If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  Two hours go by, and then the car is parked in the long empty drive at the Hall. Filippa gets out first and I follow slowly. The Hall itself is the same, but I look immediately beyond it to the lake, resplendent under the bloodless sun. The surrounding forest is as thick and savage as I remember, the trees stabbing fiercely up at the sky.

  “You all right?” Filippa asks. I haven’t moved from the side of the car.

  “This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod.”

  Panic flutters softly around my heart. For a moment I’m twenty-two again, watching my innocence slip through my fingers with equal parts eagerness and terror. Ten years of trying to explain Dellecher, in all its misguided magnificence, to men in beige jumpsuits who never went to college or never even finished high school has made me realize what I as a student was willfully blind to: that Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice. Were we bewitched? brainwashed? Perhaps.

  “Oliver?” Filippa says, more gently. “Are you ready?”

  I don’t answer. I never was.

  “C’mon.”

  I trail behind her as she walks. I’ve braced myself for the shock of seeing Dellecher again—unchanged or otherwise—but what I’m not expecting is the sudden ache in my chest, like longing for an old lover. I’ve missed it, desperately.

  “Where is he?” I ask, when I catch up with Filippa.

  “He wanted to wait at the Bore’s Head, but I wasn’t sure you should go back yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Half the same people still work there.” She shrugs. “I didn’t know if you’d be ready to see them.”

  “I’d be more concerned that they’re not ready to see me,” I say, because I know that’s what she’s really thinking.

  “Yeah,” she says. “That, too.”

  She leads me through the front doors—the Dellecher coat of arms, Key and Quill, staring disapprovingly down at me as if to say, You are no longer welcome here. I haven’t asked Filippa who else knows I’m coming back. It’s summer and the students are gone, but the staff often linger. Will I turn a corner and find myself face-to-face with Frederick? Gwendolyn? God forbid, Dean Holinshed.

  The Hall is eerily empty. Our footsteps echo in the wide corridors, usually so tightly packed with people that any small sound is trampled underfoot. I peer curiously into the music hall. Long white sheets hang over the windows, and the light falls in wide pale stripes across the vacant seats. It has the haunted feeling of an abandoned cathedral.

  The refectory, too, is empty, almost. Sitting alone at one of the student tables, nursing a cup of coffee and looking distinctly out of place, is Colborne. He stands hastily and offers one hand. I grasp it without hesitation, strangely glad to see him.

  Me: “Chief.”

  Colborne: “Not anymore. Turned in my badge last week.”

  Filippa: “Why the change of heart?”

  Colborne: “Mostly my wife’s idea. She says if I’m going to risk getting shot on a regular basis, I ought to at least be paid well for it.”

  Filippa: “How touching.”

  Colborne: “You’d like her.”

  Filippa laughs and says, “Probably.”

  “And how are you?” he asks. “Still hanging around this place?” He glances down at the empty tables, up at the corniced ceiling, as though he’s not quite sure where he is.

  “Well, we live in Broadwater,” she says. “We,” I assume, refers to her and Milo. I didn’t know they’d moved in together. She is almost as much a mystery to me now as she was ten years ago, but I don’t love her any less for it. I know more than most about desperately kept secrets. “We don’t come out here much during the summer.”

  Colborne nods. I wonder if he feels at all awkward around her. He knows me—he knew all of us once—but now? Does he look at her and see a suspect? I watch him closely and hope I won’t have to remind him of our bargain.

  “Can’t be much reason to,” he says, amiably enough.

  “We’ve got to decide on a season for next year, but we can do that in town.”

  “Any ideas yet?”

  “We’re thinking about Twelfth Night for the third-years. We have two that actually share some DNA for the first time since—well, since Wren and Richard.” There’s a brief, uncomfortable pause before she continues. “And we really have no idea what to do with the fourth-years. Frederick wants to branch out and try Winter’s Tale, but Gwendolyn’s insisting on Othello.”

  “Good group this year?”

  “Good as ever. We picked more girls than boys for once.”

  “Well, that can’t be a bad thing.”

  They share a fast grin, and then Filippa looks pointedly at me. She raises her eyebrows, just barely. Now or never.

  I turn to Colborne, mimic her expression. He checks his watch. “Shall we take a walk?”

  “Whatever you want,” I tell him.

  “All right,” he says to me. And then, to Filippa: “Coming?”

  She shakes her head, somehow frowning and smiling at the same time. “I don’t need to,” she says. “I was there.”

  Colborne’s eyes narrow. Unperturbed, she touches my arm, says, “I’ll see you tonight,” and walks out of the refectory, Colborne’s unasked questions hanging in the air behind her.

  He watches her leave, then asks, “How much does she know?”

  “She knows everything.” He frowns, eyes nearly disappearing beneath his thick brows. “People always forget about Filippa,” I add. “And later they always wish they hadn’t.”

  He sighs, like he doesn’t have the energy to be really disgruntled. He contemplates his coffee for a moment, then abandons it on the table. “Well,” he says. “Lead the way.”

  “Where?”

  “You’d know better than I would.”

  I’m silent, thinking. Then I sit. It’s as good a place as any.

  Colborne chuckles reluctantly. “You want some coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  He disappears into the kitchen, where two coffee urns stand in the corner. (They’ve been there at least fourteen years. They’re always full, though I never—even as a student—saw who filled them.) He comes back with a full mug, sets it in front of me. I watch the milk swirl as he sits down in the same chair he just got up from.

  “Where do you want me to start?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Wherever you think is best. See, Oliver, I don’t just want to know what happened. I want to know the how and the why and the when. I want to make sense of it.”

  For the first time in a long time, that little rip in the middle of me, the black bruise on my soul that’s been struggling to heal for nearly a decade, throbs. Old feelings come softly thronging back. Bittersweetness, discord, and confusion.

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” I tell Colborne. “It’s been ten years and I still can’t make sense of it.”

  “Then maybe this will be good for both of us.”

  “Maybe.”

  I sip my coffee pensively. It’s good—it has flavor, unlike the brownish slime we drank in prison, which only vaguely reminded me of coffee, even on good days. The heat soothes the swelling pain in my chest, for a moment.

  “So,” I say, when I’m ready. The mug warms my palms, and the memories flood through me like a drug, razor sharp, crystal clear, kaleidoscopic. “Fall semester, 1997. I don’t know if you remember, but it was a warm autumn that year.”

  SCENE 1

  Two weeks before opening night we had our photos taken for publicity, and the FAB was an absolute madhouse. In order to take photos we needed costumes, and everyone was running back and forth from the dressing rooms to the rehearsal hall, changing ties and shirts and shoes until Gwendolyn was satisfied. The previous year’s election had inspired Freder
ick to do Caesar as a presidential race, so we were all dressed as White House hopefuls. I had never worn a suit that really fit me in my life, and my own reflection surprised me more than once. For the first time, I entertained the idea that I could be handsome, with enough effort. (Previously, I’d thought of myself as attractive only in a forgettable, inoffensive way—an idea reinforced by the fact that the few girls I’d been mixed up with inevitably seemed to realize that they liked me better onstage as Antonio or Demetrius than offstage as my mild-mannered self.) Of course, among my classmates I might as well have been invisible. Alexander looked like a mafioso in shimmering charcoal gray, an onyx tiepin glinting on his chest. James, immaculate in deep ink blue, could have been the heir apparent of some small European monarchy. But Richard, in pale pearl gray and a blood-red tie, cut the most impressive figure of us all.

  “Is it just me or does that suit actually make him taller?” I asked, looking through the door of the rehearsal hall, where they’d set up a black screen to be our backdrop. They wanted Richard first, for the “campaign poster shot,” as Gwendolyn kept calling it.

  “I think his ego just makes him look bigger,” James said.

  Alexander craned his neck to see between us. “Maybe so. But you can’t deny, the guy looks good.” He glanced at me and added, “So would you, if you could learn to tie a Windsor knot properly.”

  Me: “Is it still crooked?”

  Alexander: “Have you seen yourself?”

  Me: “Just fix it, will you?”

  Alexander tipped my chin up to adjust my tie and carried on whispering to James. “Honestly, I’m glad we’ve got a night off from rehearsal for this. Every time we do The Fucking Tent Scene with Gwendolyn’s commentary, I just want to lie down and die.”

  “Arguably, that’s sort of how you should feel.”

  “Look, I expect to be emotionally exhausted after a show, but she makes that scene so real that I look at you offstage and I can’t decide if I want to kiss you or kill you.”

  I snorted out a laugh and Alexander jerked on my tie. “Stop squirming.”

  “Sorry.”

  Filippa appeared behind us from the girls’ dressing room. (She had at least three costumes; at that particular moment it was a pin-striped pantsuit, not flattering.) “What are we talking about?” she whispered.

  Alexander: “I might make out with James tomorrow.”

  James: “Lucky me.”

  Filippa: “Could be worse. Remember Midsummer, when Oliver head-butted me in the face?”

  Me: “In my defense, I tried to kiss you nicely, but I couldn’t see because Puck squirted his love juice right in my eye.”

  Alexander: “There was so much innuendo in that sentence I don’t even know where to start.”

  Across the room, Gwendolyn clapped her hands and said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to get anything better than that. What’s next? The couples? Fine.” She turned toward us and called, “Filippa, go and find the other girls, won’t you?”

  “Because they couldn’t possibly want me here for any other reason,” Filippa muttered, and disappeared into the dressing room again.

  “Honestly,” James said, shaking his head, “if they don’t give her a decent role in the spring, I’m boycotting the show.”

  When the other girls appeared it was immediately clear that wardrobe had spent more time on them. Wren was in a tasteful navy dress, while Meredith wore something red that hugged her curves like a coat of paint, her hair blown out to its full volume like a lion’s mane.

  “Where do they want us?” Meredith asked.

  “In the centerfold, I’d imagine,” Alexander said, looking her up and down. “Did they have to pour you into that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And I’ll need five people to pry me out of it.” She seemed annoyed about it more than smug.

  “Well,” James said, “I’m sure there will be no shortage of volunteers.” He didn’t make it sound like something to be smug about.

  “James!” Gwendolyn barked. “I need you and the girls over here, yesterday.”

  They made their way across the room, Meredith carefully tiptoeing between the tangled extension cords in gleaming patent pumps.

  “So,” Filippa said, “I don’t even count as a girl now.”

  “No offense,” Alexander said, “but not in that outfit you don’t.”

  “Quiet in the hall, please!” Gwendolyn called, without even turning around.

  Filippa made a face like she’d just bitten into a rotten apple. “God, spare me,” she said. “I’m going for a smoke.”

  She didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. As Gwendolyn and the photographer arranged Richard, Meredith, James, and Wren under the lights, it was impossible to ignore the blatant display of favoritism. I sighed, barely bothered, and watched James—hardly aware of the camera, unintentionally charming—as Gwendolyn jostled him and Wren together. I was only half listening when Alexander leaned close to my ear and said, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “Huh?”

  “Okay, actually pay attention for a minute and then tell me if you see it.”

  At first I had no idea what he was talking about. But then I did see something—just a twitch at the corner of Meredith’s mouth as Richard’s hand brushed her back. They stood side by side, turned slightly toward each other, but Meredith didn’t quite look like Calpurnia, the perfect politician’s wife, adoring to the point of distraction. Her hand lay flat on Richard’s lapel, but it looked stiff and unnatural there. At the photographer’s instruction, he put one arm around her waist. She lifted her own arm, just barely, so their elbows weren’t touching.

  “Trouble in paradise?” Alexander suggested.

  After the Halloween “incident,” as I kept thinking of it, we had all proceeded largely as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, dismissing it as a bit of drunken horseplay gone too far. Richard offered James a perfunctory apology, which was accepted with proportionate insincerity, and from that point forward, they were rigidly cordial to each other. The rest of us were making a commendable (if doomed) effort to get back to normal. Meredith was the unexpected exception: for the first few days of November, she refused to speak to Richard at all.

  “Aren’t they sleeping in the same room again?” I asked.

  “Not as of last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugged. “The girls tell me things.”

  I looked sideways at him. “Anything interesting?”

  He gave me a quick once-over and said, “Oh, you have no idea.”

  I could tell he wanted me to ask what, so I didn’t. I peeked back through the door, hoping to reach a conclusion on the state of affairs with Meredick, but another small movement distracted me. At Gwendolyn’s instruction, Wren tilted her head to rest on James’s shoulder.

  “Don’t they look the perfect American couple,” Alexander remarked.

  “Yeah.” The camera flashed. James played idly with a strand of Wren’s hair, but at the nape of her neck, where I was fairly sure the photographer wouldn’t catch it. I frowned, squinted across the room. “Alexander, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  He followed my gaze with only a vague show of curiosity. James continued winding one lock of Wren’s hair around his finger. I couldn’t tell if either of them even realized he was doing it. Wren smiled—maybe for the camera—as if she had a secret.

  Alexander gave me a queer, sad sort of look. “Are you just seeing this now?” he said. “Oh, Oliver. You’re as oblivious as they are.”

  SCENE 2

  The following night’s dress rehearsal was our first on a finished set. Twelve grand Tuscan columns made a half circle on the top platform, and a flight of shallow white steps led down into what we called the Bowl: a flat faux-marble disc on the floor, eight feet in diameter, where the infamous assassination took place. Behind the columns the scrim glowed softly, cycling through a full spectrum of celestial colors, from dusky twilight
purple to the orange blush of sunrise.

  A new set always presented challenges we hadn’t anticipated during early rehearsals, and we all returned to the Castle short-tempered and sore. James and I went immediately up to the Tower.

  “Is it just me, or did that run somehow take about ten hours?” I asked, falling backward onto my bed. The mattress caught me and I groaned. It was after midnight and we’d been on our feet since five.

  “Feels like it.” James sat on the edge of his bed and ran his hands through his hair. When he lifted his head again he looked tousled and tired, even a little bit ill. There wasn’t enough color in his face.

  I propped myself up on my elbows. “You okay?”

  “Why?”

  “You seem really, I don’t know, worn out.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Something bothering you?”

  He blinked at me, as if he hadn’t understood the question, then said, “No. It’s nothing.” He stood and pulled his shoes off.

  “Are you sure?”

  He turned his back to me as he unbuttoned his jeans and let them slide to the floor. “I’m fine.” His voice sounded flat, wrong, as if someone had struck a false note on the piano. I pushed myself off the bed and crossed slowly to his side of the room.

  “James,” I said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but I kind of don’t believe you.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at me. “I never in my life / Did hear a challenge urged more modestly. You know me too well.” He folded his jeans and dropped them on the foot of his bed.

  “So tell me what’s wrong.”

  He hesitated. “You have to promise me you’re going to keep it to yourself.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “You won’t want to,” he warned.

  “James,” I said, more urgently, “what are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer—he just pulled his shirt off and stood there in his underwear without speaking. I stared at him, bewildered and inexplicably anxious. A dozen different questions tangled together in my mouth before my own awkwardness made me glance down and I realized what he was trying to show me.