If We Were Villains: A Novel

I spent four hours the following day locked in my father’s office, on the phone with Dellecher’s administrative staff. They patched me through to Frederick, to Gwendolyn, and even, eventually, to Dean Holinshed. They all sounded exhausted, but they each assured me that we’d work something out. Loans were suggested, along with work-study and late scholarship applications. When I finally hung up, I retreated to my room, lay on my bed, and stared at the ceiling.

Inevitably my eyes wandered down to the desk (cluttered with old production photos and programs), to the bookshelf (stuffed with tattered paperbacks, purchased for single dollars and quarters from used bookstores and library sales), and from poster to poster tacked on the wall, a gallery revue of my high school theatre endeavors. Most of them were Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, even a leftover handbill from a wildly misguided production of Cymbeline, which was set in the antebellum South for no reason the director could ever satisfactorily explain. I exhaled with a strange fond sadness, wondering what on earth had occupied my thoughts before Shakespeare. My first fumbling encounter with him at the age of eleven had quickly blossomed into full-blown Bardolatry. I bought a copy of the complete works with my precious pocket money and carried it everywhere, all too happy to ignore the less poetic reality of the outside world. Never before in my life had I experienced something so undeniably stirring and important. Without him, without Dellecher, without my company of lyric-mad classmates, what would become of me?

I decided—soberly, without hesitation—that I’d rob a bank or sell a kidney before I’d let such a thing happen. Reluctant to dwell on the possibility of such dire straits, I dug Theatre of Envy out of my bag and continued to read.

A little after seven, my mother knocked and told me dinner was ready. I ignored her and stayed where I was, but regretted the decision two hours later when my stomach began to growl. On her way to bed, Leah brought me a sandwich crammed with Thanksgiving leftovers. She perched on the edge of my mattress and said, “I guess they told you.”

“Yeah,” I said—through a mouthful of turkey, bread, and cranberry sauce.

“Sorry.”

“I’ll find the money somewhere. I can’t not go back to Dellecher.”

“Why?” She watched me with curious china blue eyes.

“I don’t know. It’s just—I don’t want to be anywhere else. James and Filippa and Alexander and Wren and Meredith, they’re like family.” I’d omitted Richard without even meaning to. The bread was a sticky paste in my mouth. “Better than family, really,” I added, when I managed to swallow. “We all just fit together. Not like here.”

She tugged at the edge of my comforter and said, “We used to fit. You and Caroline used to like each other.”

“No, we didn’t. You were just too young to figure it out.” She frowned at me, so I elaborated. “Don’t worry. I love her, just like I’m supposed to. I just don’t like her very much.”

She chewed her bottom lip, lost in thought. She’d never reminded me so much of Wren; grief and affection welled up unexpectedly, both at once. I wanted to hug her, squeeze her hand, something—but as a family, we’d never been so physically demonstrative, and I was afraid she’d find it strange.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Of course I like you,” I said, surprised by the question. “You’re the only one in this house worth a damn.”

“Good. Don’t you forget it.” She smiled grudgingly and slid off the bed. “Promise you’ll come out of your room tomorrow.”

“Only if Dad’s not around.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll let you know when the coast is clear. Go to sleep, nerd.”

I pointed at her, then at myself. “Pot. Kettle.”

She stuck her tongue out before disappearing down the hall, leaving the door cracked behind her. Maybe she hadn’t grown up too much yet.

I lay down again to finish Girard, but before long a few uncomfortably evocative words slipped in through the mental barrier I’d built up to keep Richard out: This mimesis of conflict means more solidarity among those who can fight the same enemy together and who promise one another to do so. Nothing unites men like a common enemy. On the next page Casca’s name stopped me as suddenly as if it had been my own, and I snapped the book shut. Was Richard our enemy, then? It felt like a gross exaggeration, but what else could we call him? I strummed my thumb against the pages, marveling that we’d needed so little convincing to acquiesce to Alexander’s Nothing. A few days removed from the moment, my horror was stale and cold, but I asked myself again what made me do it. Was it something so defensible as fear, or was it petty retribution, envy, opportunism? I fingered the edge of my bookmark. A number had been scribbled on the back in impetuous red ink. At the airport after the memorial service, I’d carried one of Meredith’s bags to security, and when I handed it off to her (safely out of earshot of James and Alexander), she suggested I come and see her in New York before heading back to school. Richard was gone. What was there to stop me?

Guilt itched like a rash on my skin. It flared up whenever I brushed against Richard in my mind and faded to a dull discomfort when I could make myself forget him, for an hour or two. Worse than the guilt was the uncertainty. I’m scared, Filippa had told me, of what happens now. As I lay there in the past in my high school bedroom, the future had never seemed so murky. I thought about it in terms of dramatic structure, because I didn’t know any other way to think. Richard’s death felt less like a dénouement than a second-act peripeteia, the catalytic event that set everything else in motion. As Wren had said, the show wasn’t over. It was the unknown ending that terrified me.

I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyeballs. The exhaustion that had crept into my bones at Hallsworth House clung to me, the lassitude left when a high fever breaks. Soon I was asleep on top of the blankets, wading through a dream in which I and the other fourth-years—just the six of us—stood hip-deep in a misty, tree-studded swamp, saying all at the same time, over and over, “He is drown’d in the brook; look but in, and you shall see him.”

An hour or so later, I twitched awake. The bars of sky visible between the blinds on my window were pitch-black and starless. I propped myself up on my elbows, wondering what had woken me. A dull thud from somewhere downstairs made me sit up straighter, listening. Unsure if I’d really heard anything at all, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled the door open. My eyes adjusted slowly to the semidarkness as I crept down the hall, but I had had plenty of practice sneaking around the house after nightfall and wasn’t likely to stumble. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I paused, ears pricked, one hand on the banister. Something moved on the porch, too big to be a neighborhood cat or a raccoon. Another thud. Someone was knocking.

I crept across the foyer and peered cautiously out through the sidelight. Surprise pounced on me and I fumbled to unlock the door.

“James!”

He stood on the porch with a duffel bag by his feet, his breath a stream of white in the frigid night air. “I didn’t know if you’d be up,” he said, as if he were merely late for a meeting we’d arranged and not completely unexpected.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, looking at him a little blearily, unsure if I might still be dreaming.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve called.”

“No, it’s fine—come in, it’s cold.” I waved him over the threshold, and he came in quickly, grabbing his bag off the porch. I closed the door behind him and locked it again.

“Is everyone asleep?” he asked, voice dropping to a whisper.

“Yeah. Come up, we can talk in my room.”

He trailed behind me up the stairs and down the hall, glancing at pictures on the walls, knickknacks piled on side tables. He’d never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn’t have enough books.

My own room was less overtly deficient—over the years I’d insulated myself from the rest of the house (the rest of the neighborhood, the rest of Ohio) with layers of ink and paper and poetry, like a squirrel lining a nest. James followed me in and stood looking around with obvious curiosity as I shut the door. The room seemed, for the first time, small.

“Here, let me take that.” I reached for his bag and set it in the narrow alley between the bed and the wall.

“I like your room,” he said. “It looks lived-in.”

James’s bedroom in California looked like a set pulled from a home-decorating magazine for wealthy librarians.

“It’s not much.” I sat on the foot of the bed and watched him absorb his surroundings. He seemed out of place, but not in an entirely unpleasant way—like a student who had wandered into the wrong classroom and found the new subject intensely interesting. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore how worn-out he looked. His shoulders drooped low, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides. A messy map of creases showed on his sweater, as if he had slept in it. He hadn’t shaved, and the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw was jarringly unfamiliar.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“Well, you’re welcome to it. But—and don’t take this the wrong way, you have no idea how glad I am to see you—why on earth are you here?”

He leaned on the edge of my desk. “I needed to get away from home,” he said. “Rattling around that house by myself during the day, tiptoeing around my parents at night—I just couldn’t take it. I couldn’t go back to Dellecher so I flew to Chicago, but the busyness was just as bad. I thought about getting a bus to Broadwater, but there wasn’t one so I came here.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, I should’ve called.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Thy friendship makes us fresh.”

“No offense, but you don’t look it,” I told him. “You look battered, actually.”

“It’s been a long night.”

“Let’s get you to bed, then. We can talk more in the morning.”

He nodded, tired eyes warm with gratitude. I stared at him, momentarily brain-dead except for the nonsensical question of whether he’d ever looked at me quite like that before.

“Where do you want me?” he asked.

“What? Oh. Why don’t you sleep here, and I’ll crash on the couch downstairs.”

“I’m not going to kick you out of your own bed.”

“You need the sleep more than I do.”

“No, why don’t we just— We can share, can’t we?”

My synapses fizzled out again. His expression was one part puzzled, one part expectant, and so utterly boyish that in that instant he looked more like himself than he had in weeks. He shifted, eyes flicking away toward the window, and I realized he was waiting for an answer.

“I don’t see why not,” I said.

His mouth inched shyly toward a grin. “We’re not such strange bedfellows.”

“No.”

I watched as he bent down to unlace his shoes, then pulled my own socks off and climbed out of my sweatpants. I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. It was well after two in the morning. I frowned, calculating how long he’d been on the bus. Five hours? Six?

“Which side do you want?” he asked.

“What?”

“The bed.” He pointed.

“Oh. Whichever.”

“Okay.” He folded his jeans over the back of my desk chair and then pulled his sweater off over his head. Ghosts of bruises still stained his wrists and forearms green.

I sat gingerly on the near edge of the bed and found myself thinking, unexpectedly, of the summer we’d spent in California—taking turns behind the wheel of the old BMW that had once belonged to James’s father, driving all the way up the coast to some gray, fog-blurred beach where we got drunk on white wine, swam naked, and fell asleep in the sand.

“Do you remember that night in Del Norte,” I said, “when we passed out on the beach—”

“And when we woke up in the morning all our clothes were gone?”

He said it so readily that he must have been thinking of it, too. I almost laughed and turned to find him pulling back the comforter, eyes brighter than they’d been before.

“I still wonder what happened,” I said. “Do you think it could have been the tide?”

“More likely someone with a sense of humor and a very light step liked the idea of us having to hike back to the car in the nude.”

“It’s a miracle we didn’t get arrested.”

“In California? It would take more than that.”

Suddenly the old story—the water and the gray morning and James’s remark, It would take more than that—was too familiar, too close for comfort to more recent memories. He averted his eyes and I knew we were still thinking the same thing. We climbed into bed, pushed the pillows around, and pretended to get comfortable in disconcerted silence. I lay on my back, dismayed that the five or six inches of space between us suddenly felt like a hundred miles. My petty fears from the memorial service were confirmed—death wasn’t going to stop Richard tormenting us.

“Can I turn out the light?” James asked.

“’Course,” I said, glad that his thoughts and mine were no longer wandering in the same direction.

He reached for the lamp, and darkness fell down from the ceiling. With it came a soft, senseless panic—I couldn’t see James anymore. I fought the impulse to grope across the bed until I found his arm. I spoke out loud, just to hear him reply.

“You know what I keep thinking of? You know, when I think about Richard.”

He was slow to answer, like he didn’t really want to find out. “What?”

“The sparrow, from Hamlet.”

I felt him shift. “Yeah, you said. Let be.”

“I’ve never understood that speech,” I said. “I mean, I understand it, but it doesn’t make sense. After trying for so long to settle the score and restore some kind of order, suddenly Hamlet’s a fatalist.”

The mattress moved under him again. He might have rolled over to face me, but it was too dark to see. “I think you understand it perfectly. Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can’t stop it or fix it or change it, there’s only one thing left to do.”

My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. “What’s that?”

His shadow shrugged in the gloom. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.”