✦ RUDY PANKOW, CIS MALE, HE / HIM ✦ FREDDIE CODRINGTON the TWENTY FIVE year old PART TIME LIFE GUARD AND PART TIME BARTENDER AT MIDNIGHT TEASE has been in Hidehill for TEN YEARS. Whispers on the streets are that the CLOSE FRIEND to Sydney Love lives in MOSSY CREEK and are said to be FIERCLY LOYAL and SELF DESTRUCTIVE but I guess we’ll find out for ourselves. { Charlotte, 28, gmt, she/her. }
‘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’
TW: HEAVY DRUG ABUSE, PARENTAL & SIBLING DEATH, MENTAL HEALTH, NEGLECT.
full name — Frederick James Codrington nickname(s) — freddie, freddie boy, fredster, Fred. name meaning — peaceful ruler age — twenty five date of birth — april 1st place of birth — Hackney, london, england current location — Hidehill, Tennassee gender — cis-male pronouns — he/him sexual orientation — homosexual
Frederick James Codrington was born two minutes after his sister, Francesca Jane. Although born might be the incorrect word for the events that occured on the 1st April 2001. As the rain smacked violently against the windows of a run down housing estate in Hackney, Frederick and Francesca were forced into this world.
Jodie and Douglas Codrington were 17 when they were thrust head first into parenthood. Two children who really did not have a clue how to be parents. Of course, they loved their children as much as they could, but they did not yearn for them. They wanted to be teenagers. They wanted to go out to nightclubs with their friends and smoke joints in the park, they wanted to bunk lessons and argue with their own parents about curfews. But oh, how newborns leave a stain on the lives of the young.
Still, the newborns turned to toddlers and eventually children being raised in a small two bedroom housing estate in East London. To anyone looking in, Freddies childhood was nothing exceedingly special - he attended a local state school on the verge of closure, he ran wild around the estate with his peers, he was always seen kicking a ball around the youth club. He was charming and well liked, always a mop of messy curls and shit jokes.
By the time the twins were four, Jodie was trying her best and Freddie’s earliest memories were of his mother leaving for work at 3.30 am and arriving back in the early evenings. She had a look of exhaustion on her face but always pushed it aside to spend time with her Freddie and his twin sister, Frankie. She never missed a family dinner or a bedtime story. She was the foundation from which Freddie became Freddie.
But while Jodie stepped up the plate, Douglas didn't try, seemingly struck down with peter pan syndrome and refusing to grow up. He was a dominant present in the home, despite doing literally fuck all and Freddie learnt to hate him from a young age. He hated the way he shouted and swore at his mum, and the way he would smash bottles when he was angry, he hated the way he never helped them with their homework, and the way Freddies uniforms always smelt of cigarettes and beer.
Freddie had always been a sensitive soul, and while his mother was the lighthouse that guided him home, his sister Frankie was the anchor that kept him stable amongst dangerous waters. Freddie was the sensitive twin, the one that ought to be handled with kid gloves. He was impulsive in ways, full of energy and unable to sit still, definitely not as bright as his brilliantly quick sister. Frankie was always superior in freddies mind, even if nobody ever said it. She was clever, she found it easy to make friends, she was as sporty as he was, with a quick tongue and sharp mind. Freddie was a ball of chaos, using his voice to compensate for his difficulty with maths and english, throwing his energy into football and most of all being his sisters cheerleader. Freddie never resented Frankie, but nor did he idolise her. No, Freddie was just always silently aware that Francesca codrington was the better twin, and he was always happy with that. He would never know that she felt it to be the other way around. Frederick Codrington was both 90 seconds before Francesca Codrington, but she was always his big sister.
Nobody knew Freddie like his sister, and nobody ever has since. even in childhood, she could see his mind descending into dark places. The boy with his heart on his sleeve, everything was felt in extremes. You see, when Freddie was seven he didn't just get a few words wrong in his spelling test, he had failed his entire family and they would hate him. At four he hadn't just scored his first goal in football, he had won the fucking olympics!. At eleven he hadn't just gotten a detention, he was useless and stupid and everyone in school knew it. There was never a middle ground with Freddie. It was all or nothing, molehills become mountains, sand didn't become castles, but cathedrals. Frankie was the anchor that didn't just keep freddie safe against unstable waters, but against his own mind. She could feel, perhaps even sense, the descent. She could halt it.
When Freddie was nine, the world he knew would flip on his head and leave him changed forever. It was the year his father got in trouble with a local gang, and as a result decided to uproot the small family and move them across the fucking world. It happened overnight. The twins came back from school, Freddies knees scuffed and palms bleeding from football practice, dirt under his fingers, and his parents were throwing clothes into a suitcase 'too much trouble 'ere, alight?' his father had said so non chalantly, as if he wasn't blowing up their lives up in front of them 'nice fresh start, who don't love america, yeah? i'll even take you to fucking disneyland, you'd like that, ay?'. they never went to fucking disneyland.
Freddie didn't adapt as he should have. While his brilliant sister took to their new surroundings like a fish to water, Freddie found himself becoming increasingly angry. His mind got louder and darker, a boy riddled with anxiety but unable to ask for help. He poured himself into the people around him, into his mum and sister, into the friends he made in different cities, into hating his dad. if he could just capture everything he felt and channel it down one path, he might be okay, he might make it our alive. They started in Texas, but the trouble only followed, and so his first few years stateside consisted of living out of their car or whatever rundown motel they could afford. It was tense, and the violence within the family unit ( or more, between him and his father ) only worsened with each passing day.
Or at least it did, until he was thirteen and Freddie found a way to quiet his mind in a trailer park in Hidehill, Tennessee. It was a slow descent when he started using marijuana, soon joined by acid, ecstasy, mushrooms and cocaine. by the time he was nearing 16, crystal meth was his drug of choice and everything spiralled out of control. He missed his life in England, he missed playing football with his friends. But when he had tried crystal meth, he felt better about himself. All the years of underlying depression, self-doubt and crippling anxiety seemed to melt away. So he just kept doing it.
While his friends didn’t often see the darker side of his addiction, his family did. Anger, upset, frustration. Tears and tears and tears. He wanted to get better, he wanted to make everyone around him happy, but he was making everything worse and he just couldn’t stop. He focused again on football and being a good brother, a good friend, on keeping his anger and flailing fists in check, but would come home and steal from his parents. He would argue with his sister, and cry into their arms as he begged not to go back to rehab.
Freddie spent seven years in the thick of addiction. He lost his teenage years to a cycle of overdoses and rehab centres. 12-step programmes and sponsors he didn’t call. It took seven years for him to make it a year and a half sober. The most he had ever gone and for once, the future looked bright. A party with his closest friends, a cake to celebrate eighteen months. It was hopeful. and then the depression came back.
Freddie relapsed for the first time that night. Frankie had felt it, somehow, and drove two hours to collect him. Nobody knew, not even their parents. Relapses would happen, they would just work from there.
at twenty three, he had gone a year without using again. the relapse felt forgotten, he had found himself a job, he had kept himself out of trouble. He was surviving the best he could.
And then the world came crashing down for the final time two years later. Freddie was with his best friends when the call came in. His dad was on the other line, it was the second time Freddie had ever heard him cry. . But this cry was different. It was guttural. His mother and Frankie had gotten into a car accident on the way home from a ski trip. They had died on impact. Freddie sat in his friend's living room, staring at the ceiling, his heart ripped out on the floor in front of him. He didn't tell them. And at the end of the night, he got on his bike and drove into a tree. A broken leg. A damaged bike. That was all.
his mothers diary was found in her suitcase. Freddie knows he shouldn’t have, but he read it anyway. It dated back years, and he was a heavy feature across the pages.
‘ if you could take all the words in the language, it 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 a 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’
it's been three months since his mother and sister's death, and Freddie will still tell you he is fine. But that would be because he hasn't told a soul. His sister and mother were taken back to England for the funeral, and Freddie just tells everyone thats where they live now, with his mothers parents. He wants to just be Freddie. But he’s not Freddie, and he’s not fine. He’s not sure he ever will be again. His father does not help, he was always useless but now hes even more so, and more than anything, Freddie, the boy who has only ever sought human connection, feels so alone. There are signs, however, that things are not right. It can be read in the way he has been missing work, or the way his fists go flying at the smallest trigger. It can be seen behind his eyes, and the spark that seems to have dimmed.
