There had been no “wedgie check” at the American border. A guard had come out and looked in all the windows and guessed, accurately, that they were on their way to Lake Placid for a hockey tournament. He had asked where they were from and where they were born and Mr. Dillinger, organized as always, had passed over a clipboard with a photocopy of everyone’s birth certificate.
Mr. Dillinger even had the passports of Fahd Noorizadeh and Dmitri Yakushev, who weren’t yet full Canadian citizens. Fahd boasted he would be the first Saudi Arabian to make the NHL. Dmitri said he would be around the five-hundredth Russian and liked to joke that by the time he got there Canadians would be the exceptions in the NHL and people would be complaining that they were taking jobs from Russian boys.
Dmitri had a weird sense of humour. He was a thin, blond kid with a crooked smile and, Travis figured, the fastest skater in the league. He had started to play hockey back in Moscow and came to Canada at age nine with his parents, so he couldn’t really claim to be a product of either system, the Russian or the Canadian. His uncle had once played for the Soviet Red Army team and Dmitri planned to be one of the best hockey players in the world, like him. Right now he was just one of the best hockey players in Tamarack.
But the Screech Owls were a pretty good team. Once, in the back of his Language Arts notebook on an afternoon when the class was supposed to be reading ahead, Travis had even done a scouting report on them:
GOAL
GUY BOUCHER: Quick hands, great blocker. Yells a lot while playing. Two different ways of saying both names. “Guy,” or “Gee,” like in Lafleur, and “Bow-cher” or “Boo-shay,” depending on where he’s playing. No one ever knows how his name’s going to come out over the public address.
SAREEN GOUPA: Back-up. Good stick and pads, but misses high shots and can be deked pretty easily. Still, pretty good for having played only two years. Team sometimes calls her “Manon” after Manon Rhéaume, her idol.
DEFENCE
WAYNE NISHIKAWA: “Nish” is the steadiest of all the Screech Owls. Not a really fast skater, but a good shot and very good in front of his own net. Clean player, dirty mind.
LARRY ULMAR: Nish’s usual partner. Slow but a good passer. Lets other team go too much. Nickname is “Data.” Obsessed with “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Claims he can speak Klingon and sometimes tries. Sometimes plays like a Klingon, too.
NORBERT PHILPOTT: The team’s “Captain Video”–Norbert’s father owns a video rental outlet and sometimes shoots the games and they show the videos during team get-togethers. Norbert has to analyze everything. As for his own play, he’s not very flashy, but he works hard and everyone on the team likes him.
WILLIE GRANGER: The team’s trivia expert. Has probably 10,000 hockey cards in his collection and also has a lot of autographs–Pavel Bure, Jaromir Jagr, Pat LaFontaine, Raymond Bourque, even a Wayne Gretzky–which his uncle, a sportswriter in Toronto, gets for him. Willie is a smart player, if not particularly fast. If he had a good shot, he’d be on the power play.
WILSON KELLY: Tremendous checker. Still learning the game, but improving all the time. Always in position. Plans on becoming the first Jamaican to compete in hockey in the Winter Olympics. But for Canada, he says, not Jamaica.
ZAK ADELMAN: Quick, but not a physical presence like Wilson. Wilson can cover when Zak pinches up into the play. Quiet but funny–one of those senses of humour where you usually have to run it through your brain a second time before you realize what he’s said.
FORWARDS
SARAH CUTHBERTSON: Centre and the team’s best player. Mother skated for Canada in the 1976 Winter Olympics–speed skating–and she now teaches power skating. Sarah is determined to play for Canada in the 1998 Winter Olympics, the year Women’s Hockey becomes an official medal sport. She’s already been asked to play tournaments for the Toronto Aeros and will join that team after peewee. Best skater on the team. Great playmaker. Pretty good shot, but doesn’t use it enough. Team captain.
DMITRI YAKUSHEV: First-line right wing. So fast he sometimes runs right over the puck. If Sarah hits him with a breakaway pass, Dmitri is gone. No one ever catches him and hardly anyone ever stops him. Great with his feet, which he says comes from playing soccer instead of summer hockey. Idolizes Pavel Bure.
TRAVIS LINDSAY:
Left wing, first line. Good skater, good stickhandler, fair shot. Assistant captain.
DEREK DILLINGER: Second-line centre. Good playmaker with a very good shot. Would have more points if on first line and will probably move up once Sarah moves on to the Aeros. Because of strength is the face-off man used in tight situations. Hooked on video games. Quieter and more serious than his father.
MATT BROWN: Left wing. Great shot. Lacks speed. Doesn’t like to carry the puck, but get it to him and it’s in. Muck has benched him in the past for lazy back-checking.
FAHD NOORIZADEH: Third-line right wing, first-line computer expert. Produces printouts of everything from goals and assists to plus-minus and chances. Muck thinks this is ridiculous: “The only numbers that matter,” Muck says, “are the two they flash up on the scoreboard.” Didn’t start playing until nine years old and improving all the time. Great knack for reading play.
GORDIE GRIFFITH: Third-line centre. Big and gawky. Gets noticed because of size. Most penalized player on team, the one the other parents yell at–but he isn’t dirty at all. Has some shifty moves and can lift puck over net from the blueline.
JESSE HIGHBOY: Right wing. The Screech Owls’ newest player, moving into town around Christmas from way up north in James Bay. His dad’s a lawyer and Jesse says he’s going to be one, too, and still be in the NHL as the league’s first playing commissioner. A great team player, cheers everybody. Needs more ice time.
MARIO TERZIANO: “The Garbage Collector.” Nothing fancy, hardly even noticeable–until there’s a big scramble in front of the net and the puck is suddenly loose in the slot. Always has his stick down, always ready. A good-hearted guy who laughs even at himself.
The Screech Owls were even slightly famous, having been written up in the Toronto Star during a tournament they’d played in Mississauga. Someone must have called the paper in, because a writer and photographer arrived and talked to all the players, and the next day they were on the front page.
The story in the paper was all about how the Screech Owls represented virtually every part of the country. They had a French-Canadian goaltender. They had different religions. They had players who had come from, or whose parents or grandparents had come from, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Lebanon, Jamaica, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany. And now this year Jesse Highboy, a Cree, had joined. And they had two girls on the team–three before Jessica Crozier had moved out to Calgary.
The story had seemed ridiculous to Travis–after all, they hadn’t even made it as far as the tournament final. And the writer of the article kept referring to them as “Team United Nations,” only once using their proper name, the Screech Owls. He had also described Sarah as “too pretty to be taken for a hockey player with her soft eyes and long, tumbling brown hair.” But Sarah had got the writer back. The reporter had asked Sarah if it bothered her that women made up more than 50 per cent of the population but less than 10 per cent of the Screech Owls.
“Why would it?” Sarah answered. “I’ve been in on more than 50 per cent of the goals.”
Travis began dozing off again as the big van headed up into the mountains. He heard Willie Granger, team expert on everything, spouting off facts from the Guinness Book of Records on how the Adirondacks didn’t even compare to the really high mountains like the Rockies and Mount Everest. He heard Nish, the team pervert, giggling that two of the rounded hills off in the distance looked like “boobs.” Nothing unusual there. Nish was so crazy he once said the face-off circles reminded him of two big boobs out in front of the net.
Travis placed his head against the humming window and asked himself the question he’d been asking since the first year he’d signed up for hockey: when was he ever going to start growing? He had always been small, but he hadn’t started worrying about it until he turned peewee. He was twelve going on thirteen. Another school year and he would be headed into high school and–already notably small in the schoolyard of Lord Stanley Public School–he was petrified he wouldn’t grow before he got there.
Growing was only one of two serious matters that deeply bothered Travis. The second was his fear of the dark–how many twelve-year-olds still needed a night light?–but most of the time his fear of the dark was something he could keep to himself and his family. But how could you hide your size?
“Hang in there,” his father kept telling him. “You’ll grow. I was a late grower. My brothers were late growers. You’ll go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning having ripped right out of your clothes.”
Travis knew what an exaggeration that was. He knew that his father meant he’d have a late growth spurt that might come over one summer, not a single night, and he knew better than to think he would ever fall asleep a peewee and wake up a bantam in a pair of torn pyjamas. But he couldn’t help wishing anyway. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when they got to Lake Placid, Travis stepped out of the van and his pant cuffs were up around his knees…
“PIT STOP!”
Travis jumped. He had been dozing again. His head felt thick, his eyes out of focus. He rubbed them as Mr. Dillinger called again from the driver’s seat of the big van.
“Pit Stop! Last one before Lake Placid! Ten minutes! You go now or you go later in your pants–this means you, Nish!”
Travis could hear them giggling. His vision cleared and he saw that everyone in the van was looking back at him. Because he had fallen asleep, obviously. Well, so what? But they wouldn’t stop laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Travis asked Nish, who had turned around, his face looking like it was about to split.
“Mr. Dillinger. Didn’t you hear him?”
It didn’t make sense, but Travis let it go. He headed into the restaurant, pushed the door open, saw that everyone in there was laughing at the team coming in–what was the matter with them, never see hockey players in a van?–and decided that he’d better go to the washroom first.
Funny, there was no line-up. Nish and some of the other kids were hanging around outside the door but they didn’t seem to want to go in. More like they were waiting. Travis pushed past them through the door, turned to the mirror–and saw immediately what his teammates, and all the people in the restaurant, had been giggling at:
HIS HEAD WAS COVERED IN CREAM!
It had been put on like a cone. Swirled like he was about to be dipped into chocolate at Dairy Queen. He looked like a fool. But it was so light he hadn’t felt it. That’s why they’d been laughing at him. It was hilariously obvious to everyone but Travis himself, who couldn’t even feel it up there.
Travis grabbed a handful of the cream and threw it off his head into the sink. He reached for some paper towels and began rubbing it off. On the other side of the door, he could hear the entire team howling with laughter as they imagined his reaction.
Travis smelled his hands. Shaving cream. There was only one person in the Screech Owls van old enough to shave.
Mr. Dillinger.