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