If We Were Villains

I'll tell you a story. It begins after I've spent ten years in prison for a murder I did not commit, when the detective who put me away comes for one last visit. Joseph Colborne is retiring, but he cannot rest without knowing the truth. He offers me a deal: my story for his peace of mind, strictly off the record. Secrets carry weight, like lead, and I have carried mine long enough. “All right,” I say. “But you have to understand… it's not an apology.” For you, Joe, it was just one day. For us, it was one day, and every single day that came after.

There were seven of us then, in the autumn of 1997, our fourth and final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. We were a small, meticulously trained dramatic troupe, living apart from the other students in a stone house we called the Castle. We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, and we spoke Shakespeare as a second language. For four years, we had been assigned the same roles, on and off the stage: Richard, the tyrant; his beautiful girlfriend Meredith, the femme fatale; his cousin Wren, the ingénue; Alexander, the villain; Filippa, the chameleon; my best friend James, the hero. And me, Oliver, the loyal sidekick. Our lives were so steeped in theatre that the lines blurred. When we were cast in *Julius Caesar* in the exact roles everyone predicted, it felt less like a performance than a prophecy.

The stage blood first became real on Halloween. For our annual outdoor performance of *Macbeth*, James was cast as the doomed king and I as Banquo. We stood hidden in the trees as our three leading ladies emerged from the lake like phantoms, their wet dresses clinging to their bodies in the bonfire's glow. “When shall we three meet again?” Meredith called out, her voice low and lush. “In thunder, lightning, or in in rain?” The night was electric, the performance blurring into a ritual as real as any pagan rite. Later, at the party on the beach, the spell broke. Richard, drunk and seething with a jealousy none of us understood, nearly drowned James in the black water of the lake. We pulled them apart, but the damage was done. The good year Richard had predicted was over before it had truly begun.

After that night, Richard's tyranny was no longer confined to the stage. During rehearsals for *Caesar*, his violence became terrifyingly real. He left bruises on James's arms, raw and vivid blue under his sleeves. He threw Meredith to the floor with such force that blood snaked from her elbow. We were his company, but we were also his victims, trapped in a drama of his making. And so, a new plot was written. “Richard can't fight off all three of us at once,” Alexander whispered to James and me in the wings. “Tomorrow, if he tries anything, instead of assassination we give him a righteous ass-kicking.” Onstage, under the hot glare of the lights, our theatrical tragedy became a true one.

The night of the final performance of *Caesar* was the night it all came undone. At the cast party, Richard, enraged that Meredith had finally left him, exploded. He punched another student, and when Meredith confronted him, he grabbed her by the hair. “You slut,” he snarled, and the word was horrifically different from the thousand times we'd used it in jest. In the ensuing chaos, I saw Meredith in the stairwell. “You really want to help?” she asked, and then she kissed me. We fled to her room as Richard hammered on the door, his voice a muffled roar of threats: “I'LL KILL YOU, I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL KILL YOU BOTH.”

Later, in the pre-dawn quiet, Filippa woke us. We followed her down to the dock, where a grotesque pale shape floated in the mist-shrouded water. Richard. His face was a broken mask of agony, blood crawling from a crushed eye socket. We stood in numb silence, and then he moved, a hand stretching feebly toward us. “Oh, God,” James choked out. “He's still alive.” In that moment, the world tilted on its axis. Alexander's voice was a venomous whisper. “Five minutes ago when we thought he was dead, what did you feel?” We all knew the answer. Relief. So we stood on the dock, six tragic figures in the cold morning light, and did nothing. There is no comfort like complicity.

The investigation was a performance of its own. We swore it was an accident - he was drunk, he fell. We stuck to our story, a fragile shield of lies. But the cracks began to show. Wren collapsed from the strain. Alexander overdosed. And James… James was unraveling. During a rehearsal for *King Lear*, he broke my nose with the hilt of his sword, the violence onstage once again spilling into reality. That night, on the frozen lawn behind the theatre, he finally confessed. He had followed Richard to the dock, intending to reason with him. But Richard had taunted him, dared him, pushed him. In a moment of terror, James had swung an old boat hook, striking Richard in the face. “I didn't mean to,” he sobbed, his body trembling in the raw moonlight. “I thought he was dead.”

Our final performance of *Lear* was the end of everything. As James and I fought our final duel onstage, I saw Detective Colborne standing in the wings. Meredith was beside him, whispering in his ear. She had told him. The play collapsed around us, the lines blurring, the ending rewritten. As the curtain fell, Colborne came forward. “Are you ready to tell me the truth?” he asked James. Before James could speak, I stepped between them. “Yes,” I said. “I am.” I took his crime for my own. It was the last role I would ever play.

Now, ten years later, my story is told. Colborne knows the truth, and I am finally free. But as I leave the prison, Filippa tells me the one secret she kept from me all this time. “James is gone,” she says, her voice a distant echo. “He drowned himself. Four years ago.” The guilt, she explains, was killing him. He drove to the coast and walked into the sea, his body never found.

I am left with a letter he wrote, a final, cryptic passage from *Pericles* that ends with a plea: *For that I am a man, pray see me burièd.* In the end, we were all tragedies. We were all villains. There was no other way for the story to go. For what is a tragedy but a flawed hero's fatal error? And what is a hero but a man who is not a villain? *Exeunt omnes.*