If We Were Villains: A Novel

It was a week before anything else interesting happened. After Frederick’s class (where a discussion of the fine line between homosocial and homoerotic in the infamous “tent scene” had us all teetering between amusement and embarrassment), we descended the stairs together, complaining of our hunger. The refectory—once the Dellecher family’s grand dining room—was crowded at noon, but our usual table was empty and waiting.

“I’m fucking starving,” Alexander declared, attacking his plate before the rest of us had even sat down. “Drinking all that damn tea makes me feel ill.”

“Maybe if you ate breakfast that wouldn’t happen,” Filippa said, watching with disgust as he shoveled mashed potatoes into his mouth.

Richard arrived late, with an envelope in his hand, which he’d already opened. “There’s mail,” he said, and sat down at the end of the table between Meredith and Wren.

“For all of us?” I asked.

“I’d expect so,” he said, without looking up.

“I’ll go,” I said, and a few of them muttered their thanks at me as I stood. Our mailboxes were at the end of the refectory, and I found my name first on the wall of little wooden cubbies. Filippa’s was closest to mine, then James, and the rest were increasingly spread out at the far ends of the alphabet. The same square envelope waited in each of our mailboxes, our names written on the front in Frederick’s small, elegant script. I took them back to the table and passed them around.

“What are they?” Wren asked.

“Dunno,” I said. “We can’t be getting midterm speech assignments yet, can we?”

“No,” Meredith said, already tearing into hers. “It’s Macbeth.”

The rest of us immediately stopped talking and ripped our own envelopes open.

A few traditional performances took place every year at Dellecher. While the weather was warm, the art students re-created van Gogh’s Starry Night with sidewalk chalk. In December the language students did a reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in Latin. The philosophy students rebuilt their Ship of Theseus every January and held a symposium in March, while the choral and instrumental students did Don Giovanni on Valentine’s Day and the dancers performed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in April. The theatre students did scenes from Macbeth on Halloween and scenes from Romeo and Juliet at the Christmas masque. Because the first-, second-, and third-years were barely involved, I had no idea how they were cast.

I broke the seal on my envelope and pulled out a card that bore five more lines of Frederick’s tiny writing:

Please be at the trailhead at a quarter to midnight on Halloween.

Come prepared for Act I, Scene 3, and Act IV, Scene 1.

You will be playing BANQUO.

Report to the costume shop at 12:30 p.m. on October 18th for a costume fitting.

Do not discuss this with your peers.

I stared at it, wondering if there had been some clerical error. I checked the envelope again, but it said, unmistakably, Oliver. I glanced up at James to see if he had noticed anything unusual, but his face was blank. I would have expected him to be playing Banquo to Richard’s Macbeth.

“Well,” Alexander said, looking faintly bemused, “I take it we’re not supposed to talk about this.”

“No,” Richard said. “It’s tradition. The Christmas masque is the same, we’re not meant to know who’s playing whom before the performance.” I had momentarily forgotten that he’d played Tybalt the previous year.

I struggled to read the girls’ faces. Filippa seemed unsurprised. Wren looked excited. Meredith, slightly suspicious.

“Do we get to rehearse at all?” Alexander asked.

“No,” Richard said again. “You’ll get a cue script in your mailbox tomorrow. Then you just learn your lines and show up. Excuse me.” He pushed his chair back and left the table without another word. Wren and Meredith exchanged a quizzical look.

Meredith: “What’s wrong with him?”

Wren: “He was fine half an hour ago.”

Meredith: “Do you want to go or should I?”

Wren: “Be my guest.”

Meredith left the table with a sigh, her shepherd’s pie only half eaten. Alexander, who had finished his own, had the good grace to wait a full three seconds before he said, “You think she’s coming back for that?”

James pushed the plate at him. “Eat it, you savage.”

I glanced over my shoulder. In the corner by the coffee urns, Meredith had caught Richard and was listening to him talk with a hard frown. She touched his arm, said something, but he shrugged away and left the refectory, confusion hanging like a shadow over his eyes. She watched him go, then returned to the table to tell us he had a migraine and was going back to the Castle. Apparently oblivious to the fact that her plate had gone missing, she sat down again.

As lunch dragged on, I ate and listened to the others talk, lamenting the volume of lines they had to learn for Caesar before off-book day, which was another week away. The envelope felt heavy in my lap. I watched James across the table. He was quiet, too, not really listening to the conversation. I looked from him to Meredith to Richard’s empty chair, and couldn’t help feeling that the balance of power had somehow shifted.