5

From bad to worse

When Alex returned to school, she had a long list of missed classwork and homework assignments to catch up on.

“I knew she was stressed,” said Amanda. “Even if she put on a happy face for everyone else.”

Alex became less social, often telling friends she was too exhausted to hang out. She told Richard that large gatherings made her especially miserable.

As her Greater Atlanta Christian School teammates began gearing up for soccer season, symptoms of Alex’s Blount disease returned. She began to experience sharp pains below her kneecaps that grew increasingly worse day after day.

The doctor gave Alex two options: Undergo extensive leg surgeries on her ankles, which came with a prolonged recovery period, or give up playing soccer entirely. Surgery it was.

To correct Blount disease, doctors typically cut the tibia and realign it using a metal plate and screws. Most teens are able to fully recover and return to competitive sports.

Alex had the surgery in January 2017 and spent several months having to use a wheelchair and eventually crutches to get around. Painful shin splints during physical therapy prolonged the already tedious rehabilitation period.

In the months following her concussions and surgery, Alex would wake up in the middle of the night feeling inexplicably sad. She began seeing a therapist for depression and social anxiety. She expressed a lack of will to live.

“There was a total shift in who Alex became,” Kristin said. “She was not her normal self.”

But to those not privy to her intimate moments, Alex projected an image of general optimism.

Although she was not cleared to play soccer, she hardly missed a game and often helped the coaching staff or worked the concessions stand.

“If our character is revealed in our most difficult times, your daughter’s a rock star,” coach Giuliano wrote in a letter to Richard and Kim last spring.

When the team won a regional championship, Alex was rolled out to the middle of the field for the team photo.

She often joined the team in the locker room, even though friends had to carry her up the stairs to get there.

But sometimes the cracks in her facade showed, revealing the darker side of Alex’s reality.

One time, instead of allowing her friends to help her get to the locker room, she tried to pull herself up the stairs on her own.

“I opened the door and saw she was struggling to get in,” said teammate Titilayoni “TiTi” Abioduin. “When I tried to help, she wasn’t having it.”

Last summer, friend Annie Kilpatrick noticed Alex was cutting herself.

“That’s when I knew something was really wrong,” she said.

Richard was determined to help Alex, who had begun to resist therapy.

“But we were going to do everything within our power to find out what was causing this and try to fix it,” Richard said.

It wasn’t until 16-year-old Seth Masters came into the picture that Alex showed signs of improvement.

Seth and Alex first met in eighth grade at Greater Atlanta Christian School. The attraction was instant for him, but Alex barely noticed him.

But this school year, Seth mustered up the courage to make his move.

On the first day of school last fall, he switched his assigned seat to one next to Alex. It worked. By the end of the week, they’d paired up.

The two would meet before, during and after school, and frequented a park near her house where they’d sit together for hours at a time. Their first official date started at a Waffle House and ended on the rooftop of a school building, where they watched the sunset before driving wildly around the empty campus.

Just a few weeks later, she would be dead.

“She was the best adventure of my life,” he said.