Winter Sports
I was in the trees and three turns down before I noticed that something was wrong. My bindings were loose on the board. They rattled when I turned.
I struggled for control, but I was going too fast. My board shot free. It hurtled down the hill without me. I hit the snow hard and flipped, my bindings still attached to my boots. It hurt.
I tucked and rolled. I was still in the trees. Bad place to fall.
"Here they come!" Courtney learned eagerly against the railing. A blur of orange streaked past before I had a chance to see it clearly. The sled went into the turn. I watched it careering back and forth on the smooth curved ice of the track as it rocketed through the Kreisel.
"Aren't they supposed to keep the sled steady, Trevor?" asked Robyn.
"I think so," I answered. Courtney's attention was riveted to the orange sled that was fishtailing out of control.
"What's wrong?" Robyn said, just as a screech of tearing metal filled the air. Something silver had wernched loose and was lying on the ice. The sled flipped.
"Josh!" Courney screeched. The bobsled landed on its side and skidded toward the final turn, where it slowed to a grinding stop.
Chapter 1
The day my hockey team got some idea we weren't the worst team ever, Grandpa Gord drove me to the arena. Grandpa Gord is one of my three grandfathers.
We got to the rink at three-thirty, half an hour before game time. It was two weeks before Christmas.
My name is Jake Henry. My team is the Bear Claws. We play in the Oshawa Lakeridge League, which is made up of teams from Oshawa and Clarington. Since it's House League, we're not superstars or anything. Not like some teams you read about in certain books, who travel all over the country and solve murders between tournament games.
In the dressing room I put my stick in the rack. I dumped my equipment out on the floor and started to dress: pants, shin pads, socks. (I had put my jock on at home because there were girls in the dressing room.)
Just as I put my shoulder pads over my head I looked over at Victoria Eldridge, who was struggling with her sweater. Victoria and I take turns at playing goal for the Bear Claws. Victoria glanced over at me with this face she does sometimes that I can't describe.
"What on earth are you doing?" she said, loudly, separating the words the way adults sometimes do. Everybody in the dressing room turned to me.
I could have asked the same question.
"Where are your goal pads?" I asked.
"No, no, no," she said, shaking her head. "It's your turn to play goal, Jake."
Every game Victoria and I alternate playing goal and left defence. We share the goalie equipment, too, since it belongs to the team. Whoever is to play goal the next game is supposed to take the equipment home and bring it to the game.
"We got a problem here?" said Rajah Singh, our coach. Rajah is a good guy, about my dad's age, with short black hair, a dark complexion, and a moustache with streaks of white in it.
"Jake forgot the goalie stuff," said Victoria, pulling her sweater down and shaking out her hair. It was light brown and came to her shoulders. It frizzed out all over the place with static.
"It's her turn," I replied. "Isn't it, coach? I played last game
" Oops. That's when I remembered. I hadn't played last game. That game had been cancelled.
Coach Rajah looked at his watch. "We have twenty-one minutes," he said. "Where's your equipment?"
"At home," I said, trying to remember if I was right. If it was my turn to play, the equipment should have been home.
"Who's here who can get it?"
"Fred's out there," I said. Fred is my stepfather. My mother and father had divorced when I was about three, when I was too young to remember.
"And your Grandpa Cowbells!" said Simon Lee, referring to the odd clanking of bells we could hear even in the dressing room. Simon was a big kid who played defence. He had a space in his upper teeth where a tooth used to be.
Grandpa Gordor Grandpa Cowbellsis my mother's father. He comes to all my games and brings two cowbells that he rings every time our team scores. Sometimes he gets mixed up and rings the bells when the other team scores. He often does this because he knows squat about hockey. He also is teaching me how to play the violin. Or as he says, to play the fiddle, which he says is different than the violin.
"Go get Fred and see what he can do," said Coach Rajah.
I had just put on my hockey pants and had rolled one stocking over my right shin pad.
"Lemme
" I said.
"Now," said the coach. "Use some of your speed. We don't have all day." Rajah is easygoing, but when he speaks like that, everybody pays attention. And I mean everybody. Including all the parents who like to think they're needed in the dressing room. Yeah. Like a bad itch.
I jammed my foot into one boot, fumbled with the other before giving up. I limped out of the dressing room on one booted foot, shoulder pads crooked, and one shin pad flopping.
In the corridor between the dressing rooms and the boards of the rink, I looked up into the stands. There were another couple of teams on the ice finishing the third period of their game. Somebody hit the boards behind me and the glass rattled my helmet. Up in the stands, Fred was talking to some other parents and Grandpa Gord. I waved my arms until I got his attention. He came over and leaned over the railing.
My stepfather is average size with an average build. He has one blue eye and one brown eye. He teaches at a teachers' college. If you ask him, he'll tell you that he teaches the teachers to teach. If you encourage him at all he will recite a poem about a tutor who taught two kids to toot a flute. I try not to ask him.
"My goalie pads," I yelled. "They're at home."
"Thought you said it was Victoria's turn in net."
"It is, but she and the coach don't agree. The stuff should be there."
"You sure?" he said. "I don't remember seeing them."
"They've gotta be," I said. "Can you go get them? Please? Fast?"
Fred looked down at me with friendly eyes and burst into a slow-motion routine. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone.
"Good job your mother decided to stay home with N
Chapter 1
Cody Powell picked up the puck off the boards at centre ice and flew towards the opposing net. His skates pumped hard, shooting ice shavings into the cold air, and his stick handled the puck expertly, as if the puck were somehow magnetized to the blade. Beneath his blue and red Jets jersey, his heart pounded with the excitement of the goal he could sense he was about to score.
At the blue line, Cody spied a defender looming tall in a yellow Penguins jerseyRyan Miller. Instantly deciding to try a tricky deke, Cody sliced the blades of his skates sideways into the ice, came to a split-second stop directly in front of Ryan, twirled around in a tight backward arc, the puck still on his stick, and took off in the opposite direction, leaving Ryan with his legs tied up in a knot.
This is going to be a play for the highlight tapes, Cody thought, smiling to himself. He swayed his hips from side to side, once again building up momentum, and in a second came face-to-face with the goaltender, Ernie Gaines, who had slid out of his crease to challenge Cody. Cody faked to the left with his shoulders, then poked the puck with his stick to the right, sending Ernie sprawling onto the ice face-first, lifting his glove in a last-ditch effort to make a save.
Cody measured up the puck on his backhand and with the force of his powerful wrists raised the puck towards the net.
The puck zoomed past Ernie's outstretched glove and crossed the line.
A goal!
As his teammate, Mitch Porter, patted him on the back, Cody threw up his arms in celebration. Closing his eyes tightly, he could almost feel the applause of the fans wash over his body.
Meanwhile, Ernie kicked his goalpost in frustration, sending up a tinny clang that jarred Cody from his reverie.
In an instant, Cody was no longer in Winnipeg Arena, having just scored a picture-perfect goal in front of a crowd of thousands of cheering fans. He wasn't even, he admitted to himself, in Lord Strathcona Arena winning a game for the Transcona Sharks in their twelve-year-olds' community club league. Those were mere fantasies. No, he was on a crummy outdoor rink two blocks from his home, and the only sound in the air other than the reverberating clang from the kicked goalpostwhich was actually an aluminum garbage can dragged onto the ice from the adjacent back lanewas the clatter of train cars switching tracks at the nearby CN rail yard.
"I'm freezing my butt off," Ernie grunted as he retrieved the puck and slid back to the other boys. Ernie was wearing winter boots. Playing goalie all the time, he'd never learned to skate. "Can we call it quits already?"
"Yeah, let's get going," Mitch agreed. His breath turned to vapour in the cold December air. "I have some math homework to do."
The four boys were using only half the ice surface of the outdoor rink. They had a net set up along the centre lineCody and Mitch's goaland two garbage cansRyan and Ernie's goalin front of the rickety boards at the end facing the CN yard.
"It is getting kind of late," Cody put in, figuring maybe it was best to just go home. As much as he loved playing hockey, what was the use playing two-on-two pickup games all the time? The Transcona Sharks, in their official turquoise and grey uniforms with the players' numbers and names printed across the backs, were the real thing. They hosted games in their own arena and travelled across the city and even the province to play other community club teams. They had been the City East runners-up last year. If only his mother were willing to put up with the cost of letting him sign up! But she wasn't. She kept reminding Cody that there was only so much money to go around now that she and his dad had divorced. Cody whacked his stick against the ice at the thought. It just wasn't fair.
Just then Ryan skated back to the other boys, joining them in a huddle around Ernie and his garbage-can goalpost.
"Let's play just a little longer," Ryan begged, even though he lived farthest from the rink, in a new house in the east end of Transcona. "I'm still having fun." His parents wouldn't let him play organized hockey, either. They had a different reason than Cody's mom, though: they were afraid their son might get injured. As a result, Ryan also had to satisfy himself with these after-school pickup games, which, at his parents' insistence, he played wearing all the necessary equipment.
"But I can hardly see the puck it's so dark," Mitch whined.
"Next goal wins, then," Ryan suggested, readjusting his shoulder pads. Tall and thin as a rail, he was always making sure his equipment was on right. Cody had a feeling Ryan was just as afraid of injuring himself as his parents were.
"You've got to be kidding!" Mitch answered. "The score's thirty-three to twenty-six. We're ahead by seven goals."
Sometimes it seemed to Cody that what Mitch enjoyed most about these games was keeping score. He'd make a great sportscaster someday, that was for sure.
"So what?"
