If We Were Villains

Enter the players. There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces. We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum.

[James] was the sort of actor everyone fell in love with as soon as he stepped onstage, and I was no exception. Even in our early days at Dellecher, I was protective and even possessive of him when other friends came too close and threatened to usurp my place as “best”—an event as rare as a meteor shower.

Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

The lake, the broad black water, lurked in the background of every scene we played after that—like a set from a play we did once, shuffled to the back of the scene shop where it would have been quickly forgotten if we didn’t have to walk past it every day. Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.

Maybe [Dellecher], like Filippa, has hardly changed at all. I can still see it, lush and green and wild, in some tiny way enchanted, like Oberon’s wood, or Prospero’s island. There are things they don’t tell you about such magical places—that they’re as dangerous as they are beautiful. Why should Dellecher be any different?

“I won’t hurt you,” [Meredith] said. She came cautiously closer, as if she were afraid of startling me. I was paralyzed, watching the silk move like water on her skin. A bruise was already swelling beneath her collarbone, and I couldn’t help but think of Richard’s hands and how much damage they could do.

“I can think of someone who might,” I said.

“I don’t want to think about him.” Her voice had a raw, tender quality, which I didn’t immediately recognize for what it was: shame.

I couldn’t pretend I was immune to Meredith; I’d always admired her, but from what I thought was a safe distance. By coming closer she’d confused me. I didn’t believe she really wanted me, just that I was the easiest mark. But I couldn’t admit that to James—because I was embarrassed, and because I was afraid I was wrong.

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance. Unable to articulate it, we simply accepted their compliments and congratulations with the appropriate (and, in some cases, entirely contrived) humility.

It was just us—the seven of us and the trees and the sky and the lake and the moon and, of course, Shakespeare. He lived with us like an eighth housemate, an older, wiser friend, perpetually out of sight but never out of mind, as if he had just left the room. Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.

James stood behind Richard like a shadow, watching me with a shell-shocked expression, one part dread, one part indignation. Anger bristled on my skin, trapped there by the fabric of my shirt pulled tight against my body. I wanted to hurt Richard like he’d hurt Meredith, like he’d hurt James, like he would hurt any one of us who gave him half a reason.

The delicate line of her wrist was marred by tiny blooms of purple, like budding violets on her skin. Older marks, weak as watercolors now, showed where a heavier hand than mine had touched her, where phantom fingers had squeezed too hard: the nape of her neck, the curve of her knee. She was every bit as bruised as James.

Tiny ripples murmured around a grotesque pale shape, partly 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.

That little prick of sadness burrowed deeper, touched me at the quick. How well I’d been trained to mistrust her. And by whom? Richard? Gwendolyn? I glanced over my shoulder at James again. All I could see was a shock of his hair sticking up behind the arm of the couch. It didn’t really matter where I slept, I decided. Nothing mattered much after that morning. Our two souls—if not all six—were forfeit.

I exhaled with a strange fond sadness, wondering what on earth had occupied my thoughts before Shakespeare. My first fumbling encounter with him at the age of eleven had quickly blossomed into full-blown Bardolatry. I bought a copy of the complete works with my precious pocket money and carried it everywhere, all too happy to ignore the less poetic reality of the outside world. Never before in my life had I experienced something so undeniably stirring and important. Without him, without Dellecher, without my company of lyric-mad classmates, what would become of me?

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.

“You know, everyone calls you ‘nice,’” she said slowly, expression drawn and thoughtful. “But that’s not the word. You’re good. So good you have no idea how good you are.” She laughed—once—a sad, resigned sort of sound. “And you’re real. You’re the only one of us who isn’t acting all the time, who isn’t just playing whatever part Gwendolyn gave you three years ago.”

“A good Shakespearean actor—a good actor of any stripe, really—doesn’t just say words, he feels them. We felt all the passions of the characters we played as if they were our own. But a character’s emotions don’t cancel out the actor’s—instead you feel both at once. Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”

The thing about Shakespeare is, he’s so eloquent … He speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.” I stop. Shrug. “You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”

Instead the silhouette I saw on the wall belonged, inexplicably, to James—who had no business in that room, in my thoughts, at that moment […] I let my fingertips trail from the tip of [Meredith’s] shoulder to the smooth inward curve of her waist, comforted by how soft and feminine she was. Her head rested on my chest, and I wondered if she felt the fleeting stillness of my fitful, troubled soul.

I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling toward its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice? First, the reckoning. Then, the fall.

My infatuation with James (there’s the word, never mind “enamored”) transcended any notion of gender. Colborne—regular Joe, happily married, father of two, not unlike my own father in some respects—does not strike me as the sort of man who would understand this. No man is, perhaps, until he experiences it himself and deniability is no longer plausible. What were we, then? In ten years I have not found an adequate word to describe us.

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.

He stared up at me for a moment, then lifted his head and pulled me down to meet him. It was almost a brotherly kiss, but not quite. Too fragile, too painful. Soft whispers of surprise and confusion swept through the audience. My heart throbbed, and it hurt so badly that I bit his lip.

Suddenly it seems there is a fourth person in the room. For the first time in ten years, I look at the chair that had always been Richard’s and find it isn’t empty. There he sits, in lounging, leonine arrogance. He watches me with a razor-thin smile and I realize that this is it—the dénouement, the counterstroke, the end-all he was waiting for. He lingers only long enough for me to see the gleam of triumph in his half-lidded eyes; then he, too, is gone.

“Us. All that time. Was any of it real, or did you know all along, and we were just a get-out-of-jail-free card for James?” She glares at me with those dark green eyes, and I feel sick.

“God, Meredith, no. I had no idea,” I tell her. “You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.”