#meredithbio

THIS IS YOUR GAME

Name: Meredith Cotes Age: Nineteen Class Year: Sophomore Position: Vixen Hometown: Weston, Massachusetts

THIS IS YOUR MOMENT

TW: death, drug mention, sexual harassment

Her father was a businessman, a mogul, the kind that they wrote profiles on in magazines, peeking behind the curtain at his private life, his beautiful home, his perfect family. But even outside of the public eye, their life was idyllic: Meredith’s parents loved each other, and they loved her. Her parents had the kind of hobbies that only money could buy, hobbies that took them to the bottom of the ocean and the tops of mountains—and then even higher, as they took to the skies. Meredith kept her feet on solid ground, preferring the rigid structure and discipline of ballet to her parents’ constant quest for adrenaline, her childhood all ballet-pink and en pointe.

And it was her parents’ own sense of daring that undid them, Meredith losing both her parents in one fell swoop to a plane crash in which her father had been at the controls. She was fifteen and orphaned, uncertain of what would become of her until her parents’ lawyers sat her down and told there was an uncle of hers coming to take care of her—an uncle she had never met, because he had been estranged from her parents, and Meredith quickly came to understand why. Her parents had filled their home with life, with laughter, with love, made it something that always felt warm and welcoming and bright. Under her uncle, it became something else. He was rude, and the friends he invited into Meredith’s parents’ home were even ruder, filling it with raised voices and crude language and cigarette smoke, turning her childhood home into something that seemed dingy, seedy, a shadow of what it once was.

It felt like she had stepped into an alternate universe, with everything the darker inverse of its previous self. In her home she felt hunted, afraid to leave her bedroom because of the way the drunken eyes of her uncle’s friends would follow her, the lewd commentary that her uncle never stopped and sometimes encouraged, the wandering hands she had to dodge. On nights like that she would hide, alone in her bedroom with nothing but the chair jammed under her doorknob and the sinking feeling that, however bad things already were, they could still get much worse.

And then there was the money. As a minor, her uncle had sole discretion over the money her parents had left behind, charged with using it in her care until she came of age. She watched it drain away: a flashy sports car, a six-figure watch, the purest cocaine that money could buy, high-stakes card games in the dining room where her family had once had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It wasn’t the spending that saddened and enraged her. It wasn’t even about the money at all. It was about what it represented: her parents’ legacy, and the love they had for her, the future they wanted to provide her—all that she had left of them.

Her despair felt bottomless, but she resolved to not let it paralyze her, to turn it into something more inflexible, something stronger: she was not going to passively sit by and count down the days until she turned eighteen, until she was free—no, her uncle was a brute, her uncle was a criminal, and she wanted him out of her home and out of her life, where he couldn’t poison everything that was still good in it. And so, with the help of her parents’ lawyers, they built a case, a dossier of evidence that encompassed everything from embezzlement to illegal gambling to drug possession, everything they could put together to put him away for a long time.

Meredith wanted to be vindicated, imagined with deep satisfaction the day she would sit in a courtroom and recount her uncle’s crimes, make him look her in the face as he realized there was no getting out of the web of his own making—but it didn’t quite work out that way. The end result was what she wanted—her uncle plead guilty and went to prison, and she would live alone as an emancipated minor until she turned eighteen—but it was all back-room dealings that never saw a trial. There was a part of her that had grown bloodthirsty that wasn’t satisfied, but she bit her tongue and forced it to be enough—she was free, and that was what really mattered.

SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT

Her life was her own again, and so was her future—a prospect that felt more frightening than liberating, that made her miss her parents more than ever, because they weren’t around to guide her, to help her answer the questions of what she should do, or what would come next. College seemed small when compared to putting her uncle in prison, but it was impossible to visit campuses alone, look at all the other prospective students walking arm-in-arm with their parents, and not feel that ache. In the end, that’s perhaps what drew her to Palmetto: it’s where her mother attended undergrad, before meeting her father in graduate school.  

Ballet was something that had fallen by the wayside after her parents’ death, and something she thought about going back to: something rigorous, something disciplined, something that may have fit the newly formed steel spine inside of her. But instead she found herself pulled in an entirely different direction, her attention captured by the defiance of the Foxes, the roaring of a game-night crowd, and the bright orange uniforms and waving pom-poms of the Vixens. It felt so outside of what her life had become in the past few years, something unrestrained and vibrant, something full of life, and she was hungry for it—and so she followed that hunger to a spot on the Vixen squad for her sophomore year, hoping that by making herself a part of it all, she could find a way to take some of its vibrancy for herself.