Villainess 1: Janet’s First Retry

Red Pill 2: Rumors, Mirrors

The walk down the central hallway of Mariana House felt like a convict’s path to the gallows as Janet passed by several former acquaintances and friends, all of them giving her a wide berth and whispering amongst their bevy of cliques. Some even threw Janet furtive glances in her wake and giggled their heads off in churlish humor. When Janet reached the entrance doors at the foyer, she ignored the steely gazes of the two guardsmen at the doors and passed without a word. After that, she breathed another sigh and left Mariana House beneath its shadow in the cool morning air.

Outside, Janet beheld the Classical facade of Lassen Academy, a massive three-story building with its seven gabled roofs, its pilastered windows, and its double-door entrance dominating the view and glaring back at her like a biased student body council deciding her punishment in a disciplinary hearing. And from the central gable above the pilastered entrance, gleaming in the tangential sunlight like an evil eye, was the massive dial face of a clock showing the time: 7:29 a.m. Then, as the minute hand reached the bottom of the hour, the bells rang through the morning like death knells tolling for Janet’s declining influence amongst her peers.

Fisting her hands, Janet ignored more of her peers talking about her behind her back as they headed for the Student Commons Town past the gates in the outskirts of the campus grounds for a quick bite to eat. She entered the wide boulevard, teeming with more of her male and female peers hanging out with each other before heading to their homeroom classes, all of them glancing her way and whispering about her. She even passed a few couples sweet-talking each other into blushes and giggles and smiles on benches behind the juniper trees dotting both sides of the boulevard, reminding Janet of the ghost stories she had shared with the bold-faced Donny from her childhood, her pet name for Prince Blaise when they were grade-schoolers.

And so, gritting her teeth, Janet passed groups of knight students near the Garrison Quarters talking it up on which girls they met in the Student Commons Town last night, till they spotted Janet and passed her by without acknowledging her. But afterwards, they dared each other to ask Janet out on a date since the Prince had jilted her, but none of them said they would, unless it was a one-night stand. Hell, even in the courtyard, the scene of last week’s infamous denouncement, she passed more cliques of girl gossips eyeing her behind her back at the fountain, giggling about Prince Blaise humiliating her as he defended that poor commoner girl, one adding that Janet deserved it, and another adding that she’ll be expelled soon enough. She even passed more male students leering at her as she ascended the entrance steps, all of them whispering that they had free dibs on her since the Prince had jilted her, daring each other to ask her out to a one-night stand if they had the guts to face her father in a duel. And when she walked past the open double doors of Lassen Academy into the foyer of the central hallway, which teemed with more girl gossips trading in more hearsay about her broken engagement with the Prince, she heard a pair of girls in particular mentioning Janet’s dead mother, calling her a witch and a bitch and a whore and a cunt and a cum-bucket . . .

Janet fisted her hands and glared at her enemy’s two closest followers (Lady Jenna Childeron and Lady Vesper Felton), saying, “Take that back!”

“Take what back?” Lady Childeron said.

“We said nothing about you,” Lady Felton said, adding under her breath, “bitch!”

Then both ladies bolted for the double doors, and Janet ran after them, saying, “Get back here!”

Yet when she reached the entrance steps, she saw both girls already talking with Prince Blaise and Rosalie, poisoning his mind with lies. And when Lady Childeron pointed in Janet’s direction, the Prince locked eyes with her, and Janet cursed and hightailed it out of there but then second-guessed herself. If she ran away now, then that would be admitting that she did whatever they said she did, so she stood her ground in the foyer and prepared herself for a battle of words, knowing she was going against her father’s advice.

When the Prince entered and stalked over to her, hands clenched into fists, the collective hubbub of the students died down, and Janet and the damnable Prince became the observed of the observers.

So Janet charged into the fray and said, “Whatever they told you, they’re lying.”

“Says the one who accused Rosy of ripping her own dress,” the Prince said. “If you’re trying to be a villainess, then at least be honest and own up to it.”

Janet grimaced and bristled at his remark, then changed the subject and said, “You’re both on a nickname basis already? How quaint, Donny!”

“And we’re on formal terms, Lady Fleming,” the Prince said. “Until your behavior around Miss Edgeworth improves, you’re nothing but a stranger to me.”

And right on cue, the vixen named Rosalie Edgeworth came up to the Prince, saying, “Don’t be so hard on her, please. She’s still engaged to you.”

“Rosy, just let me handle—”

“Then is it true, your Highness?” Janet said and glared at the gossip-spreading nincompoops gathered around the foyer of the Academy. “Everyone’s saying you’ve annulled our engagement. Is that true?”

And for the first time this morning, Prince Blaise was silent and stayed so for a few moments, while the other students loitered in the hallway, waiting for him to confirm or deny Janet’s question. In the end, the Prince said, “I’ve talked about it with his Majesty, and his Majesty has talked about it with Lord Marquess Fleming. That’s all.”

Janet fisted her hands again to fight back tears and said, “Doesn’t our engagement mean anything to you?”

“Not anymore,” the Prince said.

Janet clenched her jaw at his words and said, “Then are you planning on eloping with her behind my back?”

Then Rosalie feigned shock, cupping her hands over her gaping mouth and saying, “Lady Fleming, whatever you think of me, I’m not that kind of woman.”

Which made Prince Blaise approach Janet, fisting his hands as if to hit her, so Janet took a deep breath, closing her eyes, but the slap never came.

When she opened them, Janet saw Rosalie looking adorable with her doll-like face, her trembling lips, and her blue-eyed gaze that beheld Janet and looked away. Coupled with her blonde flowing locks reaching halfway down her uniform dress and her grasp of Prince Blaise’s arm close to her body, she belied the image of a damsel restraining her dashing prince from slaying the monster with a sword—

Which pissed Janet off, but instead of going off on Rosalie, she kept her eyes on Prince Blaise and said, “Is that what’s going on, your Highness?”

So the Prince told Rosalie to stay clear of Janet, then said to Janet herself, “Unlike you, I don’t go around spouting off nonsense, but starting tomorrow, you’ll be transferred to another homeroom class. Until then, I’ll be watching you like a hawk, so don’t do anything else between now and then, or I’ll have you expelled,” and he left Rosalie’s side and stalked up to Janet like an enemy combatant, and Janet faltered back a step and raised her forearm to shield her face. She was expecting to get slapped or even punched in the face, yet he leaned over her shoulder to whisper something into her ear, so that nobody else but Janet could hear him, saying, “If it wasn’t for our fathers, I’d have had you banished by tonight. As it is now, you’re dead to me.”

The Prince went back to Rosalie’s side and escorted her towards the lower grand staircase in the parlor area on the way to her homeroom classroom on the third floor, passing Janet by without another word or glance. All the while, Rosalie was asking Prince Blaise what he had just said, but he told her that it was between Janet and himself and that Rosalie need not concern herself with that. But Rosalie, followed by her acolytes, glanced back at Janet with a smirk on her face before turning back to the Prince with her innocent persona.

And just like that, one by one, the other students broke up their loitering groups and headed to their classrooms in the upper floors, while Janet just stood there in the foyer, stunned, the Prince’s words filtering through her ears, and Rosalie’s smirk filtering through her eyes. Janet Fleming’s face was scrunched up into an agony of disbelief over the Prince’s words, over her childhood friend tearing her memories of him asunder with such cruel words, matched only by what he’d said about her mother last Friday. She had known Prince Blaise for ten years from age six to her current age of sixteen, yet his words filled her chest with an unfamiliar tightness as if she had just finished burying a childhood friend.

She looked back outside through the open double doors as the rest of the students passed her, paying her no heed as if she was a ghost, giving her a wide berth as if she was a plague. She cast her gaze past the fountain and down the boulevard lined with juniper trees and focused on the gates leading to the Student Commons Town and thought of catching a carriage back to her home, where she would cry over her father’s shoulder and tell him what Prince Blaise had said to her, but her steps betrayed her. Instead of going outside, she followed the foot traffic into the open-plan parlor area that bisected the Academy building into two major sections, where a lower grand staircase led most of the students into the second floor and an upper grand staircase led the remainder into the third floor.

Then she cut across the foot traffic into the main corridor just off the left side of the lower grand staircase where the first floor bathrooms were on the Western half of the Academy and opened a heavy door into the women’s bathroom. Once inside, she dashed towards a nearby sink and turned on the faucet, letting the water run and fill the bathroom with a soothing static sound, then cried out her miseries over the sink bowl in rivulets of tears from her eyes and runny mucus from her nose, crying into the rippling puddle growing inside the bowl. She cried through gritted teeth and squinting eyes, squeezing her hands into knuckle-white fists over the countertop, yet despite the raging fire burning black and unseen inside her, she refrained from screaming herself hoarse, from letting it out, lest someone from somewhere should hear it and spread another rumor about her, that Janet had gone insane and should be confined to an insane asylum. So she just concentrated on breathing in and breathing out, letting the running water fill her mind with soothing static, letting her bad juju run off of her like water off a duck’s back, waiting for the storm to pass as the nighttime passes into the daytime.

All the while, in the reflection of her pitiful self in the mirror, copies of Janet appeared around her, one by one. And whilst Janet was just beginning to assuage the pain lingering in her chest, just beginning to lighten the load over her shoulders, her spectral doubles all put their hands on her back and rubbed circles between her shoulder blades.

And little by little, as Janet regained her composure, she looked up and said, “Who’s there?”

Nobody else was there.

To Be Continued