The Guardians

murdered.'

'I can see that.'

'No, you can't. Look at her.'

So I did. And as I kept my eyes on Heather, Ben spoke into my ear.

'This isn't the time you threw the footbal through Mrs. Laidlaw's window. This isn't letting Randy drive your dad's car into a mailbox. She's dead. And they don't just forgive people for that. They need someone to pay. And that is going to be us, unless we make it go away.'

I stepped back to get away from him, the sharp tang of his skin.

'How did Randy bleed al over her anyway?' I asked.

'I hit him,' Carl said.

'You punched Randy?'

'A few times.'

'Why?'

'For being so stupid. Moving her? I didn't know he'd bleed al over the place, though.'

'We can clean it up.'

'It's al over her,' Ben said. 'No matter what we do, if they look for it, they'l find it. And if they find somebody's blood other than Heather's down here—blood on her body—'

'They'l know who to look for,' Carl finished.

Randy moaned. A childish, stomach-ache sound.

'Shut up,' Carl told him.

Randy stood straight. I'd seen people in states of shock before, concussion cases who'd gone head first into the boards left to wander the rink's halways after the game like zombies, unable to recal their phone number or the colour of their eyes. But Randy's condition was different. He knew exactly who he was, what was happening—he knew too much, and it was crushing him.

'He told me to touch her,' he said. It was something less than a whisper.

'Didn't quite catch that,' Carl said, and looked as though he was about to charge at him.

'He told me to,' Randy said again.

'No, I didn't! Why would I do that? Tel you to drag her over the goddamned floor?' Carl looked to us. 'You think I'd be that stupid?'

'Wait. Wait,' Ben said, stepping closer to Randy yet not too close, as though to avoid contagion. 'Who told you to?'

Randy raised his eyes. Met mine.

'Nobody. Nothing. I'm just—everything's fucked up, that's al.'

'That's true,' Carl said, slapping his hands together. 'Fucked up? Right on the money there, Rando.'

We fel into a colective silence. Remembering to breathe and little else.

I was the first to move. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found myself lowering to kneel beside Heather Langham's body. I'm not sure what drew me closer to her, but it wasn't curiosity. The physical fact of her being dead was something I could grasp only at the edges, fleetingly, before forcing my thoughts to some smaler, more manageable detail, like the papery meeting of her grey lips, or her eyes, the lids slightly parted as though caught in a fight against sleep. Perhaps I needed confirmation that this was al as it appeared to be: she was dead, there wasn't any walking away now. Perhaps I was sorry that she had become a problem of ours, that everything that made her so vibrantly human had left her in this sour- smeling celar, and now she was, for us, a logistical puzzle, a stain.

Or perhaps I had to see for myself how she had been murdered.

Part of her lay on a blanket. No, not a blanket: a canvas drop cloth of the kind used by painters. The way it was smoothed out beneath her, buffering her from the hard dirt, gave the impression of a makeshift bed. The cloth told a history of a thousand mistakes: splashes of turquoise and yelow and off-whites falen from brushes or sloshed over the side of a kicked can. Now, as close as I was, I could see the more recent colours. Randy's bright nosebleed. Beneath it, the brown-red sprays and tracks emanating from the back of Heather Langham's skul.

Only then did I notice the screw. A fiercely beveled four-inch screw that had been pounded through a plank, sharp point up, which lay an arm's length from Heather's splayed fingers. Nearly half of the wood's length had been discoloured by blood. Maybe Heather had managed to pul it from the wound herself and toss it to where it now rested. Maybe someone else dropped it after seeing the job was done.

I leaned over. Bent so far across her body I had to brace myself on palms laid on the floor on the other side of her. For a second, my finger was hooked on the gold chain around her neck, puling the heart-shaped locket she was wearing to rest like an egg in the soft dimple at the base of her throat. I shook my hand free and the chain made a smal, watery sound as it settled over her skin. Then I lowered my head to the floor to look at her face.

Her eyes weren't fuly open as I would later dream them to be (the horrific clarity of marbles, twinkly and blind), but they weren't closed either. The lids empurpled, a colour of eyeshadow worn by only the sluttiest girls at school. The result was an expression I initialy confused with seductiveness. It made me think that maybe this was Heather's twin, the one who liked to do al the naughty stuff Heather would never do. But then I saw the teeth knocked out of her mouth, the white, bloodless gums. The liquefied nose. I saw that she had been alone as the life emptied out of her, and that this aloneness was a thing worse than dying.