If We Were Villains: A Novel

Richard had reached toward us and wrenched the world right out of orbit. Everything tilted, hurtled forward. As soon as those three words—He’s still alive—were out of James’s mouth, he was running headlong to the end of the dock.

“Richard!” Wren croaked, the sound involuntary and compulsive, like a cough. Her cousin lay convulsing in the water, blood bubbling vivid red on his lips as one hand groped toward us.

“James!” Alexander’s voice, shrill and frantic, pierced through the gloom. “Oliver, grab him!”

I stumbled into a sprint, feet pounding on the wet planks, seized by the senseless fear that James would throw himself into the water and let Richard drag him under.

“James!” My fingers scraped off the back of his jacket, closed on nothing. “Stop!” I made one more reckless grab and caught him clumsily around the waist. He lost his balance and pitched forward with a cry of surprise. For one terrible moment the water rushed up to meet us, but just as I gasped to go under, James slammed into the dock chest-first and I crashed down on top of him. Pain went howling through my limbs but I didn’t let go, hoping that my weight would be enough to hold him down.

Wren tried to call out again but gagged and swallowed her voice.

“Can he hear us?” Alexander said. “Jesus, can he even hear us?”

My head hung over the edge of the dock, pulse pounding between my temples, eyes open wide. Richard, just out of reach, gulped against the thick slime of blood in his mouth. His limbs were twisted and bent around him like the broken wings of a bird—pushed too soon from the nest, unready for flight. Hamlet stirred in my memory. There’s a special providence, he says, in the fall of a sparrow.

“He’s not dead!” James writhed underneath me. “He’s not dead, get off!”

“No!” Alexander said, sharply. “Wait—”

Filippa’s voice broke through, closer than Alexander’s. “Oliver!” I felt her hands on my shoulders, dragging me away from the edge. “Get up,” she said, “get him away from there—”

“James, come on!” I hauled him backward, pulled him to his feet. He strained feebly against my arms, and I worried for a moment that I might have broken his ribs. Behind us, Wren was on her knees, moaning, and Meredith crouched beside her, face livid—her expression less like terror than rage.

“Let go of me!” James said, half trying to push me off. “Let go—”

“Not if you’re going to do something crazy,” Alexander said. “Just wait a minute—”

“We can’t wait, he’s dying—”

“And we’re going to what, leap in and save him? All the king’s horses and all the king’s men? Shut up and think, for one fucking minute!”

“Think about what?” I asked, still holding James but not sure why.

“I mean, how did this even happen?” Alexander asked, of nobody in particular.

“Well, he fell,” Filippa said, immediately. “He must have—”

“He just fell?” I said. “Pip, look at his face—”

“So he smashed his head on something,” Meredith said. “After how much he drank, are you really surprised?”

“God, Richard,” Wren said again, but seething now, wiping angrily at her eyes. “Richard, you idiot—”

“Hey! Stop that.” Alexander yanked her up off her knees. “Don’t cry over him, it’s his own fucking fault—”

“Are you all insane?” James demanded, looking wildly from one of them to each of the others. He’d stopped straining against my grip, as if he’d forgotten I was holding him. “We have to help him!”

“Do we?” Alexander asked, whirling around, taking one impulsive step toward him. “I mean, do we really?”

“Alexander, he’s still alive—”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“What?” I said, but neither of them seemed to hear me.

“We can’t just stand around arguing about how it happened, we have to do something—” James started, but Alexander cut him off.

“Look, I know you have a pathological need to play the hero, but right now you need to stop and ask yourself if that’s really what’s best for everyone.”

I stared at him, appalled.

“What are you saying?” James asked, faintly, as if he already knew the answer.

Alexander stood with his long arms braced at his sides, twitching with a kind of crazed potential energy. He glanced over his shoulder at the water. Richard’s last convulsion had subsided and he lay unnervingly motionless, as if he were playing dead. The water was smooth and dark as velvet now except for the weak flutter of his exhalations that gave him away. If it be now, I thought, ’tis not to come.

“All I’m saying is, let’s not do anything before we’ve thought it through,” Alexander said, sweat gleaming on his temples despite the raw November chill. “I mean, do you not remember what he’s been like the last few weeks? Clobbering us onstage, we’re covered in bruises, he nearly drowned you on Halloween, and last night?” He looked at me. “You and Meredith?” There was a sharp, stabbing pain in my chest. “Richard completely lost his mind. You didn’t hear him ranting about what he’d do when he got his hands on you. If he wasn’t in the water right now, you probably would be.”

“We had to stop him breaking in,” Filippa said. I’d forgotten how close she was standing beside me, one hand on my back, until she spoke and I felt the vibration of her voice. “He almost put Alexander through the wall.”

“Never mind me, what about Wren?” Alexander said, but he was appealing to James, not her. “You were there, you saw it.”

“What did he do?” Meredith said, when James didn’t answer. Wren squeezed her eyes shut. “What did he do to her?”

“She tried to stop him storming off,” Filippa said, talking quietly, whispering, like Richard might hear. Like she was afraid to wake him. “He threw her across the yard. He could have broken every bone in her body.”

“You think all that’s going to stop?” Alexander asked, with a throb of fear in his voice. “You think we’ll pull him out of the water and he’ll be fine and we’ll all be friends again?”

A thin silence answered him. If it be not to come, it will be now.

Alexander forced one nervous hand into his pocket and found the stub end of a cigarette. His lighter flared and he cupped his fingers around the flame as if it were something unspeakably precious. At the first breath in he shivered, and when he exhaled again his voice was lower, if not quite steady. “Don’t say it out loud if you don’t want to. But five minutes ago when we thought he was dead, what did you feel?”

Filippa’s face was ashen but unreadable. Silver tear tracks glistened on Wren’s cheeks. Beside her, Meredith was upright and immovable as a statue. James stood suspended between her and me, mouth open in abject, childlike horror. Around us the trees’ bristling black silhouettes stood eerily straight and motionless, and thin clouds strung across the milky sky like smoke. The world was no longer dark; a cold light had broken and crouched low on the horizon, prowling the no-man’s-land between night and day. I forced myself to look down at Richard. If he was breathing I couldn’t hear it, but even in that silence he was snarling, teeth bared and seamed with blood. I felt it on the tip of my tongue, the compulsion to confess that in that perilous instant when I thought he was dead, all I’d really felt was relief.

“So,” Meredith said—and it seemed, somehow, that she was speaking for all of us. Her warm vivacity was gone, and there was something about how coldly sober and steady she looked that sent pins and needles prickling down my spine. “What do you suggest we do?”

Alexander shrugged, and there was something terribly momentous in that simple, meaningless gesture. “Nothing.”

For a long time, nobody spoke. Nobody protested. I was stunned by their reticence until I realized—I hadn’t spoken either.

James’s voice finally stirred in the dead air. “We have to help him. We have to.”

“Why, James?” Meredith said, quietly, reproachfully, as if he had somehow betrayed her. “You of all people should understand … We don’t owe him anything.”

James averted his eyes—perhaps in defiance, perhaps in shame—and Meredith turned her gorgon gaze on me. Every tiny intimacy of the previous night came creeping back to mind: her lips against my skin and Richard’s ugly fingerprints on hers, neither more persuasive than the other. I swallowed a hard lump in my throat. If it be not now, yet it will come.

Alexander was fidgeting, on the verge of interrupting, but he shut his mouth when I moved, shifted, put myself between James and the rest of them. He twitched at the weight of my hands on his shoulders. “Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?” I said. He looked at me with unbearable mistrust, as if I were a stranger, someone he didn’t recognize. I pulled him just an inch closer, trying to tell him in some impossible way that I wanted him and the others unhurt and unafraid more than I wanted Richard alive, and we couldn’t have both anymore. “James, please. Let be.”

He stared at me a moment longer, then let his head droop again. “Wren?” he said, turning just enough that he could see her from the corner of his eye. She looked impossibly young, huddled between Meredith and Alexander, arms wrapped tight around her stomach, as if they wouldn’t unwind. But she seemed to have wept all the softness out of her cool brown eyes. She didn’t speak, didn’t even open her mouth—just nodded, slowly. Yes.

Something wretchedly like a laugh slipped out between James’s lips. “Do it, then,” he said. “Let him die.”

That loathsome opiate, relief, raced through my veins again—sharp and lucid at the initial prick, before everything went numb. I heard one of the others, maybe Filippa, exhale and I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt it. The moral outrage we should have suffered was quietly put down, suppressed like an unpleasant rumor before it had a chance to be heard. Whatever we did—or, more crucially, did not do—it seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.

Alexander tried to say something, but a wet spluttering sound made us all look toward the lake. Richard’s head had lolled to one side, low enough that the water lapped at his nose and mouth and left a cloud of dark hematic red around his face. His whole body stiffened, seized up, the muscles in his neck and arms bulging like steel cables, though he didn’t seem to be able to move his limbs. The rest of us watched in a state of rigid paralysis. There was a distant groan, the sound trapped somehow inside his body, unable to find a way out. One last little spasm went through him, the hand that had so futilely stretched toward the sound of our voices opening up like a flower. The fingers flexed, closed again, shrank back toward the palm. Then everything was still.

At long last Alexander rolled his shoulders forward, and all the smoke he’d been holding in his lungs spilled out at once. “Well,” he said to the rest of us, suddenly calm and placid as the lake that lay behind him. “What now?”

The question was so absurd and the way he said it so ludicrously casual that I had to clench my teeth against a psychotic impulse to laugh. My classmates shifted around me, turning inward, toward one another, away from the water. Their faces were smooth, impassive, the panic of a minute before forgotten. No reason to fuss now. No rush. I couldn’t help but wonder if my own expression was so staid, if perhaps I was a better actor than I’d always thought and none of them suspected that there was some sick, silent laughter trapped in my throat.

Filippa: “We need to decide what to tell the police about what happened.”

Alexander: “To him? Who knows. I don’t even know where I was half the night.”

Meredith: “You can’t say that. Someone’s dead and you don’t know where you were?”

Me: “Jesus, it’s not like one of us did this.”

Filippa: “No, of course not—”

Me: “He was drunk. He drank himself blind and went crashing into the woods.”

Wren: “They’re going to want to know why one of us didn’t go after him.”

Alexander: “Because he’s a violent fucking lunatic and he chucked you across the yard?”

Meredith: “She can’t say that, you idiot—it sounds like a motive.”

James: “Then you had better not say where you were either.”

He spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear him. He watched Meredith without embellishing, his face white and stiff as a plaster cast.

“Sorry,” she said, “what motive do I have to kill my boyfriend?”

“Well, what I remember about last night is your boyfriend calling you a slut in front of everyone and you rushing upstairs to revenge-fuck Oliver. Or have I left something out?” He looked from her to me, and that pain in my chest was back, like he’d grasped an invisible dagger and twisted it between my ribs.

“Look, he’s right,” Filippa said, before Meredith could argue. “We don’t know what happened to Richard, but there’s no sense making this more difficult for ourselves. Least said, soonest mended.”

“Okay, but we can’t avoid the fight in the kitchen because half the school was there,” Alexander said, then gestured from Meredith to me. “And someone saw these two morons making out in the stairwell.”

“He was drunk,” Meredith snapped. “Drunker than you, and you don’t even know where you were.”

Filippa talked over them. “We were all drinking, so any question you don’t want to answer, just say you don’t remember.”

“And the rest?” James asked.

“What do you mean?” Wren said. “‘The rest.’”

“You know. Before.”

Filippa, as always, was quickest to understand. “Not a word about Halloween,” she said. “Or the assassination scene, or anything else.”

“So, what,” Alexander said, “before last night, everything was just fine?”

Filippa’s face was perfectly blank, and I could already picture her sitting across from some rookie police officer, back straight, knees together, ready to answer whatever question he threw at her. “Yes, precisely,” she said. “Before last night, everything was fine.”

Wren scuffed her toes against the dock, glancing away, avoiding everyone’s eyes. “And this morning?” she said, in a very small voice.

“Nobody ever comes out here besides the seven of us,” Alexander said. “So we say we’ve just found him.”

“And what are we supposed to have been doing up ’til now?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” Meredith said. “The sun’s not even up.” But as she spoke, the shrill call of a bird echoed between the trees and we knew—it wouldn’t be long. I glanced toward the end of the dock where Richard lay unmoving in the water, unable to push Hamlet’s poor fallen sparrow out of my head. The readiness is all.

Alexander said as much, in humbler words: “What time is it? Are we sure he’s … shuffled off?”

“No,” Filippa said. “But before we call the police, we need to be.”

Another silence, just long enough for the fear we’d briefly forgotten to come creeping back.

“I’ll do it,” Meredith said. She dragged her fingers through her hair, then let her arms fall to her sides again. I’d seen her do it a thousand times before: push her hair back from her face, steel herself, and step into the spotlight. But to watch her disappear into the freezing water was more than I could stomach.

“No,” I said. “I’ll go.”

Everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind except Meredith. A kind of desperate gratitude flitted across her face, so fast I almost didn’t see it. “All right,” she said. “Go.”

I nodded, mostly to myself. When I’d spoken, I’d done it thinking only of her, not of what I would have to do in her place. The others drifted apart, leaving a narrow path for me to walk to the end of the dock. I stood numb and unmoving for a second or two, then put one foot forward. Three slow steps put them all behind me. I paused, reached down to pull my shoes off. Three more steps. I unzipped my jacket and dropped it on the dock, tugged my sweatshirt off over my head. The cold air stung my bare skin, and goose bumps crept from my scalp down my spine and my arms and legs until every hair on my body was standing on end. Three more steps.

The lake had never seemed so enormous, so dark or so deep. Richard had sunk almost beneath the surface, like a toppled statue, and only marmoreal fragments emerged—three fingers loosely curled, the slope of a collarbone, sensuous twist of the throat. Misery set in stone. A thin film of crimson clung to his skin, too bright, too lurid, for that place of misty grays and evergreen. Fear seized my heart in a pitiless grip and crushed it to a small, hard lump like a cherry stone.

I stared down at him until I thought my blood would freeze if I didn’t move. I looked back to tell the others that I couldn’t do it—couldn’t go any closer, couldn’t plunge into that black water, couldn’t prod his crooked throat in search of a pulse. But the sight of them huddled together, like five children afraid of the dark, watching me and waiting for some kind of reassurance, made my own fear seem selfish.

I held my breath, closed my eyes, and stepped off the dock.