If We Were Villains: A Novel

Our first day back in class was surprisingly quiet. Wren hadn’t appeared, and Meredith arrived so late Monday night that none of us saw her, and she was given permission to sleep through Tuesday. With only the boys and Filippa in attendance, our teachers seemed content to simply explain what the short winter term between Thanksgiving and Christmas would include: Romeo and Juliet, our introduction to weapons combat, and midterm speeches.

Evening found the four of us in the Castle library (vigorously tidied by me the previous day), writing out our new monologues and beginning to scan them. Pens, pencils, highlighters, notebooks, and wineglasses were strewn on every table. A towering fire lit the whole room but didn’t keep the cold entirely at bay. Filippa and I sat toe-to-toe on the couch, one thick wool blanket stretched over both of us. My eyelids had begun to droop an hour before, and at last I let them close. I might have fallen asleep if not for the constant motion of Filippa’s left foot, which wiggled persistently against my leg as she wrote.

The words of my newest piece tumbled around between my ears, disconnected and chaotic, not yet regimented and committed to memory. They’d given me something surprisingly robust—Philip the Bastard’s rousing battle speech from King John:

Your royal presences be ruled by me:

Be friends awhile and both conjointly bend

Your sharpest deeds of malice on this town:

And when that we have dash’d them to the ground,

Why then defy each other and pell-mell

Make work upon ourselves, for heaven or hell.

I sat up when a small voice said, “Hello. Sorry I’m late.”

“Wren!” James launched himself out of his chair.

She was standing in the doorway, eyes dreamy and tired, a carry-on bag slung over her shoulder.

“We thought you weren’t coming back,” Alexander said, shooting a dirty look down the hall toward Meredith’s room.

“Had enough of me?” Wren asked, as James pulled her bag off her shoulder and set it on the floor.

“Of course not. How are you?” Filippa stood up with her arms already open.

Wren drifted into her embrace and hugged her tight around the waist. “Better now.”

I followed Filippa off the couch and, in a moment of foolish affection, put my arms around them both. “Us, too.”

Alexander snorted. “Really?” he said. “Group hug? Are we going to do this?”

“Shut up,” Wren said, her cheek squashed against Filippa’s shoulder. “Don’t spoil it.”

“Fine.” A second later Alexander’s long monkey arms crushed us all together, and then James latched on as well. We lost our balance, swayed, Wren trapped and laughing at the heart of our human knot. The sound shivered through us, moving fluidly from one body to the next like a breath of warm air.

“What’s going on in here?”

I looked over everyone’s heads toward the hall. “Meredith.”

She stood in the doorway, barefoot, barefaced, in leggings and a long T-shirt I was fairly sure had once belonged to Richard. Her hair was tousled, her eyes dusky and slow. I hadn’t seen her since the airport and I felt slightly winded.

Our little clutch broke apart, each of us retreating half a step until Wren emerged again from the middle. Meredith’s stern expression softened. “Wren.”

“Me.” She smiled weakly. Meredith blinked, staggered into the room, and crashed into her. The two of them were hugging and laughing and falling over all at the same time, and Filippa and I barely caught them before they hit the coffee table.

When we were all upright again, smarting from colliding elbows and trodden-on toes, Meredith let go of Wren and said, “It’s about time. Best of comfort / And ever welcome to us.”

Filippa: “You must be exhausted. When did you leave London?”

Wren: “Yesterday morning. I’d love to hear about Thanksgiving, but I don’t want to offend anyone by falling asleep.”

Alexander: “Don’t be stupid. Get thee to bed and rest; for thou hast need.”

James: “Where’s your suitcase?”

Wren: “Downstairs. I couldn’t face carrying it up just yet.”

James: “I’ll get it.”

Wren: “You sure?”

“Let him go,” Meredith said, brushing Wren’s hair back off her forehead. “You look like you might need someone to carry you.”

“Come on,” Filippa said. “I’ll help you get settled.”

They disappeared down the hall together, while James vanished into the stairwell. Alexander gave me a soporific smile and said, “The gang’s all here.” His eyes moved lazily from me to Meredith and the grin slid off his face. All of her gentleness seemed to have left the room with Wren, and she stood staring at me with a hard, unassailable sort of look. “So,” Alexander said. “I think I’ll go have a smoke before bed.” He wound his scarf tightly around his neck and left the room, whistling “Secret Lovers” under his breath. (I considered running after him and kicking him down the stairs.)

Meredith was in Flamingo Pose again, one foot perched on the inside of the opposite knee. She made even that look graceful. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I slid them into my back pockets, which felt far too casual.

“How was New York?” I asked.

“You know, hustle and bustle,” she said, dryly. “We had a parade.”

“Right.”

“How was Ohio?”

“It sucked,” I said. “It always does.”

The fact that I could have come to New York and didn’t hung so heavily in the air between us that there was no need to mention it.

“How’s your family?” I asked.

“No idea,” she said. “I only saw Caleb once and everyone else is in Canada.”

“Oh.”

I could picture her rambling around in an empty apartment, nothing to distract her from Richard’s death. Our holidays weren’t so different, probably—hours of reading and staring at the ceiling, isolated from siblings and parents so unfamiliar that they might as well have been a different species. Of course, I’d had the windfall of James’s company, and she hadn’t been so lucky. An impossible apology glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

She folded her arms and said, “I’m going to bed unless you’ve got something to say.”

I didn’t. I desperately wanted to, but my mind was blank. For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

She waited, watching me, and when I said nothing, her mask of apathy cracked for a moment and I saw the quiet disappointment underneath. “Well,” she said. “Goodnight, then.”

“I—Meredith, wait.”

“What?” she asked, the question dull and tired.

I shifted my weight, uncertain, unsure, cursing my own ineloquence. “Do you, um, want to sleep alone?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to sleep with me or would you rather sleep with James?”

I glanced away, hoping to hide the rising warmth in my cheeks. When I looked back again she was shaking her head, one corner of her mouth tugged upward, caught between pity and disdain. She didn’t wait for an answer—just turned and walked down the hall again. I watched her go, mental gears whirring and churning out weak, inadequate replies until she was gone and it was too late to say anything at all.

I lingered by the fireplace, debating whether to go after her—barge into her room, then throw her against the wall and kiss her until she was too out of breath for such harsh words—or just retreat to the Tower and try to sleep. I was too much a coward for the former, too restless for the latter. Unable to commit to either course of action, I reached for my coat instead.

The night was so cold that stepping outside felt like a slap in the face. I set off through the trees, shoulders hunched up to keep my ears warm, watching the ground for roots and rocks that might trip me in the dark. I reached the dock almost without realizing where I was. My feet had brought me there automatically, as though there were no other logical place to go. By night the lake was black and as still as a mirror, five hundred stars perfectly reflected on the surface. There was no moon—just a small round gap in the field of stars where the moon should have been. Alexander sat on the dock by himself, legs dangling over the water.

I walked to the end and stopped behind him. He must have heard me approach, but he didn’t react, just sat staring out at the lake with his hands folded between his knees.

“Can I join you?” I asked, and my words emerged in a cloud.

“’Course.”

I sat beside him, and for a moment neither of us spoke.

“Smoke?” he said, eventually.

“Yeah, I could use one.”

He reached inside his coat without looking, then passed a spliff to me and fumbled in his pockets for a lighter. He flicked a flame to life and I inhaled as deeply as I could, the smoke scorching hot in my throat.

“Thanks,” I said, after my second pull, and passed it back to him.

He nodded, eyes pointed forward. “How’d it go?”

I assumed he meant my conversation with Meredith.

“Not well.”

We sat in silence for a while, the smoke and our breath swirling and mingling as they drifted out over the water. I tried to push Meredith out of my head, but there was no safe distraction. In every corner of my mind, doubts and fears crouched on all fours, prepared to spring and sink their teeth in me at the slightest provocation.

“Colborne was in the Castle,” I said, without really planning to. I hadn’t told any of them what I’d overheard, but it was dangerous knowledge to have, and I didn’t trust myself with it.

“When?” he demanded.

“Yesterday.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, but I heard him talking to another cop. Young ginger guy. Hadn’t seen him before.”

Alexander swallowed a mouthful of smoke, and it unfurled from his nostrils in a distinctly dragonish way. “What were they talking about?” he asked, with a diffidence that suggested he didn’t really want to know.

“All … this.” I made a loose, unspecific gesture that included the lake, the dock, and both of us.

“You think he suspects something?” Alexander asked. To someone who didn’t know him so well, he might not have sounded scared.

“He knows we lied. He just doesn’t know about what.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

He sucked on the spliff and the end flared orange, a single bright ember in the bleak Illinois wilderness. There wasn’t much left but the roach. He passed it to me; I took one last drag and stubbed it out.

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing, I guess,” he said, and that empty word, “nothing,” made me clench my fists in my pockets. “Stick to our story. Try to keep our wits about us.”

“We should tell the others. He’s just waiting for one of us to slip up.”

He shook his head. “They’ll start acting funny if they know.”

I chewed on my bottom lip, wondering how much danger we were really in. I thought of meeting James in the bathroom the night of the party. By some unspoken agreement, we hadn’t mentioned it to the others. It was trivial, unimportant. But the possibility that we weren’t the only ones keeping secrets made my heart drum a little faster. If we’d all lied to one another the way we’d lied to Colborne—I couldn’t finish the thought.

“What do you think happened to him?” I asked. “After he left the Castle.”

“Dunno.” He knew who I meant. “I can’t imagine he just stumbled around in the woods.”

“Where were you, anyway?”

He gave me a shifty sort of look and said, “Why?”

“Just curious. I missed everything that happened after I, uh, went upstairs.”

“If I tell you, you have to swear to keep your mouth shut.”

“Why?”

“Because, unlike you,” he said, loftily, “I don’t kiss and make sure the whole school knows about it.”

Half curious and half annoyed, I said, “Who were you with, jackass?”

He turned away from me, with a smug little smile on his mouth. “Colin.”

“Colin? I didn’t think he liked guys.”

Alexander’s smile broadened just enough to show his sharp canine teeth. “Neither did he.”

I laughed, grudgingly, which would have seemed impossible two minutes before. “Call up the right master constable—we have here recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth!”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Fucksake,” I said, “she started it.”

“Obviously. No offense, Oliver, but starting things isn’t exactly your MO.”

I shook my head, my amusement dampened by the lingering bitterness of my conversation with Meredith. “I am so stupid.”

Alexander: “If it makes you feel any better, I’d have done exactly the same thing.”

Me: “What are you?”

Alexander: “Sexually amphibious.”

Me: “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Alexander: “You should try it.”

Me: “I’ve had enough sexual misadventures for one year, thanks.”

I sighed and looked down at my own reflection on the surface of the water. My face seemed somehow unfamiliar, and I squinted, trying to work out what was different. The realization hit me like a blow to the stomach: with my dark hair a little wilder than usual and my blue eyes hollowed out by the weak starlight, I almost resembled Richard. For one sickening moment he stared back at me from the bottom of the lake. I looked up sharply.

“You okay?” Alexander asked. “For a second there it looked like you were going to throw yourself in.”

“Oh. No.”

“Good. Don’t.” He climbed to his feet. “C’mon. It’s fucking freezing and I’m not leaving you out here alone.”

“All right.” I stood, brushing little bits of ash out of my lap.

Alexander buried his hands deep in his pockets, searching the darkness that shrouded the opposite shore. “I was on my way back from Colin’s room,” he said, and it seemed random until he added, “when I found him. Wandered down here for a smoke and … there he was. I didn’t even think to check if he was alive, he seemed so totally dead. Must not have heard me.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me. Perhaps he relived that terrible moment of discovery every morning, the same way I felt my stomach drop and found myself neck-deep in memory almost every time I closed my eyes.

“Know what’s weird, though?” he said.

“What?”

“There was blood in the water, but not on the dock.”

I glanced down at my feet. The wood was clean and dry, bleached like bone by years of wind and sun and water. Not a speck of red. Not a stainèd spot.

“So?”

“So his face was smashed in. If he hit his head and fell in the water … what the hell did he hit?”

The stub of our spliff smoldered on the very edge of the dock. Alexander nudged it off with the toe of his shoe. Ripples moved outward from the point of impact, warping the reflection of the sky so the stars wobbled and winked in and out of existence.

“I keep thinking of the bird.” I didn’t even want to say it. It was a tic, a compulsion, as though I might get the image out of my head if I got the words out of my mouth.

He looked sideways at me, completely nonplussed. “What bird?”

“From Hamlet. That’s what he reminded me of.”

“Oh,” he said. “Not sure I can see him as a sparrow. Too … delicate.”

“So what sort of bird would he be?”

“Dunno. The sort that smacked into a window trying to have a go at its own reflection.”

It was my turn to look at him strangely, but as soon as our eyes met, I wanted to laugh. I was horrified until I realized he was fighting it, too.

“Oh my God,” I said, shaking my head. Alexander let the breath he was holding burst out, chuckled softly. “When did we become such terrible people?”

“Maybe we’ve always been terrible.” He shrugged and watched the white cloud of his laughter shimmer and fade. His good humor seemed to vanish with it, and when he spoke again his voice was brittle. “Or maybe we learned from Richard,” he said.

That scared me more than Colborne did.