THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: Oz Mayweather Age: Eighteen Class Year: Freshman Position: Goalkeeper, #30 Hometown: Pontiac, Michigan
Related Bios: Dove Lowry
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: abuse, death, kidnapping
He used to burn brightly. A strutting peacock, always ready with a slanted smile and quick remark. Making people laugh, making them look at him. But that light is dimmed, now, a formerly silver tongue weighed down with all the things he won’t say. He learned it from his father. He had that magnetism, a born salesman who used his gift to sell people on things that weren’t real—on falsehoods, on cons. For a long time, Oz had that gift, too. But when he lost his father, he lost it.
It wasn’t a glamorous life, tricking people door-to-door or over the phone into handing over their money, a traveling salesman with a briefcase, a charming smile, and nothing to sell. Most of the time they didn’t even break even, moving from state to state in search of the next great payout, or fleeing from someone who’d been screwed over by his father’s machinations. All that moving never bothered Oz much: he was as flashy as his father, and he knew how to take whatever changes life threw at him. Wherever he went, he made a splash, and he never lacked for companions. It never quite felt like running, all of the different schools and the different places, or if it did it felt like running in slow-motion. At least until his father got caught.
Their life had always seemed so normal. He’d never though of his father as a criminal, and he wasn’t prepared to lose him. But he did what he had done in so many new situations before and didn’t show it: he put on a smile, and he adapted. His father was in federal prison, and Oz was placed into foster care when he was eleven, with single mother Candice Lowry and her adopted daughter Dove. They were a family, and they welcomed him in, and soon all his practiced posturing was less of an act: he was happy there, happy with them, and though he missed his father he found he didn’t miss the uncertainties that came with their life before.
Everything changed when his father was released. He was fourteen, and everyone was fighting over him: his father and the state and lawyers, with Candice doing her best to maintain careful neutrality, trying to encourage Dove to do the same. They were all talking about what was best for him, but Oz didn’t know what was best for himself, or what he wanted. And so he did the one thing he had never done before and stayed silent—even when they asked him. It didn’t matter: the court made its decision, which was to keep him away from his father; and his father made his own decision, which was to take matters into his own hands. To take him.
This time it felt like running. This time it was terrifying. Prison had changed his father, given him a new darkness and new debts and new so-called friends whose demands he couldn’t deny. If his father had hurt people before, it had been abstract, a loss in their wallets and the humiliation that came from being duped. But this time there was violence; this time there was blood. This time, they couldn’t pretend to be normal: they lived in dank motel rooms, Oz didn’t go to school. This isn’t the life I wanted for you, his father would say to him, but if Oz showed any fear or sadness that guilt morphed into violent anger, until Oz—normally so expressive—learned to numb himself and show nothing at all.
He was sitting alone on a motel room bed when the police burst in. After that, things happened very quickly, in a blur of police and lawyers and the word guilty, but the end result was that his father was going to prison again, but this time it was for kidnapping; and Oz was going back to live with Candice and Dove, but this time it was for good. He tried to fold himself back into his old life, but everything felt different. He felt different: he was quieter than he used to be, still trapped in that place he’d retreated to in the months with his father. He stuck tight to Dove’s side, even as he told himself it was for her sake more than his—she’d been disconsolate in his absence, and never quite seemed to settle after his return, like he could disappear again just as quickly.
She held on tight to him, and would have kept holding on, even after she got an offer to play for the Foxes, if he hadn’t done everything he could to push her away and toward Palmetto.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
In Dove’s absence, he took up Exy for the first time. He’d never played for real before, for a team, just messed around with Dove’s extra racquet when they were bored. He found that he was a decent goalkeeper, and that standing in the goal made him feel present and focused in a way that little else did. And so he kept with it. It made Candice happy, and it impressed Dove, who introduced him to the team with pride and took him to practice on the court when he visited her at school. Still, he was surprised when, during his senior year, the offer came to join Dove on the Foxes.
He knew that she had something to do with it: Dove was like that, headstrong and stubborn, willing to move heaven and earth for the people she loved. But he couldn’t bring himself to mind it—it was a future, it was something, a path forward where he was still having a difficult time finding one for himself. And he might not love Exy the way that Dove did, but he still didn’t want to let her down, didn’t want his new teammates to resent him for just taking up space, didn’t want Wymack to regret his decision. And so he works at it, putting everything he can into being the best goalkeeper he can be—and he found something he didn’t expect. Class I is a far cry from his high school’s dingy gym, and he likes the grandeur of it all, likes the lights and the attention and the spectacle and, underneath them, feels a forgotten part of himself starting to stir, a light just waiting to reignite.
OZ MAYWEATHER is portrayed by CHANCE PERDOMO and is OPEN
