Villainess 1: Janet’s First Retry

Red Pill 3: Homerooms, Quarrels

After washing her face and drying it with the side flap of her bolero, Janet exited the women’s bathroom and stalked through the empty parlor area by herself, save for some truant students talking amongst themselves and glancing her way. She ignored them and ascended the first flight of stairs into the second floor and a second flight into the third floor, where her homeroom class awaited her beyond the staircase landing, the first classroom on the Western half of the third floor facing the South through its windows: Classroom 1-3C.

Yet just as she stalked up to the double doors, expecting the familiar hubbub of talking students ten minutes before class, she paused at the threshold when she noticed the silence. Janet wondered what was going on. So she pushed the doors open and entered a large homeroom with a coffered ceiling and tall windows letting in the daylight and floating lanterns illuminating the rest of the classroom. She looked at her fellow peers and saw them looking back at her as if she was a criminal, including Rosalie sitting at her usual spot at the back of the class next to the last window, yet Prince Blaise was absent from her side.

“Where did his Highness go?” Janet said, yet none of the students answered her and kept on staring at her. “Won’t any of you say anything?”

None of them answered her.

“Fine! Be that way!” Janet said, fed up with their insolence. So she gritted her teeth and approached the last column of tables next to the windows to ask her nemesis where Prince Blaise had gone off to, till several of her male and female peers rose from their seats and blocked her path. “What’s going on here? Why are you all acting so strange?”

Yet none of them answered her.

Janet looked at the stern faces of her peers surrounding her, and she began to suspect that Rosalie had something to do with it. She glared at her and said, “What’s going on? What did you tell them?”

“I told them the truth,” Rosalie said.

“And what’s that?” she said.

So Rosalie got up from her seat and approached Janet, yet the students blocking her path to Janet said that she shouldn’t tempt fate, since they all knew that Janet had it in for her. But Rosalie was adamant, saying, “I have to get this off my chest. Otherwise, I can’t live with myself.”

Her words moved them, so they stood aside and let her pass, letting her walk right up to Janet.

Rosalie leaned close to her ear and whispered, “I told them you’re born out of wedlock, bitch!”

Janet grabbed a hold of Rosalie’s bolero in both hands, ready to throttle her, but she let go just as two male students grabbed her wrists, a male student hooked his arms under her shoulders, and a female student wrapped her arms around her waist. Yet through it all, Janet kept struggling against them and yelled, “Take that back! Take that back, or I’ll have you imprisoned!”

So Rosalie backed away on tenuous legs, as more students got up from their seats and shielded her from Janet struggling against her peers.

“But, my Lady,” Rosalie said, looking at her with tear-filled eyes, “I only wanted to apologize to you for catching his Highness’s attention. I never meant you any harm by it, I swear.”

“Stop lying, damn you! You said no such thing!” Janet said, struggling to free herself from the four students holding her, while two of the student witnesses, a daughter of a viscount and a son of an earl, left their seats at the front of the classroom and ran out into the hallway. “Let go of me!”

Yet the one holding her left wrist said, “For God’s sake, calm yourself, my lady!”

While the one holding her right wrist added, “This is unbecoming, even for you, my lady!”

“I said, let go of me!” Janet said, struggling against their hold on her, as more students approached and helped her restrainers drag her, kicking and screaming, out of the classroom and into the hallway. She kept struggling against them even as they restrained her against the wall, leaning into her so that she would stay put. All the while, she kept saying, “Let go of me, you fiends! LET GO!”

Her restrainers kept telling her to calm down, but she wouldn’t in the slightest.

Janet kept saying that she wanted an apology from Rosalie for insulting her mother and lying to everyone else in the classroom, saying that Rosalie had slandered her father and lied about apologizing, adding, “That bitch said I was born out of wedlock!”

As such, the double doors of the nearby classrooms opened up, disgorging some students and professors coming out and asking what was going on, just as the daughter of a viscount and the son of an earl ran up the stairs, bringing with them Prince Blaise and their homeroom professor, Baron Andrew Palmer, who came running up (“What are you doing? Stop it, right now!”) and wrestling his students away from Janet.

And to his credit, Prince Blaise kept himself between Janet’s seven restrainers and Janet herself. So Janet put her hand on the sleeve of Prince Blaise’s blazer, but he shook it off, dashing her hopes.

“What’s going on here?” Baron Palmer said.

So one by one, they said that Rosalie had tried to apologize to Janet for catching Prince Blaise’s interest, which had gotten Janet angry enough to attack Rosalie in front of all the students in the classroom. They said they had no choice but to restrain Janet and bring her out into the hallway, so she wouldn’t hurt Rosalie or herself.

“But why would she do that?” the baron said.

So they said that after Prince Blaise left the classroom, Rosalie had warned the rest of the class that he had gone to Baron Palmer’s office to have Janet transferred to another homeroom. When her classmates asked her why, they added, Rosalie had said that she wanted to apologize to Janet before she got transferred but also warned them that she might get angry at her for doing so.

“She lied!” Janet said. “She never apologized to me!”

“Can you prove that?” Prince Blaise said.

Janet just stared at the Prince and gaped in wide-eyed shock, stunned at his words. Thus, for the second time this morning, she found herself wondering just how far she had fallen from Prince Blaise’s favor, wondering if the truth even mattered to him when it concerned Rosalie. And so, fed up with Prince Blaise, fed up with Rosalie’s lies, fed up with everything, Janet said, “Fine. Don’t believe me, your Highness. You’re free to think of me however you want!”

“I didn’t say that,” the Prince said.

“Oh, whatever,” Janet said and started walking away from him. “Maybe instead of having me transferred to another class, you can just have me banished to another country.”

“Janet, that’s not—”

“We’re on formal terms, your Highness,” Janet said. “I’m a stranger to you,” and she continued walking.

So the Prince went after her, saying, “Janet, listen to me. Will you just stop for a minute?”

But she wouldn’t, so he grabbed her wrist.

“Let go of me!” Janet said, yanking herself away, and winced at his grip strength.

So he let go and said, “I was angry at you, because you were placing me in a bad spot in front of everybody in the hallway. But, damn it, I never meant for you to take it that way.”

“Then did you threaten to banish me just to screw with me? Did you say I was better off dead just to put me down? Am I nothing but a fucking bitch to you?”

Prince Blaise was silent and for a few moments, staring at her, at a loss for words. At first, he opened his mouth to say something, then paused for a moment longer as he thought of his words, which irritated Janet to no end.

“Answer me, your Highness,” she said. “Were you toying with me just to mess with me?”

“Janet, that’s not what—”

“Or did Rosalie put you up to it?” Janet added.

All at once, Prince Blaise glared at her like an enemy combatant, his eyes flashing like a lion’s as it was about to pounce on its prey. He said, “That’s just like you, isn’t it? Always blaming others for your own selfishness. This was never about you and me in the first place, wasn’t it? You’re always going on and on about Miss Edgeworth doing this and Miss Edgeworth doing that, when I should’ve known you’ve had it out for her from the start! I’m telling you now, if you dare harm Miss Edgeworth again, I’ll have you banished! No, I’ll have you executed! Now fuck off!”

And the Prince walked off back towards his peers and homeroom professor, who had witnessed the lover’s quarrel in silent amazement, while Janet stood there crying. For as long as she had known him, Janet had never known Prince Blaise to have ever yelled at her like that. Now brimming with tears and stinging from his threat, Janet yelled after him at the top of her lungs, saying, “Do you really want me gone, Donny? Then goodbye! When I see you again, it’ll be in HELL!”

And in front of horrified students and a panicked Baron Palmer, Janet dashed towards the upper staircase and climbed the balustrade and steadied herself on the top railing overlooking the gap between the upper and lower staircases. Even Prince Blaise turned around when Baron Palmer dashed past him, screaming for Janet to get down from there, as more students were yelling in the hallway for her to stop. Yet before Baron Palmer or Prince Blaise or anyone else got to her, Janet glanced over at Prince Blaise bolting for her—

And jumped.

To Be Continued