Villainess 1: Janet’s First Retry

Red Pill 1: Dreams, Toilettes

Janet Fleming’s dream rolled and tossed her across her bedsheets in the wee hours of the morning, chasing her up three flights of stairs and down a hallway of Lassen Academy with shadowy footfalls at night. Weird voices were calling for her to stop as she opened a side door into a gabled classroom and pushed a nearby table up against it, barricading herself in the room. As several shadowy hands started banging on the door and voices called out her name, telling her to stop already, Janet ran to the only window looking outside and opened it, then perched her foot on the sill and climbed up and jumped from the window, where she saw Prince Blaise waiting three stories below her. Yet instead of falling, she was floating like flower petals through the air, floating into the arms of her Prince under a moonlit night. In his arms, she embraced his neck and thanked him with winded breath and started kissing his lips, wanting to drink him up like a glass of wine, till she looked back on her savior and gasped.

A clone of herself was carrying her in her arms, so she pushed herself away and looked for Prince Blaise, calling out his name within the moonlit courtyard in front of the Academy, then proceeded down the boulevard and through the gates into the Student Commons Town of various eateries and shops and entertainment venues calling out his name. Yet her gallant Prince was nowhere in the dark and empty streets, nor at any of the venues, nor within shouting range of Prince Blaise’s name echoing through the silence.

Breathing hard, Janet looked back down the main boulevard towards the Academy’s courtyard, but the anomalous clone was gone. For almost a week now, she had been encountering clones of herself in her dreams, but why they were there or what they wanted from her, she could only guess.

“Is anybody there?” she yelled.

Yet before she took another breath to shout, the street lamps fluttered to life under a spectral green glow, and several school girls walked in from various thoroughfares carrying lamps in their hands. All of them were glowing a phosphorescent green, all of them bearing the same ghostly appearance as the doppelgänger she’d pushed away, all of them with expectant smiles on their faces, all of them beckoning her to follow them with their lamps.

“Who are you?” she said.

But none of them said anything in return.

So Janet found herself backing away from this lugubrious night parade, but when they approached her en masse, she said, “Are you the ones chasing after me?”

Again, no response.

Then the clone that had caught her in the Academy courtyard manifested behind her and grabbed her wrist and said, “Stop this nonsense! You have to—”

Yet Janet screamed as she fell back through the abyss of her dreams . . .

Till Janet fell from her bed amidst a tangle of bedsheets and bed curtains and the hems of her nightgown and hit her shower-capped head on the floor. Stars flashed across her eyes, and she winced and blinked, gritting her teeth and groaning. She cradled her head in her hands, saying, “Ow, ow, ow!”

Then the double doors to her dorm room shoved open, and her personal maid rushed in and said, “My Lady, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Janet rolled herself onto all fours, and with the help of her maid giving her a hand, she got to her feet and brushed the folds out of her nightgown, trying to hide the fact that her head was killing her right now.

“I’m fine, Sue,” Janet said. “I just fell off the bed again, that’s all.”

“Was it another nightmare?” Susan said, combing her shaky fingers through her long gray locks.

“Yeah, but it’s okay,” she said and grabbed Susan’s shaking hands to soothe her qualms, because at the very least, Prince Blaise in Janet’s dream was there to catch her, though she puzzled over the clone part of it. Then her thoughts shifted to the way the real Prince Blaise had treated her in her waking life, ever suspicious of her intentions and hostile to everything she did and said, ready to pick a fight with her when it came to the whims of a certain commoner. She pushed those thoughts away, and with Susan’s help, Janet sat at her vanity desk and felt the back of her head again—

And winced.

Susan bit her lower lip and ventured to touch the sore spot on her mistress’s head, but Janet grabbed her hand.

“I’m fine, Sue,” she said.

“Should I call for a doctor?” Susan said.

“No,” Janet said and resumed her composure and attempted a smile. “I’m all right, Sue. It’s no big deal.”

Yet Susan put two fingers in front of Janet’s face, anyway, and said, “How many fingers am I—”

“Two,” she said and looked at Susan’s face, thankful that Susan and Marin had been so kind to her since she had returned to her dorm room in tears. Last week on that Friday afternoon, Prince Blaise had defended Rosalie and had denounced Janet in the courtyard of the Academy in front of the other students for ripping Rosalie’s dress, and as far as Janet knew, none of the witnesses present had challenged the Prince’s slur against her honor. His slur, the culmination of a month’s worth of mishaps orchestrated by Rosalie, had shaken her faith in the Prince and had solidified her contempt for the woman that had ruined her school life.

The only consolation was her father visiting her dorm that evening and listening to her side of what happened in the courtyard before he went to the King’s palace to air out her grievances that night. During the weekend, she had also inquired through messenger birds about what her father and the King had discussed, and her father’s responses were that she was going to be transferred to another classroom and that she should focus on her studies. But on Sunday afternoon, she received one more messenger bird from her father along with a packet, so she opened it and found an amulet necklace and then read the contents of his letter, which told her to wear the amulet whenever she went to school. In fact, she was wearing it now underneath her gown when she put her hand to it, feeling it there between her breasts.

“My Lady, are you okay?” Susan said.

Pushing those thoughts away, Janet smiled at her confidant and said, “Really, Sue. I’m fine.”

“All right, I believe you,” Susan said and got up and walked out of the room, leaving the double doors ajar.

After she left, Janet did another quick search of the premises, starting with her vanity desk. She pulled open all the drawer boxes, looking for her missing engagement ring, and wondered where it could have gone after she had placed it inside the upper left drawer box before going to sleep that Friday evening. Afterwards she opened and inspected all the cabinet drawers of her study desk and even rummaged through the contents of her book bag without finding her ring. Then she went over and opened the armoire full of hanging nightgowns and tea gowns and ball gowns, running her hands along the floor of the armoire beneath the hems of her dresses, but found no ring whatsoever. Failing the four most obvious places, she once again crouched and scanned the floor of her dorm from one wall to the other, then got on her hands and knees and checked underneath the vanity table, underneath the tea table and chairs, underneath the study desk and chair, underneath the dressing bench, and underneath the frame of her four-poster bed after moving the curtains out of the way.

At that moment, Susan came back through the double doors with a cart carrying a water basin full of water, a towel, and various beauty products on a tray for Janet’s morning toilette, accompanied by a bosomy brunette maid named Marin who came in with Janet’s Academy uniform folded over her forearm.

Janet looked up at her maids gaping at her compromising position on her hands and knees, so she let go of the curtains and said, “Any message yet from the Lost and Found?”

Both maids traded looks and shook their heads, making Janet heave a long sigh, so Susan said, “Marin and I will go to the Lost and Found today. Hopefully someone found it over the weekend and took it there.”

“If you find it there,” Janet said, “let me know through a messenger bird.”

“Will do, my Lady,” Susan said and helped Janet back up and guided her back to her chair by the vanity table, while Marin waited by the dressing bench for Janet to complete her toilette. Before the vanity mirror, Janet splashed some water onto her face and toweled it dry, then removed her shower cap, revealing three snail-like buns of twisted hair on her head. Susan helped her unroll the buns and untwist the tresses from the rolled-up towels used to curl Janet’s hair, letting them fall past Janet’s shoulders in dirty blond drills.

After rearranging her drills the way she liked them, Janet winked at her reflection and smiled at herself and said, “Now be honest, Sue. How do I look?”

Susan smiled, saying, “Beautiful enough to kill.”

Janet smiled again and giggled, then thought of Prince Donavan Blaise in her dream and pouted once again. The gallant Prince of her dream had once been the real Prince, had once been hers to monopolize as much as she wanted before the start of the school year, till a certain commoner changed it with her beaming smile, her innocent glances, her coquettish manners, and her blatant disregard of proper etiquette in the company of someone else’s fiancé. How could the Prince fall for someone like that?

In contemplating an answer to that question, Janet glared at the mirror, her red eyes flashing in the reflection and making her personal maid flinch and gulp behind her.

“I’m sorry, Sue,” she said, turning back to her confidant and friend and attempting another smile. “Is this better?”

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”

At her words, Janet reverted back to her gloomy disposition over the Prince’s actions and Rosalie’s ruses and nodded. Then she stood up from her chair and patted her cheeks and said, “No need for makeup today.”

“Why so, my Lady?” Susan said.

“If I come back crying later, at least I won’t have soiled makeup stinging my eyes,” Janet said and left the vanity table for her dressing bench at the foot of her bed, where her other maid waited with her uniform in hand. “All right, Marin. Now it’s your turn.”

“Yes, my Lady,” Marin said.

Susan helped Janet out of her nightgown, and Marin helped her into her school uniform, and both maids fussed over the creases on her long dress, around the collar of her undershirt, and on the sleeves of her bolero. They even fussed over the position of the beret on Janet’s head, keeping it at the back of her head, so it won’t mess up her bangs, while Janet kept slanting it over her left eye like an avant-garde detective.

Both maids had their hands on their hips, arms akimbo, looking at her like observers staring at a portraiture. Susan slanted her head to match the angle of Janet’s beret and said, “Playing the detective, are you?”

And Janet simulated putting a smoking pipe at the corner of her mouth with her hands like a pantomime, puffing on a make-believe pipe and blowing out make-believe smoke rings, and touched the bill of her beret over her left eye. She said, “Not without a pipe, my darling.”

All three girls sniggered and giggled.

Yet after her mirth subsided, Janet breathed in and exhaled and said, “Bring me my book bag.”

So Susan retrieved her book bag from the chair at her study desk and handed it to her, saying, “Here you go, my Lady.”

“Don’t lose it now,” Marin added.

“Thank you, and I won’t,” Janet said, smiling, then stood up from the dressing bench and slung it over her shoulder and headed for the double doors. She looked back on her two loyal maids and gave them one more smile as they wished her good luck out there, then paused and looked at her left hand, where there was the indentation of a missing ring at the base of her ring finger. She had her suspicions, but she kept them to herself and said, “When you two go to the Lost and Found, please don’t make too much of a fuss.”

Susan said, “We won’t, my Lady—”

“—unless that vixen shows up,” Marin added, fisting her hands with an icy glare in her eyes.

“Oh, believe me,” Janet said, fixing their gazes with a demonic flash of her eyes and her devilish grin. “I know what you’re thinking, but don’t make accusations before finding out the truth.”

“I know,” Susan said, crossing her arms and deadpanning, “but his Highness is a dunce.”

“Unfortunately,” Janet said.

“God, I’ve had it up to here with his nonsense!” Marin added, leveling her hand up to her raised chin, which meant that Prince Blaise had fallen so far from her graces that he was up to his neck in her vitriol.

Which brought a smile to Janet’s face again, so she said, “Thanks, you two,” and she passed the threshold into the hallway beyond and entered a cruel world of whispered rumors and furtive glances and God knows what else.

To Be Continued