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There's a kid in the front row. He's maybe ten. He's wearing a hockey jersey with my number on it that's so big on him the sleeves go past his hands, and a little rainbow pin on the collar, and he's looking up at me the way I used to look at posters in my bedroom in Rimouski.

"Hi," I say into the microphone.

"HI," a hundred kids yell back.

I laugh. Some of them laugh too. Good. A laughing crowd can't throw anything at you. My junior coach taught me that, and he was mostly wrong about everything else.

"So," I say. "They told me to talk for two minutes. I talk a lot, so this is going to be hard for me."

More laughs.

"I came out when I was sixteen," I say. "I was playing junior hockey, eight hours from home, living with a family I didn't know. I was so scared. I thought if anybody found out, I'd never play again. I thought my teammates would hate me. I thought my dad would—" I stop. I look at the kid in the front row. "I thought a lot of scary things."

The gym's gone quiet.

"Some of them happened," I say. "I'm not going to lie to you. Some guys were mean. Some guys are still mean. But a lot of the scary things didn't happen. My mom cried and hugged me. My dad hugged me too, and then he went and sat in his truck for an hour, but he came back inside. I kept playing. Now I'm here."

I look out over the kids. At the back of the gym, by the juice boxes, Hale's looking at me. Not at the banner. At me.

"The thing I want to tell you," I say, "is don't hide. It's so much work to hide. It takes all your energy. You can't play your best when you're hiding. You can't be your best. So if you're scared, that's okay. Everybody's scared. But don't let being scared make you small."

I swallow.

"Play proud," I say, because it's on the banner, and I'm supposed to.

They go nuts. They stand up on their folding chairs. The kid in the front row is clapping so hard his too-long sleeves are flapping.

I look for Hale.

He's gone.

I find him in the hallway outside the gym, by a bulletin board covered in flyers for a youth basketball league and a lost cat named Pickles. He's standing very still with his hands in the pockets of the quarter-zip, reading about Pickles like it's the most important document he's ever seen.

"You left," I say.

"I needed air."

"It's a hallway. The air's the same."

He doesn't turn around. "That was good. What you said. Those kids needed to hear it."

"Owen."

"Don't hide. It was good." He finally looks at me. His face is doing something complicated. "You meant it."

"Of course I meant it."

"You're right. It is a lot of work." He looks back at the flyer. "I don't know how to do what you said. Not yet."

I stand next to him and look at Pickles, who is orange and fat and last seen on Kedzie Avenue.

"I know," I say.

"I don't want you to have to hide for me."

"I know."

"But I can't—" He stops. "Not yet. The season. Moretti. The room. If it comes out now, in the middle of all this, with the divorce and the article and Brandt⁠—"