The Guardians

'How are we going to find him, Trev? Put up posters? 'LOST—Half-Starved English Teacher. Contents of Teenager's Piggy Bank Offered in Reward'?'

'At least I'm trying.'

'You fucking should.'

'What's that mean?'

'Just that the last time I was down here, the coach was tied to that post and my gun was in the workbench drawer.'

Our brains were running at the same speed. They must have been, because it took both of us the same one second to turn to see the workbench drawer upside down on the earth floor.

We both went for it. Carl got there first. Kicked the drawer instead of turning it over with his hand, either to prevent leaving his fingerprints or because he needed to kick something if not me.

The revolver was gone.

'Shit,' Carl said. 'This is some seriously shitty shit.'

'He wasn't even supposed to know it was there.'

'Unless somebody showed him.'

'You're blaming me for this too?'

'I said 'somebody.''

'Who? Why would one of us do that?'

'Maybe it wasn't one of us.'

Carl faced me. What I could read in the lips, suddenly gulping for his next mouthful of air, made it clear. He had seen something too.

Laughter. Coming from upstairs. The coach's, along with at least one other. Whinnying and cruel.

I can't remember if Carl started up the celar stairs first or if I did. But we were both running, clutching handfuls of the house's cold air and throwing it behind us.

The laughter was now impossibly loud, a chorus of false joy shrieking out from the cracks in the wals. Sound so dense it thickened the space we moved through, slowing us to the floating leaps of astronauts.

Carl rounded through the kitchen and down the main hal. The nylon of his parka squeaking through my fingers as I folowed a half-stride behind him. And then, in the next second, he was puling away. Because I made the mistake of glancing into the living room on the way past.

There was the boy. Standing behind a naked Heather Langham, his pants a coil of denim around his ankles.

The two of them framed by the tal side window, the fuckt stil there, Heather's fingers cutting lines around the letters. The boy slapping himself against her, oblivious to anything but his grip on her waist.

Then he spun his head around to face me. Except it wasn't the boy's face. It was mine.

'Trevor!'

Carl was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me quizzicaly, knowing I'd seen something.

I could have run past him, opened the front door (if it could be opened) and left Carl on his own to find out what the boy and the coach found so funny. There was no one left to save, after al. Whatever we'd done, and the reasons we'd first done it, didn't mean anything anymore.

Yet when Carl started up the stairs, I was right behind him. When I got to the landing, he was already halfway down the hal, led by the laughter that was coming from the one partly open door. The same doorway through which I'd seen the boy standing over a facedown female body on the bed.

Carl slowed. It wasn't cowardice that held me there, watching, but a command.

Carl's turn first.

He booted the door open.

Then a cowardly thought did enter my mind: I didn't need to know what Carl now knew. A second-hand report would be enough. And judging by the stricken look on Carl's face, what was to be seen belonged to a different level of awfulness altogether. It was the party the boy had invited us to.

But instead of doing what I meant to—turn around and start back down the stairs—I made my way along the halway to where Carl stood outside the boy's childhood bedroom.

Because that's what it was, wasn't it? A room that, in its past, had been caught in the uncomfortable in- between of smal-town sixteen, of the age and place I was myself.

'Carl?' My voice girlish in the empty halway.

He didn't answer, didn't move.

We're going to have quite a time.

The coach stood across the room, in the same place where the boy had stood over the body on the bed. In the dim light, his degradation was fuly visible: soiled pants, running nose, the beginnings of grey beard. And he was wearing lipstick. A smearing of rosy red extended beyond the lines of his thin lips, yet stil carefuly applied, a drawn mouth of female wantonness, al curves and pucker. It was the lipstick colour Heather wore—no, it was Heather's. Taken from her before she died, before the coach left her in the celar.