M.L. Rio

One sin, I know, another doth provoke;

Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke

His fingers drum restlessly on the table. “Tell me something,” he says. “Do you ever lie in your cell, staring up at the ceiling, wondering how you wound up in here, and you can’t sleep because you can’t stop thinking about that day?”

“Every night,” I say, without sarcasm.

Richard: “Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Alexander: “That’s imitation, dickhead.”

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.

“I thought they would have beaten that bullshit out of you in prison.”

“That bullshit is all that kept me going.” One thing I’m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened? No performance. No poetics.”

“For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.”

The moral outrage we should have suffered was quietly put down, suppressed like an unpleasant rumor before it had a chance to be heard. Whatever we did—or, more crucially, did not do—it seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.

I desperately wanted to, but my mind was blank. For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

Me: “What are you?”

Alexander: “Sexually amphibious.”

Me: “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Alexander: “You should try it.”

“When did we become such terrible people?”

“Maybe we’ve always been terrible.” He shrugged and watched the white cloud of his laughter shimmer and fade. His good humor seemed to vanish with it, and when he spoke again his voice was brittle. “Or maybe we learned from Richard,” he said.

“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.” Her eyes found mine again, the echo of that laugh lingering around her mouth. “I’m as bad as the rest of them. Treat a girl like a whore and she’ll learn to act like one.” Her shoulders inched up, barely a shrug. “But that’s not how you treat me. And that’s all I wanted.”