If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  Meredith was in Flamingo Pose again, one foot perched on the inside of the opposite knee. She made even that look graceful. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I slid them into my back pockets, which felt far too casual.

  “How was New York?” I asked.

  “You know, hustle and bustle,” she said, dryly. “We had a parade.”

  “Right.”

  “How was Ohio?”

  “It sucked,” I said. “It always does.”

  The fact that I could have come to New York and didn’t hung so heavily in the air between us that there was no need to mention it.

  “How’s your family?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said. “I only saw Caleb once and everyone else is in Canada.”

  “Oh.”

  I could picture her rambling around in an empty apartment, nothing to distract her from Richard’s death. Our holidays weren’t so different, probably—hours of reading and staring at the ceiling, isolated from siblings and parents so unfamiliar that they might as well have been a different species. Of course, I’d had the windfall of James’s company, and she hadn’t been so lucky. An impossible apology glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

  She folded her arms and said, “I’m going to bed unless you’ve got something to say.”

  I didn’t. I desperately wanted to, but my mind was blank. For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

  She waited, watching me, and when I said nothing, her mask of apathy cracked for a moment and I saw the quiet disappointment underneath. “Well,” she said. “Goodnight, then.”

  “I—Meredith, wait.”

  “What?” she asked, the question dull and tired.

  I shifted my weight, uncertain, unsure, cursing my own ineloquence. “Do you, um, want to sleep alone?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to sleep with me or would you rather sleep with James?”

  I glanced away, hoping to hide the rising warmth in my cheeks. When I looked back again she was shaking her head, one corner of her mouth tugged upward, caught between pity and disdain. She didn’t wait for an answer—just turned and walked down the hall again. I watched her go, mental gears whirring and churning out weak, inadequate replies until she was gone and it was too late to say anything at all.

  I lingered by the fireplace, debating whether to go after her—barge into her room, then throw her against the wall and kiss her until she was too out of breath for such harsh words—or just retreat to the Tower and try to sleep. I was too much a coward for the former, too restless for the latter. Unable to commit to either course of action, I reached for my coat instead.

  The night was so cold that stepping outside felt like a slap in the face. I set off through the trees, shoulders hunched up to keep my ears warm, watching the ground for roots and rocks that might trip me in the dark. I reached the dock almost without realizing where I was. My feet had brought me there automatically, as though there were no other logical place to go. By night the lake was black and as still as a mirror, five hundred stars perfectly reflected on the surface. There was no moon—just a small round gap in the field of stars where the moon should have been. Alexander sat on the dock by himself, legs dangling over the water.

  I walked to the end and stopped behind him. He must have heard me approach, but he didn’t react, just sat staring out at the lake with his hands folded between his knees.

  “Can I join you?” I asked, and my words emerged in a cloud.

  “’Course.”

  I sat beside him, and for a moment neither of us spoke.

  “Smoke?” he said, eventually.

  “Yeah, I could use one.”

  He reached inside his coat without looking, then passed a spliff to me and fumbled in his pockets for a lighter. He flicked a flame to life and I inhaled as deeply as I could, the smoke scorching hot in my throat.

  “Thanks,” I said, after my second pull, and passed it back to him.

  He nodded, eyes pointed forward. “How’d it go?”

  I assumed he meant my conversation with Meredith.

  “Not well.”

  We sat in silence for a while, the smoke and our breath swirling and mingling as they drifted out over the water. I tried to push Meredith out of my head, but there was no safe distraction. In every corner of my mind, doubts and fears crouched on all fours, prepared to spring and sink their teeth in me at the slightest provocation.

  “Colborne was in the Castle,” I said, without really planning to. I hadn’t told any of them what I’d overheard, but it was dangerous knowledge to have, and I didn’t trust myself with it.

  “When?” he demanded.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No, but I heard him talking to another cop. Young ginger guy. Hadn’t seen him before.”

  Alexander swallowed a mouthful of smoke, and it unfurled from his nostrils in a distinctly dragonish way. “What were they talking about?” he asked, with a diffidence that suggested he didn’t really want to know.

  “All … this.” I made a loose, unspecific gesture that included the lake, the dock, and both of us.

  “You think he suspects something?” Alexander asked. To someone who didn’t know him so well, he might not have sounded scared.

  “He knows we lied. He just doesn’t know about what.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  He sucked on the spliff and the end flared orange, a single bright ember in the bleak Illinois wilderness. There wasn’t much left but the roach. He passed it to me; I took one last drag and stubbed it out.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Nothing, I guess,” he said, and that empty word, “nothing,” made me clench my fists in my pockets. “Stick to our story. Try to keep our wits about us.”

  “We should tell the others. He’s just waiting for one of us to slip up.”

  He shook his head. “They’ll start acting funny if they know.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip, wondering how much danger we were really in. I thought of meeting James in the bathroom the night of the party. By some unspoken agreement, we hadn’t mentioned it to the others. It was trivial, unimportant. But the possibility that we weren’t the only ones keeping secrets made my heart drum a little faster. If we’d all lied to one another the way we’d lied to Colborne—I couldn’t finish the thought.

  “What do you think happened to him?” I asked. “After he left the Castle.”

  “Dunno.” He knew who I meant. “I can’t imagine he just stumbled around in the woods.”

  “Where were you, anyway?”

  He gave me a shifty sort of look and said, “Why?”

  “Just curious. I missed everything that happened after I, uh, went upstairs.”

  “If I tell you, you have to swear to keep your mouth shut.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, unlike you,” he said, loftily, “I don’t kiss and make sure the whole school knows about it.”

  Half curious and half annoyed, I said, “Who were you with, jackass?”

  He turned away from me, with a smug little smile on his mouth. “Colin.”

  “Colin? I didn’t think he liked guys.”

  Alexander’s smile broadened just enough to show his sharp canine teeth. “Neither did he.”

  I laughed, grudgingly, which would have seemed impossible two minutes before. “Call up the right master constable—we have here recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth!”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “Fucksake,” I said, “she started it.”

  “Obviously. No offense, Oliver, but starting things isn’t exactly your MO.”

  I shook my head, my amusement dampened by the lingering bitterness of my conversation with Meredith. “I am so stupid.”

  Alexander: “If it makes you feel any better, I’d have done exactly the same thing.”

  M
e: “What are you?”

  Alexander: “Sexually amphibious.”

  Me: “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Alexander: “You should try it.”

  Me: “I’ve had enough sexual misadventures for one year, thanks.”

  I sighed and looked down at my own reflection on the surface of the water. My face seemed somehow unfamiliar, and I squinted, trying to work out what was different. The realization hit me like a blow to the stomach: with my dark hair a little wilder than usual and my blue eyes hollowed out by the weak starlight, I almost resembled Richard. For one sickening moment he stared back at me from the bottom of the lake. I looked up sharply.

  “You okay?” Alexander asked. “For a second there it looked like you were going to throw yourself in.”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Good. Don’t.” He climbed to his feet. “C’mon. It’s fucking freezing and I’m not leaving you out here alone.”

  “All right.” I stood, brushing little bits of ash out of my lap.

  Alexander buried his hands deep in his pockets, searching the darkness that shrouded the opposite shore. “I was on my way back from Colin’s room,” he said, and it seemed random until he added, “when I found him. Wandered down here for a smoke and … there he was. I didn’t even think to check if he was alive, he seemed so totally dead. Must not have heard me.”

  I didn’t know why he was telling me. Perhaps he relived that terrible moment of discovery every morning, the same way I felt my stomach drop and found myself neck-deep in memory almost every time I closed my eyes.

  “Know what’s weird, though?” he said.

  “What?”

  “There was blood in the water, but not on the dock.”

  I glanced down at my feet. The wood was clean and dry, bleached like bone by years of wind and sun and water. Not a speck of red. Not a stainèd spot.

  “So?”

  “So his face was smashed in. If he hit his head and fell in the water … what the hell did he hit?”

  The stub of our spliff smoldered on the very edge of the dock. Alexander nudged it off with the toe of his shoe. Ripples moved outward from the point of impact, warping the reflection of the sky so the stars wobbled and winked in and out of existence.

  “I keep thinking of the bird.” I didn’t even want to say it. It was a tic, a compulsion, as though I might get the image out of my head if I got the words out of my mouth.

  He looked sideways at me, completely nonplussed. “What bird?”

  “From Hamlet. That’s what he reminded me of.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Not sure I can see him as a sparrow. Too … delicate.”

  “So what sort of bird would he be?”

  “Dunno. The sort that smacked into a window trying to have a go at its own reflection.”

  It was my turn to look at him strangely, but as soon as our eyes met, I wanted to laugh. I was horrified until I realized he was fighting it, too.

  “Oh my God,” I said, shaking my head. Alexander let the breath he was holding burst out, chuckled softly. “When did we become such terrible people?”

  “Maybe we’ve always been terrible.” He shrugged and watched the white cloud of his laughter shimmer and fade. His good humor seemed to vanish with it, and when he spoke again his voice was brittle. “Or maybe we learned from Richard,” he said.

  That scared me more than Colborne did.

  SCENE 13

  A week later, we arrived in the refectory for breakfast and found it humming with holiday excitement. At every table people were tearing invitations open and chattering about the Christmas masque—which was to go forward as usual, in defiance of recent events. The commotion was surprisingly refreshing after weeks of bowed heads and stiff, unsmiling faces.

  “Who wants to gather the mail?” Alexander asked, digging into a pile of hash browns with characteristic relish. (Filippa had bullied him out of bed for breakfast, insisting that if he skipped any more meals he’d simply vanish into thin air.)

  “Why bother?” I asked. “We know what it says.”

  Filippa blew steam off her coffee and said, “You don’t think it might be a little different this year?”

  “I don’t know. Sort of seems like they’re trying to get back to normal.”

  “And thank God,” Alexander said. “I’m sick of being stared at.”

  “It could be worse.” Wren pushed eggs around on her plate, not eating. She looked thin and wan, as if she hadn’t eaten anything for days. “People keep looking around me and through me like I don’t exist.”

  We sat in tongue-tied silence—avoiding one another’s eyes and Richard’s empty chair—while the other students continued to jabber at one another about the masque, what they’d wear, and how spectacular the ballroom would be. The spell of isolation broke when Colin appeared at the edge of our table, one hand alighting (unnoticed by everyone but me) on the back of Alexander’s chair.

  “Morning,” he said, and then frowned. “Everyone all right?”

  “Yes.” Alexander speared a sausage on the end of his fork, a little violently. “Just considering starting our own leper colony down at the Castle.”

  “They do stare, don’t they?” Colin said, glancing around as if he’d just noticed the wide berth everyone was giving our table.

  “Voyeuristic little shits,” Alexander said, and bit the sausage in half, teeth snapping down like a guillotine. “What brings you into exile with the rest of us?”

  Colin held up a familiar envelope, small and square, a black splash of Frederick’s writing on the front. “We’ve been given R and J assignments,” he said. “Thought you’d like to know.”

  “Oh?” Alexander twisted around his chair, glancing across the room to the wall where all our mailboxes were.

  “Want me to grab them?”

  “No, that’s all right.” Meredith pushed her chair back and threw her napkin down in her seat. “I need another coffee. I’ll go.”

  She left the table, and as she crossed the room people drifted automatically out of her way, like they were afraid her misfortune might be contagious. I felt a little snag of anger or anxiety (I couldn’t tell the two apart anymore; after Richard’s death they were somehow indistinguishable), tore a piece of bacon in half, and proceeded to crumble it into oblivion. I didn’t realize I was ignoring everyone else until Filippa said loudly, “Oliver?”

  “What?”

  “You’re torturing your bacon.”

  “Sorry, I’m not hungry. I’ll see you guys in class.”

  I stood and carried my plate to the kitchen. I dumped it in the bin without bothering to scrape it off and went back out again. Meredith was still picking through the mailboxes, collecting our letters. I glared at a table of language students who were watching her until they bent their heads over their breakfasts again, whispering fiercely in Greek.

  “Meredith,” I said, when I was close enough that only she would hear me.

  She looked up, eyes flicking dispassionately across my face before she turned back to the mailboxes. “Yes?”

  “Look,” I said, without hesitating. My annoyance with the rest of the student body had somehow made me bolder than usual. “I’m sorry about the other night, and I’m sorry about Thanksgiving. I’ll be the first one to admit I don’t know what we’re doing here. But I want to figure it out.”

  She stopped rifling through the mailboxes, her hand perched on the edge of the one labeled Stirling, Wren. Right next to it was Richard’s mailbox, empty. They hadn’t removed his name. I forced myself to ignore it and look at Meredith. Her expression was inscrutable, but at least she was listening to me.

  “Why don’t we go get a drink or something?” I asked, leaning a little closer. “Just us. I can’t think straight with everyone watching like we’re a reality show.”

  She folded her arms, said skeptically, “Like a date?”

  I wasn’t sure what the right answer was. “I guess. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out whe
n we get there.”

  Her face softened, and I was startled all over again by how pretty she was.

  “All right. We’ll get a drink.” She put a pair of envelopes in my hand and left me alone by the mailboxes, staring dumbly after her. It was a moment or two before I realized the language students were gawping at me in her absence. I sighed, pretended not to see them, and opened my first envelope. The script on the front was long and loopy, not at all like Frederick’s compact, tilted scribble. A blue silk ribbon had been fixed to the back with a wax seal bearing the Dellecher coat of arms. I slid my finger underneath it and flicked it open. The note was short, and the same as it had been the last three years except for the date.

  You are cordially invited to the annual

  CHRISTMAS MASQUE

  Please arrive in the Josephine Dellecher Ballroom between 8 and 9 p.m. on the evening of

  Saturday, 20th December.

  Masks and formal attire are required.

  The second envelope was smaller, less ornate. I tore it open, quickly scanned the writing inside.

  Please be in the ballroom at 8:45 p.m. on December 20th.

  Come prepared for Act I, Scenes 1, 2, 4, and 5; Act II, Scene 4; and Act III, Scene 1.

  You will be playing BENVOLIO.

  Please report to the costume shop at 12:30 p.m. on December 15th for a fitting.

  Please report to the rehearsal hall at 3 p.m. on December 16th for combat choreography.

  Do not discuss this with your peers.

  I left the refectory without going back to our table. Colin had taken my seat. All of their envelopes were open, and they took turns glancing at one another, wondering whose note from Frederick said what. For the first time, I decided I didn’t really want to know.

  SCENE 14

  Our winter-term schedule was so chaotic that it was five days before Meredith and I found a free minute to sneak away from the Castle. James and Wren and Filippa were locked in their various rooms—likely learning lines; we hardly had enough time to do them justice—and Alexander had disappeared early in the evening (probably, I thought, with Colin, though I kept this hypothesis to myself). What with R and J and work to do on our midterm speeches, we were all unusually high-strung. The idea of a quiet drink was wonderfully appealing, but even as I held the door to the bar for Meredith to precede me, I wasn’t sure either one of us really had the time.