The wingless Joe Fflowers flies…in skates, on ice. Unless he makes a mind-boggling decision, tomorrow will be the last time Joe will skate in Evenen Rink. He loves the old arena. Of the scores of rinks where he has practiced and played hockey for eleven years, the century-old Evenen Rink has the hardest ice he has ever skated on. Evenen’s ice is so hard that the sound his speeding blades make as he races over its surface could have come from some medieval Japanese musical instrument.
Joe has the entire sheet of ice to himself. His Friday schedule leaves the last class period of the day free. Every week of hockey season he has taken those extra minutes before practice begins just to skate.
No helmet. No pads. No stick. Just dim lights and hard ice.
Joe explodes forward as he uses all of his strength to push through on the inside edge of his left skate. He closes his eyes to concentrate on two sounds—the hissing of metal slicing through ice and the roar of a thirty kilometer-an-hour wind blowing past his ears. He glides blind down the length of the rink. At the last second, as some inner sense feels the boards just ahead, he shifts his weight to his outside edge and, eyes still closed, circles back from whence he came.
If he does not decide, cannot decide, then, tomorrow it is over. In a week, the skater will be gone. A mutant bird in its place.
Joe opens his eyes, cuts an edge, uses three short explosive steps to accelerate, lengthens his stride, digs hard, increases his speed and smashes his shoulder into the rickety old glass. The rink reverberates with sound.
Five more days. His father has let him know the day before that the wing-mute is scheduled for the day after he gets home for spring break.
Five days and the thing he likes doing most in the world will be gone. Unless….
Joe spins toward the opposite end of the rink and speeds off. He drives himself down the ice. As he crosses the second blue line, he notices movement in the shadows behind the heavily scratched glass.
Coach Deirkin. The bald, but bearded coach, famous for his harangues, merely points his finger and gives a slight shake of his head to his best player.
Joe aborts his crash. Slowing his breathing and his speed, the fifteen-year old circles the rink a half-dozen times. The first three times around as he comes down the ice he looks closely through the dim glass for Deirkin. After that, he decides that his coach has gone down to his office, probably to practice yelling.
Joe tentatively extends his arms and flaps. Flaps again. Flaps and swears at his father and what is to be his fate. Unless….
After practice ends, Joe holds back. He waits until he is sure that he is the last one leaving the rink. Instead of following his teammates, who are rushing down the hill to get to the dining hall, Joe slips along the wall of the side of the rink and hurries to the back. The boy makes his way through a small forest of shadows. He stops where he has been told to wait and listens. The only sounds he hears are a couple of shrill taunts from down the hill and the bored drone of the compressors making ice.
“It’s Joe.”
The tired boy leans against the wall and looks at stars sprinkled, like sequins, among a sky full of cotton-balls. He waits for ten minutes, but no one shows. As Joe waits, his feelings rise and sink, like a teeter totter, between relief and disappointment. He doesn’t want wings, but he doesn’t want to leave Dutton and he definitely doesn’t want to leave Prissi. Joe knows he has a hard time showing it, but Prissi Langue does something inside him that no girl…no person… ever has done. She seems to see past all the defenses and screens he has had to put up from being from an immensely wealthy family. She teases him, likes him, argues with him and, best of all, acts like she doesn’t know his last name. He can’t even imagine how much he will miss her…if he decides to go.
As Joe pushes himself from the wall and shifts his skate bag higher on his shoulder, a low voice emanates from the deep shadows between the compressors and the rink wall, “Have you decided?”
A startled Joe blurts, “Yes, I…no. Not really.”
“Time’s short.”
“I know.”
“It can’t happen on a whim. It has to be set up. Organized.”
“I know. I know.”
As Joe’s fears turn to anger at being watched…studied…for ten minutes, it causes his voice to pitch up an octave. He worries that it might break.
“It can’t happen with a day’s notice. We need two days, at least.”
“It’s not going to happen now. I’m late. I’ve got to go.”
“Think hard. It’s close to too late. Think what you will lose. You could be the best.”
Joe whirls away from the speaker, as if eluding a defender on the ice, and sprints toward the lights of the dining hall. As he shoves open the massive door, the teener is breathing hard, and not so much from the run, as from what he is running from. He hurries into the reassuringly familiar light and warmth, the myriad of noises and pastiche of smells swirling through Mullen Dining Hall.