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“Sounds like he’s okay,” Bell answered, blowing into his cupped hands. “They think it might be RSV.”

“Oh fuck.” Mikey shuddered. “I caught that a couple of years ago from some fifth graders my team did a thing with. Couldn’t catch my breath for like two months.”

“Shit,” I mused. “Hope Hale doesn’t come down with it, too. I’d hate to rely on Banks.”

Mikey snickered, while Bell chuckled. “Wow, Cal. Tell us how you really feel.”

“Oh, come on. You know as well as I do the guy sucks.”

Bell shrugged. “He’s not the worst goalie I ever played with.”

“I wasn’t only talking about his skills,” I said, ready to launch into an explanation of all the ways our backup goalie annoyed me, but I was cut off by the front door swinging open, Penny waving us inside.

Sandra Springer was a tall woman in what I guessed was her early fifties, judging by her short, gray bob and the fine lines around her eyes. I’d pictured a no-nonsense woman dressed in a suit, but Sandra wore a red and cream striped turtleneck, forest green corduroy overalls over heavy work boots, and blinking, battery-powered Christmas earrings dangling from her ears.

“Gentlemen,” she said, shaking each of our hands before pulling a small bottle of sanitizing gel out of her front pocket and squirting it into her palms. Rubbing vigorously, she added, “Thank you for being here. Please. Follow me.”

Sandra led us through a set of metal double doors into a massive warehouse, its metal shelves stacked to the rafters with cans of all sizes and boxes upon boxes of dried goods. Hundreds more pallets were spaced out on the concrete floor.

“Before we put you to work, some background info,” she said over her shoulder as we followed her across the cavernous space. “Most people hear ‘food insecurity’ and picture starvation. The reality in our community is much broader than that.”

She stopped near a pallet of canned black beans and spun to face us. “What it actually looks like is parents skipping dinner so their kids can eat. It’s children whose only guaranteed meal comes from the school cafeteria. Families who can make a whole meal around a cup of rice.”

I frowned. That wasn’t … sustainable. A body couldn’t function properly without lean proteins for muscle repair, complex carbs for sustained output, healthy fats for hormone regulation, and essential micronutrients to keep the engine firing. Rice alone? My brain simply couldn’t compute.

“How is that possible?”

Sandra’s expression fell slightly, almost like she expected this question and was sad to have expected it. “Protein is expensive. Fresh produce is expensive. So families subsist on staples like rice, dried beans, and pasta. They’re cheap, they don’t spoil, and more importantly, they fill a stomach. Families eat what they can afford, not what your body actually needs.”

My mind was wired around high-performance sports science, and part of that was looking predominantly at food as fuel. Yes, there were meals I enjoyed more than others, and I loosened the reins a bit on my meal plan during the summer, but once training started back up, if something wasn’t going to contribute to my performance or recovery, I didn’t eat it.

Standing here now, learning that for some people rice was what stood between them and starvation made me feel physically ill—the privilege of never having considered this someone’s reality before now like an absolute asshole.

It was like the time Mikey had explained the realities of medical debt to me all over again. Theoretically, these were things I knew happened in the world, but because they’d never affected me or anyone I knew personally, they existed on my periphery.

Sandra told another story about a local family the food bank served, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mikey’s chin drop forward, his gaze fixed on the floor.

“All right,” Sandra said brightly. “Let’s find you some aprons.”

A staff member materialized and handed Bell, Mikey, and me each a red canvas apron with the food bank’s logo screen-printed on the front that I accepted with shaking hands. Then a door opened to reveal a handful of similarly outfitted volunteers, a few trying—and failing—to act casual about the three professional hockey players in their midst.

It would never fail to surprise me that while the Marauders were objectively terrible, we still somehow managed to have fans.

Bell, of course, handled their attention like the star he was, eating up their praise like it was his due, all while managing to make each one of them feel like they were just as important. Currently, a woman I overheard say she’d been volunteering for twelve years was showing him videos of her granddaughter on her phone, Bell commenting that she had a wicked backhand.

I watched the easy way he charmed her, thinking how different we were.

Deep in my bones, I knew I would never be as good as Bell at any of it—I was shy at best, awkward at worst, and while the boys respected me, I didn’t really connect with them on a personal level the way he was able to. And this was before they knew about Mikey and me. Once we came out, I couldn’t be sure their respect wouldn’t turn to mistrust—or worse.

And yet, the suits were still gung-ho on setting me up as his heir apparent.

They’d given me the time I needed at Harvard to get my head on straight, and now it was time for me to deliver the goods. The pressure was enough to send me spiraling. It had sent me spiraling.

Bell caught my eye and gave a quick jerk of his head, summoning Mikey and me over to meet a small cluster of donors.

“We’re being summoned,” I told Mikey, gathering my resolve.

He breathed in deeply, then blew it out in a quick gust, pulling his shoulders back and shaking out his hands a few times. “Okay. Let’s do this.”