The Guardians

'He wasn't its friend,' I say, sharper than I expected to.

We stay there a minute longer. Staring at the Thurman house from the far side of Caledonia Street, a perspective we had returned to countless times in sleep-spoiling dreams. Watching for what Ben had been watching for. A white flash of motion. Opened eyes. A glint of teeth.

I'm first to start back to the hotel. The moon leading us on, peeping through the branches.

Randy laughs. 'Guess it knows we're here now.'

I do my best to join him in it, if only to prevent the sound of his forced humour from drifting unconvincingly in the night air. And to push away the thought that we had already made mistakes. Coming back to Grimshaw. Pretending that we could avoid certain topics if we simply told ourselves to. Most of al, the mistake of letting it know we're here.

We had forgotten what Ben reminded himself of every day: the Thurman house never alowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price.

Every time you looked into it, it looked into you.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 6

Most days, I'd stop to pick up Sarah so the two of us could walk the rest of the way to school together. It had become habit for me to knock at her side door on the mornings I didn't have one of the Guardians' deadly pre-dawn practices, and for her mom to offer me homemade waffles or bacon sandwiches, something that would have been a Christmas treat in my house. I would decline at first, but I always ended up snarfing down a second breakfast al the same as I waited for Sarah to come downstairs. I liked these stolen minutes, the anticipation of Sarah's face, me teling her mother something that made her laugh too loudly for a woman so petite and religious. Sarah's father had already left for work. Now that I think of it, maybe he'd planned it that way. Maybe he'd designed these moments in the kitchen to say Nice, isn't it? Make an honest woman of my daughter and al this could be yours.

But on the morning of the day after Ben told us he'd witnessed—or felt, or dreamed—the coach carrying Heather Langham into the Thurman house in the middle of the night, I walked past Sarah's place without stopping. The world that she and I inhabited together— the hand- holding walks, the drives out to Harmony, the thriled admissions of love beyond the footbal field's endzone—had been soiled by the speculations of the night before. Not irrevocably. Not yet. There was, on that February Wednesday, stil a chance for certain courses to be avoided.

But they wouldn't be. Even as I drifted by Sarah's house and realized she wasn't walking next to me only after I stepped out onto the playing field's 40-yard line, I could tel there would be choices coming my way. What they would involve I couldn't guess. Al that was clear was that Sarah would have to be shielded from their outcomes.

We had opened our minds to their darkest possibilities. There was no going back from that. But such liberties came with obligations. Like the wals of the Thurman house, we would have to try to keep the darkness inside.

Grimshaw Colegiate sits atop the highest hil within the town's limits, which isn't saying much as hils go. A pocked mound of stone and thistles just steep enough for toboggans to reach a speed that might coax a whoop out of six-year-olds. Stil, in a town free of topographic features worth mentioning, the cubist mess of the school building—brick gym from the 1890s, colour- paneled '60s wing of classrooms sticking out the rear, the cinder-block science department added on the cheap—

appeared with enhanced importance on its piebald throne, looking down over the mud playing field, the river gurgling next to it, the parking lot surrounded by trees that provided shade for the smal crimes entertained within students' cars.

One offence we frequently committed was a 'hot box' before morning attendance. This involved me, Ben and Randy cramming ourselves into the two-door Ford that Carl's dad left behind, roling the windows up and sharing a joint Randy would produce from the baggie he kept hidden in the lining of his Sorels. With the four of us inhaling and passing and coughing, the cabin of Carl's sedan soon became thick with smoke, the air moist and opaque as a sauna. A hot box offered the most efficient use of a single joint, a technique that 'seals in al the grassy goodness,' as Randy said in his Price Is Right voice. When we were done, we would open the doors and stand around in an unsteady circle, watching the plumes escape the car's confines, rise through the pine boughs and into the sky above like a signal to another, faraway tribe.

So while I know what Randy has in mind when he waves me over and makes a toking gesture obvious enough to show he doesn't realy care who knows, there's something subdued in his expression, worried quarter moons of darkness under his eyes that tel me there's more going on in Carl's Ford than a bunch of guys getting high before chemistry.

'We're having a meeting,' Randy says as we make our way through the rows of cars. 'Ben has something he wants to say.'

'Is this more bulshit about what he said he saw?'

'He wants us al together first.'

'But you've guessed.'

Randy pauses at the car, his fingers slipping under the passenger-side door handle. 'I've just got a feeling I'd rather be stoned when I hear it, that's al,' he says.

We pile in. Carl behind the wheel, Ben hugging the glovebox to let me and Randy slip into the back.

'Ready?' Randy asks.

'Ready,' Carl answers, clicking the power window buttons, making sure we're sealed in.

As Randy puls the baggie out of his boot, Ben shifts around in the front seat, taking each of us in, one at a time. A kind of silent rol cal that would be funny if attempted by anyone else. But laughing is out of the question. It intensifies the one sound to concentrate on: Randy, who clinks his Zippo open and sucks the joint to life.

'We have to go in,' Ben says.

None of us say anything. It's as though Ben had not uttered the sentence we'd al just heard. Or perhaps we were trying to pretend it was a sentence that didn't properly belong to the moment, a glitch in the soundtrack.