The Aldens had just sat down to eat when Pete burst into the dining room. He was wearing large orange boots. Their thick rubber soles left a line of snow stars on the floor as he stormed along.
Freddy followed after him. She pulled off her orange, green, and yellow gloves and stuffed them into her pockets. “Pete, listen to me,” she said. “You can be timekeeper. That’s an important job.”
Pete rolled his eyes. “I don’t want to be timekeeper!” he shouted. “I don’t want to be anything!” He stormed off.
Jimmy came along carrying his lunch tray. “What’s the matter with Pete?” he asked Freddy.
“He didn’t make the events he wanted.” She moved close to Jimmy and lowered her voice. “This whole thing — it’s not fair,” she hissed. “You got all the good people. Something has to be done. Something to…even things out.”
She noticed the Aldens watching her. She turned to them and smiled. “Oh, hi,” she said, her tone bright. “I was just telling Jimmy that next year, we’ll have to divide up families. It’s not fair that one team gets all that talent.” She sailed off toward the buffet table.
Jimmy sat down. “We do have a good team,” he said. “We could win.”
“Are your parents coming for the awards dinner?” Benny asked.
Jimmy’s entire face turned red as his cheeks. “The awards dinner? I — uh — ”
“Freddy told us about it,” Henry said.
“She told us her parents were coming,” Benny said. “Will yours be here?”
Jimmy stood up abruptly. “They wouldn’t miss it,” he said. He took his tray and moved on.
“I wonder why he rushed off like that?” Violet said.
“Maybe he didn’t want to talk about the awards dinner,” Henry said.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Jessie wondered.
Henry shrugged. “The competition hasn’t even started. Maybe he thinks it’s bad luck to talk about awards so soon.”
“Pete and Freddy seemed upset, too,” Violet reminded them.
“I’m not sure I like this competition business,” Benny said. “It makes everybody act funny.”
“You can’t think about competing,” Jessie told him. “Just think about doing the best you can.”
After lunch, Benny met with the other sculptors out on the lawn in front of the lodge. They were all about the same age. The only things they had made with snow were balls, forts, and people.
“We should stick to something that’s not too hard,” Benny decided.
The others — Jason, Alan, and Debbie — agreed. They would build snowpeople. But what kind?
“Why not do us?” Alan asked. “We could have them — us — working on a snow sculpture.”
“That’s a great idea!” Benny said.
Violet’s ice carving group — Violet, Beth, and David — were meeting near the ski slope. No one had ever carved ice before. They were all afraid they couldn’t do it.
“It will have to be a simple shape,” Beth said.
Watch ambled over to the group. He yawned and put his head in Violet’s lap. That gave her an idea.
“How about a dog?” she asked. “We could use Watch as a model.”
Beth twisted her pony tail around her fingers. “The legs would be hard to carve,” she said.
Violet thought about that. Then, she said, “We won’t have to worry about the back legs if we’re making him sit.”
At the sound of the word sit, Watch perked up his ears. Then, he sat.
Everyone laughed.
Benny and his group were having problems. They tried rolling the snow into bigger and bigger balls, but chunks kept falling off.
“The snow’s too powdery,” Jason complained.
Benny had an idea. “If we had some pans, we could fill them with water and pour it on the snow,” he said. “That’d make it easy to pack.”
They got four buckets of water from the kitchen. Then, they poured the water on the snow. At first, it seemed as though Benny’s plan would work. But the water went fast.
Jason sighed. “We can’t keep going all the way back to the kitchen.”
“Even if we had enough water,” Alan said, “the snow would be too heavy to roll.”
“Then we’ll have to find some other way to build,” Debbie said.
“Like what?” Jason asked.
Benny remembered a picture he had seen in the snow-sculpting book. “If we had some sticks or something, we could build forms,” he said.
Alan liked the idea. “It’ll be easy to pack the snow around them,” he said.
They looked for something to use to make forms. Behind the lodge, they found a scrap heap next to the garage. Debbie saw an old sled under a tarpaulin. They piled it with metal pipes and strips of wood.
“Take that wire, too,” Benny said. “It’s perfect for holding the form together.”
Now that they knew what they were doing, the work went fast. In an hour, four stick figures stood in the snow. By supper time, they had the rough beginnings of snowy self-portraits.
“I wonder how Freddy’s team is doing,” Jason said.
“Don’t worry about them,” Benny said. “Just think about doing the best we can.” |