The Guardians

'It's pretty cold in there,' I said. 'Maybe he's hypothermic.'

'Or possessed,' Randy said, and mock-barfed, Linda Blair-style.

Carl was the only one who laughed. A sharp snort that reminded us he was there.

'Don't you get it?' he said. 'It's a warning.'

'About what?'

Carl looked around the table. He's going to tel them, I thought. He's going to say there's a boy in the house who can talk inside your head if you give him half a chance.

'Us,' he said. 'He's saying we have to guard against ourselves.'

Now it was Randy's turn to snort. 'Ooooh. That's deep, Carl. You've just blown my mind.'

Carl just kept grinning. Trying to look like he was stil able to kid around with Randy as he always had. Sitting there, aware of our eyes on him, we saw how our hockey brawler, our square-jawed tough who was alone among us in being able to fool liquor store clerks about his age, had lost twenty pounds overnight. Chiled and frail, hugging his arms across his chest like one of the wheelchaired ladies who lined the hals of Cedarfield Seniors Home.

I wondered if Todd Flanagan detected anything strange about us as he made his way over to our table. Todd was a Guardian too. I could only hope he was writing off our oddness to nerves about that night's game two against Seaforth.

'Morning, ladies,' he said.

Todd was blue-eyed and dark-haired ('black Irish,' as my father caled his family, though I never knew what this meant) and essentialy decent, though he fought hard to keep up his minimum obligations in the bulying and mockery departments. I always thought he'd rather have been our friend than his senior-year teammates', but such transgression between grades was unthinkable. What also set Todd apart was that he was a dad. An eighteen- year-old father to a daughter born at the beginning of the season. We envied him—not for this, but for his girlfriend, Tina. A tight-sweatered vixen whose brief career in boy-trading had been cut short with the arrival of Tracey, the drooling, howling bundle she sometimes brought to games.

'Anybody seen the coach?'

'No,' Ben said, taking another gulp of my muddy hot chocolate. 'Why?'

'Laura caled me this morning.'

'Laura?'

'His wife dickwad. Said he didn't come home last night. Wondered if he was hanging out with somebody on the team.'

'Al night?'

'I know. It's weird.'

'He'l turn up,' Carl said. 'Has the coach ever missed a game?'

Todd shook his head. 'Seaforth pussies,' he said half-heartedly before backing away.

Over morning classes, news of Laura Evans spotted in the principal's office was circulated in different versions, from her showing up with a pair of cops to her bawling uncontrolably until the school nurse gave her a pil. We didn't believe any of these stories necessarily. But what we did know was that the coach's absence had now been officialy reported. Combined with Heather Langham's disappearance, it was a story that had nowhere to go but into wilder and wilder speculations. Primary among these was that Heather and the coach had run off together. The other theory concerned a more macabre take. A monster who had crept into Grimshaw to claim its teachers, one by one.

'I hope he takes Dandruff Degan next,' I remember Vince Sproule saying. 'Save me asking for an extension on my cartography assignment.'

Among the Guardians there was an added concern about whether that night's game could go ahead without the coach. There was a critical, morale-sapping difference between the man behind the bench being reported missing and him coming down with the flu. Nothing actualy wrong was known to have happened. And yet the mystery about his absence, the foreign whiff of the uncanny that had drifted over Grimshaw's imagination, seemed to undermine the importance of a hockey game, even if it was the playoffs.

But without a coach to cal it off, and without any evidence of adultery or more serious wrongdoing to bring before league officials, the game was an at once unbelievable and unstoppable event shadowing our day. For us, the four Guardians who knew where the coach was, the idea of lacing up and charging around the ice in just a few hours made us almost as sick as thinking of how he had got there.

It wasn't until I saw Sarah waiting for me at my locker that I realized I'd been running from her al day. Taking different routes between classes, avoiding the cafeteria at lunch, pretending I didn't see her on the one occasion she waved over the heads of other students at the far end of the hal. But now there was no escape.

Nothing to do but try to work up a smile and taste her grape ChapStick with a kiss.

'You sick or something?' she asked. 'Because you look a little on the pukey side, gotta say.'

'Just nervous about tonight's game.'

'Nope. Try again.' She came in for another hug, which alowed her hand to cup my crotch. 'So tel me,' she whispered against my ear, 'what's going on here?'

'There's nothing going on.'

'You think I'm dumb?'

'You're the opposite of dumb.'

'And what's that?'