Chapter 16 Nazar
The school arena—if you can even call it that—is barely bigger than a regulation ice surface with bleachers that look like they were installed during the Cold War.
Every seat is filled. People are standing along the walls, pressed against the glass, sitting in the aisles despite what are probably multiple fire code violations.
The entire town has shown up.
Plus what feels like half the surrounding county—families who drove in from other small towns, probably making this the biggest event Millbrook has seen in years.
The energy is wild, unpolished. Nothing like the calculated atmosphere of professional games where every cheer is timed, every moment designed for maximum broadcast value.
These people are genuinely excited. Kids are screaming. Parents are filming on their phones. Someone brought cowbells.
And Nazar and Kai spend sixty minutes trying to tear each other apart within the loose confines of what’s supposed to be a friendly exhibition match.
It’s a personal war waged on a public stage, and everyone probably thinks it’s just competitive spirit. Just two talented players pushing each other to play better.
They nearly destroy two pucks in the process, the rubber scarred and dented from the sheer violence of their shots ricocheting off the posts when they miss the net.
At one point, Kai checks Nazar into the boards hard enough that the sound echoes through the arena, and a collective “Oooooh” rises from the crowd.
Nazar is up in a second, already skating away, but not before shooting a look that promises retribution.
Five minutes later, Nazar “accidentally” clips Kai’s skate during a line change, sending him stumbling.
After the game, as the team is collecting their gear, the school principal intercepts them—a woman in her fifties named Mrs. Patterson who has the kind of relentless positive energy that makes Nazar immediately suspicious.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she says, her voice wavering with emotion.
“You have no idea what this means to the community. The donations that came in from the publicity around your visit—the school board just told me we’ve raised enough to renovate the science lab and update the library.
That’s… that’s everything to these kids. ”
Burke, ever the diplomat, shakes her hand. “We’re honored to help.”
“Actually,” Mrs. Patterson continues, clearly on a roll, “as a thank-you, we’ve organized a small program in the auditorium. Just some student performances. Would you mind terribly? It would mean the world to them.”
Burke looks at the team. Several players are already mentally checking out, probably dreaming of the bus ride home and real food.
“Of course,” Burke says, because what else can he say?
The auditorium is exactly what Nazar expected. A multipurpose space that probably serves as cafeteria, gymnasium, and theater depending on the day of the week.
They’re ushered into the front rows—folding metal chairs that creak ominously under the weight of professional athletes.
The first performance is a choir of nine-year-olds singing a Christmas carol.
Nazar has faced down six-foot-four defensemen without flinching. He’s played through broken ribs and a concussion. He once took a puck to the face that required twelve stitches.
Nothing in his professional experience has prepared him for this.
The children are singing—and Nazar uses that term generously—a song that might be “O Holy Night.” It’s hard to tell because approximately zero percent of them are in the same key. One kid in the back row is clearly just mouthing the words. Another is actively picking his nose while singing.
Next to him, Sam makes a sound like he’s being strangled. Across the aisle, Miller has his face in his hands.
The next act is somehow worse.
A sixth-grader named Tyler performs a magic trick that consists of attempting to pull a rabbit out of a hat, dropping the hat twice, then producing a very real and very angry hamster that immediately tries to escape.
The hamster makes it halfway across the stage before a teacher tackles it.
Kai, slumped in the folding chair behind Nazar, lets out a long-suffering sigh.
“I’ve played in hostile arenas,” he mutters, but his voice is loud enough for everybody to hear.
“I’ve been booed by sixty thousand people in Montreal.
I had someone throw a beer at me in Boston.
Nothing—and I mean nothing—has prepared me for this level of psychological damage. ”
He pauses as a seventh-grader begins an interpretive dance that seems to be about either climate change or breakfast cereal, it’s genuinely impossible to tell.
“This is officially the last charity event I ever agree to,” Kai whispers. “I’m putting it in my contract. No more children. No more small towns. No more performances of any kind.”
Despite everything, Nazar feels his mouth twitch. “You suggested coming here.”
“I was temporarily insane. It won’t happen again.”
After what feels like hours but is probably only forty-five minutes, the performances finally end. Mrs. Patterson returns to the stage, her smile somehow even brighter than before.
“Thank you all so much for being such wonderful sports,” she says. “Now, as a special treat, we’re going to split you into groups for some classroom activities. We thought you might enjoy spending time with the students, talking about your careers, maybe answering some questions…”
Burke shoots the team a look that clearly says Be nice about this or I’ll make you regret it at practice.
“Rykov, Callahan, Sam, Chase—you’re in Mrs. Henderson’s sixth-grade art class. Second floor, room 204.”
Of course. Of course Nazar is assigned to the same group as Kai.
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
* * *
Sixth graders swarm them the moment they enter, shoving clay sculptures and crayon drawings into their faces.
“This is a puck,” a boy announces proudly, holding up what is objectively a lumpy gray sphere.
“That’s a rock,” another kid with a prominent cowlick yells from across the room.
“It’s abstract,” the first boy insists.
“It’s just a rock,” the other kid repeats with the brutal certainty only children possess.
Mrs. Henderson—a young teacher who looks slightly overwhelmed by having professional athletes in her classroom—claps her hands. “Alright, everyone! Let’s give our guests some space! You can show them your projects, but let’s do it in an organized way, please!”
The word “organized” has zero effect on the chaos.
Sam gamely tries to engage, crouching down to examine a painting that’s mostly brown and might depict a horse or possibly a large dog.
Chase stands near the door looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, including a dentist’s office or a tax audit.
Kai leans against a desk with an air of profound boredom, then slides his sunglasses on.
The move is so egregiously out of place—they’re indoors, under fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look vaguely ill—that it’s almost comical.
Nazar’s immediate reaction is familiar and well-worn: Rich jerk. Thinks he’s too good for this. Can’t even be bothered to engage with kids in a small town.
Nazar himself has no idea what to do. He stands awkwardly by a bulletin board covered in construction paper leaves.
He can handle a two-on-one rush, can read a defense’s positioning in a split second, but a classroom of eleven-year-olds is a nightmare with no playbook.
“Mr. Rykov?” A small voice near his elbow.
He looks down. A girl with bright red pigtails is holding up something made of orange and purple clay. It’s lumpy and lopsided and he has no idea what it’s supposed to be.
“It’s a hybrid,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “A carrot and a beetroot. My mom grows them in our garden and I thought, what if they were one thing?”
Before Nazar can formulate a response—something appropriately encouraging but not condescending—the cowlick boy swoops in like a predator who’s spotted weakness.
“That’s not real,” he declares. “Vegetables can’t be hybrids. You just couldn’t make a normal carrot.”
The girl’s face crumples. Her eyes go shiny with the particular sheen that precedes crying. “I know,” she whispers.
The boy seems to realize he’s gone too far.
His triumph deflates. “I mean… I couldn’t make my Transformer either,” he admits glumly, holding up a tangle of gray and silver clay that looks more like a car accident than a robot.
“It was supposed to be Optimus Prime but it just turned into… I don’t know. Nonsense.”
Silence falls over their small corner of the room. The girl looks like she’s about to cry. The boy looks like he wishes he hadn’t said anything. Nazar is completely out of his depth.
Then Callahan moves.
“Show me that again,” he says, his voice cutting through the awkward quiet.
He walks over to the girl with the purposeful stride of someone who’s just decided something.
He crouches down—a smooth, athletic movement—and takes the lumpy vegetable from her hands. He turns it over with surprising seriousness, examining it from multiple angles like it’s a piece in an art gallery.
“The carrot-beet hybrid,” he says slowly. “Here’s the thing: it is real. You made it. Therefore, it exists. That’s how creation works.”
He stands up, holding the clay creation aloft like it’s Simba from The Lion King.
His sunglasses are still on, which should make this ridiculous but somehow doesn’t.
“This isn’t just a vegetable,” he announces to the kids, who are now gravitating toward him like he’s got a magnetic field. “This is the Karabeet! The superfood of the future. Sweet like a beet, crunchy like a carrot, and full of vitamins that make you grow tall and strong.”
He pauses dramatically, and Nazar can see him thinking, calculating.
“We need a slogan,” Kai says. “Something catchy. How about…” He strikes a pose like he’s in a commercial. “‘The Karabeet—it’s root-tastic!’”
Several kids giggle. The girl with the pigtails looks up at him with something approaching worship.
Then Kai sings a little jingle—just a few notes, nothing elaborate, but somehow catchy.
“Wait,” one of the kids says. “Sing it again!”
“No, no, you all have to sing it,” Kai insists. “It’s a commercial. Everyone together…”
And somehow, impossibly, he gets half the class to sing his stupid made-up jingle about the Karabeet.
Then he rolls up the sleeves of his sweater—which Nazar knows from earlier is Loro Piana and cost somewhere in the three-thousand-dollar range—and points at the boy with the failed Transformer.
“You,” he says. “Bring me that ‘nonsense.’”
The boy shuffles forward cautiously. Kai takes the clay tangle and holds it up to the light.
“This is not nonsense,” he declares. “This is Scrapshard. A Decepticon who was blown apart in an epic battle but reformed himself using rage and scrap metal from destroyed Autobots. His superpower is that he can absorb any machine and make it part of his body. If he touches your car? Now he’s got wheels. If he touches a jet? Boom, he can fly.”
The boy’s eyes go wide. “Really?”
“His catchphrase,” Kai continues, lowering his voice into a gravelly villain tone, “is ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me… more me.’”
The boy grins so hard his face looks like it might split.
Kai surveys the room like a general assessing troops. “Okay. Who’s next? Who else has a project that isn’t quite what they wanted?”
And the most scandalous player in the League transforms into a one-man creative agency for failed sixth-grade art projects.
A lopsided spaceship becomes “a stealth reconnaissance drone specifically designed for sneaking snacks out of the kitchen without parents noticing.”
A brown clay blob that was supposed to be a turtle is christened “The Primordial Ooze Monster Who Only Eats Homework and Tests You Didn’t Study For.”
He invents backstories. Creates superhero origin stories. Does voices—shifting seamlessly from a booming movie trailer narrator to a cackling villain to a surfer dude to a posh British butler.
The kids are screaming with laughter, arguing over which creation is better, building on his ideas with their own increasingly wild additions.
At one point, two boys start shoving each other over whose alien design would win in a fight. Kai steps between them, his voice dropping to a low, stern tone that has both of them immediately backing down.
“We don’t fight over art,” he says simply. “We collaborate. You want to know whose alien wins? Neither. They team up to fight an even bigger threat. What’s the bigger threat? You tell me.”
The boys look at each other. “A giant space squid?”
“Exactly. Now draw me that space squid.”
Through all of it, Nazar sits in a too-small plastic chair clearly designed for children and just… watches.
He can’t take his eyes off Kai.
He watches the way that three-thousand-dollar sweater stretches across Kai’s shoulders when he crouches down to a child’s level.
Watches the elegant movements of his hands as he helps reshape a piece of clay, turning a mistake into an intentional feature.
Watches his face currently alive with focused passion instead of the careful boredom Kai usually wears like armor.
Mrs. Henderson looks like she’s witnessing a miracle. Sam is recording some of this on his phone with a grin. Even Chase has cracked a smile.
But Nazar isn’t watching them.
He’s not sure there’s anything on earth that could make him look away right now. Not a fire alarm. Not a meteorite hitting the building.
Not the entire team showing up to physically drag him away.
It’s impossible.
He wouldn’t take his eyes off Kai for a second.
And somewhere in the back of his mind Nazar realizes something that makes his chest tight:
This is who Kai really is.
And Nazar is completely fucked.