If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  “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.

  SCENE 8

  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.

  SCENE 9

  There were only four of us in class on Tuesday morning: James, Filippa, Meredith, and me. Alexander hadn’t yet come back from Broadwater’s emergency clinic—though he was stable by then, or so we’d been told. The rest of us were pulled from class one by one on Monday to undergo psychiatric evaluation. The school shrink and a doctor from Broadwater took turns asking us invasive questions about ourselves, one another, and our collectively bad track record with substance abuse. (We each left with a pamphlet on the dangers of drug use and a stern reminder that attendance of the upcoming alcohol awareness seminar was mandatory.) Beyond the obvious problems of stress and exhaustion, both James and Wren, from what I’d overheard outside Holinshed’s office on my way to the bathroom, were exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d taken an additional day off class to rest, but when I suggested that James do the same, he said, “If I’m shut up in the Castle by myself all day, I’ll lose my mind.” I didn’t argue with that, but as it turned out, he wasn’t much better off in Studio Five.

  “Well,” Gwendolyn said as soon as we sat down, “I don’t think anyone’s up for new material today, and besides there aren’t enough of you. I’d be teaching the same lesson tomorrow.” Her solution was to work problem scenes from Lear that couldn’t be more thoroughly dissected during rehearsal for the sake of time.

  James and I watched for an hour while Gwendolyn dug her nails into Meredith and Filippa, searching for sparks of real-life sibling rivalry to fan into a flame for the stage. She had her work cut out for her; Meredith barely knew her own brothers, and Filippa claimed not to have any siblings. (I still don’t know whether this is true.) Gwendolyn startled me out of a stupor by asking about my sisters, a subject I was not then—nor ever had been—fond of. She stopped just short of outing me as the Castle’s new custodian and mercifully moved on. When she’d hassled the girls to distraction, she gave us a five-minute water break and instructed James and Meredith to come back prepared for Act IV, Scene 2.

  When we returned, Gwendolyn opened the scene work with a lecture on the last week’s lackluster performance. “I mean, really,” she said. “This is one of the most passionate moments of the play, between two of the most powerful people in it. The stakes are as high as they can be, so I don’t want to feel like I’m watching a bad pickup at the bar.” Meredith and James listened without comment and, when she finished, took their places without so much as acknowledging each other. (After James had broken my nose, Meredith’s attitude toward him went from lukewarm to icy, which undoubtedly contributed to their complete lack of chemistry onstage.)

  Filippa fed them a cue line—it wasn’t hers, but Gwendolyn couldn’t be bothered—and they went through the motions with a woodenness that made me cringe. Their words fell flat; their touches were forced and awkward. Beside me, Filippa watched the scene collapse with a grim, pained expression, like she was being tortured.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” Gwendolyn said, waving one hand at James and Meredith. “Stop.” They moved gratefully apart, like magnets with the same polarity. Meredith folded her arms; James scowled at the floor. Gwendolyn glanced from one of them to the other and said, “What on earth is the matter with you two?” Meredith stiffened. James sensed it and tensed to match but didn’t look at her. Gwendolyn put her hands on her hips and studied them shrewdly. “I’ll get to the bottom of it, whatever it is,” she said, “but let’s talk about the scene first. What’s happening here? Meredith?”

  “Goneril needs Edmund’s help, so she bribes him the only way she knows how.” She sounded utterly bored by it.

  “Sure,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s a fine answer, if you’re dead from the neck down. James? Let’s hear from you. What’s happening with Edmund?”

  “He sees another way to get what he wants and he plays the hand she gives him,” he said, in a toneless, automatic sort of way.

  “That’s interesting. It’s also bullshit,” Gwendolyn said, and I looked up from my knees in surprise. “Something huge is missing from this scene, and it’s staring you in the face,” she went on. “Goneril’s not going to kill her husband just so she can have a new captain in the field, and Edmund’s not going to risk losing Regan’s title unless there’s a more compelling offer on the table. So why do they do this?”

  Nobody spoke. Gwendolyn whirled around and said, “Oh, for God’s sake—Oliver!” so loudly that I jumped. “I know you know—Murder’s as near to what as flame to smoke?”

  The old familiar line from Pericles shot through my head. “Lust?” I said, wary of the word, as afraid of being right as I was of being wrong.

  “Lust!” she barked, and shook her fist at James and Meredith. “Passion! If you just play the logic and not the feelings, the scene doesn’t work!” She waved at the two of them again. “Clearly you two don’t feel it, so we’re going to have to fix that. How? First, we stand facing each other.” She took James by the shoulders and turned him sharply, so he and Meredith were almost nose to nose. “Now, we dispense with all the he/she nonsense and start talking like real people. Stop saying ‘Edmund’ like he’s some guy you met at a party. It’s not about him, it’s about you.”

  They were both watching her blankly.

  “No,” she said. “No. Don’t look at me.” They turned and glowered at each other until she added, “It’s not a staring contest.”

  “This isn’t working,” Meredith snapped.

  “And why not?” Gwendolyn said. “You two don’t like each other right now? That’s too damn bad.” She stopped, sighed. “Here’s the thing, kids—and I know this because I’ve lived a long and scandalous life—here’s the thing about lust: you don’t have to like each other. Ever heard of hate sex?”

  Filippa made a small gagging noise, and I swallowed a nervous laugh.

  “Keep looking at each other, but stop me if I’m wrong,” Gwendolyn continued. “James, you don’t like Meredith. Why not? She’s beautiful. She’s intelligent. She’s fiery. I think she intimidates you, and you don’t like to be intimidated. But there’s more than that, isn’t there?” She began to walk a slow circle around the pair of them, like a prowling jungle cat. “You look at her like she disgusts you, but I don’t think that’s it. I think she distracts you, like she distracts every other man with a pulse. When you look at her, you can’t help having filthy, sexy thoughts, and then you’re disgusted with yourself.”

  James’s hands curled into fists at his sides. I could see how carefully he was breathing—his chest rising and falling in perfect clockwork time.

  “And then there’s Miss Meredith,” Gwendolyn purred. “You’re not afraid to get filthy and sexy, so what is it? You’re used to everyone you walk past looking at you like you’re a goddess, and I think you’re offended by the fact that James resists you. He’s the only boy here you can’t have. How badly does that make you want him?”

  Unlike James, Me
redith seemed not to be breathing at all. She stood perfectly still, lips barely parted, a vivid dart of pink on each cheek. I knew that look—it was the same reckless, burning look she’d given me in the stairwell during the Caesar party. Something squirmed under my lungs.

  “Now,” Gwendolyn instructed, “for once I want you to forget about eye contact and look at every other inch of each other. Do it. Don’t rush.”

  They obeyed. They looked at each other, stared, indulged, and I followed their eyes, saw what they saw—the line of James’s jaw, the triangle of smooth skin visible in the V of his collar. The backs of his hands, the delicate bones, precise as lines carved by Michelangelo. And Meredith—the soft clamshell pink of her mouth, the curve of her throat, the slope of her shoulders. The tiny mark I’d left with my teeth on the heel of her palm. Anxiety flickered through every nerve in my body.

  “Now look each other in the eyes,” Gwendolyn said. “And do this like you mean it. Filippa?”

  Filippa glanced down at the script in her hand and said Oswald’s last line. “What most he should dislike seems pleasant to him; / What like, offensive.”

  Meredith inhaled in a rush, like someone waking up. Her hand landed on James’s chest before he could move, held him at arm’s length.

  Meredith: “Then shall you go no further.

  It is the cowish terror of his spirit,

  That dares not undertake. He’ll not feel wrongs

  Which tie him to an answer. Our wishes on the way

  May prove effects.”

  She toyed with the collar of his shirt, perhaps distracted by the warmth underneath the fabric. He reached up to find her wrist, traced the blue lace veins there with his fingertips.

  Meredith: “Back, Edmund, to my brother.

  Hasten his musters and conduct his pow’rs.

  I must change arms at home and give the distaff

  Into my husband’s hands.”

  He watched her mouth as she spoke, and she let her arm bend at the elbow, inviting him closer, as if she’d forgotten why he ought to be kept at a distance.