Hat Trick

by W. C. Mack

  Neither option sounded very good.

  “Uh …” I wasn’t fast enough, and the tag-teaming ended with Mum.

  “Or maybe it would be best if you stuck to our original plan and got all of your gear in order the night before practice,” she said, one eyebrow raised.

  I nodded. “That would be good.”

  “Yes, it would be,” Dad said. “It’s always good to have a plan.”

  Mum dug her keys out of her purse. “In the meantime, you can grab your new socks from the bottom of your chest of drawers.”

  I started to turn, then stopped in my tracks.

  Wait a second.

  “I have new socks?”

  “Two pairs,” she said, like I hadn’t just freaked out about not having any. “I bought them at the end of last season.”

  Man, was she tricky! I spun around to race up the stairs, and remembered halfway up to shout, “Thanks, Mum!”

  “Shut up, Nugget!” Wendy shouted from her room.

  “J.T.” I muttered.

  I grabbed my socks, which were still in their packaging, and raced back downstairs to shove them into my hockey bag.

  “Ready?” Mum asked as she opened the door for me.

  “Yup,” I told her, hoisting the huge bag onto my back. The weight almost knocked me over.

  “What happened to your hair?” Dad asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, turning toward the door.

  “It has bubbles in it.”

  The shampoo! “Someone flushed the toilet when I was in the shower,” I sighed.

  Mum lifted her coffee cup toward her mouth, but not before I heard her chuckle.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “You’re right,” she said, clearing her throat. “I’m the one who flushed it. I’m sorry honey, I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “Good luck at practice,” Dad said, then started singing some weird song about tiny bubbles.

  I thought he was making it up until Mum started in as well. I scowled at no one in particular as I pulled the door closed behind me. Just as it clicked shut, I heard Wendy yell, “Are you kidding me with the singing? Seriously! I’m trying to sleep!”

  Mum was pretty quiet for the first few minutes of the drive, and I hoped she wasn’t mad at me.

  “Thanks again for getting the socks, Mum,” I told her.

  “No problem.”

  I looked out the window and thought for a moment or two. It wasn’t like buying me new socks was the only nice thing she’d done for me lately. I’d just finished eating a peanut butter sandwich she got up early to make for me. “And for all the other stuff you do, too,” I added.

  “It’s all part of being a mum,” she said, reaching over to give my knee a squeeze.

  “Kenny’s mum doesn’t do all that stuff,” I told her.

  That’s when it hit me.

  Kenny!

  “Nuts!”

  “What?” Mum asked, hitting the brakes.

  “Kenny needs a ride to practice!” I couldn’t believe I forgot!

  “Today?” Mum gasped.

  “Yes. Uh, right now.”

  “Good grief,” she groaned, pulling off the road and turning around so we could go back for him. “Why didn’t I know anything about this?”

  “He only asked me yesterday.”

  “You’re not answering the question,” she said, shooting me a look out of the corner of her eye.

  “Because I forgot to ask you,” I sighed.

  “There’s been an awful lot of forgetting lately, Jonathan. Please tell me you remembered to do your Math homework.”

  “I did,” I told her, with a nod.

  Well, the regular work, anyway. That extra assignment was a stupid idea. Why had I even asked for it? And could I honestly finish it during a fifteen minute recess? If I didn’t, would it count as missed homework, or just a missed opportunity to win Mr. Holloway over?

  Before I had time to really think about it, we were at Kenny’s house. Luckily, the Cavanaughs’ kitchen light was on and I could see my buddy standing at the window, waiting for us. I helped him load his bag into the back of the van, and when he climbed in next to me, he looked like someone had glued his eyelids together, too.

  “Thanks for the ride, Mrs. McDonald,” Kenny said, buckling his seatbelt.

  “No problem,” she told him, but she caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and I had a feeling she’d have more to say about it later on.

  * * *

  Practice was insane, and I’m not just saying that because I did a faceplant when we were skating drills and ended up with a bloody nose. I’m saying it because Coach O’Neal told us it was time to start taking the game seriously, and that meant skating hard and fast for what seemed like forever.

  I’d thought my workouts during the summer would give me a serious edge over the rest of the guys and they kind of did. But they didn’t give me an edge over Coach.

  “Let’s hustle out there!” he shouted, in between blasts on his whistle.

  “I am hustling,” Colin grunted at me.

  “Me too,” I grunted back.

  “Bayview isn’t going to slow down for you guys at next week’s game, you know,” Coach shouted.

  “We know,” Colin and I groaned at the same time.

  “You’ve got three days before you face them. Do you want to win?”

  “Yes,” I heard a couple of guys say.

  “What about the rest of you?” Coach shouted.

  “Yes,” we mumbled.

  “I still can’t hear you.”

  “Yes!” we shouted, loud and clear.

  For most of practice, I felt like I had too much on my mind to concentrate properly. Life had been kind of a breeze up until twenty-four hours earlier, and it had been going down the tubes ever since, especially on the ice. I should have been a lock for starting right wing, since I’d been on Coach’s team forever. Never mind all the extra work I’d done over the summer. That position should have been mine, period.

  Eddie Bosko was ruining everything for me.

  He was going to be a tough player to beat. He was good, he was strong and he had the size advantage. And now he was going to be my tutor? I’d be stuck spending time with him off the ice? That stunk worse than week-old garbage, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  And when it came to things I had no control over, there was the fact that I wasn’t growing at all. What if I was the size of an eight-year-old when I was seventeen … or seventy!

  Jeff swiped the puck from me during scrimmage and scored his second goal.

  Nuts!

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eddie Bosko check Kenny, who tripped over his own skates and wiped out. Eddie did the same thing to Patrick Chen, who was one of the only guys on the team who liked him. Patrick managed to stay on his feet, but barely. In fact, he looked pretty shaken up after Bosko made contact.

  That monster was going to help me with Math? He would slowly explain all the calculations that made no sense?

  I seriously doubted it, especially when he checked me into the boards three times in four minutes, each hit a little harder than the last.

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing it hurt me, though. I grunted, but kept my face totally blank, just like he did. I tried to smirk once, but it probably looked more like a wince, and even with pads on, my elbow felt like it was on fire.

  After the last hit, I went after the puck like it was the key to fixing everything that was going wrong. I forgot how tired I was and much pain I’d be in the next morning. I pushed myself as hard as I could, and the people around me even harder.

  Unfortunately, that included Kenny, who was rubbing his shoulder and shooting me dirty looks as practice was winding up.

  “Geez, Nugget! What’s your problem?” he asked, as Coach O’Neal blew his whistle to call us in.

  “Sorry, man,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt,” he said, skating toward centre
ice.

  “Let’s huddle up,” Coach said, clapping his hands silently.

  I guess he forgot he was wearing gloves.

  The group of us skated into a circle and I saw that every one of us was dripping sweat, even Eddie Bosko. That was a good sign, at least. I wiggled my toes, and even they felt sweaty. If my socks stood up on their own from the first practice, the second would have had them dancing around the laundry room.

  “I know I ran you guys hard today,” Coach O’Neal said, over the sound of us catching our breath. “And you know I did it for your own good.”

  A couple of the guys nodded.

  “We beat Bayview twice last year, but that doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels and —”

  “Our what?” Kenny asked.

  “Laurels. Don’t worry about it right now. Just know that Bayview is hungry for a win. We all know last season left them with something to prove.”

  “I’ll say,” Jeff whispered.

  Coach shook his head. “But you guys have something to prove too. Being a great team means always looking for ways to get better. That means pushing yourselves, even when you feel like you don’t need to.”

  Coach looked each of us in the eye, one at a time. When it was my turn, I did my best to give him a tough look, by squinting a little.

  “Do you need glasses, Nugget?” Colin whispered.

  I shook my head and stopped squinting. Apparently my tough look needed some work.

  “Okay,” Coach said, nodding slowly at his team. “We’ll see you Friday morning, bright and early.”

  Chapter Six

  Even though I knew I spent an equal amount of time in each of my classes, it seemed like I was always in Mr. Holloway’s room. Even worse, it seemed like I was always three or four steps behind whatever crazy lesson he was teaching in there.

  While Mr. Holloway scribbled a bunch of numbers on the board, Carrie Tanaka walked up and down every row, collecting homework assignments. I had a bad feeling as I tried to smooth out the crumpled ball of equations I’d shoved in the bottom of my backpack. I had an even worse feeling knowing I’d spent recess playing street hockey in the school bus parking lot instead of doing my special make-up assignment.

  Nuts.

  I cringed at the wrinkled assignment I had completed. When I’d worked on it the night before, it seemed like getting half the answers right would be good enough. But if it was half right, it was also half wrong. Now that was the kind of depressing Math I could calculate.

  Another calculation?

  The chance of Mr. Holloway giving me another make-up assignment was about zero percent.

  So, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to use the next two minutes to try saving myself. I opened my textbook to the right page and tore some loose-leaf paper from my binder. Where was my pencil? I dug through the front pocket of my bag until I found it, but by then Carrie Tanaka was only two rows away. Two stinkin’ rows!

  I had to work fast!

  I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry, and read over the first question.

  Surprise, surprise. It didn’t make sense. (To me, anyway.)

  I read it again as Carrie turned into the row next to mine. The longer I stared, the more the numbers and letters started to look like the pictures of hieroglyphics we’d seen in Mr. Marshall’s class. Hieroglyphics it would take an archaeologist years to decipher.

  And I was no archaeologist.

  “Mr. McDonald,” Mr. Holloway said, making me jump in my seat. “You appear to be racing ahead of the rest of the class.”

  Racing ahead? I was trying to catch up!

  “No, I —” I gulped. Please don’t make me write on the board.

  “I have yet to instruct you or anyone else to open their textbooks, and there you are, feverishly working.”

  “I —”

  “And if you aren’t racing ahead,” he said, peering at me over the top of his glasses, “I certainly hope you aren’t trying to finish up an earlier assignment.”

  “No, I —”

  “Class, where is homework meant to be done?”

  “At home,” almost everyone said at the same time, like a bunch of robots.

  Even I whispered along, since he’d been training us since the first day of class.

  He nodded and started walking down the aisle toward me. “Not in class, not at recess, not on the bus, or in the back seat of the family minivan.”

  Had he been spying on me all year?

  Carrie Tanaka gave me a sympathetic look and I handed over the crumpled assignment. She reached for the page I had just started scribbling on.

  I held on to it and shook my head as Mr. Holloway continued, “Not in the minutes before class, and certainly not once class has begun.” He stood next to my desk. “Am I making myself clear, Mr. McDonald?”

  “Yes,” I told him.

  He glanced at the open page of my textbook and raised one eyebrow at me, just like Mum. “I don’t imagine I’m going to discover your make-up assignment among the sheets Miss Tanaka has just collected.”

  I shook my head slowly instead of saying anything.

  “Is that a negative, Mr. McDonald?”

  “Yes … I mean, no,” I babbled. “I mean no, you will not find it.”

  “It being the assignment that you requested to compensate for yet another uncompleted assignment?”

  “Yes,” I told him, my voice barely a squeak.

  Mr. Holloway sighed and started walking back toward the chalkboard.

  Whew.

  At least he hadn’t made me go to the front of the class.

  “Mr. McDonald?” he said, suddenly spinning around to face me.

  “Yes?” I gulped.

  “Please join me at the front of the class.”

  Nuts!

  Travis Cosgrove and Jason Kiniski both snickered as I shuffled past them on the way to certain doom.

  “You can do it,” Kenny whispered.

  Of course, he was worse than me at Math and was probably just relieved he wasn’t Mr. Holloway’s target.

  When I stood at the board and faced the class, the thirty faces I’d known forever looked more like two hundred strangers. They were all staring at me and waiting for me to mess up. I didn’t have much time to think about it though, because Mr. Holloway was already throwing a bunch of numbers at me. I tried to follow the story of some friends stopping at a vending machine to buy a bunch of sandwiches. I’d seen vending machine sandwiches on the ferry, and I wouldn’t have paid a nickel for squished ham or dried out turkey.

  But of course, that wasn’t the question.

  What was the question? Something about a $20 bill and some change. Did he say 5 guys and 3 sandwiches? No, 6 sandwiches. My brain was like a tornado, swirling around in my skull. The room was totally silent. I wanted to count on my fingers, but I couldn’t decide whether my thumb represented a sandwich or a person.

  Why couldn’t he ask me a hockey question?

  “We’re all waiting, Mr. McDonald.”

  Did he think I didn’t know that? I would have rather been just about anywhere, even squished by a sumo wrestler or slammed into the boards by Eddie Bosko. I glanced at my enemy, and he just stared blankly at me, the way he had before, like he had no idea who I was. Like he hadn’t spent that very morning trying to destroy me on the ice.

  Jerk.

  I turned to face the board again, and that was when I heard Eddie Bosko.

  “Two-fifty,” he said, in that deep Dad-voice.

  “Mr. Bosko, you have something to contribute?” Mr. Holloway said, frowning.

  Eddie sighed. “The 6 sandwiches at $3.75 apiece will cost $22.50. The one guy can put in his 20 and the other 4 have to come up with the remaining $2.50. That’s the answer.”

  Mr. Holloway looked like he’d just eaten something very sour. “And the question wasn’t directed toward you.”

  Eddie Bosko shrugged and I half-expected him to ask, “So what are you gonna do about it?”
/>   I stood at the board like a big dork, gripping my piece of chalk and waiting for someone to tell me what to do.

  Mr. Holloway cleared his throat. “Take your seat, Mr. McDonald.”

  I made it back to my desk in about two seconds flat, trying to figure out if Eddie Bosko had saved or humiliated me. As much as it shocked me, I was leaning toward saved.

  For the rest of the class, I tried really hard to understand the problems Mr. Holloway worked through on the board and I tried even harder to understand why Eddie Bosko would help me.

  * * *

  When the bell rang, I grabbed my books and raced into the hallway to catch up with him. He was at least a foot taller than the rest of the kids, so he was easy to follow. When he stopped at the drinking fountain, I waited for him to finish slurping and stand up straight. When he did, I kind of waved at him, then felt like an idiot and shoved my hand in my pocket.

  He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stared at me.

  “I just wanted to say thanks for helping me in there,” I said, keeping my voice steady.

  He didn’t say anything for about ten seconds, which felt like ten years.

  I tried to smile.

  He sighed, then said, “I got tired of watching you stand there with your mouth hanging open, like a flounder on the line, right before it gets nailed with a bat.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my face turn red.

  “It was kind of pathetic,” he said, then turned toward the cafeteria.

  “Eddie?” I called after him.

  “Yeah?” he asked, over his shoulder. He didn’t even bother turning around.

  “You’re going to be my tutor, you know.” My cheeks were so hot they felt sunburned. “I need help with Math.”

  He stopped and turned to stare at me again, long and hard.

  “No kidding,” he said, then walked away.

  * * *

  Thankfully, my day got better in gym period, since Mrs. Ramsey let us play floor hockey. Five of the guys from the Cougars were in my class, and four of us ended up on one team, which meant trouble for the competition, especially the girls.

  Hannah Richards and Molly Irving stood around, twirling their hair and gossiping for almost the whole game. They only stopped talking long enough to scream whenever the bright orange puck whizzed past them at 500 kilometres per hour, which happened at least twenty times. The rest of the girls were pretty useless, too. I knew a bunch of them were good skaters, since I’d seen the Cutter Bay Ice Dancers practise at the rink, but skating was only one part of playing hockey and they sure were lame on the gym floor.