Name: Sydney McCray
Age: Twenty One
Class Year: Senior
Position: Backliner, #21
Hometown: Rocky Mount, North Carolina
She was eight years old when her mother didnât come home. Most of the time, it feels like her life didnât truly begin until that moment. Everything before it, every memory of her mother, seems to be an underdeveloped photograph, gauzy and impossible to bring into stark relief. Everything after that, however, she remembers far too well.
Her father had gone to the police, frantic, only to be turned away with derision. Your wife left you, they said, unconcerned. Sheâs probably living it up with another man. Shitty, but it happens. Some of them even looked at him with suspicion, like if she was gone then it was his fault, that he must have done something to make her want to leave. But her father was persistent, trying over and over again with the police even though it got him nowhere:Â My wife is gone, I know something bad has happened to her, please help me. But they went on ignoring him, right until the moment her body was found floating in the reservoir, over a month after sheâd disappeared. Murdered.
Thatâs how she remembers her mother, in the grisly photos they played on the news, in the empty space she left behind, in her fatherâs grief. The investigation consumed their city, especially after her motherâs murder was linked to several others, and then attached to the word serial killer. The police were suddenly attentive, full of the questions theyâd never asked before; their neighbors were pitying in the way a flock of vultures were pitying, looking to tear into any new information on the case, making her familyâs grief a public spectacle.
Her father folded in on himself. He didnât eat, he barely spoke, and it was all Sydney could do to get him out of bed, deliberately missing the bus to school because she didnât want to leave him aloneâand because she didnât want to face her teachers and her classmates, their pity and their gossip-mongering poorly disguised as concern. And, as the investigation slowed down without anything to show for it, it only got worse, especially where her father was concerned. Plagued by a house and a city that only served as a reminder that his wife was dead and a killer was still at large, he and Sydney left North Carolina and moved to Florida that same year to live with Sydneyâs grandparents.
But it never really went away. Her father was never the same, and Sydney grew up under his weight, the pillar that held him up and the anchor that kept him tethered to the real world, like without her he would have just slipped away and followed his wife. Her grandparents were only getting older as she did, and they were kind to a fault, falling prey to every predatory journalist or aspiring true-crime novelist that wanted to exploit their tragedy for the sake of a good story, for money. Sydney was the steel spine that held everything together, old before her time, loving to her family but showing a cold face to the rest of the world. Certain that any display of emotion or weakness would be seized upon and devoured, she decided when she was still very young that she would never give anyone the chance.
She thought sheâd had her life figured out. Sheâd graduate high school and get a job close to home, maybe take some community college classes if she had the time and the money, and take care of her family the way she had always done. Exy had been a welcome diversion during her high school years, allowing her to hone the strength that she needed off the court, but she never thought it held all the answers, and she was prepared to hang up her racquet the second she graduated. She wasnât trying to be scouted, and so it was a complete coincidence when Coach Wymack came to one of her games to look at a player on the opposing teamâand a fortuitous one when he found himself focusing on her instead, seeing something he recognized in the determined set of her shoulders and the way that she played.
SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOUâVE GOT
Her father and grandparents had been insistent, practically putting the pen in her hand and pushing her out the door: Youâve done so much for us, itâs time you do something for yourself. So she signed a contract and she packed up her belongings and she went to Palmetto, but she had one foot out the door her entire freshman year, convinced that something would happen at home and sheâd have to leave. Still carrying the weight of the world. The more she worried, the more she struggled in class and on the court. And, the more she struggled, the more she was faced with a new worry: that maybe she wasnât meant to be at Palmetto, maybe she wasnât meant to be in college, maybeâdespite what Wymack had told her when he recruited herâshe wasnât cut out to play Class I Exy at all.
She held it all in, as she had long since grown used to doing, never reaching out to Wymack or Betsy or even her own teammates, and she returned home after her freshman year having resolved to not go back. It was her father who talked her out of it, after the beginning of her sophomore year had come and gone, Wymack having respected her decision after she told him she wouldnât budge. He had tearfully told her that he realized, then, how much he had demanded of her, how unfair it had been, and that he would do better because she deserved to live her own life. She was back on the Foxhole Court a week later, like she had never left, though she still kept home in her heart, called home a little too often, doubted her fatherâs promises to changeânot because she didnât love him, but because she did, and so she knew how much he struggled, how much he hurt. But despite coming back, sheâs never quite opened up to her teammates, still keeping an entire world inside herself that no one else sees, still holding everything else at bay.
SYDNEY MCCRAY is portrayed by LAURA HARRIER and is TAKEN
