Name: Marley Reid
Age: Twenty Two
Class Year: Sophomore
Position: Offensive Dealer, #9
Hometown: Roanoke, Virginia
TW: alcoholism, abuse, pregnancy, miscarriage
Born into a falling-down house on the wrong side of town, Marley was never supposed to amount to much, never meant to be anything bigger than the city she lived in and the name her father had given her. Her father was a criminal, but he was far from a mastermind, what small amount of infamy he had was due to being a small fish in an even smaller pond. But it gave him an exaggerated sense of his own importance, and with a small cadre of thugs to carry out his bidding, Patrick Reid exerted just enough control over his neighborhood and the surrounding blocks to be threatening. But no one was more afraid of him than his own children. Behind the walls of their run-down home he turned from a lowlife bookie and racketeer into something truly frightening: a monster soaked in alcohol, all flying fists and broken glass.
His wife left when their two daughters were still small, Marley hardly remembered her and her younger sister Emma didn’t at all. But despite his children’s lack of memory, her loss affected Patrick deeply: he held onto his children with an iron fist, viewing them as extensions of the mother they couldn’t remember, and thus just as prone to leaving, to disappointing him. They were guilty by association, and he punished them for her sins.
With their mother gone, it fell on Marley to be the responsible one, a surrogate mother to her sister and keeper of the household for her father. She took Emma to school and helped her with her homework, she cooked dinner for her father and whichever of his associates he brought home with him, she did the washing up when they passed out in the living room, holding her breath and hoping they wouldn’t wake up until she was finished and safely in her room. Those were her duties, but that wasn’t her life: her life, her real life, she tried to live in the snatched and stolen moments that weren’t dedicated to someone else—and she dedicated those to Exy.
At night, when it was just her and Emma in the small bedroom they shared, they dared to dream of a better life: of Marley turning eighteen and taking them both away from their father’s house into some bright but indistinct future. Marley thought, even if she never said it out loud, that Exy might be the key to it, and she gave the game everything she had, everything that wasn’t already pledged to her father or her sister. But maybe her sister knew that all their dreams were impossible flights of fancy, or maybe Emma just couldn’t wait that long, because her freshman year of high school she ran away with her boyfriend, and she left Marley all alone to face their father’s wrath.
And even though she’d thought her father’s grip was already suffocating, after that he held onto her even more tightly than before. He needed to know where she was at every moment of the day, like a malevolent shadow dogging her every move, ready to punish her if she arrived home even a minute later than she said she would. At night he would grab her by the throat, breath reeking of cheap vodka, and make her promise that she wouldn’t be like her mother, or her sister, that she would never leave him. If you do, I’ll kill you, he said, and she felt that promise in her bones.
By the time she graduated high school she was beaten down, and she’d given up on dreaming of Exy taking her away from Virginia—and yet she received an offer to join the Foxes, a full ride to Palmetto State. She held the contract in her hands, pen hovering over the dotted line, and yet she couldn’t make herself believe it. Joining the Foxes might have bought her five years of safety away from her father, but after that? College Exy seemed miraculous enough, being recruited to a professional team or making Court seemed like an even more impossible dream. And so Marley didn’t let herself believe in it, and forced herself down a different path, one she told herself was practical even if it was joyless. At eighteen she married Samuel Lawrenz, a bookie working for her father, and put down her racquet. ‘Til death do us part seemed a better guarantee of her safety than the five years she knew she’d get with the Foxes. It was only simple math.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT
She passed hands: from her father’s care to Samuel’s, but soon it became clear that nothing had really changed. Though Samuel wasn’t a drunk like her father, he was a different kind of cruel. Sometimes, Marley thought, a worse kind: she would look in his eyes when he hurt her and see them clear and bright, and have no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing, that he liked it. The home they built was full of violence and fear, somewhere Marley didn’t want to bring a child into, but a child was exactly what Samuel wanted—and if the world had taught Marley anything, it was that men like Samuel got what they wanted, and she never did. When Marley became pregnant, things did get better. He doted on her, full of plans for the future and their soon-to-be-child. When she miscarried, however, he became a monster, and the brutal beating he gave her was the last straw.
Coach Wymack? It’s, uh, Marley Reid. I just wanted to ask—is that offer still open? He was the only person she could think of to call, the only person she knew outside of the city she grew up in, and therefore the only person who could take her away from that place. And despite the fact that she was injured, despite the fact that she hadn’t so much as held a racquet in the three years of her marriage, Wymack gave her the spot on his line he had promised her all those years ago. She saw little gametime her freshman year, spending it re-acclimating to the sport—and going to court with the Foxes’ support to get a divorce from Sam—but this year, she’s determined, she’ll prove to Wymack, the team, and everyone else who questioned Wymack’s decision to recruit her that she was worth the investment.
MARLEY REID is portrayed by FLORENCE PUGH and is TAKEN
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