#claudiabio

THIS IS YOUR GAME

Name: Claudia Jewell Age: Twenty One Class Year: Junior Position: Backliner, Vice Captain, #13 Hometown: San Diego, California

THIS IS YOUR MOMENT

TW: kidnapping

Her story may begin and end with Claudia Jewell, but it’s the middle that is perhaps the most interesting, and the middle is Daphne O’Shea. Claudia Jewell’s life was nothing of note: upper-middle-class parents living in California, each with respectable jobs and a large amount of love for their infant only child. But the worst tragedies seem to befall the most ordinary people, and such was the case when one-year-old Claudia was abducted from her mother’s unlocked car in a grocery store parking lot, left unattended for only a minute when she went to put the shopping cart away.

The O’Sheas, on the other hand, might have appeared to be a normal family, but the cracks were readily apparently upon further inspection. Martin O’Shea traveled often on business, leaving behind a delicate wife. Miranda O’Shea’s untreated postpartum depression after having their daughter Daphne spiraled into something that left her riddled with fault lines and fractures, and while her husband was away her daughter accidentally drowned in the bath. She could have sworn, she told the police much later, that she had only left her alone for a second. She’d panicked, unsure of how she could ever tell her husband what she’d done, until—and surely, she thought, it must have been fate—she saw a child that could have been the spitting image of her departed daughter. And so she took her, and Claudia Jewell became Daphne O’Shea, and when her too-busy husband returned from his trip overseas, he didn’t seem to know the difference.

Daphne was raised a princess: a father that, while often absent, spoiled her beyond belief, always returning from his business trips bearing gifts from faraway places; a mother that loved her beyond belief—but clung to her so tightly that she’d leave bruises behind. The guilt that Miranda carried was a poison, and it corroded the edges of what should have been a picture-perfect life. She’d sit up nights crying, only to wake Daphne in her bed to hold her and whisper apologies for things Daphne didn’t understand, because her mother wouldn’t explain. Her mother was near-terrifying thing in the hush of darkness: pale as a ghost and wailing like a banshee, and Daphne could never be certain if she was going to do harm to her—or to herself.

In the morning such instances were washed away with a smile. They never spoke about those strange nights in the light of day, and they never told Daphne’s father. Why worry him? Miranda would entreat. He’s been so stressed at work lately. Besides, I don’t know what came over me. And so her mother’s fragility was a secret that Daphne alone seemed to bear, and she watched her seem to break apart a little bit more every year without understanding why.

And maybe that was the root of all of Daphne’s silent unhappiness, or maybe there was a part of her that knew all along that she didn’t belong—she just didn’t really know until she was fourteen years old. Kidnapped Claudia Jewell showed up on the news reliably once a year on the anniversary of her disappearance, but with every year that passed it became just another unsolved mystery, a case where a happy ending seemed impossible after so much time had gone by. But the Jewells never gave up hope, and maybe fate rewarded them for that: thirteen years after Claudia Jewell disappeared, the remains of a one-year-old were dug up during the building of a new housing development. DNA testing of the remains revealed that it was not Claudia Jewell, but further testing led them right to the O’Shea’s door—and right to where Claudia had been hiding, there under everyone’s noses the entire time.  

It took a long, public, and messy trial, but the end result was this: the woman she called her mother was imprisoned; the man she had called her father hid himself away with his guilt, wanting nothing to do with the daughter he had raised; and Daphne O’Shea was returned to her birth parents and given back a name that she was told had been her real one all along—Claudia Jewell. And then she had to figure out what that meant.

SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT

With her entire world and her entire self turned on its head, Claudia made a decision: that Claudia would be everything that Daphne was not. And since Daphne had been a cheerleader, bouncing ponytails and waving pom-poms, Claudia would play Exy. And so she did, and she let it define her. And despite not having touched a racquet until she was fifteen years old, Claudia brought unparalleled grit to the court, giving every game and every practice everything she had until there was nothing left, all of her confusion and her anger and her divided loyalties left behind on the court. Her parents wanted to cling to her, the daughter they lost miraculously returned, but Claudia didn’t know how to relate to them, and it soon became clear that they didn’t know how to relate to her, either.

She saw the way the light in their eyes dimmed when their daughter wasn’t the perfect loving angel they had constructed of her in their heads, and she set her sights on college—and on Exy—as a means of escaping the weight of that disappointment. She was the one to send her stats and tapes of her games to Palmetto State, determined to earn herself a spot on that line. And now, after playing with the Foxes for two years, the team is her life, and she is its staunchest defender. It’s the tradition of the Foxes, dating back to Dan Wilds and Neil Josten, to rotate captaincy between male and female players, and at the end of last year it was formally announced that Claudia would be the team’s Vice Captain and next Captain—formalizing what most everyone on the team already knew.