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Grimshaw. Pretending that we could avoid certain topics if we simply told ourselves to. Most of all, the mistake of letting it know we’re here.
    We had forgotten what Ben reminded himself of every day: the Thurman house never allowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price.
    Every time you looked into it, it looked into you.

MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 6
    Most days, I’d stop to pick up Sarah so the two of us could walk the rest of the way to school together. It had become habit for me to knock at her side door on the mornings I didn’t have one of the Guardians’ deadly pre-dawn practices, and for her mom to offer me homemade waffles or bacon sandwiches, something that would have been a Christmas treat in my house. I would decline at first, but I always ended up snarfing down a second breakfast all the same as I waited for Sarah to come downstairs. I liked these stolen minutes, the anticipation of Sarah’s face, me telling her mother something that made her laugh too loudly for a woman so petite and religious. Sarah’s father had already left for work. Now that I think of it, maybe he’d planned it that way. Maybe he’d designed these moments in thekitchen to say
Nice, isn’t it? Make an honest woman of my daughter and all this could be yours
.
    But on the morning of the day after Ben told us he’d witnessed—or
felt
, or
dreamed
—the coach carrying Heather Langham into the Thurman house in the middle of the night, I walked past Sarah’s place without stopping. The world that she and I inhabited together—the hand-holding walks, the drives out to Harmony, the thrilled admissions of love beyond the football field’s endzone—had been soiled by the speculations of the night before. Not irrevocably. Not yet. There was, on that February Wednesday, still a chance for certain courses to be avoided.
    But they wouldn’t be. Even as I drifted by Sarah’s house and realized she wasn’t walking next to me only after I stepped out onto the playing field’s 40-yard line, I could tell there would be choices coming my way. What they would involve I couldn’t guess. All that was clear was that Sarah would have to be shielded from their outcomes.
    We had opened our minds to their darkest possibilities. There was no going back from that. But such liberties came with obligations. Like the walls of the Thurman house, we would have to try to keep the darkness inside.
    Grimshaw Collegiate sits atop the highest hill within the town’s limits, which isn’t saying much as hills go. A pocked mound of stone and thistles just steep enough for toboggans to reach a speed that might coax a whoopout of six-year-olds. Still, in a town free of topographic features worth mentioning, the cubist mess of the school building—brick gym from the 1890s, colour-panelled ‘60s wing of classrooms sticking out the rear, the cinder-block science department added on the cheap—appeared with enhanced importance on its piebald throne, looking down over the mud playing field, the river gurgling next to it, the parking lot surrounded by trees that provided shade for the small crimes entertained within students’ cars.
    One offence we frequently committed was a “hot box” before morning attendance. This involved me, Ben and Randy cramming ourselves into the two-door Ford that Carl’s dad left behind, rolling the windows up and sharing a joint Randy would produce from the baggie he kept hidden in the lining of his Sorels. With the four of us inhaling and passing and coughing, the cabin of Carl’s sedan soon became thick with smoke, the air moist and opaque as a sauna. A hot box offered the most efficient use of a single joint, a technique that “seals in all the grassy goodness,” as Randy said in his
Price Is Right
voice. When we were done, we would open the doors and stand around in an unsteady circle, watching the plumes escape the car’s confines, rise through the pine boughs and into the sky above like a signal to another,