SOPHIE
Saturday morning at the Riverside Community Center arrived under a low, steel-gray sky.
I got there at seven-thirty, letting myself in through the kitchen side entrance. For two years, this basement kitchen had been my personal sanctuary—the one place where nobody cared what size jeans I wore or how quiet I was, as long as the soup was stirred and the prep line kept moving.
Mrs. Chen stood at the center stainless-steel island, her reading glasses pushed down her nose as she flipped through three separate clipboards.
"Sophie, thank goodness you're early," she said without looking up, her pen tapping against the counter. "The Fourth Street shelter had an electrical surge around midnight. Their entire walk-in cooler went down. We're taking their dry-storage overflow and packing six
