THIS IS YOUR GAME
Name: River Tate Age: Nineteen Class Year: Sophomore Position: Defensive Dealer, #17 Hometown: Brooklyn, Indiana
THIS IS YOUR MOMENT
TW: abuse, misgendering
They weren’t always as fierce as they are now, as uncompromising, as unwilling to accept any less than what they deserve. If what they are now is a phoenix, then they spent the better part of their life as ashes, ground into dirt and dust under the uncompromising weight of their father’s burning rage and their mother’s colder hatred. Living in the thin walls of that house was a seeming life sentence they shared with their older sister Dana—literally, as the two of them shared a room, even if they didn’t seem to share anything else, each of them preferring to lick their wounds alone and unable to spare any sympathy for the hurts of their sibling, because it was one they didn’t have to bear themself.
On the night of her eighteenth birthday, Dana lay on the floor of their room and said I don’t think I can stay here another day. They hadn’t thought anything of it, their lives had been unbearable from the moment they were born, and yet they’d both continued to endure them anyway. But they woke up the next morning and Dana was gone, just like that, River having missed their chance to say goodbye. They could never blame her for getting out when she could—in their house, it was everyone for themselves, and they had never been each other’s allies, only each other’s unwilling shields.
Though, sometimes, when their father’s fists would come down and there’d be no one else to take the brunt of it, they couldn’t help but feel angry—though it was mostly an anger born of jealousy, the unfairness that came from being the second, youngest child. But that unfairness became their fuel, and they started planning their escape, dreaming of the life they could have when they finally got away. Dana had traded Brooklyn, Indiana for Brooklyn, New York, living in a cramped shared apartment and working as many jobs as she could to stay afloat. She was only a phone call away, she told River when they finally got up the nerve to call, but by unspoken mutual agreement they didn’t talk much. It wasn’t like either of them knew what to say.
Home was a crushing weight, and every day there seemed to another rock piled on top of them, pushing them further and further to breaking. But the thing that made them finally decide that, like Dana, they couldn’t stay another day, wasn’t home at all. Exy had always been their escape, a shit team in a shit town that barely had enough kids for a full lineup—but something that was theirs. Exy was the thing that they had carved out for themself, the court the place they could be themself, not holding their breath, not apologizing for their existence, not afraid.
But somewhere in there they’d miscalculated, and the easy camaraderie they’d found among their teammates soured they second they opened their mouth and said actually, I’m not a boy at all and found that it didn’t seem to mean or change a thing. That no one understood, and so they just acted like they had never said anything at all, treating them like the boy they’d always been assumed to be. Any attempts to say otherwise, to stand up for themself, were shut down with rapidly expiring patience, why do you always have to be so difficult? the refrain that followed them off of the court and out of the boys locker room. They were sixteen years old, and suddenly it didn’t seem enough to wait anymore. I need out now, they thought to themself, I need life to get better now.
And so they stole their father’s credit card and bought a bus ticket to New York, showed up on Dana’s doorstep with a duffel bag and a desperate plea: please, you can’t make me go back. They hadn’t called ahead, they knew she would have told them not to come. But once they were already there, she didn’t have the heart to turn them away. And, when their father came calling, she stood her ground for their sake, and her threats to involve the police were enough to get him to back down, and for River to be allowed to stay—to be free.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
It wasn’t always easy: balancing school and practice and bussing tables at the diner where Dana worked to help her pay their bills. And it wasn’t like they and Dana had ever learned to communicate, or be kind to each other, and their smallest complaints piled silently on top of each other until they got into screaming matches as bad as any of the ones the four walls of their home back in Indiana had ever seen. But it was a life, with a team and a fucked-up little family and a name they had picked for themself, and that made up for everything else.
And River decided that they were done with taking what life handed to them, that they were going to go out and grab life with both hands, and do everything they could to make it better for themself. They’d suffered enough, and for so long. They deserved it. And so, their senior year of high school, they didn’t just send their stats and tape to Coack Wymack, they took a twelve-hour bus ride to deliver them to him in person after a Fox game. Well, as long as you’re here, kid, Wymack had said, and put them through their paces on the Foxhole Court before putting them on the bus back to New York with his phone number and instructions to look out for a contract, which came not even a month later. Fall took them to Palmetto, where they’ve kept that determination alive, through both their freshman year and into their sophomore one: a relentless drive to win both on the court and off of it, and to heal—to never feel trapped, or afraid, or unhappy, or anything other than wholly themself.
RIVER TATE is portrayed by CHARLIE HEATON and is OPEN
