The Boston Breakout (2 page)

T
he tour guide was wonderful. Dressed in period costume – blue waistcoat, wide-brimmed hat, long stockings, leather shoes with gleaming French buckles, a powder bag slung over his right shoulder – he was full of fascinating tales. They set out across the gorgeous green Boston Common toward the Massachusetts State House. All along the walk, he told them how this was where the colonists in America first rose up against British rule and British taxes and where American independence was born.

He took them to the Granary Burying Ground nearby and showed them the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams (“I thought he was a beer,” Nish hissed behind Travis’s ear), and John Hancock, whose flowery signature was on the Declaration of Independence.

Travis blushed to recall his own efforts to create a fancy signature. At the back of the little scrapbook he kept for newspaper stories about the Owls that he clipped from the
Tamarack Weekly
he had reserved several pages for practicing autographs. He must have tried forty or fifty different styles before he settled on one that included a long loop in the
Y
, the last letter of his name, and tucked inside the loop was a carefully drawn
7
– his number, and the number once worn by his father’s distant cousin, “Terrible” Ted Lindsay, when Ted Lindsay was a star with Gordie Howe and the Detroit Red Wings.

The Owls took pictures of the various graves and monuments. Wilson asked Travis to take a photo of him standing beside a tiny little gravestone off to the side of the huge monument to John Hancock. The simple marker said “Frank – Servant
to John Hancock.” The guide had explained that Frank was a slave who was owned by the Hancock family. Frank was so beloved by the Hancocks that they got special permission to bury him here, beside his master, rather than in the burial ground designated for slaves.

“They didn’t even give him a last name,” said Wilson, his eyes tearing up for someone he’d never known. “Just
Frank
. Like he was the family dog or something.”

Travis said nothing. He took the photo for Wilson and handed the camera back. What could he say? The world was sometimes such a mystifying place.

The group moved down a side street to Boston Latin School, which the guide said was “the first public school in the United States. It dates from 1635. It was a school nearly four hundred years ago – and it remains a school today.”

The guide named a long list of people who had gone to the school, most of them unfamiliar to Travis. Presidents of Harvard University had
gone here. Several state governors had gone to school here. And Ben Franklin had once been a student here.

“Benjamin Franklin,” the guide said, “may have been the smartest American ever. He was a great writer and a newspaper editor and publisher. He was an accomplished musician. He signed the Declaration of Independence. He served as United States ambassador to France. He was a chess master and spoke fluent French and Italian as well as English. He studied electricity. He invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses. He was an absolute genius, no doubt, but there is something even more unusual about Ben Franklin. It has to do with his statue standing here at this very school. Can anyone tell me what it is?”

The Owls mumbled among themselves and guessed. Fahd thought Franklin had “invented” electricity and several of the players agreed, but the guide said no, he didn’t invent electricity, but it was true that Ben Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm to study the behavior of electricity. Sam
thought maybe he had invented the camera, but the guide shook his head and smiled.

“No,” he said. “It’s got something to do with this school.”

Muck could hold his answer in no longer. “He dropped out.”

The guide raised an eyebrow in appreciation. “You knew!” he said to Muck, who appeared to blush. “You’re right!

“Benjamin Franklin, the smartest man in America, despised school,” the guide said to the delighted Owls. “His family was poor. His father was a candle-maker.”

“What did his mother do?” Sarah asked.

The guide laughed. “She
survived
. Mrs. Franklin had seventeen children. Little Ben was her fifteenth. But the family recognized that he was brilliant beyond his years, and somehow they got the money together to enroll him here. It was then called the South Grammar School. But he hated it.”

“How old was he when he quit?” Fahd asked.

“Ten,” the guide said. “When he was ten years
old, he dropped out and never again attended a single day of school.”

“I’m twelve,” Nish said. “That means I’ve already wasted two years of my life.”

The guide laughed and moved on. Nearby was a life-size statue of a donkey, symbol of the Democratic Party.

Nish climbed onto its back and asked Fahd to take his picture.

“Perfect,” Sam pronounced. “A total ass sitting on an ass.”

But the idea had lodged in Nish’s brain. They spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the various sites along the Freedom Trail: Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s house, the Bunker Hill monument, and, all the way out along the harbor, the USS
Constitution
, the famous three-masted warship that had won so many battles during the War of 1812.

The Owls had never seen Muck so happy. After the tour, their coach took them to a nearby souvenir store and told them all to pick out postcards and he would pay for them.

The Owls all thought the cards were just for themselves, small souvenirs of the afternoon, but Muck had other ideas.

“We’re going back to the hotel, and you are all going to send your card home with a message for the parents who couldn’t come on the trip. I want them to know you’re not just wasting your time and their money while you’re here in Boston. We want them to know you might be learning something as well.”

Some of the Owls groaned. They didn’t want to write postcards. They wanted to try the hotel pool.

“No one sends postcards,” Nish said. “Why can’t we just text them to let them know we’re okay?”

Muck sent a withering stare at the mouthy defenseman.

An hour later, Nish had his postcard written, addressed, and stamped. And before Travis could stop it, the message was in the mail and on its way to poor, suffering Mrs. Nishikawa, who was about to find out that her only son had decided to quit school.

T
he Owls’ first game was scheduled for the Boston Bruins’ practice arena in nearby Wilmington. Mr. D pulled up the old team bus outside the suburban rink. The bus burped and backfired in a cloud of black exhaust as the engine died. Mr. D grasped his nose and made a face as if the old bus had just passed wind.

Travis caught his own reflection in the side mirror that the driver used for backing up. His first thought was that he had never seen himself
reflected there before. Could he be getting taller?
Finally?

Travis’s mother had told him he worried unnecessarily about his size. “Lindsay men are late bloomers,” she said. “You’ll grow taller than your father, just you wait and see.”

Travis hoped so. His father was tall, taller than most of the other fathers of his teammates, but why did he have to “wait and see”? Why couldn’t he grow now, so he could stop worrying about it?

He could see he was changing. His face was a little longer. His hair was close-cut now, and thanks to the summer sun it was more blond than it was in hockey season. Travis looked around at his teammates to see if they, too, were changing. Sarah’s hair was like gold. It even seemed to sparkle. Travis couldn’t tell if she looked different. Sam’s hair was as red as ever. Jesse Highboy was maybe broader at the shoulders. Little Simon Milliken was finally catching up to the rest. Only Nish seemed not to have changed one bit: still wider than any of the others, still slopping stuff into his hair so he could style it high like his idol, Elvis Presley. Still with a
face that couldn’t hide an emotion even if you pulled a brown paper bag over it. That face – beet red during games, redder yet when embarrassed, twisting and churning with whatever mad plan or crazy thought was passing through it – was pure Nish. His signature. No flowery loop or number 44 required.

The Owls were thrilled to think that the Boston Bruins, Stanley Cup champions, had sat in the very stalls they would be sitting in. They would be skating on the same ice as Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, hockey’s tallest player at six foot nine. And if they went all the way to the final of the Paul Revere tournament, they would play for the championship in the Boston
TD
Garden itself, the rink where all the great stars of the
NHL –
Sidney Crosby, Steven Stamkos, Taylor Hall, Alexander Ovechkin, and dozens of others – had played. It was not the old Boston Garden, where Bobby Orr had practically reinvented the way defense was played in hockey, but it was close. It was a true
NHL
hockey rink, and that was what mattered most.

There had been no time for practice sessions. The tournament was beginning immediately so that all games could be fitted in before the championship round on the weekend. First up against the Screech Owls would be the Chicago Young Blackhawks, one of the top peewee teams in the country.

The Owls and the Young Blackhawks had met before, at the Big Apple tournament in New York City. Travis remembered that they had been a tough team to play, smart and quick and well-coached. The Owls had only got past them thanks to a brilliant play by Nish at the blue line. Nish had twisted and danced his way in with the puck and then dished off at the last moment to Travis, who scored the winner in a close 3–2 game.

Travis also remembered the championship game in that tournament. Again, it was the Nish show. The Owls had come back all the way to even the score against the State Selects, and Nish had then settled the game, scoring a truly ridiculous goal by sticking his stick between his legs and roofing the puck. Nish had seen an old YouTube clip of
Mario Lemieux doing this for the Pittsburgh Penguins and vowed he’d do the same. Muck was not amused – the Owls’ coach hated “showboaters” – but the team had been delighted. They’d won the championship.

Travis dressed slowly. After several weeks away from the ice, he wanted to savor his return. He put his gear on precisely as always, first right side then left – shin pads, socks, shoulder pads, elbow pads, skates – then kissed the inside of his jersey as the Screech Owls crest and the letter
C
on the outside slipped over his head and shoulders. He placed the helmet over his head, snapped the face shield in place, tucked on his gloves, grabbed his stick – and was set.

So, too, were the other Owls. Sarah was concentrating so fiercely on her hands it seemed she might burn them with X-ray vision. And Nish was doubled over, his head between his padded knees as he stared hard, hard, hard at the floor. Each Screech Owl had his or her own special ritual. Each respected the others’ little quirks, even if, as in the
case of Nish, it was hard to keep a straight face when watching them get ready to play.

The ice felt slightly alien. There was no way, Travis knew, that he would feel as comfortable as he did mid-season, when it seemed his feet and skates had melded together as a natural part of his body. He never thought about skating then. Now he had to concentrate on his stride. He could feel unfamiliar muscles – “hockey muscles,” Muck called them – straining into action. It was almost as if he’d rusted up while being off the ice.

The Young Blackhawks had clearly been playing summer hockey. The Owls sensed it immediately in the warm-up. They seemed to be in a higher gear and brimming with confidence.

“I’d love to wipe the smiles off those smug faces,” Nish hissed as he and Travis moved in on Jenny Staples to tap her pads and goalposts. It was a pregame ritual that Jenny insisted be followed exactly the same each time: Nish tapped one pad, Travis the other; Nish bumped one post with his fist, Travis the other.

Hockey rituals fascinated Travis. He’d once read a book called
A Loonie for Luck
about the Canadian gold-medal victory at the Salt Lake City Olympics. The book told the story about a “lucky loonie,” a one-dollar coin that Canadian ice-maker Trent Evans secretly buried at center ice to inspire the men’s and women’s hockey teams on their way to the gold, but it also included other stories of weird hockey superstitions.

When Gretzky played, he used to put baby powder between his stick blade and tape to “soften” his passes. Hall of Famer Phil Esposito wouldn’t stay in any hotel room that had the number 13 in it, and he kept so many rabbits’ feet and lucky charms hanging in his stall he could barely find his equipment. Bobby Orr never wore socks in his skates. But Travis’s all-time favorite concerned a player named Bruce Gardiner who had fallen into a terrible scoring slump while with the Ottawa Senators. Gardiner became so frustrated with his lack of goals that once, between periods, he took his stick into the washroom, placed the blade of his stick into the toilet bowl – and flushed. He immediately went out and
scored. Soon all of the Senators were “flushing” their sticks before games.