Leo and Bryce line up a series of pucks on the ice. They’ll skate past the four goalies, firing on us each in turn. Longer shots provide more reaction time, but greater force and speed.

Then the drill begins. The coach and his assistant skate through the foreground, obscuring our clear view of the shooters and their setups, while the two players fire at us.

Leo shoots the first puck on Silas, who handily stops it. Then Bryce gets a missile off on Scarlet, who just barely swats it away with the tip of her glove.

Suddenly there’s a puck hurtling toward me at high speed. I dive, but miss it as it whistles past my ear and into the net’s upper corner.

Damn it. I pick my exhausted self up just in time to misjudge a shot from Bryce, sending that one through the five-hole.

Focus, Hansen, I coach myself. I know I can do this.

It works, too. I get the next one from Leo. No problem. And then I stop three more from Bryce. But as I’m batting away the third one, I realize that the speed of that puck wasn’t much to deal with.

And neither is the next one. I watch as he fires a shot on Silas, and then on Beacon, both of them at jet speed.

I have to look away to dive for a shot from Leo. But then Bryce comes back to me and sends me a puck at the speed of a grandmother riding on a donkey.

He’s soft-balling me, I realize. Bryce can see that I’m struggling, so he’s throwing me a series of easy shots. He’s coddling me.

And I am livid.

It’s funny what anger will do to a girl’s game. I am ferocious as I stop the next two shots from Leo. And when Bryce sends me another yawner, I slap it back to him so hard and so accurately that he has to dodge out of the way to avoid taking a shot to the nuts, because he’s not wearing any pads.

“Merde,” he curses softly.

“Whoops,” I say through gritted teeth. And I give him a look so bitter that his eyes widen in alarm.

But the boy does not learn his lesson. For the remaining few minutes of the exercise, he takes it easy on me. After ripping meteors at every other goalie, he sends me pucks that would embarrass a high school center.

I am incensed. I don’t need Bryce to humiliate me like this, when I’d been doing a fine job of it without his help.

When the coach finally blows the whistle, calling our session to a close, I gather up the pucks with everyone else.

“Whoa, that was intense,” Scarlet says, still breathing hard. “Great session, huh?”

“Yup. Great,” I manage. At this rate, I’ll spend the season sitting in the corner of the bench opening and closing the door for other players on shift changes, while Scarlet plays every last game.