If We Were Villains: A Novel

I slept through most of the following day, regaining consciousness for only a moment or two when Meredith slid out of bed, brushed my hair back off my forehead, and left for class. I murmured something at her, but the words never really took shape. Sleep crawled back on top of me like an affectionate, purring pet, and I didn’t wake again for eight hours. When I did, Filippa was sitting cross-legged on the bed beside me.

I gazed up at her blearily, groping through my muddled memory of the previous night, unsure whether I had any clothes on under the blanket. She pushed me back down when I tried to sit up. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“How do I look?”

“Honestly? Awful.”

“Coincidence? No. What time is it?”

The windows were already dark.

“Quarter to nine,” she said, and her forehead creased. “Have you slept all day?”

I groaned, shifted, reluctant to lift my head. “Mostly. How was class?”

“Very quiet.”

“Why?”

“Well, without you there were only four of us.”

“Who else was missing?”

“Who do you think?”

I turned my head away from her on the pillow, stared hard at the wall. The movement produced a painful thud in my sinus cavity that distracted me, but only for a moment.

“I suppose you’re waiting for me to ask where he is,” I said.

She plucked at the edge of the comforter where it was folded across my chest. “Nobody’s seen him since yesterday. After fight call he just disappeared.”

I grunted at her and said, “There’s a ‘but,’ I can hear it coming.”

She sighed, her shoulders rising slightly up and sinking down much farther. “But he’s back now. He’s up in the Tower.”

“In which case I will be staying right here until Meredith kicks me out.”

Her mouth made a flat pink line. Behind her glasses—I didn’t know why she was wearing them, she wasn’t reading anything—her eyes were drowsy ocean blue, patient but tired. “Come on, Oliver,” she said quietly. “It can’t hurt to go up and talk to him.”

I gestured at my face. “Um, apparently it can.”

“Look, we’re all mad at him, too. I think Meredith left a scorch mark on the floor where she was standing when he came in. Even Wren wouldn’t talk to him.”

“Good,” I said.

“Oliver.”

“What?”

She leaned her cheek on one hand and inexplicably, grudgingly, smiled.

“What?” I said again, more warily.

“You,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t even be in here if you were anyone else.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you have better reasons than the rest of us to hold a grudge, but you’re also the first one who’s going to forgive him.”

The unsettling feeling that Filippa could see right through my skin made me squirm deeper into the mattress. “Is that so?” I said, but it sounded weak and unpersuasive, even to me.

“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “We can’t afford to be at one another’s throats right now. Things are bad enough.” She seemed frail, all of a sudden. Thin and transparent, like a cancer patient. Unflappable Filippa. I felt a weird overwhelming urge to just hold her, ashamed that I had, however briefly, suspected her of anything. I wanted to pull her under the blanket and wrap my arms around her. I almost did it before I remembered that I (probably) wasn’t dressed.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him.”

She nodded, and I thought I saw the flash of a tear behind her glasses. “Thanks.” She waited a moment, realized I wasn’t moving, and said, “Okay, when?”

“Um, in a minute.”

She blinked, and all traces of the tear—if it had ever been there—were gone. “Are you naked?” she said.

“I might be.”

She left the room. I took my time getting dressed.

As I climbed the stairs to the Tower, I found myself walking in slow motion. It didn’t feel like I was going up to see James for the first time in only a day or two. I felt like I hadn’t really seen him, spoken to him, communicated with him in any significant way since before Christmas. The door at the top of the stairs was cracked. I nervously licked my lip and pushed it open.

He was perched on the side of the bed, eyes fixed on the floor. But it wasn’t his bed—it was mine.

“Comfortable?” I said.

He stood swiftly and took two steps forward. “Oliver—”

I raised one hand, palm out, like a crossing guard. “No—just stay over there, for a minute.”

He stopped in the middle of the room. “Okay. Whatever you want.”

My feet were unsteady on the floorboards. I swallowed, choked down a surge of strange, despondent affection. “I want to forgive you,” I blurted. “But James, I could kill you right now, honestly.” I reached toward him, clenched my fist on empty air. “I want to—God, I can’t even explain it. You’re like a bird, you know that?” He opened his mouth—a question, some expression of confusion caught on the tip of his tongue. I made a harsh, inelegant gesture, a chop of the hand, to keep him from speaking. My thoughts tumbled out manic and disorganized. “Alexander was right, Richard’s not the sparrow, it’s you. You’re—I don’t know, this fragile, elusive thing, and I feel like if I could just catch you, I could crush you.”

He had this terrible, wounded look on his face, and he had no right to it, not in that moment. Half a dozen conflicting feelings roared up in me at once, and I took a huge, ungainly step toward him.

“I want so badly to be so mad at you that I could do that, but I can’t, so I’m mad at myself instead. Do you even understand how unfair that is?” My voice was high and stringent, like a little boy’s. I hated it, so I swore, loudly. “Fuck! Fuck this, fuck me, fuck you— God damn it, James!” I wanted to throw him to the floor, fight him down—and do what? The violence of the thought alarmed me, and with a strangled noise of outrage, I seized a book off the trunk at the end of his bed and flung it at him, threw it at his knees. It was a paperback copy of Lear, limp and harmless, but he winced as it hit him. It fluttered to the floor at his feet, one page hanging crookedly out from the binding. When he looked up at me I averted my eyes immediately.

“Oliver, I—”

“Don’t!” I jabbed a finger at him for silence. “Don’t. Just let me—just—for a minute.” I dragged my fingers through my hair. A hard ball of pain had lodged behind the bridge of my nose, and my eyes were beginning to water. “What is it about you?” I asked, my words thick from the effort of keeping my voice steady. I glared at him, waiting for an answer I knew I wouldn’t get. “I should hate you right now. And I want to—God, I want to—but that’s not enough.”

I shook my head, utterly at a loss. What on earth was happening to us? I searched his face for a hint of it, some clue to seize on, but for a long time all he did was breathe, with his face twisted up like breathing hurt.

“My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.”

The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?”

He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.”

“James,” I said again, more gently. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head, eyes downcast. His voice crept out of his mouth with fearful, cautious steps. “No. I’m not.”

“Okay.” I shifted my weight, foot to foot. The floor still didn’t feel firm enough. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

“Oh,” he said, with a strange, watery smile. “No. Everything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and it sounded like a question.

He moved forward, one step, closed the small space between us, and lifted his hand, touched the bruise that had spread beneath my left eye. A sliver of pain. I twitched.

“I should be the sorry one,” he said. My eyes flicked from one of his to the other. Gray like steel, gold like honey. “I don’t know what made me do it. I’ve never wanted to hurt you before.”

His fingertips felt like ice. “But now?” I said. “Why?”

His arm fell lifelessly to his side. He looked away and said, “Oliver, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to hurt the whole world.”

“James.” I took his arm, turned him back toward me. Before I could decide what to do next, I felt his hand on my chest and glanced down. His palm was pressed against my shirt, his fingers splayed across my collarbone. I waited for him to pull me closer or push me away. But he only stared at his hand, like it was something strange he’d never seen before.