If We Were Villains: A Novel

I wasted ten scenes or so waiting in the dressing room for James to appear. He never did, but I knew better than to go looking for him in the wings. The kind of confrontation we were doomed to have couldn’t be confined to the alleys and walkways backstage. Intermission would be my best chance to catch him before he could slip away. As the last scene of Act III approached its violent climax, I climbed out of my chair, pulling a jacket on over my bare chest. My madman’s rags made me feel naked and vulnerable.

The crossover was empty, the lights glowing dull autumnal yellow. I was reaching for the backstage door when Meredith emerged at the other end of the hall. I hadn’t really laid eyes on her all night, and for a moment I was frozen in place. She looked like a Grecian princess, draped in pale blue chiffon and voile, a band of gold across her forehead, curls falling loosely down her back. I turned and walked right at her, unsure of when I’d find her alone again, or what the rest of the night might bring. The sound of my footsteps made her look up, and surprise flashed on her face before I caught her and kissed her, as deeply as I dared.

“What was that for?” she asked, when I leaned back.

She knew she was beautiful. I didn’t need to tell her that.

“You know, you scare the hell out of me,” I said, clutching the fabric of her dress to keep her close.

“What?”

“I don’t know, it’s like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway.”

Whatever either one of us had expected me to say, it wasn’t that. She blushed, and a little thrill of joy went through me—improbable, inexplicable, given all the other circumstances of the evening. But then it was extinguished like a candle flame, blown by doubt out of existence.

“Where were you last night?” I asked.

She looked away. “I just—I had to go somewhere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, absently tracing the notch of my collarbone with one fingertip. “Tonight. Later.”

“All right.” I couldn’t help wondering if there would be time later. What “later” even meant. “Later,” I agreed, anyway.

“I have to go.” She brushed my hair back off my forehead—a sweet affectionate gesture of hers, by then familiar and perpetually hoped for. But I worry and misgivings made my knees weak.

“Meredith,” I said, as she moved toward the girls’ dressing room. She paused at the door. “The other day, in class—” I didn’t want to say it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Don’t kiss James like that again.”

She stared in blank incomprehension for a moment; then her expression hardened and she asked, “Who is it that you’re jealous of? Him or me?” She made a soft sound of disgust and disappeared through the door before I could reply. My throat seized up. What had I even meant to do? Protect her, warn her, what? I slammed my open hand against the wall, and the impact stung.

It would have to wait. Act III was coming to a close; I could hear Colin gasping through the speakers.

Colin: “I have receiv’d a hurt. Follow me, lady.

Turn out that eyeless villain! Throw this slave

Upon the dunghill. Regan, I bleed apace.

Untimely comes this hurt. Give me your arm.”

I waited by the stage-left door, my back against the wall. The lights went out and the audience applauded, weakly at first and then with greater fervor, shell-shocked by the gruesome tearing out of Gloucester’s eyes. Second-years spilled out of the wings and hurried past without seeing me. Then Colin, then Filippa. Then James.

I grabbed him by the elbow and steered him away from the dressing rooms.

“Oliver! What are you doing?”

“We need to talk.”

“Now?” he said. “Let go, you’re hurting me.”

“Am I?” I had a brutally hard grip on his arm—I was bigger than he was, and for the first time I wanted both of us to be keenly aware of it.

I shoved the hall door open, pulling him through after me. The loading dock had been my first thought, but Alexander and some of the second- and third-years would have gone out to smoke. I considered the basement, but I didn’t want to be trapped down there. James asked two or three more questions—all variations on the same theme; where were we going?—but I ignored them and he fell silent, his pulse quickening under my fingers.

The lawn behind the Hall was wide and flat, the last open place before the ground sloped downward toward the trees. The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous—Man’s futile attempt to imitate God. When we were far enough from the FAB that I knew we wouldn’t be seen in the dark, much less overheard, I let go of James’s arm and shoved him away from me. He stumbled, found his footing, then glanced nervously over his shoulder at the steep drop of the hill behind him.

“Oliver, we’re in the middle of a show,” he said. “What’s this about?”

“I found the boat hook.” I wished, suddenly, for the wild howling wind of the previous night. The stillness of the world beneath the dark dome of the sky was suffocating, massive, unbearable. “I found the boat hook, shoved inside your mattress.”

His face was pale as bone in the raw moonlight. “I can explain.”

“Can you?” I asked. “Because I’ve got to open Act IV, so you have fifteen minutes to convince me that this isn’t what I think it is.”

“Oliver—” he said, and turned his face away.

“Tell me you didn’t do it.” I risked a step closer, afraid to raise my voice above a whisper. “Tell me you didn’t kill Richard.”

He closed his eyes, swallowed, and said, “I didn’t mean to.”

A steel fist clenched in my chest, crushing the air out of me. My blood felt cold, crawling through my veins like morphine. “Oh, God, James, no.” My voice cracked. Snapped in half. No sound left.

“I swear, I didn’t mean to—you have to understand,” he said, coming desperately toward me. I staggered three steps back, where he couldn’t reach. “It was an accident, just like we said—it was an accident, Oliver, please!”

“No! Don’t come too close,” I said, forcing words out when there was no air for them. “Keep your distance. Tell me what happened.”

The world seemed to stop on its axis, like a top precariously balanced on its point. The stars gleamed cruelly overhead, shards of glass scattered in the sky. Every nerve in my body was a live wire, shrinking away from the touch of the cold March air. James was colder, carved from ice, not my friend, not even human.

“After you went upstairs with Meredith, something happened to Richard,” he said. “It was like Halloween, but worse. He came crashing out of the Castle in this … uncontainable rage. You should have seen it. It was like watching a star explode.” He shook his head slowly, terror and awe indistinguishable in his expression. “Wren and I, we were sitting at the table. We had no idea what was happening, but then he just appeared, with this look on his face like he would crush anything that got in his way. He was headed for the woods—to do what, I have no idea—and Wren tried to stop him.” He faltered, squeezed his eyes shut, like the memory was too close, too painful, excruciating. “God, Oliver. He grabbed her, and I swear I thought he might just break her in half, but he threw her down in the grass, halfway across the yard. And he stormed off into the trees and left her there, just sobbing. It was horrible. I put her back together as best I could, and Pip and I put her to bed. But she wouldn’t stop crying and she kept saying, ‘Go after him, he’ll hurt himself.’ So I went.”

I opened my mouth in disbelief, but he didn’t give me time to say a word.

“You don’t need to tell me how stupid it was,” he said. “I know. I knew then. But I went.”

“And you found him.” I could already see it unfolding. A quarrel. A threat. A shove. Too much.

“Not at first,” he said. “I stumbled around in the dark like an idiot, calling for him. Then I had the idea that he might have gone down to the dock.” He shrugged, and the motion was so powerless and pathetic that I felt the knot in my chest loosen, just barely. “I climbed down the hill, but I didn’t see him. I went as far as the boathouse, just to make sure he hadn’t done something stupid, like jump in the water, and when I turned around to go back up, there he was. He’d been following me around in the woods the whole time, like it was some sick sort of game.” He was talking faster by then, all the words he’d kept stopped up for months flooding out at once. “And I said, ‘There you are. Let’s go back up, your cousin’s a wreck.’ And he said, you can guess what he said, it was ‘Don’t you worry about my cousin.’ So I said, ‘Fine. Everyone’s upset. Come back and we’ll sort it out.’ And he gave me that look again—God, Oliver, I’ve been dreaming about it for weeks—it was like all the hate in the world at once. Has anyone ever looked at you like that?” For a moment the same stupefied fear seemed to seize him, but then he shook his head and continued. “And that’s when it started. The pushing. The—taunting.” His voice climbed to a high, nervous pitch, and he rubbed at his arms, stamped one foot on the ground like he couldn’t keep his body warm enough. “And he wouldn’t stop. It was Halloween again— C’mon, let’s play a game. I didn’t take the bait and it just got worse. Why don’t you fight back? Why won’t you get your hands dirty? Let’s play a game, little prince, let’s play a game. That’s all it was to him, but I was so scared, and I tried, I said, one more time, why don’t you just come back to the Castle and we’ll talk to Wren? We’ll talk to Meredith, we’ll fix it. And then he just—he said—” He stopped, his face flushed an ugly red, as if the words were so vile he couldn’t repeat them.

“James, what did he say?”

He looked up at me sharply, his head tilted back, his mouth a cruel, flat line, eyes dark and fathomless. He looked like Richard; he even sounded like him when he spoke. “‘Why can’t you and Oliver just admit you’re queer for each other and leave my girls alone?’”

I stared at him, throat tight, the cold sweat sensation of dread spreading slowly through my limbs.

“So I said,” James went on, in his own voice again, “‘I don’t know who told you otherwise, but you don’t own Meredith and you certainly don’t own Wren. Drink yourself to death if you like. I’m going.’ And he wouldn’t let me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted a fight. He wouldn’t let me leave without one. I tried to walk past him, but he grabbed me, and he threw me against the doors of the boathouse. They’re not solid, it’s so old, and I kind of crashed inside, fell against all the stuff piled up in there. And he came at me again and I just reached for the nearest thing, and it was the boat hook.”

He stopped, pressed his hand over his eyes, like he wanted to wipe the recollection away. His lip trembled. His whole body was trembling.

“And then what?” I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear another word.

“And then he laughed,” James said weakly, from behind his hand. I could almost hear the sound, Richard’s deep, dangerous laugh, ringing in the dark. “He laughed and said, do it, pretty boy, little prince, I dare you. And he pushed me again. Pushed me down to the end of the dock, saying, ‘I dare you, I dare you, you won’t do it.’ And I looked behind me and the water was right there and all I could think of was Halloween, and who would keep him from drowning me this time? And he wouldn’t shut up, he just kept saying it, you won’t do it, I dare you I dare you I dare you, and I—” His hand slid down to cover his mouth, eyes wide with horror, as if he had just in that moment realized what he’d done. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, a soft little moan from behind his hand. “I didn’t mean to. But I was so scared, and so angry.”

I could see it just as it must have happened. A wild, unplanned blow. The painful jolt of impact. Surprise at the hot spray of blood on his face. Richard falling in slow motion toward the water. A sickening splash and even more sickening silence.

“Oliver, I thought he was dead,” he said, so faintly I almost didn’t hear him. “I swear, I thought he was already dead. And I didn’t know what to do, so I just … ran. I think I lost my mind, for a minute. I ran back into the trees and I might have kept running all night if I hadn’t run right into Filippa.”

I felt numb, frozen, stunned into stillness. “You what?”

He nodded, distractedly, like he couldn’t quite remember how the rest of it had happened. “I guess she was worried that I hadn’t come back and came out to look for me and I ran right into her. It’s a miracle I didn’t hurt her, I still had the fucking hook in my hand—I don’t know what made me take it.”

“She knew,” I said, that one fact skipping and repeating in my brain. “She knew?”

“She was so calm, it was like she expected it. She didn’t even ask questions, really, just got me inside and up the stairs, somehow. I was shaking so badly she had to help me out of my clothes, but as soon as she left me in the bathroom, went to burn everything with blood on it, I just started throwing up and I couldn’t stop until—” He fell abruptly silent, made a strange gesture toward me, like I was supposed to finish the sentence.

“Oh God,” I said. “Me.” Half asleep, half dressed. Him. Heart hammering, crouched on the floor. “You didn’t tell me.” I didn’t realize until it was out of my mouth that that alone was worse than any of the rest of it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. He took another step toward me, and this time I didn’t move back. “Filippa—maybe she’s crazy, I don’t know, nothing fazes her—but you? Oliver, you—” His voice failed him, and in its absence he gestured at me again, but it was a thought I couldn’t finish for him.

“I what, James? I don’t understand.”

He let his hand fall back to his side, and he gave me that same helpless, hopeless shrug. “I never wanted you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”

And maybe there was a kind of terror in my expression, but not for the reason he thought. I looked at him in the cold moonlight, frail and small and scared, and the thousand questions that had come thronging around me every time I looked at him since Christmas melded and fused and shrank until there was really only one.

“Oliver?”

“Yes,” I said, that single word accepting everything at once. I couldn’t remember when he’d started crying, but tears glistened on his cheeks. He stared at me, mistrustful and confused.

“It’s okay,” I said, to myself as much as him. I glanced back toward the FAB, calmed somehow as I heard Hamlet in my head again: The readiness is all. “It’ll be okay,” I said, though I’d never been less certain of anything. “We’ll sort it out, but now we have to go back.” I had no idea what “it” meant or what he thought it was supposed to mean. “We have to go back and act like nothing’s wrong. We’ve got to get through tonight, and then we’ll worry about it. All right?”

Relief—hope—something—finally warmed his face. “Are you—”

“Yeah, I am,” I said, the only possible answer to whatever he wanted to know. “Let’s go.” I turned toward the FAB. He caught my arm.

“Oliver,” he said, a question clinging to the end of my name.

“It’s okay,” I said again. “Later. We’ll figure it out.” He nodded, eyes darting down, but I felt his fingers tighten on my arm. “Come on.”

He followed behind me as we ran back to the theatre. We slipped in through the side door and separated as I went to the wings and he went the other way, toward the bathroom, to wipe all evidence of distress from his face. In that one brief moment, I actually wondered if “okay” or something like it might still be possible. But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.