The Guardians

tel.

Here's the thing: I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. We were al good kids. And now it was time for our essential natures to take control again. So I got dressed before everyone else, puled a dime from the pocket of my jeans and dialed the cavalry.

I remember that perfectly wel. Just not why it didn't end there.

But the memory can lie too. Hide things away. Occasionaly, it can lie and hide even better than you.

Because there's Ben. Eyeing me through the crowd of disappointed fans lingering beside the trophy cases.

We can't, his look said . I want this to end too. But right now, you have to put the phone down.

I opened my mouth to speak to the dispatcher. To put words to the nature of my emergency.

They'll send us to jail. Ben started toward me, his face growing in detail as he approached . A grown-up biker-gang-and-rapist jail. We'll be their girlfriends in there. For years. And when we get out, we'll be fucked all over again.

I returned the receiver to its cradle.

'Sarah not home?' Ben said, lying for us both.

I remember dropping my equipment off after the game, teling my parents I was going over to Ben's house and walking along to the McAuliffes' with a bad feeling.

I'd had bad feelings about what was going on since our first hot-box meeting, when it was decided something had to be done. But that night, the ragged nerves took a turn into ful-blown ilness. Light-headed, tingly-toed. I had the idea that the Thurman house wasn't haunted as much as it carried contagion, and I was showing the first signs of infection.

This idea was folowed by another. A premonition of the life ahead that turned out to be largely true. Feeling sick, worrying about becoming sick, fighting and carrying sickness: this is what it meant to grow up, grow old.

By the look of Ben's blotched cheeks when I met him under the railway trelis, he'd caught the virus too.

'It has to happen tonight,' he said.

When Ben opened the door to the celar, I couldn't tel if he heard the voices down there or if it was only me. A whispered conversation (too soft to make out any words) between the coach and someone else. No, not a conversation—it was too one-sided to be caled that. The coach murmuring with excitement, and his audience offering only a hissed Yes in response.

But how could I have heard al that within the few seconds between Ben's opening the celar door and placing his boot onto the first step, its protesting creak instantly silencing whoever was down there? Because I'd been hearing them before the door was opened. Whatever the coach was saying had been growing louder in my head from the moment we'd stepped onto the Thurman house's lot. A few seconds more and I might have clearly made out the words.

We turned on our flashlights and started down. There was a smel I hadn't detected on previous visits. A sweetness. It reminded me of the orange I had left in my lunch box over Christmas holidays, and it turned my stomach.

Our lights found the coach at the same time. His teeth, in particular. Bared in a comic exaggeration of mirth.

'Come closer,' he said.

With his attention on Ben alone, I took the revolver out of the workbench drawer and came forward to aim it at the wal two feet off the coach's side. (It is harder than you'd ever guess to hold a gun steady on a man's chest. The snout keeps slipping off its target, resisting, like trying to press two magnets of the same charge together.) Now the coach watched me. Stil showing me those teeth of his, but with his head back, so a red throat glistened in my flashlight beam as wel.

Ben untied his hands. Offered the coach a ham sandwich, which he took but didn't eat. Instead, he stuffed it into the front pocket of his parka to join the last two sandwiches we'd brought him.

'You have to eat something,' I told him.

'I've lost my taste for meat.'

'We'l bring you something else, then.'

'No, no, no,' he said agreeably, in an I-don't-want- to-be-any-trouble voice. 'This wil do fine.'

That's when he bit Ben.

Launched forward without any change in expression or posture, not a twitch. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrists. Then he was on his knees, snarling, clamping down on Ben's knuckles.

Ben screamed. Someone else screamed too. Not me, I don't think.

The blood startled me. Quick and forceful. The rhythmic pulses, like jumping up and down on a hose. How the coach swalowed it without letting go.

' Don't!'

It took my voice for him to spit out Ben's hand. Then he leaned back against the post. Crossed his arms over his chest, his teeth outlined in crimson.

Ben was already wrapping his hand in a rag from the floor.

'Didn't your mother ever tel you to keep your fingers out of the monkey cage, Benji? Or maybe that was your daddy's department. Wait. Wait! Your daddy did himself in, didn't he?'

'Shut up,' Ben whispered.