The Guardians

'He might try to stop us.'

'He might.'

Randy unzips, pees into the fire. A wet sizzle that sends up smoke, momentarily enveloping us al in shadow. 'The coach wouldn't fuck with us,' he said.

'He fucked with Heather,' Carl said.

'We stil don't know that,' I said.

'We don't?' Ben asked, the flames returning to life as Randy finished his nervous dribbles. 'You saw the coach today. Do you realy think somebody else did that to Miss Langham? Can you honestly say you think he doesn't know that we know?'

Three faces, facing me. Even in the near dark I could see their certainty, their glitter-eyed excitement. The good news was we weren't alone. This was the comfort I could see my friends offering to me. We were in danger, the holders of terrible knowledge, but al could be borne if we stayed together. And we would.

'You're right. He knows,' I said, my conviction instantly as real as I tried to make it sound. 'And we're the only ones who know what he did.'

'So what are we going to do?' Ben asked, though we could tel he knew the answer already.

Heather Langham failed to show up for our music class on Tuesday, and we found her body at the bottom of the Thurman house on Friday. But by the time the next Tuesday arrived, and because there were no new developments to report, the story of her continued missing status in that morning's edition of The Grimshaw Beacon moved off the front page for the first time. The town's speculation over Heather Langham had already been replaced by the chances of the Guardians going al the way to the provincial championships.

Which is not to say that people had stopped caring about the missing teacher, just that her story had nowhere to go. She had no family in Grimshaw, no one to make impatient urgings to the police or write letters to the editor. Despite the appealing photo of her that appeared with each article and TV news clip we saw, Heather Langham remained an outsider. There were no Langhams other than her in the phone book, none listed on the granite war memorial that named the local men who died overseas. She came from elsewhere, an unattached woman who lived alone in a rented room. She offered little foundation to build a mystery on.

Perhaps it was for these reasons that most of us were forced to accept the dulest of explanations: she had quit and left town. Besides, there were no lashings of blood in Heather Langham's dormitory in the nurses' residence as was first rumoured, no suicide note, no sign of an evil twin sister stirring up trouble. Some concrete suggestion of foul play was required to get the town excited about the Langham story after the first few days of nothing to report.

Over that first week, we—Ben, Carl, Randy and I—were kept busy perfecting our 'normal' act. You might think one of us would have cracked, blabbed, broken into guilty sobs against our mother's breast. We had buried someone, after al. We carried news of murder. Wouldn't this find its way to the surface? Didn't we come from a world so cushioned and flat that the secret of what lay in the Thurman celar would be more than we could bear?

The answer was in the us of it. Alone, we would have run screaming from the house and told al. But together we held it in. As us, we could believe what was happening wasn't entirely, wakingly real.

Sarah wanted to go to the movies. I remember because it was a return engagement of Flashdance, which we'd both seen when it first came out months earlier, and because I didn't realy believe she was interested in seeing it again. She wanted what I wanted, something that only a couple of hours in the back rows of the Vogue could deliver: the two of us together in a warm place without any of the talk that had become so troubled between us.

The house lights dimmed, and we were enveloped in shadow and Love's Baby Soft. As Jennifer Beals tumbled and flew across the screen, Sarah and I drew close.

We weren't making out—there was no grappling with bra hooks or belts. Our hands were communicating, skin on skin. And what did our touches say? Some combination of I'm sorry and Here I am and No one could ever be closer to me than you.

Then the movie ended, and we were forced back out into the cold. We stopped a half a block from her house, in the side lane next to Patterson's Candy & Milk that was our goodnight-kiss spot. Not that we were kissing.

'I'm not going to ask you about it anymore,' she said.

'Ask about what?'

'You're a terrible liar.'

Snow fel in fat clumps over our heads. It made the night feel smaler, surrounding us like the wals of an old barn, solid enough to keep out al outside sound but not the cold.

'You think you're doing this for me,' she said.

'It's not your problem.'

'Look at me.'

It was a hard stare to meet. Partly because her hurt was so much clearer than my own. And because it made her even more beautiful.

'I'm looking,' I said.

'And what do you see? Just another girl who can't handle the serious stuff.'

'That's not it.'

'Does Randy know what you're not teling me? Do Carl and Ben?'

'They know because they have to know.'