Camp

Darren's Pov

The hallway outside Priscilla's room smelled like antiseptic and cold coffee. I sat with my back against the wall, my bare feet throbbing from the run through the parking lot, little rust-colored smears already dried onto the tile where I'd tracked blood without realizing it.

Stella sat beside me, knees pulled to her chest, phone in her hand though she wasn't looking at it.

"She's stable," she said, for the third time. "The doctor said stable."

"I heard him the first time." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to.

Stella didn't flinch at my tone. She never did. She just reached over and pried one of my hands off my knee, holding it like she could keep me from shaking apart through sheer stubbornness.

"We're going to figure this out," she said.

"With what money, Stel?"

She didn't answer right away. That was worse than if she'd lied to me.

I pulled my hand back and dragged it down my face instead, feeling the exhaustion sitting behind my eyes like sand. My mother's voice was still looping in my head — *that's not my problem* — cold and final, like I was a bill she'd already paid off years ago.

"Okay," I said, mostly to myself. "Okay. Think."

I pulled out my phone, ignoring how badly my hand was shaking, and opened my notes app. I stared at the blank white screen for a long moment before I started typing.

*Car. Gear. Ask coach for advance. Loan?*

Stella leaned over and read it upside down, and I watched her jaw tighten.

"No," she said immediately.

"No to what?"

"The loan part. I know what you're thinking, Darren, and no. Those places will eat you alive. You'll be paying off double what you borrowed by the time you're thirty."

"I don't have a lot of options left."

"You have options. Just not good ones yet." She said it gently, but there was steel under it, the same steel that had kept her showing up outside my house every single day the year I stopped answering texts. "Sell the car if you have to. Ask coach. But don't go to those people. Please."

I didn't answer. I just kept staring at the list like it might rearrange itself into something that actually added up to what the doctor had told me.

*She needs urgent surgery.*

*How much?*

The number sat behind my eyes like a stone.

My phone buzzed in my hand, cutting through the silence before I could spiral further. Unknown number, but the area code I recognized — team office.

"Don't," Stella said, watching my face. "Not tonight, whatever it is."

I answered anyway. Some habits don't care what kind of night you're having.

"Morrison." It was Delgado, the team manager, brisk and already talking before I'd fully said hello. "Sorry to call this late. We just got confirmation — league wants a joint scouting camp before the season starts, cross-team, showcase for the draft boards. Falcons and Icebulls sharing ice for two weeks."

I felt my stomach drop straight through the floor.

"The Icebulls," I repeated, flat.

"I know, I know, nobody's thrilled about it, but it's mandatory for anyone with active scholarship or draft interest. That includes you, obviously. Captain's expected to represent." A pause, like he could feel me not saying anything. "Darren, you there?"

"I'm here."

"Good. I'll send the schedule tomorrow. Get some rest, big two weeks coming."

He hung up before I could tell him exactly how impossible that sounded — rest, when my sister was down the hall with a tube in her arm and a bill I couldn't pay hanging over both our heads, and now on top of it, two weeks of forced proximity to the four people who used to make my life a countdown to the next humiliation.

Stella was watching my face carefully. "What?"

"Camp," I said. "With the Icebulls. Two weeks. Mandatory."

She swore under her breath, low and creative. "Of course it is. Of course it's now."

"I don't have a choice." I said it like I was trying to convince myself as much as her. "Scouts. Scholarship. If I skip it, it doesn't just hurt me, it—" I stopped, because saying it out loud made it worse. If my scholarship got flagged, if my standing dropped, I lost the one stable thing keeping any of this together at all.

Stella exhaled slowly. "Then we get the money another way. Starting tonight."

I looked at her, and something in my chest untangled slightly, just from not being alone in it, even though nothing about the situation had actually gotten easier.

"The car," I said.

"The car," she agreed.

The dealership two towns over did late buybacks, cash-for-keys, the kind of place that didn't ask a lot of questions if you didn't ask a lot of questions either. I drove there straight from the hospital, Stella following behind in her own car so she could drive me back after, and the whole ride over I kept doing the math in my head like it would somehow change if I ran the numbers enough times.

It didn't change.

The guy at the counter barely looked up from his monitor when I handed him the keys. He walked around the car twice under fluorescent lights that made everything look worse than it was, made a few notes on a clipboard, and named a number that hit somewhere between insulting and infuriating.

"That's it?" I said. "It's two years old. Full maintenance record."

He shrugged, unbothered, the kind of unbothered that came from doing this exact conversation forty times a week. "Market's soft on used right now. That's what I can do tonight, cash, no paperwork delay. You want more, you list it yourself and wait a month."

I didn't have a month.

I signed where he told me to sign.

Outside, under a flickering parking lot light, I counted the bills twice even though I already knew the total, because some stupid part of me kept hoping I'd miscounted the first time. I hadn't. It was barely a fraction of what the doctor had said, a number so far from enough that for a second I just stood there holding it, feeling more exhausted than I had all night.

Stella pulled up beside me, window rolled down. "How bad?"

"Not even close," I said, climbing into her passenger seat, the cash sitting heavy and useless in my jacket pocket. "Not even a dent."

She didn't say anything comforting, because there wasn't anything comforting to say. She just reached over and turned the radio down to nothing, and we drove back toward the hospital in silence, the number in my head getting bigger instead of smaller no matter how I tried to make the pieces fit.

Two weeks with the Icebulls starting tomorrow.

A sister who needed surgery money I didn't have.

And somewhere underneath all of it, quieter than it should have been, the memory of a hallway and a locker and a voice saying *pathetic* like it was the only word that had ever fit me.

I closed my eyes and let the dark of the car window swallow my reflection, and told myself, the way I always did, that I would figure it out.

I had to.