If We Were Villains: A Novel

My family home in Ohio was not a place I enjoyed visiting. It was one of twelve mostly identical houses (all clapboard, painted barely different shades of beige) on a quiet suburban street. Each came complete with a black mailbox, gray driveway, and jewel-green lawn dotted with little round boxwoods, some of which had already been wrapped in white Christmas lights.

Thanksgiving dinner (traditionally a dull affair made cheery only by the abundance of wine and food) was unusually tense. My mother and father sat on opposite ends of the table, wearing what I always thought of as their “church clothes”: black slacks and embarrassingly similar pea green sweaters. My sisters bumped elbows on one side, and I sat alone on the other, wondering when in the world Caroline had gotten so thin, and when, for that matter, Leah had done the opposite and developed curves. Both of these changes seemed to have become points of contention in my absence—my father told Caroline to “stop playing with her dinner and eat it” more than once, and my mother’s eyes kept flicking toward Leah’s neckline as though the depth of it made her profoundly uncomfortable.

Oblivious to her scrutiny, Leah had peppered me with questions about Dellecher since we opened the wine. She, for some reason, took a keen interest in my alternative schooling, while Caroline had never displayed any interest at all. (I knew better than to be offended. Caroline rarely displayed an interest in anything unrelated to frenetic exercise or her 1960s fashion fetish.)

“Do you know yet what play you’re doing spring semester?” Leah asked. “We’ve just read Hamlet for world lit.”

“I doubt it’ll be that,” I said. “They did that last year.”

“I wish I could have seen you do Macbeth,” she went on, in a rush. “Halloween here was incredibly lame.”

“Too old to dress up now?”

“I went to this absolutely awful party as Amelia Earhart. I think I was the only girl there not wearing some kind of lingerie.”

The word “lingerie” coming out of her mouth was a little alarming. I hadn’t been home much in the past four years and still thought of her as much younger than sixteen. “Well,” I said. “That’s—well.”

“Leah,” my mother said. “Not during dinner.”

“Mother, please.”

(When had she taken to calling her “Mother”? I reached for my wineglass and emptied it hastily.)

“Do you have pictures of Macbeth?” Leah pressed. “I’d love to see them.”

“Don’t give her any ideas, please,” my father said. “One actor in the family is enough.”

Privately, I agreed with him. The idea of my sister wearing only a nightgown and being ogled by all the boys of Dellecher made me feel slightly nauseous.

“Don’t worry,” Caroline said, slouched down in her chair, pulling at a loose thread on the cuff of her sweatshirt. “Leah’s much too smart for that.”

Leah’s cheeks flamed pink. “Why do you always call me that like it’s something horrible?”

“Girls,” my mother said. “Not now.”

Caroline smirked and fell silent, smearing mashed potatoes around with her fork. Leah sipped at her wine (she was allowed half a glass, and half a glass only), still blushing. My father sighed, shook his head, and said, “Oliver, pass me the gravy.”

An excruciating half hour later, my mother pushed her chair back from the table to clear the dishes. Leah and Caroline began carrying things out of the dining room, but when I made to stand up my father instructed me to stay where I was.

“Your mother and I need to talk to you.”

I sat up straighter, waiting. But he didn’t say anything else, just returned his attention to his plate, picking at the broken bits of piecrust that were left. I poured myself a fourth glass of wine with clumsy, nervous hands. Had they heard about Richard somehow? I’d spent two days loitering around the mailbox and snatched the Dellecher newsletter out as soon as it arrived, hoping to prevent exactly that.

It was another five minutes before my mother came back. She sat beside my father in the chair that had been Leah’s during dinner and smiled, a nervous twitch of her upper lip. My father wiped his mouth, set the napkin in his lap, and looked pointedly at me. “Oliver,” he said. “We need to talk to you about something difficult.”

“All right, what?”

He turned to my mother (as he always did when “something difficult” needed to be said). “Linda?”

She reached across the table and seized my hand before I could withdraw it. I fought the urge to squirm out of her grip.

“There’s no easy way to say this,” she said, tears already in her eyes. “And it’ll probably come as a surprise to you, because you’ve been away from home so much.”

Guilt crept down my spine like a spider.

“Your sister…” She let out a small, strangled sigh. “Your sister isn’t doing well.”

“Caroline,” my father said, as if it weren’t obvious which one of them she meant.

“She’s not going back to school this semester,” my mother went on. “She’s been trying so hard to finish, but the doctor seemed to think it would be best for her health for her to take a break.”

I glanced from her to my father and said, “Okay. But what—”

“Don’t interrupt, please,” he said.

“Fine. Sorry.”

“You see, sweetheart, Caroline’s not going back to school, but she’s not going to stay here,” my mother explained. “The doctors think someone needs to keep a closer eye on her than we can, being away at work every day.”

Caroline had the least common sense of the three of us, but the fact that my parents were talking about her like she couldn’t be left alone was more than a little unsettling.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that she’s going to be … going away for a while, to stay with some people who can help her.”

“What, like rehab?”

“We’re not calling it that,” my father snapped, as if I’d said something obscene.

“Okay, then what are we calling it?”

My mother cleared her throat delicately. “It’s called a recovery center.”

I glanced from her to my father and back again before I said, “What the hell is she recovering from?”

My father made an impatient sort of sound and said, “Surely you noticed she’s not eating right.”

I pulled my hand away from my mother. My mind was blank, stuck, unable to process this information. I took another unsteady sip from my wineglass, then put my hands in my lap, out of reach.

Me: “Right. That’s … awful.”

My father: “Yes. But now we have to talk about what it means for you.”

Me: “For me? I don’t understand.”

My mother: “Well, I’m coming to that.”

My father: “Please just listen, won’t you?”

I squeezed my molars together and watched my mother.

“This recovery center, it’s expensive,” she said. “But we want to make sure she’s getting the best treatment possible. And the problem is—the problem is that we can’t afford the recovery center and your school at the same time.”

My whole body went numb so fast I felt light-headed. “What?” I said, like I hadn’t heard her.

“Oh, Oliver, I’m so sorry.” Tears had spilled out of her eyes and were making dark spots on the tablecloth, like dripping candle wax. “We’ve agonized over this, but the truth is, right now we need to help your sister. She’s not well.”

“What about her tuition? You just said she’s dropped out—what about that?”

“It’s not enough,” my father said, shortly.

I looked from him to her, openmouthed, disbelief turning my blood to sludge. It pounded and oozed slowly from my heart to my brain. “I have one semester left,” I said. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, you’ll have to talk to the school,” my father said. “Think about taking out a last-minute loan if you really want to graduate.”

“If I want— Why wouldn’t I want to graduate?”

He shrugged. “I can’t imagine a diploma really makes a difference to an actor.”

“I— What?”

“Ken,” my mother said, despairingly. “Please, let’s just—”

“Let me get this straight.” Anger kindled deep in the pit of my stomach, quickly devoured the little twigs of incredulity. “You’re telling me I have to drop out of Dellecher because Caroline needs some celebrity doctor to spoon-feed her?”

My father banged his open hand down on the table. “I’m telling you you need to start considering monetary alternatives because your sister’s health is more important than us paying twenty thousand dollars for you to play pretend!”

I glared at him for a moment in stupefied outrage, then thrust my chair back and left the table.