Ice Magic

by Matt Christopher

  Pie reentered the game, eager to make up for lost time.

  A Hawk got the pass on the face-off, passed it to a teammate, and Pie was after him as swiftly as his oversize skates would allow. Just past the blue line, heading into Hawk territory, he jolted the Hawk with a neat bodycheck and stole the puck. Dribbling the black pellet with care, he swung around in a semicircle and started back across the blue line, then across the neutral zone into Penguin territory.

  Two Hawks charged after him, and he flipped the puck to Bud. The puck rose off the ice and flopped through the air between the two Hawks, bouncing in front of Bud. Bud stopped it with his skate, then snapped it back to Pie.

  Pie, heading for the right-hand side of the net, caught the puck and with one sweeping motion shoved it hard toward the narrow opening between the Hawk goalie’s padded leg and the goal.

  Score!

  “Nice shot, Pie!” Bud cried as the wingman skated up beside him.

  “Thanks, Bud.”

  He looked for Terry and saw the center sweeping around the net, totally ignoring him.

  The meathead, thought Pie. I scored, didn’t I? He can’t be mad at me for that!

  “All right, third line!” Coach Joe Hayes yelled from the bench. “Off the ice!”

  “I just get going and then I have to get off,” Pie grunted as he headed for the sideline.

  “That’s your problem,” said a voice at his elbow. “You always get started too late, if you ever get started at all.”

  Pie glanced over his shoulder at Terry. The blue eyes met his and held unflinchingly.

  “Why do you keep riding me, Mason?” Pie asked. “What have I done to you?”.

  “Nothing to me! It’s what you’re doing to the team! I don’t know about you, but I’d like to get on a winning team once in my life!”

  So that was it, Pie thought. Terry was blaming him for the poor direction the team was going. But why me? he thought. I’m not the only one who isn’t playing like a big leaguer.

  He was sure there was something else bothering Terry. Something else that made the center pick on Pie more often than he did anyone else.

  Line 2 failed to score. With fifty seconds to go in the game, Line 3 banged in a twenty-footer, and the game ended with the Hawks winning, 4 to 3.

  The teams skated off the ice, the Hawks triumphantly loud over their victory, the Penguins quiet and cheerless. They had learned to accept losses without crying over them. There would be other games, other chances for victory.

  But one man did feel differently about losing. Terry “the terrible” Mason, who slammed his skates into his gym bag and sourly left the rink.

  Pie was met with a surprise greeting at the gate. The twins! He quickly forgot about Terry.

  “Got a minute?” Jody whispered.

  Pie stepped toward the wall with them, out of the way of the people leaving the rink.

  “Didn’t think you guys were here,” he said. “What is it?”

  Both twins looked at him as if they had something on their minds that couldn’t wait another minute.

  “We played a game last night, and it was exactly like this one, Pie!” Jody said excitedly. “Exactly!”

  Pie stared.

  “Even to my getting penalized?”

  “Right! Even to that!” Joliette exclaimed.

  6

  Pie sat down in the locker room to take off his skates and saw Coach Hayes and Terry Mason talking together near the far wall.

  Terry looked at him, and something flashed in his eyes that made Pie suspect that they were talking about him.

  He blushed and with nervous fingers began to unlace his skates. What was Terry up to now?

  A few minutes later Pie left the locker room. Outside, in the bright sunshine, Bud Rooney caught up with him.

  “Bud,” Pie said, “what were the coach and Terry talking about?”

  “You,” said Bud directly.

  Pie’s heart skipped a beat. “That’s what I figured. Did you hear what they said?”

  “Not all of it,” Bud replied. “But I think Terry asked to play on another line.”

  “What did Coach say?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t talk as loud as Terry did.”

  So, Pie thought, the great Terry “the terrible” Mason doesn’t want to play on the same line with me anymore. Suits me fine, I don’t exactly enjoy playing with him either. Not with him on my back all the time.

  He couldn’t guess, though, just what the coach proposed to do. He would have to wait till the next game.

  That afternoon he went over to the twins’ house and found them downstairs in the recreation room, busy as beavers, drawing pollution posters.

  “Our class is conducting a contest,” Joliette explained enthusiastically. “The best poster on pollution wins two free tickets to a movie.”

  SHOW YOU CARE BY CLEARING THE AIR, read the bold heading of her poster. Underneath she had started to sketch tall smokestacks of a factory.

  KILLING FISH AT SEA IS THEIR CUP OF TEA was the title of Jody’s poster. Jody was sketching a weird-looking monster holding a huge cup supposedly representing an ocean. On the surface of the cup were several fish lying flat on their side, presumably dead. POLLUTION was scrawled on the monster’s headdress.

  Pie’s jaws slackened. He had come over with hopes of playing with their toy hockey game.

  “I suppose you guys won’t have time to play a game of hockey since you have those posters to work on,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, we have!” Joliette cried, dropping her pencil. “These don’t have to be in till next Thursday!”

  Pie looked at her, then at Jody. He hadn’t particularly considered her as his opponent. He had considered Jody.

  “Well, ah …” he stammered, embarrassed. “Only two can play the game at the same time. Why don’t you work on your poster, Jolie, while Jody and I play?”

  Grudgingly, she agreed. “Okay. I understand perfectly. I’m a girl, and you prefer playing with a boy. It’s perfectly logical — to a boy, I guess.”

  She took up her pencil again and continued to work on the poster, showing only the least bit of disappointment.

  Pie laughed. “You can play the winner,” he said.

  He and Jody went over to the table where the hockey game was set up, selected their sides, and started to play. An old clock on a shelf beside them served as a timer.

  “Three periods, twelve minutes each,” Pie said. “Just like a real game.”

  They started to play. Within three minutes Jody scored a goal. Pie tied it up, and the game continued with each scoring twice before the period was over.

  “Have you picked out yourself in the game?” Jody asked.

  “That right wingman,” Pie pointed. “I think he’s doing better than I could, though.” He paused, then said seriously, “Jody, do you really think I’ll be playing like he is at our game next Saturday?”

  “No,” Jody said. “I think this game works only when we play it the day before the real game. That’s the way it’s been working out anyway.”

  “Then playing now doesn’t mean anything?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’m not really sure, Pie. We can only wait and see.”

  “Well, if it does, playing this game might help me,” Pie said, thoughtfully. “If it doesn’t, at least we’ve had a lot of fun.”

  “How can it help you?” Jody asked.

  “I’m slow on the ice,” Pie confessed, then chuckled. “Haven’t you heard Terry Mason? He broadcasts it like a radio announcer.”

  “Yes, I heard him.” Jody scowled. “He gives me a pain.”

  Pie shrugged. “He’s right in a lot of ways, though. I am slow, but it’s not all my fault. It’s my skates. They’re too big. They used to belong to my brother, Pat.”

  He didn’t mind confiding that information to Jody. Jody wouldn’t tell a soul.

  Suddenly he saw a movement from the corner of his left eye. He turned abruptly and looked at the window
above the shelf where the clock stood. The curtains were partly drawn, letting in daylight.

  A face was there, and a pair of large, inquisitive eyes was staring down at them.

  7

  Quickly the face disappeared, but not before Pie had recognized it. He looked wide-eyed at Jody

  “Did you see who that was?”

  “Yes. Terry Mason.” Angrily Jody ran over to the curtains and snapped them shut. “Man, he’s got nerve.”

  “Wonder if he heard us talking.”

  “Probably. Did you see that grin on his face? He seemed to be getting a kick out of what he heard.”

  They finished the game, Pie winning by two goals. He took a five-minute breather before squaring off against Joliette.

  He beat her by one point.

  “You’re almost better than Jody,” he said frankly.

  She shrugged. “Even though we’re twins,” she said, “I firmly believe that I’m inclined to be more athletic than he is.”

  “Oh, sure,” Jody said.

  Pie thanked them for letting him play and then left. He saw Terry outside, packing snowballs and throwing them at a tree. Clinging close to his feet was his faithful cat, Tipper.

  “Hi, Pie,” Terry greeted, grinning. “Quite a hockey game the twins have, isn’t it?”

  Pie frowned. How much did Terry hear, anyway?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s magic, isn’t it? Each player on your team represents one of us on the Penguins. Right?”

  Pie let a smile curve his lips. The best way to handle Terry Mason, he thought, is to agree with him. “If you say so,” he said.

  “How many goals did you score? I mean you — not the whole team.”

  “Two,” Pie answered.

  “And I?”

  “Two.”

  Terry scooped up a handful of snow, packed it into a firm ball, and pegged it at the tree again. Smack! Right in the middle of its trunk.

  “And you think that game will be just like the game we’re playing Saturday?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Terry looked at him. “I thought that’s what you guys said.”

  “You stuck your nose close enough to the window, but not your ears,” Pie declared. “We said maybe it’ll be like the game Saturday. We’re not sure.”

  “Oh.”

  Terry’s ears reddened as Pie, a wide grin on his face, headed for home. Let the smarty-pants believe what he wants to. He’ll probably get so confused he won’t know whether or not to believe that the twins’ hockey game is really magic.

  During the rest of the week he wondered, too, if the real game on Saturday morning would turn out to be like the one he had played with Jody. It hardly seemed likely. The last two real games were like the ones the twins had played on their toy game the Friday nights before the actual matches. It would seem that the pattern would remain the same.

  On Friday afternoon, just after he had arrived home from school, there was a knock on the door. Pie answered it. It was Jody Byrd, looking as excited as if he had just seen a flying saucer.

  “Hi, Pie! Coming over for a game of hockey?”

  Pie considered. “I don’t think I will, Jody,” he confessed. “It might be like our game tomorrow, and I don’t think I’d like to know beforehand how it goes. You know.”

  “Oh, okay. Anyway, Jolie and I have our posters done, and we made a discovery.”

  Pie’s eyebrows arched. “What discovery?”

  “We figured out what S-K-X-R-O-T really is,” Jody said proudly. “Remember Merlin the magician in the story of King Arthur?”

  Pie’s forehead knitted. “Yes.”

  “Well, in the alphabet, six letters to the right of each letter in Merlin’s name spells S-K-X-R-0-T!”

  Pie stared. “How’d you discover that?”

  “By experimenting,” Jody explained. “Jolie helped me, of course. We figured it must be a code, so we wrote the alphabet on two separate sheets of paper, then put one under the other, passing it along underneath each letter to see if S-K-X-R-O-T would spell out a word we were familiar with. Sure enough it came up with Merlin. And both of us have read about him in the King Arthur books.”

  “Then Merlin the magician must Ve been a real person,” said Pie, feeling goosebumps on his arms.

  “Must’ve,” said Jody. “Well, see you tomorrow, Pie.”

  Jody left, and Pie was in the act of closing the door when he spotted a familiar figure across the street. Terry Mason, he thought, seems to be around a lot lately when you least expect him.

  And Pie saw as he looked harder that the confused look was still on Terry’s face, too.

  He smiled as he closed the door.

  The game at 9:00 on Saturday morning was against the Seals, a team wearing blue uniforms with white trim. As he skated around the ice to warm up for the game, Pie looked at the stands for the familiar faces of the twins. He saw them finally, waved, and they waved back.

  Wonder how their game turned out? he thought. And I wonder how I played?

  He pushed the thoughts out of his mind as a skater whisked past him, spun halfway around, and skated backward, facing him. Their eyes met and held. This time not even a flicker of a smile spoiled the waxlike features of Terry’s face.

  Near the corner of the rink Terry spun halfway around again and continued skating frontward. He’s baffled, Pie thought. He doesn’t believe in magic, so he doesn’t know what to think about me, the twins, or their toy hockey game.

  Now that I’ve got him guessing maybehe’ll lay off me, Pie thought. But I’d better not count on it.

  Face-off time rolled around, and the first lines of both teams got in position on the ice. Terry centered against Corky Jones, a boy shorter than Terry, but muscular and fast.

  The whistle shrilled, the puck was dropped, and the centers’ sticks clattered against the ice for possession of the puck. The rubber disk took a severe battering, then skittered across the ice into Penguin territory. Bud Rooney hooked it with the blade of his stick, whisked around, and started back up the ice. Pie, moving slowly in the neutral zone toward his own blue line, waited for the puck to cross into Seal territory.

  Challenged by a Seal who came upon him suddenly from behind, Bud snapped the puck. Pie sprinted across the blue line in an effort to get in front of it, and shreek! the whistle pulled him up short.

  “You were offside, Pennelli!” Terry yelled.

  Pie blushed. That was stupid, he admitted. He had misjudged the speed of the puck and had caused a violation by crossing the blue line before the puck had.

  The face-off was at the Penguin end of the rink between Frog and a Seal wingman. The Seal got control of the puck, passed it to another Seal, who caught it and bolted for the Penguin net. Pie lunged forward, sprinting as hard as he could to get between the goal and the oncoming Seal.

  Suddenly his left skate twisted and his ankle gave way, throwing him off balance. He fell, skidded on the ice, and a player in a black uniform toppled over him.

  A storming “You idiot!” identified the skater. It was Terry.

  Terry clambered to his feet, his eyes blazing hot. Behind him a cry of jubilation had exploded, and Pie could see sticks rising in the air like spears as the Seals celebrated their first goal.

  “I’m sorry,” Pie apologized. “My ankle gave way.”

  “Your ankle!” Terry scoffed. “You know what’s the matter with you? You haven’t learned how to keep your balance yet, and you’re trying to cut corners going eighty miles an hour! Well, you can’t do that, Pie! You have to learn to keep your balance first!”

  “C’mon, you guys!” yelled Coach Hayes. “Off the ice!”

  Line 1 skated off, and Line 2 skated on. Pie, tired and sweaty, avoided the coach’s eyes as he climbed over the wall and sat down. Terry had no business talking to me like that, he thought. Not on the ice in front of all that crowd. Not anywhere.

  One of these days I’m going to surprise him, Pie promised himself.
I’ll break every one of his teeth.

  The fault was in his skates, of course. But if I told that to Terry, Pie thought, he’d laugh and say that that excuse was worse than none.

  He watched Line 2 and then Line 3 do their stuff, and helped in the cheering when Butch Morrison, Line 3’s center for the Penguins, knocked in a goal to knot the score.

  Back on the ice went Line 1, and this time Pie tried his best not to cut corners sharply and risk a spill. But after a while he realized that he might as well have stayed off the ice as stick rigidly to that rule. Playing hockey was skating as fast as you could, stopping as quickly as you could, and cutting corners as sharply as possible. There was no other way to play the game and play it well. Fall or not, that was the way he was going to play it.

  Terry, he told himself, could lump it.

  An offside violation was called on Chuck Billings. And on the face-off in neutral territory Bud got the pass and shot it to Terry. Terry dribbled the puck up the ice, across the blue line, and into Seals’ territory. He was suddenly trapped by two Seals who came swooping down at him from different directions.

  He tried to pass the puck between them to Bud Rooney, but one of the Seals stopped it with his skate. The puck skidded to the side, and Pie, speeding down the ice near the boards, cut in and snared it. Pulling the puck safely toward him, he put on a burst of speed and carried it down the ice toward the Seals’ goal.

  From ten feet away he shot.

  A save!

  “Why didn’t you pass it, Pie?” Bud Rooney cried.

  There, on the other side of the crease, Pie saw the wingman in the open.

  Pie skated around the back of the net, coming up behind Bud. “Sorry, Bud,” he said.

  “Sure,” Bud grumbled.

  “Come on, you guys! Move! Move!” yelled Coach Hayes.

  Too late, both Pie and Bud saw the fast breakaway the Seals had made. Two of them had the puck up the ice, and the only Penguin on their tails was Terry Mason.