If We Were Villains: A Novel

Convocation was traditionally held in the gold-spangled music hall on the ninth of September, Leopold Dellecher’s birthday. (He’d moved north from Chicago and had the house built sometime in the 1850s. It wasn’t turned into a school until a half century later, when the upkeep proved to be too much for the rapidly shrinking Dellecher family.) Had old Leopold somehow evaded death, he would have been turning one hundred and eighty-seven. An enormous cake with exactly that many candles was waiting upstairs in the ballroom to be cut and distributed to students and staff following Dean Holinshed’s welcome speech.

We sat on the left side of the aisle, in the middle of a long row filled in by second- and third-years. The theatre students, always the loudest and most likely to laugh, sat behind the instrumental and choral music students (who kept mostly to themselves, apparently determined to perpetuate the stereotype that they were the most complacent and least approachable of the seven Dellecher disciplines). The dancers (a collection of underfed, swan-like creatures) sat behind us. On the opposite side of the aisle sat the studio art students (easily identified by their unorthodox hairstyles and clothing perpetually spattered with paint and plaster), the language students (who spoke almost exclusively in Greek and Latin to one another and sometimes to other people), and the philosophy students (who were by far the weirdest but also the most amusing, prone to treating every conversation as a social experiment and tossing off words like “hylozoism” and “compossibility” as if they were as easily comprehensible as “good morning”). The staff sat in a long line of chairs on the stage. Frederick and Gwendolyn perched side by side like an old married couple, conversing quietly with their neighbors. Convocation was one of the rare times that we all melted together, a sea of people in what we all knew as “Dellecher blue,” because nobody wanted to call it “peacock.” School colors were not, of course, mandatory, but nearly everyone was wearing the same blue sweater, with the coat of arms stitched above the left breast. A larger version of the family crest hung on a banner behind the podium—a white saltire on a blue field, a long gold key and a sharp black quill crossed like swords in the foreground. Below was the motto: Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

As always, it was one of the first things Holinshed said at convocation.

“Good evening, everyone. Per aspera ad astra.” He had appeared onstage from the shadows of the wings, a spotlight on his face striking the rest of us into silence. “Another new year. To the first-years among you I must simply say welcome, and that we are delighted to have you. To the second-, third-, and fourth-years, welcome back, and congratulations.” Holinshed was a strange man—tall but stooped, quiet but forceful. He had a large hooked nose, wispy copper hair, and little square glasses so thick that they magnified his eyes to three times their natural size. “If you are sitting in this room tonight,” he said, “it means you have been accepted into the esteemed Dellecher family. Here you will make many friends, and perhaps a few enemies. Do not let the latter prospect frighten you—if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely. And that is what I wish to discourage.” He paused, chewed on his words for a moment.

“He’s gone a bit off the wall,” Alexander muttered.

“Well, he has to recycle his speeches at least every four years,” I whispered. “Can you blame him?”

“At Dellecher, I encourage you to live boldly,” Holinshed continued. “Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets. You have come to Dellecher because you prized something above money, above convention, above the kind of education that can be evaluated on a numeric scale. I do not hesitate to tell you that you are remarkable. However”—his expression darkened—“our expectations are adjusted to match your enormous potential. We expect you to be dedicated. We expect you to be determined. We expect you to dazzle us. And we do not like to be disappointed.” His words boomed through the hall and hung in the air like an odorous vapor, invisible but impossible to ignore. He let the unnatural quiet linger far too long, then abruptly leaned back from the podium and said, “Some of you have joined us at the end of an era, and when you leave you will be emerging into not only a new decade and a new century, but a new millennium. We plan to prepare you for it as best we can. The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.”

His gaze settled unmistakably on us, the seven fourth-year thespians.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” he said. “On such a full sea are we now afloat, / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures. Ladies and gentlemen, never waste a moment.” Holinshed smiled dreamily, then checked his watch. “And on the subject of waste, there is an enormous cake upstairs that needs devouring. Goodnight.”

And he was gone from the stage before the audience could even begin to clap.