THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: Graham Sosa Age: Eighteen Class Year: Freshman Position: Backliner, #19 Hometown: Elizabeth, New Jersey
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: incarceration
The apartment he grew up in always felt too empty—if was just him and his mom, who worked nights and often asleep when he came home from school, driving him outside in order to avoid disrupting her rest. And it was there that he found himself the group of friends that he would follow into his adolescence. Among them, Graham was always the youngest, the smallest, the one that was picked on—the runt of the litter trying to prove himself tough, saying yes to every dare and challenge. If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Graham was often asked, with varying degrees of exasperation, his entire young life. And he never wanted to admit that the answer was, maybe, yes.
And as he got older, the stakes were raised—underage drinking, trespassing, shoplifting, joy riding, vandalism—and Graham did it all. Calls from school became run-ins with the law, accompanied by warnings that soon he’d be too old for slaps on the wrist. You’re breaking my heart, his mother would say to him, to no avail, until eventually she stopped saying it. Either he’d already broken it, or she’d stopped caring. And then, one day, she was gone. No note, no warning, just an apartment devoid of possessions to let him know that she wasn’t planning on coming back. But he waited anyway, staying in the apartment until the bills piled up and the eviction notice came. And then he did what he always did—he relied on his friends, bouncing between them, all of their parents none the wiser that he had no idea where his mother was, or what her breaking point had been.
He’d been warned off of his friends for years, by everyone including his mother, but in the end they were the ones that had stuck around, when even she had not. He’d never listened before, and he wasn’t about to start, throwing himself into every cheap thrill and dangerous scheme with new vigor born of hurt—though he wasn’t prepared for how far things would go. Years of breaking rules meant that every risk they took had to be bigger than the last, until they took one that Graham, at least, couldn’t come back from: a trashcan bonfire in an abandoned building that quickly got out of control, quickly spread.
And when the police sirens came, they scattered—but Graham was the one who didn’t get away, who was scapegoated, taking all the blame when he refused to snitch on his friends. It wasn’t the first time he’d been inside of a courtroom: he’d been let off with warnings before, assigned community service—but this time he couldn’t escape juvenile detention. It was only a few months, but that was enough time to harden him, to teach him the lesson that no one had been able to teach him before: that he couldn’t trust anyone else to have his best interests at heart, to stand by him—that he shouldn’t rely on anyone but himself.
When his sentence was up, there was another problem: his mother was still nowhere to be found, and so there was no one’s custody to release him into. And so he ended up in a group home that seemed to have more in common with juvie than it did with anything else, bunk beds and strict rules and constantly shifting alliances. He’d played Exy on and off throughout his youth, and joining his new high school’s team was, at first, a way for him to get away from a place he refused to call home—but it soon became more, Graham avoiding the group home altogether in favor of spending nights in the locker room, behavior that his coach let him get away with until it got him in trouble with the group home’s staff, who warned that Graham’s behavior could constitute running away.
Graham didn’t care, but his coach did, making sure that Graham went home after practice even if he had to drive him there himself. But the more that he made sure Graham stayed in a place he hated, the worse he felt, until he was letting Graham spend nights at his house instead, tossing around words like temporary guardianship. There was only one problem: his son, who didn’t play Exy, didn’t take kindly to Graham’s presence, and the fights between them ended that talk before it could turn into anything real—but not before Graham had let himself hope that it would. So he went back to the group home, and he killed that hope, tried to look at his coach across the Exy court like he’d never let him down—because it wasn’t like he was the first person to.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
He kept playing Exy, but he never imagined that it could be anything more than a temporary escape, one that he was watching tick down day by day as his senior year of high school drew to a close. At the group home, they told them that he should join the military, that it was the only way he’d make something of himself—and, failing any better idea of what to do with his future, he started to consider it. But before he could sign his name to an enlistment form, Coach Wymack offered him a different contract, and a different future. He knew that his coach must have called Wymack, said that he had another lost cause for him, but even that wasn’t enough for Graham to want to forgive him. And so he signed the contract, but he didn’t say thank you, and waited for the day when he could forget that his high school coach ever existed.
He’d lost count of how many times he’d been told he wouldn’t amount to anything, lost count of the number of times he’d believed it. Being a Fox feels like the ultimate fuck you to everyone who had abandoned him, everyone who had written him off and, worst of all, everyone who had convinced him to write himself off. No one’s talking about him yet, just another kid with a sob story that Wymack plucked out of obscurity—but when he hits the court as a Fox, he’s determined that they will.
GRAHAM SOSA is portrayed by DIEGO TINOCO and is CLOSED
