Thin Ice

~~~~

Excuse the mistakes

Dedicated to imallergicetoidiots, because inadvertantly, she inspired this story. Go check out her stuff!

~~~~

Two minutes.

There were two minutes left in the last hockey game I would play with my teammates of the past four years. Two minutes left in a game, which was tied at zero, that I really wanted to win. Two minutes left in a game, and I stuck sitting in my home away from home; the penalty box.

The other girl had it coming, though. The referee had clearly blown his whistle, yet she kept digging at my goalie and best friend Kelly, whose glove contained the puck after a dynamite save. I couldn’t let that go down, and when I’d stepped between the girl and Kelly, she’d shoved me. I was not someone who would just let that go.

It was an incredibly bad habit, but as my mom would say, I got my stubbornness and aggression from my dad. He played division one hockey and led Boston University in penalty minutes. My older brother, Nick, was the same way at Cornell.

“Skate, Brianna, skate!” I screamed, banging my gloved fist against the boards as one of my teammates got a hold of the puck and took off down the ice. I glanced up at the scoreboard as Brianna was stripped of the puck, and I bit my lip. I had thirty seconds left in my penalty, and I was itching to get back onto the ice.

My team needed this win. Mostly, it was because we were playing the Razorsharks, a girls’ travel team from Rashido, which was a town about twenty minutes north of where I lived. The rivalry between my team, the Cyclones, and the Razorsharks was pretty much like Toronto versus Montreal; we hated each other. This win was something we needed to shut the Razorsharks’ trash-talking mouths.

Plus, tonight was my last game. Tomorrow, I was moving to Clarkson, New York, which was about five hours away from my current home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I didn’t really have a choice, since my dad’s job was moving him up to New York.

I was partly excited, since I was closer to Canada and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Clarkson was only fifteen minutes away from Ithaca. That meant I could see a lot more of Nick, who was only two years older than me in his freshman year at Cornell.

However, I was also really mad since the season had just started, and I’d been playing with the same girls for the four seasons that I’d played girls’ travel hockey. Up until I was twelve, I’d just played on various boys teams. These girls were like my unofficial family.

“Three… two… one.”

As my penalty disappeared from the scoreboard, I hopped over the penalty box door and as soon as my skates touched the well-worn ice, I took off into my team’s zone. “Taylor!” I called, coming up next to my teammate as she guarded in the area in front of the net, “Go back to offense.”

Taylor nodded, and without a word, she went back to her left wing position, and I returned to left defense. There was less than a minute on the clock now, and we needed a goal. I watched the play in the corner, as I kept an eye on the Razorshark hovering in the slot.

Suddenly, the puck was coughed up, and it shot around the back of the net. I took off after it, and I angled the Razorshark wing out of the way to get my stick on the puck. Then, I brought it up the boards until the puck was out of our zone and on the way to the Razorshark net. I could vaguely hear my teammates cheering me on as I passed them, but I was too focused to understand what their words were.