THIS IS YOUR GAME

Name: Lukas Baxter Age: Twenty One Class Year: Senior Position: Vixen Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio

THIS IS YOUR MOMENT

Some kids are meant to be only children—and Lukas Baxter was certainly one. And, for a long time, he was. Once he grew up, he viewed that time through rose-tinted glasses, a perfect time when he hadn’t had to share his parents’ attention with anyone. It was a simplified view, his parents had been perpetually on the verge of divorce for several years by the time his younger sister Piper was born, but it was easier to take all of his blame and anger and foist it on the younger sister he never wanted. Having a second child seemed to settle his parents’ marriage, and that only made it worse for Lukas, that Piper was enough to hold their family together when he alone was not.

It was a big adjustment, a ten year old boy with a baby in the house. He was sullen and difficult—and only getting more difficult by the day—and she was a perfect bundle of joy. And, as they both got older, it only got worse. When Piper was a baby, he could just ignore her. When she started walking and talking and holding onto his legs, demanding attention in that guileless annoying way, his dislike for his sister and his resentment towards his parents became something much less passive. His torment of his younger sister was relentless, but the more he was cruel to Piper, the more his parents seemed to lavish her in attention, leaving even less for him.

Frustrated and unsure of how to recapture his parents’ affection, he instead only escalated his bullying of his sister, until it reached a breaking point when he was fourteen: after agreeing to take Piper to the park, he left her there to meet up with some friends. The police were called when Piper couldn’t find him, and child services were brought in to determine whether the Baxters were suitable or negligent parents. Lukas had been frightened, then. He hadn’t meant for the police to be brought into it, hadn’t meant to get his parents in trouble, he’d just been filled with a childlike anger and hurt that was too big to be contained, all of it focused on the sister he wished never had existed.

And though he tried to apologize, it was the last straw for his parents, and for Piper’s sake they decided to send Lukas to live with an Aunt and Uncle a state away. His Aunt and Uncle had never had kids of their own and had never wanted any, and while they agreed to take in Lukas for his parents’ sake, they were unsuited to handle Lukas’ teenaged moods and anger. They treated him as little more than a boarder, or a roommate, and mostly left him to his own devices, while his parents only existed at the end of a weekly phone call where he could often hear Piper’s chirping voice in the background, reminding him of everything she had that he did not. And sometimes he’d visit, for weekends or holidays, but when they only made him feel worse instead of better, he started begging off and making other plans instead—and if his parents seemed disappointed, they never seemed disappointed enough.

Joining his high school’s cheerleading squad didn’t help with any of that, at least not at first. No, that was just to get girls. At school he was a misfit, just a kid with a skateboard and a penchant for skipping class to smoke under the bleachers with other kids just like him, all of them equally invisible. Girls had ignored him, but it was harder for them to do it when he was throwing them in the air every day after school. Everybody else had ignored him, too, and when they started taking notice of him after he joined the squad, it was mostly to make fun of him. But even that had a silver lining—an outlet for his anger in the form of schoolyard fights where he wasn’t the one in the wrong, just standing up to his bullies.

SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT

In some ways, joining the squad was the best thing that had ever happened to him, though he couldn’t have known it at the time. The girls were a good influence on him—and, though they might not have appeared to have much in common, became better friends to him than his old ones had been—and his attendance and his grades steadily improved over his high school career.  His parents had written him off, his Aunt and Uncle had never believed in him in the first place, and Lukas shocked them all when his college acceptances came in.

By the end of high school, he got something he’d always thought he wanted but never really intended, a ticket back home and his parents saying we’re proud of you. So he spent the summer in a house that didn’t feel like a home to him, getting to know the sister he had once left alone on a playground, and sitting through family therapy, which only seemed to dredge up old anger and guilt. And all of it felt too late—everything he’d done, whether it was intentional or a happy accident, had been by himself and for himself. He’d stopped considering his parents in his decisions when they’d seemed to stop considering him a member of their family. They were paying for him to go to college and that, at that point, was all he really wanted out of them. At Palmetto, trying out for the Vixens was something he hadn’t even needed to think twice about. By then, it had just felt like a part of who he was: he cursed a lot and smoked too much and still picked more fights than he should—and, on top of all that, he was a cheerleader, no matter how strange anybody else seemed to find it.