“Is it still flushing backwards?”
“Drop dead!”
The first voice belonged to Fahd; the second, coming from inside the toilet bowl, belonged to Nish. The first was laughing, and the second sounded, understandably, near tears.
Nish was throwing up in the bathroom. Not pretend hurling for once, but really being sick.
Travis felt like he might be next. A few minutes earlier he had even scurried into the little hotel bathroom himself, the same bathroom where most of the Screech Owls had gathered earlier in the day while Nish – using the vitamin pills his mother always packed – had given a demonstration how toilets here flushed in the opposite direction.
“Only Nish would know which way they go down back home,” sneered Sarah, who’d come in with Sam to watch.
It had been hilarious, with Nish red-faced and grunting as he climbed up on the sink and reached over to let the little brown pills plop loudly into the toilet bowl before he pressed the flush lever with his toes to send them swirling in what he explained was the reverse of normal, clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, down, down through the hotel waste system.
But no one was laughing now. Travis had been sure he, too, would be sick to his stomach, but all he could do was retch a couple of times and wish, more than anything else in the world, that Nish had been right.
That everything here did run backwards.
Including time.
Travis’s stomach hurt. His temples hurt. The back of his neck hurt like he’d been cross-checked headfirst into the boards.
And yet the Owls still hadn’t played a single hockey game in Australia. They’d been so excited about that first game Down Under, but now it was impossible even to think about playing hockey. Who could, after what had happened?
The team had never been so up for a trip. They had visited some exciting places before, but this trip was special, because it had come to them completely out of the blue and involved probably the last place on earth any of them ever thought they’d be playing their favourite game.
It all began with a letter that had arrived one day in the downtown office of Mr. Lindsay, Travis’s father:
The Australian Ice Hockey Federation, in an effort to promote minor hockey development in Australia, would like to extend an invitation to the Tamarack Screech Owls to come to Sydney, Australia, for the first-ever “Oz Peewee Invitational.”
The trip would coincide almost exactly with the March school break.
Travis’s father had been surprised there was even ice in Australia, let alone a national ice hockey organization. Australia, Mr. Lindsay said, was probably the top sporting country in the world, but the sports they played were soccer and cricket and swimming and track-and-field and basketball. When a country was mostly desert, when the temperature on a bright January day could reach forty-eight degrees Celsius, well on the way to making ice boil, hockey was hardly the game that came to mind.
But Mr. Lindsay, as president of the Tamarack Minor Hockey Association, discovered that little in Australia is ever quite what it first seems. The Australians would pick up all costs, including airfare, for the Screech Owls peewee hockey team and their coach and manager. All that was requested in return was that in the future the Screech Owls invite an Australian team to take part in a minor hockey tournament put on by the town of Tamarack.
But there was more. The Australians were convinced they could not really compete against the Screech Owls in the “Oz Invitational,” and so the games would be exhibition only. To add to the competitive edge, however, the City of Sydney would put on a “Mini-Olympics” at the same time, to be held at many of the same facilities that had been used for the Sydney Summer Olympics – the best Summer Games ever, many people thought.
“Can I do synchronized swimming?” Nish had asked when Muck read the letter to them in the Owls dressing room after practice.
“Better that than beach volleyball!” Sam had shouted from the other end of the room. “At least that big butt of yours would be under water.”
“Imagine Nish in a thong!” Sarah had laughed, kicking off her skates.
“People have seen me in less,” Nish shot back, his face reddening as he leaned over to loosen his laces.
“Don’t remind me,” Travis said, wincing at the flood of memories: Nish in the Swedish sauna, Nish and the World’s Biggest Skinny Dip at summer hockey camp, Nish running nude on Vancouver’s Wreck Beach, Nish planning to “moon” the entire world at Times Square …
From the moment Muck read that letter, the excitement had built. They were going to the land of kangaroos, koalas, platypus, crocodiles, and the deadly Great White Shark. They were going to Sydney, that magnificent city they’d all seen on television during the Olympics Games. And they were going to be in their own Mini-Olympics.
Dmitri was talking about running the 100-metre dash. Travis wanted to try the mountain bike course. Liz, who was on a swim team, couldn’t believe she’d be getting a chance to try out the Olympic pool. Wilson, probably the Owls’ strongest player, wanted to try weightlifting. Little Simon Milliken said he knew how to wrestle. Derek and Jesse wanted to form a team for tennis doubles. Sarah and Sam said they were going to be the Owls’ official beach volleyball team, and Sarah, the team’s best athlete, also wanted to enter all the races and swimming events.
“Rhythmic gymnastics,” Nish had said one day at practice. “I think that’s my new sport. You know, prancing about and throwing a ribbon up in the air and catching it.”
“Get serious,” Travis had told him.
“I’m also thinking about synchronized diving,” Nish said, leaning back in his stall, his eyes closed dreamily.
“What?” Sam had yelled over. “You and a boulder!”
“Nah. Me ’n’ you – how about it?”
Nish had meant it as a joke. With his eyes still closed, he hadn’t seen Sam winking at Sarah.
“You’re on, Big Boy – me ’n’ you!”
Nish’s eyes had popped open, but it was too late. The whole team loved the idea.
Sam was an excellent diver. There wasn’t a player on the team who didn’t remember her wild leap from the rocks high over the Ottawa River when they’d gone rafting. But neither was there an Owl who didn’t know that Wayne Nishikawa, the World’s Biggest Big Talker, was terrified, absolutely petrified, of heights.
Travis had smiled to himself. This was going to be interesting.
In the days that followed, Sarah Cuthbertson, more than any of the other Owls, had become consumed with the upcoming trip. She’d often said her greatest dream was to become a marine biologist, and she told them that Australia was like a dream come true. It was where the Great Barrier Reef was, and its waters offered the finest scuba diving and snorkelling in the world.
“I plan to see lots of seahorses, and my first Great White Shark,” she said.
It would happen quicker than any of them imagined.