The Guardians Read Free

help.
    “Trev! Carl! Ben!”
    And all of us came.
    Once we’d thrown Randy’s attacker off him we were able to form a circle and hold our own. In fact, we ended up faring better than many of our older teammates, who left Exeter that night with split cheeks and teeth in their pockets.
    On the bus ride home we, the youngest Guardians, were permitted to sit at the back, an acknowledgment of our success on the battlefield. I recall us looking at each other as we rolled out of the parking lot, unable to hold the giddy smiles off our faces. Which started the laughing. We laughed three-quarters of an hour through a snowstorm, and though we expected someone to tell us to shut our mouths or they’d shut them for us at any second, they never did.
Ben:
    Our Zen mascot of a backup goalie. Because Vince Sproule, our starter, was eighteen and the best stopper in the county, Ben almost never saw ice time, which wasfine with him. His proper place was at the end of the bench anyway. Mask off, hands resting in his lap, offering contemplative nods as we came and went from our shifts, as though the blessings of a vow-of-silence monk.
    Ben was the sort of gentle-featured, unpimpled kid (he made you think
pretty
before pushing the thought away) who would normally have invited the torment of bullies, especially on a team composed of boys old enough to coax actual beards from their chins. But they left Ben alone.
    I think he was spared because he was so plainly
odd
. It was the authenticity of his strangeness that worked as a shield when, in another who was merely different, it would have attracted the worst kind of attention. They liked Ben for this. But they kept their distance from him because of it too.
Trevor (Me):
    A junk-goal god. Something of a floater, admittedly. A dipsy-doodling centre known for his soft hands (hands that now have trouble pouring milk).
    There was, at sixteen, the whisperings of scouts knowing who I was. Early in the season the coach had a talk with my parents, urging them to consider the benefits of a college scholarship in the States. Who knows? Maybe Trev had a chance of going straight to pro.
    Of course, this sort of thing was said about more than it ever happened to. Me included. Not that I wasn’t good enough—we’ll never know if I was or wasn’t. Because after the abrupt end of my one and only season as a Guardian, I never skated again.
    I had known Randy since kindergarten, when I approached him and, offering to share my Play-Doh, asked, “Do you want to be in my gang?” I remember that:
gang
. And even though I was alone, Randy accepted.
    Ben joined us in early grade school, Carl a year later. That was grade three.
    My father, not known for his wisdom (though he took runs at it on the nights he hit the sauce harder than usual), once told me something that has proven consistent with my experience: while a man can accumulate any number of acquaintances over his life, his only true friends are the ones he makes in youth.
    Yet why Randy, Ben and Carl and no others? I could say it was the way we saw ourselves in each other. The recognition of my own foolishness in Randy’s clowning, my imagination in Ben’s trippy dreams, my rage in Carl’s fisticuffs. How we had a better chance of knowing who we were together than we ever would have on our own.
    What we shared made us friends. But here’s the truth of the thing: our loyalty had little to do with friendship. For that, you’d have to look elsewhere.
    You’d have to look in the house.
    We were in Ben’s backyard, out behind his garden shed, the four of us passing around a set of
Charlie’s Angels
bubble-gum cards. I remember the hushed intensity we brought to studying Farrah Fawcett. The wide Californian smile. The astonishing nipples piercing their bikini veils.
    We were eight years old.
    And then there’s Mrs. McAuliffe’s voice, calling Ben inside.
    “I’m not hungry,” he shouted back.
    “This isn’t about dinner, honey.”
    She was trying