Theo was heading to USC, where he would join the ranks of the Trojans, golden and smiling. He’d have a home to go back to for summer breaks, a family to pick him up from the airport. Arlo’s father still had years left on his sentence, but Arlo’s sentence was a lifelong one: he would always be a misfit, he would always be a kind-of orphan. And so, it was only natural that when Theo got on a plane for California, Arlo got on one, too—except his took him to South Carolina.
But while Arlo had felt like a kind-of orphan since the day his father was taken away, he became a full-fledged one during his junior year, when his father died behind bars just shortly before he was due to be released. With no reunion to look forward to, Arlo focused all of his energy on the dream he had left: beating Theo, proving once and for all that he’s better than him, even if it’s just at one thing, just in one way. They were rivals before they were ever teammates, and so it seemed only natural that they were rivals again. But, on opposite coasts, the only way for them to face off is to make it to the Spring Championships—something that might be a sure bet for USC, but that seemed like more of a miracle for the Foxes. Arlo will do anything to get the team there, and while his single-mindedness makes him a force to contend with on the court, it can grate on his teammates—particularly Grant Rollins, who has the captaincy that Arlo has always coveted.
ARLO BOOTH is portrayed by SAMUEL LARSEN and is TAKEN
