BEAUTIFUL BOY.

full name — Frederick James Codrington

nickname(s) — freddie, freddie boy, fredster, Fred.

name meaning — peaceful ruler

age — twenty three

date of birth — april 1st

place of birth — Hackney, london, england

current location — Michigan state university, michigan

gender — cis-male

pronouns — he/him

sexual orientation — bisexual

Frederick James Codrington was born ninety seconds before his sister, Francesca Jane. Although born might be the incorrect word for the events that occured on the 1st April 2001. As the spring rain smacked violently against the windows of a run down housing estate in Hackney, Frederick and Francesca were forced into this world.

Jodie ans douglas codrington were barely 17 when they became parents. Nothing more than children who had no clue what it took to be parents. Of course, they loved the two lives they had bought into the world as much as they could, but they did not yearn for the reality they had created. They still wanted to be teenagers. They wanted to smoke joints in the park with their friends after dark and argue with their parents about curfews. They wanted to go to school and bunk off their lessons. They wanted to be like every other seventeen year old. But oh, how newborns leave a stain upon the lives of the young.

And yet, life continued as it always does. And The newborns became toddlers and eventually children being raised in a cramped two-bedroom flat in East London. To anybody looking in, Freddie’s childhood was nothing exceedingly special. He attended a local state school on the verge of closure, ran wild around the estate with the other children and spent most evenings kicking a football around outside the youth club until the streetlights flickered on. He was all messy curls and shit jokes, loud laughter and grass-stained knees.

By the time the twins became young children, nobody could say that Jodie hassnt stepped up to the plate or that she wasnt trying her best. Freddie’s earliest memories were of his mother leaving for work before sunrise and returning home exhausted in the evenings, her face worn down by long shifts and little sleep, yet still somehow finding enough of herself to sit with the twins at dinner or read bedtime stories curled up between them on the sofa. She was the foundation from which Freddie became Freddie.

Douglas, meanwhile, remained stubbornly trapped in adolescence. He shouted too loudly, drank too much, smashed bottles when angry and treated responsibility as though it were something cruelly inflicted upon him rather than something he had chosen. Despite contributing very little, he remained a dominant force within the household, and Freddie learnt to hate him from a painfully young age. He hated the way he shouted at Jodie. Hated the smell of beer soaked into school uniforms. Hated the tension that settled over the flat whenever his father walked through the front door.

But while Jodie became the heart of the family, Frankie became Freddie’s anchor. Nobody had ever known him the way Francesca Codrington did. Because Freddie felt everything in extremes. At seven years old, a failed spelling test did not simply mean he had performed badly, no, It meant he was stupid, unbearable, impossible to love. A goal scored during football practice did not make him happy, it made him invincible. There was never a middle ground within him. Molehills became mountains, joy became euphoria, embarrassment became catastrophe, sand castles became cathedrals.

Frankie understood this instinctively. She softened the sharper corners of him before anybody else even noticed they existed.

When the twins were nine years old, Douglas got himself into trouble with people far worse than him. The move to America happened almost overnight. One afternoon the twins returned home from school to find their lives half-packed into suitcases while their father spoke about “ fresh starts ” as though uprooting children was no more consequential than changing the channel on a television. There was promises of coney island and Disney land.

They never went to fucking Disneyland.

Michigan was colder than Freddie expected. Louder in some ways, quieter in others. Frankie adapted beautifully, as Freddie always knew she would. she made friends effortlessly, settled into school with ease and seemed to blossom within their new surroundings. Freddie, meanwhile, became angrier. His mind louder. Darker. He struggled academically, struggled socially, struggled with the unbearable homesickness lodged permanently beneath his ribs.

Football became the only thing capable of silencing the noise inside his head. And no, he was never going to call it fucking soccer.

On the field, Freddie understood himself. Fast. Useful. Wanted. Coaches loved him because he played as though he were constantly trying to outrun something unseen. The sport gave him structure where the rest of his life had none.

Then, at thirteen years old, Freddie discovered another way to quiet his mind. It began slowly. Marijuana first, then acid, ecstasy, mushrooms and cocaine. By sixteen, crystal meth had become the drug that hollowed him out completely. Addiction wrapped itself around Freddie so tightly that it became difficult to tell where he ended and the substances began. His friends rarely saw the worst of it. They saw funny Freddie, charming Freddie, the boy who made everybody laugh and made sure his friends got home safely after parties.

His family saw everything else.

The screaming arguments. The tears. The stealing. The apologies whispered desperately into his mother’s shoulder as he promised he would get better this time, truly this time. Rehab centres became painfully familiar. So did relapses. Freddie lost years of his life to addiction, bouncing between sobriety and self-destruction with dizzying speed.

And through all of it, Frankie remained beside him. Often angry, mostly exhausted. But always there. The anchor that kept him tethered.

Freddie spent six years trapped inside addiction before sobriety finally began to stick. Slowly rather than all at once. Eighteen months became two years, then three. Football remained the one stable thing in his life throughout recovery, and when he eventually enrolled in community college studying kinesiology, it felt less like passion and more like survival. Sport had saved him in many ways. Or at least delayed his destruction long enough for other people to reach him first.

Because the thing that truly saved Freddie Codrington was never football.

It was people.

Sponsors who answered late-night phone calls. Recovery workers who treated him like a person instead of a problem. Counsellors who sat with him through withdrawals and grief without asking him to become easier to handle. Professors who saw intelligence in him long before he could recognise it in himself.

Freddie worked brutally hard at college, terrified somebody would realise he did not belong there. He rewrote essays three times over, sat silently during seminars in fear of sounding stupid and carried a quiet shame about his intelligence despite achieving grades nobody would have expected from the boy he once was. His grades got better, but he didn't recognise jt like his professors did.

Then his mother died.

Suddenly. Cruelly. One ordinary morning stretched into catastrophe before the family had time to comprehend what was happening. There was no warning. No careful preparation. No final conversations designed to soften the blow afterwards. One moment she existed and the next she did not, and Freddie would spend months afterwards unable to understand how the world had continued spinning so normally without her inside it.

The loss of his mother changed the trajectory of Freddie’s life entirely.

Somewhere inside his grief, Freddie realised he no longer wanted to dedicate his life to sport. He wanted to understand people instead. Families. Addiction. Childhood trauma. The strange and painful ways human beings pass suffering between one another whilst desperately trying not to.

So he transferred to Michigan State University and changed his degree to Human Development and Family Studies. Frankie told him it suited him more anyway. She was always right about those things.

At twenty-three years old, Freddie should, by all accounts, be doing better than he is. He is sober. He attends one of the best universities in the country. He has professors who believe in him, classmates who like him and a future slowly unfolding in front of him despite everything that once threatened to destroy him.

And still, some days, he feels moments away from collapse.

And that is because nobody at Michigan State knows Francesca Codrington is dead.

Not properly.

Not beyond vague mentions of “family issues” and tired smiles and apologies for delayed assignments. Because Frankie only died three months ago, and Freddie has discovered there are very few socially acceptable ways to explain that losing your twin feels less like bereavement and more like somebody tearing half your internal organs from your body without anaesthetic.

He had been struggling for weeks beforehand. Restless. Quieter than usual. The old thoughts creeping back around the edges of his mind again. the exhausting ache of wanting to disappear into something numb and chemical and temporary. Freddie never explicitly admitted he was thinking about relapsing, but Frankie had always known him too well for words to be necessary.

She heard it hidden between pauses in conversation. Inside the exhaustion in his voice. Inside the way he kept insisting he was “ fine. ”

So she got in the car to drive to him.And she never made it there.

Somewhere between home and East Lansing, Francesca Codrington died in a car accident whilst trying to save her brother from drowning inside himself once again.The cruelest part of it all is that Freddie never relapsed that night.

He almost wishes he had. Because then perhaps her death would feel like it had purchased something.

Instead, Freddie attended lectures the following week hollowed out entirely, answering discussion questions and making coffee and laughing in the correct places whilst privately feeling as though the world had ended and only he had noticed.

His mother’s diary was found amongst her belongings months after her death. Freddie knows he should not have read it, but he did anyway. Years and years of entries filled the pages, and Freddie appeared within them constantly.

‘if you could take all the words in the language, it still wouldn’t describe how much I love those children. And if you could gather all those words together, it still wouldn’t describe what I feel for them.’

‘I worry sometimes that this … what’s happened is my fault. I wanted to raise my beautiful boy to be kind and empathetic. I worry it’s because he’s too kind and empathetic that he turns to drugs to cope. My Freddie .. he said the world is really ugly and everybody seems to be okay with it. He says everybody is out to make everybody else seem less human and he doesn’t want to be part of it or witness it. He says that’s why he does drugs. To make this world easier to process.’

‘he will sometimes send you funny emails. He prefers spaghetti over penne. Have you seen my son? Have you seen my beautiful boy? Tell him I miss him’

Freddie still reaches for his phone to text Frankie sometimes. He still hears her voice whenever things become difficult and still imagines what she would say whenever panic starts crawling beneath his skin. Some days he thinks grief has made him ridiculous for it. Other days he thinks loving somebody that completely must surely leave fingerprints behind somewhere inside the brain forever.

So Freddie continues forward because he does not know what else to do. He attends lectures and goes to meetings. He keeps his routines painfully intact because routine is currently the only thing separating him from self-destruction. He studies attachment theory and childhood development and grief psychology whilst privately feeling like a living case study himself.

But perhaps that is why Freddie understands people so well because Freddie Codrington has spent his entire life surviving things that should have destroyed him. Yet beneath all the grief and addiction and anger, there remains something painfully tender within him. A boy who still believes people can save one another if they try hard enough.