If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  I risked brushing a strand of hair off her cheek, then turned the light out. The room shrank in around me, the eager darkness encroaching at last. I lifted the sheet and put my feet on the floor. I wanted water, badly, to soothe my dry throat and clear my head. Halfway across the room I pulled my underwear on.

  Before I opened the door, I pressed my ear against it. Was Richard crazy enough to wait outside all night for one of us to emerge? Hearing nothing, I opened it just a crack. The hall stretched empty and dark in both directions. The lights and music downstairs had been shut off and the whole building felt skeletal, like an empty shell where some soft spineless creature used to live. I crept toward the bathroom, wondering if I was the only person awake. Evidently not—Alexander’s door was open, his bed empty. I moved quietly, hoping not to rouse anyone. I knew a confrontation of some kind was unavoidable, but I didn’t want to face it any sooner than I had to. Not before I could convince myself that it had all actually happened—my memory of the party had the gauzy, chimerical quality of a dream. Part of me wanted to believe that was all it was.

  Assuming an inebriated partygoer had left the light on, I opened the bathroom door without knocking. In the instant it took my eyes to adjust, a crouching figure sprang up from the floor.

  “Jesus!”

  “Hush, Oliver, it’s me!” James reached around me to pull the door shut. His arm brushed across my bare stomach and I shivered at the dampness of his skin. He took one step back, naked and dripping wet. The shower drummed softly in the background.

  “What are you doing?”

  He pushed the toilet handle down and the water swirled away as he wiped his mouth. “Just been sick,” he said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Drank too much is all. What are you doing up?”

  “Needed some water,” I said, averting my eyes. We’d shared a room for three years and James naked was nothing I hadn’t seen before, but I’d surprised him and it felt somehow intrusive.

  “Do you care if I get back in?” His hand rose briefly from his side, a loose abortive gesture toward the shower. “I feel disgusting, I hate vomiting.”

  “Go ahead.” I slid past him to get to the sink and cupped cold water into my mouth as he stepped over the side of the tub. The spray hit his skin with a hiss, and he pulled the curtain halfway closed.

  “So,” he said, a little too casually. “Did you just come from Meredith’s room?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “Not especially.”

  My reflection was messy, disheveled. I surreptitiously wiped a smear of lipstick from the corner of my mouth. In the mirror I could see James leaning on the shower wall, water dripping from his nose and chin.

  “I guess everyone knows,” I said. I splashed my face, hoping my skin would cool.

  “One of the first-years came in from the stairwell and basically announced it to the room.”

  “I really hate first-years.” I shut the faucet off, then closed the toilet lid and sat on it.

  “So. How was it?”

  I glanced up at him, anxiety prickling sorely on my skin. “You do know Richard’s going to kill me.”

  “That did seem to be his plan.”

  James turned his face into the water, eyes squeezed shut. My limbs felt heavy and useless, as if the muscles and bones had dissolved and been replaced with half-mixed concrete. I raked my wet fingers through my hair and asked, “Where is he, anyway?”

  “Don’t know. Disappeared into the woods with a bottle of Scotch after Pip and Alexander stopped him kicking Meredith’s door down.”

  “Christ.” I hung my head for a moment, then pushed myself to my feet before I felt too heavy to move.

  “Are you going back to her room?” James asked. His back was to me, the water slithering down between his shoulder blades in two narrow streams (for a moment I indulged the idea that maybe it would wash his bruises off like paint).

  “I don’t want to just leave her in there, like a one-night stand.”

  “Is that not what this is?”

  I couldn’t remember ever being angry with James before. The feeling surged up unexpectedly—broad and vulnerable, raw as a burn. “No,” I said, too loudly.

  He glanced over his shoulder, brow furrowed in confusion. “Oh?”

  “Look, I know she’s not your favorite but she’s not just some girl either.”

  He blinked. “I guess not,” he said, and turned his back to me again.

  “James,” I said, with no idea what I meant to say after.

  He turned the water off, one hand lingering on the handle. A few tiny drops clung to his eyelashes, rolled down his face like tears. “What?” he said, slightly delayed.

  I struggled to form words—I felt the shape of them, but not the substance—until a smudge on his cheek distracted me.

  “I— You’ve got puke on your face,” I blurted.

  His expression was blank as the odd sentence registered, and when it did he blushed to the roots of his hair. “Oh.”

  Suddenly we were both embarrassed (which seemed absurd, after the last five minutes of intimate conversation and casual nakedness).

  “I’m sorry, that’s vile,” he said.

  “It’s fine.” I stooped down to grab his towel from the floor. “Here.” We’d both reached for it, and when I stood up again we nearly bumped heads. I eased back, enormously aware of my own body and how clumsy it was. He looked wide-awake, almost alarmed. I felt my own face going hot.

  I garbled a goodnight, put the towel in his hand, and hastily left the room.

  SCENE 10

  An hour or so later I woke again, to the sound of someone banging on the door. There was a voice, too—female. Not Richard. I propped myself halfway up and Meredith stirred beside me. Whoever it was knocked again, more insistently.

  “Oliver, I know you’re in there,” Filippa said. “Get up.”

  She sounded hollow, like a bad recording of herself. I didn’t want her to wake Meredith, so I slid out of the bed and opened the door without bothering to find my jeans.

  Filippa’s face was drawn and pale. “Get dressed,” she said. “Both of you. You need to come down to the dock. Now.”

  She left, walking quickly, head bent. I stood in the doorway for a moment, surprised by her failure to make some scathing remark. Something was wrong—wrong enough that my waking up déshabillé in Meredith’s room didn’t matter. I closed the door again and began grabbing my clothes off the floor. “Meredith,” I said, urgently. “Wake up.”

  We went down to the dock together, bleary-eyed and puzzled.

  “What the fuck is going on?” she asked. “It’s not even light out.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Filippa seemed upset.”

  “About what?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  We stumbled down the rickety wooden stairs built into the side of the hill in partial darkness. A soft muffled cold, like a blanket of snow, pressed in around me and made me shiver, even though I’d pulled a coat and a sweatshirt on. The steps were littered with rocks and twigs, and the danger of stumbling was so great that I kept my eyes on my feet until the last step finally flattened out and I glanced up. A few stubborn stars still peered down from a sky barely lighter than the jagged black branches of the trees. I paused as my eyes adjusted to the sunless, twilit world. Shadow shapes solidified as James, Alexander, Wren, and Filippa—all standing there on the dock, staring out at the water. I couldn’t see past them, see what it was they were looking at.

  “What is it?” I said. “Guys?”

  Alexander was the only one to turn my way, and he just shook his head—a tiny, labored motion.

  “What’s going on?” Meredith said. There was finally a note of worry in her voice.

  I pushed between James and Wren, and the vast expanse of the lake opened up in front of me, mist blurring the lines of the banks. Tiny ripples murmured around a grotesque pale shape, partl
y submerged where the water should have been glassy and smooth. Richard floated on his back, neck twisted unnaturally, mouth gaping, face frozen in a Greek mask of agony. Blood crawled dark and sticky across his face from the crush of tissue and bone that used to be an eye socket, a cheekbone—now cracked and broken open like an eggshell.

  We stood numb and silent on the dock as the earth ceased to turn. A terrible stillness held our six warm breathing bodies and Richard—unmoving, inanimate thing—in the same unbreakable thrall. Then there was a sound, a soft groan; Richard stretched one hand feebly toward us, and the whole world lurched. Wren stifled a scream and James grabbed my arm.

  “Oh, God.” He choked on the word. “He’s still alive.”

  ACT III

  PROLOGUE

  Colborne and I emerge into the early afternoon together. The day feels primeval, prehistoric, the sun bright and blinding behind a thin layer of clouds. Neither of us has sunglasses, and we grimace against the light like reluctant, newborn babies.

  “Where to now?” he says.

  “I’d like to walk around the lake.”

  I start across the lawn and he walks close beside me. Mostly, he’s been silent, just listening. Every now and then his face responds to something I’ve said—a subtle lift of the eyebrows, or a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He’s asked a few questions, little things, like “This was when?” Though the timeline is clear in my head, explaining it to someone else is a curious task, simple in theory but painstaking in practice, like assembling a long line of dominoes. One event inevitably leads to the next.

  We walk all the way down to the woods without speaking. The trees are taller than I remember—I don’t have to duck under the branches anymore. I wonder how much a tree grows in ten years and reach out to brush the bark, as if each knotted trunk is the shoulder of an old friend I touch as I pass, without thinking. I reconsider: I don’t have any old friends except Filippa. How do the others think of me now? I haven’t seen them. I don’t know.

  We emerge from the copse onto the beach, which looks exactly the same. Coarse white sand like salt, rows and rows of weather-beaten benches. The little shed where James poured blood all over me on Halloween is listing slightly to the side—a diminutive Tower of Pisa.

  Colborne’s hands hide in his pockets as he looks out over the water. We can see the opposite shore, just barely, a hazy line drawn between the trees and their reflections. The Tower sticks up out of the forest like a fairy-tale turret. I count three across to find the window that was beside my bed, a narrow black slot in the gray stone wall.

  “Was it cold that night?” Colborne says. “I don’t remember.”

  “Cold enough.” I wonder if there’s still a clear patch of sky over the garden, or if the branches have all tangled together to block it out. “At least, I think it was. We’d all been drinking, and we always drank way too much, like it was something we were just supposed to do. The cult of excess: drink and drugs, sex and love, pride and envy and revenge. Nothing in moderation.”

  He shakes his head. “Every Friday night I lie awake wondering what dumb thing some drunk kid’s going to do that I’ll have to clean up in the morning.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Yeah. Just got my own kids to worry about.”

  “How old are they now?”

  “Fourteen,” he says, like he can’t quite believe it. “Starting high school this fall.”

  “They’ll be all right,” I tell him.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ve got better parents than we did.”

  He smirks, not quite sure whether I might be mocking him. Then he nods toward the Castle. “You want to walk around to the south bank?”

  “Not yet.” I sit down in the sand and peer up at him. “This is a long story. There’s a lot you don’t know yet.”

  “I’ve got all day.”

  “You going to stand until nightfall?”

  He makes a face but bends his knees to sit beside me as a breeze blows off the lake. “So,” he says. “How much of what you told me about that night was true?”

  “All of it,” I say, “in one way or another.”

  A pause. “Are we going to play this game?”

  “Wherein I am false I am honest; not true, to be true,” I say.

  “I thought they would have beaten that bullshit out of you in prison.”

  “That bullshit is all that kept me going.” One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what happened? No performance. No poetics.”

  “For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”

  Colborne is quiet for a moment and then says, “You win. Tell it your way.”

  I gaze across the lake at the top of the Tower. A large bird—a hawk, maybe—soars in long lazy circles over the trees, an elegant black boomerang against the silvery sky.

  “The party started around eleven. We were all wrecked by one o’clock, Richard worst of all. He broke a glass, punched a kid in the mouth. Things got ugly and confused and out of control, and by two I was upstairs in bed with Meredith.”

  I can feel his eyes on the side of my face, but I don’t look up.

  “That was the truth?” he asks, and I sigh, exasperated by the note of surprise in his voice.

  “Weren’t there enough witnesses?”

  “Twenty shitfaced kids at a party, and only one of them actually saw anything.”

  “Well, he wasn’t blind.”

  “So there was something between you two.”

  “Yes,” I say. “There was something.”

  I don’t know how to continue. Of course, I was at Meredith’s mercy. Like Aphrodite, she demanded exaltation and idolatry. But what was her weakness for me, tame and inconsequential as I was? A thing of mystery.

  As I tell the story to Colborne, guilt wriggles, wormlike, in the pit of my stomach. Our relationship was a point of significant interest, but Meredith refused to testify at my trial, stubbornly insisting that she didn’t remember what everyone wanted to know. She spent a few weeks being hounded by press people, which proved to be too much attention even for her. After I was convicted she went back to the Manhattan apartment and, for a month or so, didn’t come out. (Her brother Caleb made the news before she did, when he broke a paparazzo’s jaw with his briefcase. After that, the vultures lost interest, and I thought of Caleb more fondly.)

  Meredith did eventually make her way to TV—she stars now in some legal drama loosely based on the Henry VI cycle. It was popular in prison, not because of its Shakespearean source material, but because she spends a lot of time on the show lounging around in slinky nightgowns that show off her figure. She came to visit me—only once—and when the rumor that I’d had some sort of affair with her surfaced, it won me unprecedented respect among the other inmates. If pressed for details I told them only what could be found on the Internet or was obvious: that she was a natural redhead, had a small birthmark on her hip, wasn’t shy about sex. The more intimate truths I kept to myself: that our lovemaking was as sweet as it was savage; that despite her normally foul mouth the only noise she ever made in bed was to murmur “Oh God, Oliver” in my ear; that we might have even loved each other, for a minute or two.

  I give Colborne only the trivial details.

  “You know, she came to see me one night,” he says, digging his heels into the sand. “Rang the bell until it woke us up, and when I opened the door she was standing there on the porch in this ridiculous dress, glittering like a Christmas tree.” He almost laughs. “I thought I was dreaming. She barged in and said she needed to talk to me, said it couldn’t wait, that there was a party on and it was the only time you all wouldn’t miss her.”


  “When was this?”

  “The same week we arrested you. Friday, I think.”

  “So that’s where she went.” He glances at me and I shrug. “I did miss her.”

  We lapse into silence—or as close to silence as we can get with the distant cries of birds, the murmur of the wind between the pine needles, the tiny wash of waves licking at the shore. The story has changed; we both feel it. It happens just like it did ten years ago: we find Richard in the water and we know nothing will ever be the same.

  SCENE 1

  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.