If We Were Villains

by M.L. Rio

“It was like Halloween, but worse. He came crashing out of the Castle in this … uncontainable rage. You should have seen it. It was like watching a star explode.”

“And you found him.” I could already see it unfolding. A quarrel. A threat. A shove. Too much.

and when I turned around to go back up, there he was. He’d been following me around in the woods the whole time, like it was some sick sort of game.”

And he gave me that look again—God, Oliver, I’ve been dreaming about it for weeks—it was like all the hate in the world at once.

“And he wouldn’t stop. It was Halloween again— C’mon, let’s play a game. I didn’t take the bait and it just got worse. Why don’t you fight back? Why won’t you get your hands dirty? Let’s play a game, little prince, let’s play a game.

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?’”

Drink yourself to death if you like. I’m going.’ And he wouldn’t let me.” “What do you mean?” “He wanted a fight.

“And then what?” I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear another word. “And then he laughed,”

“He laughed and said, do it, pretty boy, little prince, I dare you. And he pushed me again. Pushed me down to the end of the dock, saying, ‘I dare you, I dare you, you won’t do it.’ And I looked behind me and the water was right there and all I could think of was Halloween, and who would keep him from drowning me this time?

“Oliver, I thought he was dead,” he said, so faintly I almost didn’t hear him. “I swear, I thought he was already dead.

I ran back into the trees and I might have kept running all night if I hadn’t run right into Filippa.”

It’s a miracle I didn’t hurt her, I still had the fucking hook in my hand—I don’t know what made me take it.” “She knew,” I said, that one fact skipping and repeating in my brain. “She knew?”

somehow. I was shaking so badly she had to help me out of my clothes, but as soon as she left me in the bathroom, went to burn everything with blood on it, I just started throwing up and I couldn’t stop until—”

“Oh God,” I said. “Me.” Half asleep, half dressed. Him.

“Filippa—maybe she’s crazy, I don’t know, nothing fazes her—but you? Oliver, you—” His voice failed him, and in its absence he gestured at me again, but it was a thought I couldn’t finish for him. “I what, James? I don’t understand.” He let his hand fall back to his side, and he gave me that same helpless, hopeless shrug. “I never wanted you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”

I looked at him in the cold moonlight, frail and small and scared, and the thousand questions that had come thronging around me every time I looked at him since Christmas melded and fused and shrank until there was really only one. “Oliver?” “Yes,” I said, that single word accepting everything at once. I couldn’t remember when he’d started crying, but tears glistened on his cheeks. He stared at me, mistrustful and confused.

calmed somehow as I heard Hamlet in my head again: The readiness is all. “It’ll be okay,” I said, though I’d never been less certain of anything. “We’ll sort it out, but now we have to go back.”

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

and Meredith—who looked guilty enough that I believed she might have poisoned someone.

Gwendolyn was standing there at the edge of the light, her expression blank with shock. Holinshed stood beside her, and Detective Colborne stood beside him, the badge on his hip glinting in the fiber-optic starlight.

“Ask me not what I know.”

“What you have charg’d me with, that have I done,” he said. “And more, much more. The time will bring it out.”

“The gods are just,” I said, “and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to scourge us.” James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two. “Th’ hast spoken right; ’tis true,” he said. “The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”

My next line was meant for him, but I said it to James instead. “Worthy prince, I know’t.”

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 n...

Alexander’s face was so full of sadness that there was no room left for surprise. In Filippa’s expression there was only a desperate kind of confusion. In Wren’s, emptiness. In Meredith’s, something violent I couldn’t find a word to describe. And on James’s face, despair. Richard stood beside them, so solid it seemed a miracle that no one else could see him, eyes burning black, somehow still unsatisfied.

Perhaps that lingering doubt was why he let me have so many visitors.

risked glancing up at the two of them. Alexander had slumped against the wall. Filippa was glaring. “Would you change the ending, if you could? What if Benvolio came forward and said, ‘I killed Tybalt. It was me.’”

I didn’t see Meredith before my trial, and heard of her only through Alexander and Filippa and my lawyer.

Of course, the only person I really wanted to see was James.

He came halfway through the first week of my detention. I would have expected him sooner, but according to Alexander it was the first time in days he’d even managed to pick himself up off the floor.

James was sitting on the floor in front of the bars, pale and somehow insubstantial, as if he’d been stitched together from scraps of light and memory and illusion, like a patchwork doll.

“Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said. “Why?” “You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.

(I don’t think he ever forgave me.

But his was a softer soul, sunk in sin to the hilt, and I wasn’t sure he would. Every time he took my refusal a little bit harder. The very last time he came was six years after my conviction, six months since I’d seen him. He looked older, ill, exhausted. “Oliver, I’m begging you,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.” When I refused again, he pulled my hand across the table, kissed it, and turned to leave. I asked where he was going and he said, “Hell. Del Norte. Nowhere. I don’t know.”)

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

I turned in my clothes and my personal belongings, and began my ten-year penance on the same day that the Dellecher school year ended.

“You know, it’s not too late,” he said. “If there’s another version of the truth you want to tell me.” I wanted, in some strange way, to thank him for refusing to believe me.

“I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and h...

“Demand me nothing,” I say to Colborne. “What you know, you know: / From this time forth I will never speak a word.”

“What’s next for you? I’m just wondering. What happens now?” The answer is so obvious I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to him. I hesitate at first, protective of it. But then I meet Filippa’s eyes and I realize she’s wondering, too.

But more than that—you must know—more than anything, I just need to see James.”

Instead Colborne turns toward Filippa, eyes wide with alarm.

But I stay where I am, glued to the spot by the fear that not knowing is worse. “I was afraid that if I told you while you were inside, you’d never want to come out,” she says. “So I waited.”

“I’m so sorry. James is gone.” The world drops out from underneath me. My hand gropes blindly for the bookshelf beside me, for something to hold on to. I stare down at the burn on the carpet, listening for my own heartbeat and hearing nothing. “When?” is all I manage to say. “Four years ago,” she says, quietly. “Four years ago now.”

Is he ashamed that he dragged the story out of me and all the while he knew, and I didn’t?

“How did it happen?” I ask. “Slowly. It was the guilt, Oliver,” she says. “The guilt was killing him. Why did you think he stopped visiting?” There’s a note of desperation in her voice, but I have no pity for her. There’s no room for that. No room for anger either. Only a catastrophic sense of loss. Filippa is still talking, but I hardly hear...

“He drowned,” she says. “He drowned himself. God, Oliver, I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you when it happened, but I was so afraid of what you might do.”

I am wretched. Destitute.

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.