If We Were Villains: A Novel

Up on the fifth floor of Dellecher Hall was a secret cache of rooms reserved for the school’s more illustrious guests. This peculiar apartment had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a large central drawing room that contained a fireplace, a collection of elegant Victorian furniture, and a baby grand piano. Hallsworth House (as it was called, after Leopold Dellecher’s wealthy in-laws) was where the faculty decided to hide the six remaining fourth-years while the south shore of the lake was crawling with police.

Dean Holinshed had called an emergency assembly in the music hall that evening, but he decided that we should not be present. He didn’t wish, he explained, to subject us or the other students to the temptation to gossip. So, as the rest of the school sat in dumbstruck silence four floors below, Wren, Filippa, James, Alexander, Meredith, and I were prisoners at the fireside in Hallsworth House. Frederick and Gwendolyn didn’t like the idea of leaving us entirely alone, so one of the nurses from the infirmary had been placed as a sentinel outside the door to the rest of the fifth floor, where she sat sniffling into a tissue as she halfheartedly filled in a crossword puzzle.

I strained my ears against the suffocating quiet, acutely aware of our schoolmates, all gathered together without us. Exile was intolerable. It felt somehow Damoclean, a period of suspended judgment, dreading condemnation by a jury of our peers. (O, my prophetic soul.) Our mercenary relief at having Richard gone was quickly turning sour. Already I’d found a thousand things to be afraid of. What if one of us let something slip? Talked in our sleep? Forgot how the story was supposed to go? Or perhaps we’d walk on tiptoes the rest of our lives, waiting for the thread to snap, the axe to fall.

Alexander must have been infected by the same anxiety. “Do you think they’re going to tell everyone we’re up here?” he asked, staring hard at the carpet as though he might suddenly develop X-ray vision and be able to see what was going on downstairs.

“I doubt it,” Filippa said. “They won’t want anyone sneaking up.” The lines on either side of her mouth were deep and dark, as if she had aged ten years in as many hours. The others were silent, listening uselessly for a sound from downstairs. James sat with his knees pinned tightly together, arms folded over his chest, like he was cold. Wren was listless, limp, her limbs bent into her chair at odd clumsy angles, like those of a dropped doll. Meredith sat on the couch beside her, cross-legged, fists clenched, tension making every elegant line of her body hard and angular.

“What do you think they’ll do about Caesar?” Alexander said, when he couldn’t stand the quiet anymore.

“They’ll call it off,” Filippa said. “It’d be tasteless to just replace him.”

“So much for ‘the show must go on.’”

I tried—for one abortive moment—to imagine someone, anyone, else assuming Richard’s role. The threat Gwendolyn had made to have me learn his lines and take his place echoed from my memory and I balked, recoiled from the idea. “Honestly,” I said, afraid I’d have to scream if I didn’t do something else with my voice, “do you really want to get back onstage without him?”

A few heads shook; nobody spoke. Then—

“Is it just me,” Alexander said, “or is this the longest day of everyone else’s life?”

“Well,” James said. “Certainly not Richard’s.”

Alexander gaped at him, eyes wide and glaring.

“James,” Meredith said. “What the fuck.”

Filippa breathed out in a hiss, rubbing her forehead. “We’re not doing this,” she said, then looked up, from one of them to each of the others. “We are not going to bicker and bitch at each other—not about this. Things without all remedy / Should be without regard: What’s done is done.”

Alexander laughed a thin, humorless laugh I didn’t like at all. “To bed, to bed, to bed!” he said. “God, I need a smoke. I wish they hadn’t stuck the nurse outside.” He clambered to his feet, turned on the spot, moving in the quick, restless way he did when he was upset. He wandered around the room in an aimless zigzag, struck a few random notes on the piano, then started opening cupboards and fumbling around on the bookshelves.

“What are you doing?” Meredith asked.

“Looking for booze,” he said. “There must be something hidden in here. The last guest they had was the guy who wrote the Nietzsche book and I bet my ass he’s an alcoholic.”

“How can you possibly want to drink right now?” I said. “My insides still feel like liquid from last night.”

“Hair of the dog. Aha.” He emerged from a cabinet in the back of the room with a bottle of something amber in one hand. “Anyone for brandy?”

“Go on,” Filippa said. “Maybe it’ll take the edge off.”

Glasses clinked together as he rummaged deeper in the cabinet. “Anyone else?”

Wren didn’t speak, but to my surprise James and Meredith both said, “Yes, please,” at precisely the same time.

Alexander returned with the bottle in one hand, four glasses stacked and tilting in the other. He poured himself enough brandy to burn the Hall down, then passed it to Filippa. “I don’t know how much you want,” he said. “Personally I plan to drink myself to sleep.”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again,” I said. Richard’s half-smashed face—garish as a carnival mask—leapt at me every time I closed my eyes.

James, staring into the fire, chewing a fingernail, said, “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’”

“Where are we sleeping?” Meredith asked, ignoring him. “There’s only three rooms.”

“Well, Wren and I can share,” Filippa said, with a sidelong look at her. She didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard.

“Who wants to share with me?” Alexander said. He waited for a reply but didn’t get one. “Don’t everyone jump up at once.”

“I’ll stay out here,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“What time is it?” Meredith said. She lifted her glass to her lips, with a pained expression, as if that simple motion were monumentally taxing.

Filippa squinted at the carriage clock on the table beside her. “Quarter after nine.”

“Is that all?” I said. “It feels like midnight.”

“It feels like Judgment Day.” Alexander threw back an enormous gulp of brandy, gritted his teeth as he swallowed, and reached for the bottle again. He filled his glass almost to the brim and stood clutching it tightly. “I’m going to bed,” he announced. “If someone decides they don’t want to crash in the living room, well, we all know I’m not picky about who I sleep with. Goodnight.”

He left the room, with a small stiff bow. I watched him go and propped my head on one hand, unsurprised by how heavy it felt. Exhaustion pumped sluggishly through my veins, dampening everything else. In the raw dark of the morning I’d felt relief rather than dismay at the spectacle of Richard’s death, and now that it was dark again—after all we’d done and said during the long hypnotic hours in between—I was too tired for sadness or pity. Perhaps it was absent because I didn’t quite believe it. I half expected Richard to burst through the door, wiping stage blood from his face, laughing cruelly at how he’d had us fooled.

Filippa finished her drink, and the sound of her glass touching down on the table made me look up. “I’m going to go to bed, too,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “I want to just lie down for a while, even if I don’t sleep. Wren? Why don’t you come to bed?”

Wren was still for a moment, then reanimated, unfolded herself from the chair, eyes bleary, out of focus. She accepted Filippa’s proffered hand and followed her out, without protest.

“Are you sleeping here?” Meredith asked, when they’d gone. She spoke to me as if James wasn’t there. He didn’t react or respond, as if he hadn’t heard her.

I nodded. “You take the other bedroom.”

She straightened up—slowly, gingerly, like everything hurt.

“Going to sleep?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I hope I never wake up.”

The first real pang of sadness stuck me like a needle, but it had nothing to do with Richard, not really. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find a single adequate word and so I sat silent and immobile on the couch as she, too, left the room, half her brandy undrunk. When the door closed behind her I deflated, slumped against the pillows behind me, dragged my hands across my face.

“She doesn’t mean it,” James said.

I frowned behind my fingers. “Is that meant to be comforting or critical?”

“It’s not meant to be anything,” he said. “Don’t be angry with me, Oliver, I can’t take it right now.”

I exhaled and lifted my hands off my face. “I’m sorry. I’m not angry. I’m just … I don’t know. Drained.”

“We should sleep.”

“Well. We can try.”

We lay down—I on one couch, James on the other—but didn’t bother trying to find sheets or proper pillows. I smashed a decorative bolster under my head and pulled a throw blanket down over my legs. On the other couch, James did the same, pausing to finish his brandy and what was left of Meredith’s. When he was settled, I turned out the lamp on the table behind me, but the room was still saturated with firelight. The flames had shrunk to small buds of yellow, flickering between the logs.

As I watched the wood blacken and crumble and collapse, my lungs constricted, refused to take in sufficient air. How swiftly, how suddenly everything had gone wrong. Where did it even begin? Not with Meredith and me, I told myself, but months earlier—with Caesar? Macbeth? It was impossible to identify Point Zero. I squirmed, unable to dismiss the idea that some huge invisible weight was crushing down on me like a boulder. (It was that ponderous crouching demon Guilt. At the time I didn’t know him, but in the months to come he would climb onto my chest every night and sit snarling there, an ugly Fuselian nightmare.) The fire burned down to embers and its light slowly left the room, leaking out through the cracks. Lacking oxygen, light-headed, I tilted back toward unconsciousness, and it was more like suffocating than falling asleep.

A whisper brought me back to life.

“Oliver.”

I sat up and blinked against the gloom at James, but it wasn’t he who had spoken.

“Oliver.”

Meredith had appeared, a pale shape in the dark void of her bedroom door. Her head drooped against the doorframe like a flower bud swollen with rainwater, and for one odd moment I wondered what the weight of her hair was, if she felt it hanging down her back.

I pushed my blanket off and crept across the room with another furtive look at James. He lay on his back, head turned to the side, away from me. I couldn’t tell if he was dead asleep or trying too hard to fake it.

“What is it?” I whispered, when I was close enough for her to hear me.

“I can’t sleep.”

My hand twitched toward her, but it didn’t get far. “It’s been a bad day,” I said, lamely.

She exhaled, gave me a weak nod. “Will you come in?”

I leaned away from her, forcibly reminded of that night in the dressing room when I’d withdrawn in exactly the same way. She could tempt anyone, but Fate didn’t seem like a good target. We had one casualty already. “Meredith,” I said, “your boyfriend’s dead. He died this morning.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s not that.” Her eyes were glassy, unapologetic. “I just don’t want to sleep alone.”

That little prick of sadness burrowed deeper, touched me at the quick. How well I’d been trained to mistrust her. And by whom? Richard? Gwendolyn? I glanced over my shoulder at James again. All I could see was a shock of his hair sticking up behind the arm of the couch.

It didn’t really matter where I slept, I decided. Nothing mattered much after that morning. Our two souls—if not all six—were forfeit.

“All right,” I said.

She nodded, only once, and went back into the room. I followed, closed the door behind me. The blankets on the bed were already disheveled, kicked around, messy. I slid between the sheets in my jeans. I’d sleep in my clothes. We’d sleep. That was all.

We didn’t touch, didn’t even speak. She climbed into the bed beside me and lay down on her side, one arm folded under her pillow. She watched me as I settled myself, propped my own pillow up a little higher. When I stopped moving, she closed her eyes—but not before a few tears leaked out, slipped between her eyelashes. I tried not to feel her trembling against the mattress, but it was like the tick of the mantel clock in the Castle: soft, persistent, impossible to ignore. After what might have been as long as an hour, I lifted my arm, without looking at her. She shifted closer, tucked her head against my chest. I curled my arm around her.

“God, Oliver,” she said, her voice small and stifled, one hand pressed over her mouth to keep it in.

I smoothed her hair flat against her back. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”