If We Were Villains: A Novel

February didn’t linger long. The middle of the month had come and gone before I’d even stopped writing January on all my papers by mistake. Our midterm performance exams were approaching fast—and though Frederick and Gwendolyn had been unusually kind in their scene assignments, we were fighting to stay afloat in a sea of lines to learn, reading to do, text to scan, and papers to hand in. Early one Sunday evening, James and I and the girls huddled in the library, running lines for the scenes we were scheduled to perform in class the following week. James and Filippa had Hamlet and Gertrude; Meredith and Wren were reading Emilia and Desdemona; I was waiting for Alexander to show up and read Arcite to my Palamon.

“Honestly,” Filippa said, as she tripped over the same line for the fourth time, “would it have killed them to make me Ophelia? I am not by any stretch of the imagination old enough to be your mother.”

“Would it were not so!” James said.

She sighed enormously. “What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?”

“Such an act / That blurs the grace and blush of modesty.”

They continued to argue quietly. I leaned back on the couch, watched Meredith brush Wren’s hair for a moment. They made a pretty picture, the firelight playing softly on their faces, gleaming on the curves of lips and eyelashes.

Wren: “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”

Meredith: “The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price,

For a small vice.”

Wren:          “In troth, I think thou wouldst not.”

I lifted my own notebook again. My text was slashed through and underlined in four different colors, so chaotically annotated that it was difficult to find the original words. I muttered to myself for a while, the others’ voices drifting gently on the whisper and crack of the fire. Fifteen minutes ticked by, then twenty. I was beginning to grow restless when the door opened downstairs.

I sat up straighter. “Finally.” Footsteps came quickly up the stairs and I said, “It’s about time, I’ve been waiting on you all night,” before I realized that it wasn’t Alexander.

“Colin,” Wren said, breaking out of her scene.

He nodded, hands moving uneasily in his coat pockets. “Sorry to barge in.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’m looking for Alexander.” His cheeks were pink, but I doubted it had much to do with the cold.

Filippa exchanged a fast glance with Meredith, who said, “We thought he was with you.”

Colin nodded, eyes darting around the room, strategically avoiding all of our faces. “Yeah, he said he’d meet me for a drink at five, but I haven’t seen him or heard anything.” He shrugged. “Starting to worry, you know?”

“Yeah.” Filippa was already climbing out of her chair. “Does someone want to check his room? I’ll look in the kitchen, see if he left a note.”

“I’ll go.” Colin nearly ran out of the library, clearly desperate to get to the hall, where we wouldn’t all be staring at him.

Meredith: “What do you suppose that’s about?”

Me: “Don’t know. Did he say anything to any of you?”

Wren: “No, but he’s been a bit odd lately.”

James: “Haven’t we all.”

Wren frowned at me. I had nothing to add, so I shrugged. She opened her mouth—but to say what, I never found out, because Colin came thundering in again, all the rosy color gone from his face. “He’s in his room—something’s wrong, something’s really wrong!” His voice cracked on the last word, and we were all on our feet at once. Filippa’s voice chased us down the hall from the kitchen, high and nervous, calling, “Guys? What’s going on?”

The door cracked hard against the wall as Colin flung it open. Books and clothes and crumpled papers were strewn around the room like the refuse of a bomb blast. Alexander lay stretched on the floor, his limbs bent at awkward angles, head thrown back as if his neck had been broken.

“Oh my God,” I said. “What do we do?”

James shoved past me. “Get of the way. Colin, prop him up, can you?”

Wren pointed across the room. “What is all that?”

Under the bed, the floor was littered with pill bottles and film canisters, pushed almost out of sight behind a low-hanging corner of his comforter. Prescription labels had been torn off some, leaving streaks of fuzzy white paper behind.

James knelt beside Alexander, squeezing his wrist in search of a pulse. Colin lifted his head off the floor—and some small sound escaped between his lips.

“He’s alive,” I said, “he must be, he just—”

James’s voice was thin and strained. “Shut up a minute, I can’t—”

Filippa arrived behind us in the doorway. “What’s happening?”

Alexander murmured something, and Colin bent his head low over his face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He must’ve taken too much of something.”

“Oh, God. What? What was he on, does anyone know?”

“His pulse is really erratic,” James said, talking fast and low. “He’s got to go to the hospital. Someone get downstairs and call for an ambulance. And someone gather up all of that shit.” He pointed at the pill bottles under the bed.

Colin blanched, cradling Alexander’s sweaty head in his lap. “You can’t send that stuff to the hospital—do you want him to get expelled?”

“Would you rather he died?” James said, fiercely.

Before Colin could answer, Alexander’s whole body seized up, teeth clenched, muscles twitching.

“Do what he says,” Meredith ordered. “Somebody get to the phone, now.” She crouched down beside James and started sweeping bottles out from under the bed. Alexander moaned, one hand groping across the floor. Colin grabbed it and squeezed hard, rocking slightly forward. Wren had backed into a corner and crouched there, hugging herself, looking sick. My stomach tried to crawl out of my mouth.

Filippa grabbed my arm. “Oliver, can you—”

“Yeah, I’ll go, you look after Wren.”

I left the room and flew down the stairs, my feet numb and clumsy underneath me. I grabbed the phone out of its cradle and dialed 911.

A voice answered. Female. Indifferent. Efficient. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

“I’m at the Castle on the Dellecher school grounds and we need an ambulance, immediately.”

“What is the nature of your emergency?” She was so cool, so calm. I fought an urge to shout at her, Emergency! Does it mean nothing to you?

“Some kind of drug overdose, I don’t know. Get help here, now.”

I dropped the phone, letting it fall out of my hand, pull the cord taut with a jerk, and swing like a dead man on the end of a rope. As I listened to the tinny voice droning from the phone, the distant sounds of dismay and agitation from upstairs, all I could think was, why? Why the drugs, why the overdose, what has he done what has he done what has he done? I couldn’t go back up, but I couldn’t stay where I was, terrified of what I might say when the police or paramedics wanted answers. I left the phone dangling and threw the door open, without taking my coat, scarf, gloves, anything.

I gained momentum as I walked down the driveway, the gravel like little chunks of ice under my socks. By the time I hit the dirt—buried under a muddled blanket of old snow and pine needles—I was running full tilt. My heart pumped hard against the cold, and blood slammed through my veins, thundered and roared in my ears until the dam in my sinus cavity burst and it came streaming out of my nose again. I ran straight into the trees, where branches and thorns tore at my face and arms and legs, but I barely felt them, tiny pricks of pain lost in the tumult and snarl of panic. I turned off the path and plunged deeper into the woods, so deep I didn’t know if I’d be able to find my way back, deep enough that no one would hear me. When I thought my heart or my lungs would burst, I fell on my hands and knees in the icy leaves and howled into the trees until something in my throat broke.